It was with considerable difficulty that I persuaded my peones on one occasion to assist me in the examination of a cave which was said to contain the remains of the dead. The cave had a corkscrew-like opening from the surface of the hill, a barren limestone hog-back in the State of Durango. It descended spirally for some 30 feet or more, as I found when my men lowered me down with a rope, at my command. When my feet touched bottom I lighted the candle, which had been put out in the descent, and looked around. The place was of small extent—little more than a pit—and it seemed to be a natural cavity, with nothing remarkable about it. But I turned my attention to the floor, which felt curiously soft and greasy to the touch. It was strewn with pieces of human bones and skulls! The gruesome place weighed rather upon me, I confess, silent and stifling as it was, but having come to explore I proceeded to excavate lightly in the yielding material of the floor with a light pick. The singular nature of this material aroused my attention, and well it might, for I afterwards learned that there was a legend to the effect that the pit had been the scene of a massacre, and that numbers of persons alive and dead, had been thrown into it, and the soft material was the decayed human remains! When this had taken place no one knew, but it must have been at a very remote or prehistoric period, for during my digging in the floor I unearthed a flint spearhead, beautifully chipped and fashioned, lying by a skull it had cloven. The spearhead, or blade, is some 6 inches in length and 4 inches in width, about a quarter of an inch thick, and I still preserve it.
So, as we have seen, religion and superstition are much combined in the mind of the Mexicans, the result of both ancient and modern creeds. As to the antique beliefs and cult, there is much that appeals to the philosopher in the religious structures and history of the prehistoric, semi-civilised peoples of Mexico, or indeed of Spanish-America, whether North or South. The pyramids and temples, which the Toltecs and the Aztecs and the Incas built, have something grand and broad underlying their main idea, the idea of being able to get on their temples rather than in them. There is ever a source of inspiration in being upon the point of an eminence, to commune with Providence, rather than being immured within some gloomy walls, with toppling spires overhead. The spirit ever tries to get out, to ascend, and is exalted in accordance with its altitude. Did not Moses at Sinai bring forth the enduring Decalogue from the summit of a great natural pyramid, rather than from the gloomy interior of a temple? The exceedingly numerous pyramids throughout ancient Mexico seem to attest some exalted idea of a natural religion, which found outlet and habitation in the great Teocallis.
Man, semi-civilised or modern, ever strives to commune with a God, an unseen Being. Is it not nobler and more inspiring to gaze towards the setting sun with solitude around us? An environment of Nature, the nearest approach to the "unknown God" which exists, subtly attracts us as the handiwork of a power unknown. Well may the altar lights and emblems, and the oppressive enclosure of temples, be more and more rejected by the thinking mind, as the dark ages of religion leave us and true reverential knowledge unfolds. We might almost be tempted to say that the cathedrals of Mexico are not a philosophical exchange for its Teocallis, nor that the stake and axe of the Inquisition were much advance upon the sacrificial stone of the Aztec war-god! The frenzied priest who cut open the breast of the human sacrificial victim with an obsidian knife, and tore out the palpitating heart to cast it before his fanciful gods, does not present a picture of such refined cruelty as that of civilised European man, the Inquisitors in long black cloaks, calmly sitting by whilst their victims were slowly roasted to death at the stake because they would not change their faith, or for other equally reasonless cause. There is, and ever will be, something peculiarly sinister and abominable about the recollection of the Inquisition and its operations, under the sky of the New World. And to the philosophical observer, who pins his thoughts to no mere creed of whatever designation, the fact seems palpable that the sinister authority which did those things is only slumbering, and did not civilisation and antagonism restrain it those scenes would be repeated. The germs of an Inquisition exist in almost every religious organisation, but the old original one would burn its victims again if it could!
As to the Teocallis, perhaps their form was suggested by the natural pyramidal hills of the mountain landscape, whereon men must have stood to watch the sunset and feel nearer heaven, even in those savage lands. Even to-day this hill-ascending influence is not banished among the primitive class of the Mexican people. Every hill in the neighbourhood of a hamlet is surmounted by a cross, up to which culminating point processions constantly ascend. Indeed, at times the devout—or fanatic—Indian and peon ascends these rocky steeps upon his knees, leaving blood-spots to mark his way! Processions of fanatic Indians were formerly common; they journeyed over great distances upon their knees towards some popular shrine, and although the law now prohibits these, they are surreptitiously carried out at times, and I have witnessed them myself. Onwards and upwards towards the "Unknown God" these poor people grope their way—
"Upon the great world's altar stairs."
Can we say much more of the most civilised among us?
Much of beauty and interest there is in a study of both the old and new religions of this land; much of the romance of the former we may feel, as, standing on the pyramid whence the rays of the orb of day were flashed back from the golden breastplate of Tonatiah in days of yore, we mark the sun-god of the Aztecs sink in the Occident.