The plain truth is, as we wrote earlier, that this Toltec theory represents a myth bred of a confusion of historical facts which, if critically examined, flatly contradict it. In his Myths of the New World (1868), the late D. G. Brinton, than whom no one has given a more wholehearted and enlightened attention to the problem, writes: "The story of Tula and its inhabitants the Toltecs, so currently related in ancient Mexican history, is a myth and not history." In a paper entitled "Were the Toltecs an Historical Nationality?" read before the Philosophical Society of America on the 2nd of September, 1887, provoked by a monograph written by M. Déesiré Charnay to defend the theory, he wrote: "As a translation of this work has been recently published in this country, it appears to me the more needful that the baseless character of the Toltec legend be distinctly stated.... What Troy was to the Grecian poets the fall of Tula (the Toltec capital) was to the singers and story-tellers of the Anahuac, an inexhaustible field of imagination for glorification and lamentation.... Let it be understood hereafter that whoever uses these names in an historic sense betrays an ignorance of the subject he handles, which, were it in the better-known field of Aryan or Egyptian lore, would convict him of not meriting the name of a scholar."[8]
The shortest way of dealing with this farrago of myth is to take the war at once into the enemy's camp. Let us take the point upon which all the Toltec enthusiasts agree, namely that the Toltecs came "from the north." Now let us look at this vague north, and see whether there exist in that direction any such traces as we should expect these highly civilised Toltecs to have left behind them. No; there are none. Scour that north as vigorously as you will, you find nothing save the ruins in Arizona and Colorado, which are mere heaps of unmortared stones and of such crude workmanship as to date themselves (even to the satisfaction of the most shortsighted inquirer) well into historic and post-Spanish times.
There are no actual building evidences, then. Let us next see whether a study of the tribes massed from earliest times in that vague north will help us at all. Let us review the groupings of the barbaric tribes which inhabited America north of Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and see whether we can find the smallest ethnic loophole for these Toltecs and their civilisation, almost rivalling that of Egypt, to have wriggled through. Taking the north-west first, the particular quarter towards which all good Toltecites gaze with awe as being the direction from which the Toltecs came, what do we find? From time immemorial this north-west had been inhabited by the vast Athapascan stock, stretching from the Canadian Rockies down to Mexico. One of their largest tribes, the Shoshonees, occupied North-West Mexico. Of these Athapascan peoples it has been written, "They are nearer the brutes than probably any other portion of the human race." It is obvious that there is no comfort for the Toltecites in this direction.
Well, let us take the north-east. Who lived there? The Apalachians lived there, "a loose confederation," says Brinton, "embracing most of the nations from the Atlantic coast quite into Texas." The majority of the tribes forming this family, such as the Creeks, the Choctaws, and the Seminoles, were nomadic hunting peoples, a few only stationary, and those with no record of any civilisation. The Apalachians then are as hopeless as a source of comfort for the theorists as the Athapascans. Wedged in between the Athapascans and the Apalachians were the Algonkins, essentially a hunting race of strictly nomad habits. Thus the three great peoples who formed the impenetrable ethnic frontier of Mexico at the time of and no doubt long anterior to the Conquest, are clearly seen to have been uncultured peoples, their only dwellings the wigwam, their chief occupation the chase, redoubtable fighters but undistinguished by those "victories of peace" which, as the poet sings, "are more renowned than war." It is fairly certain, then, that these much-talked-of Toltecs could not, nay, did not, come overland from the north. Driven thus from all hope landwards, the unfortunate theorists, having rashly embarked on the sea of myth, must now launch on a far rougher sea, namely the Atlantic or Pacific. Their heroes must have come from the Ocean. Venus-like, they arose perhaps from the foam. Seriously though, such a proposition is nearly as complete a fairy tale as the Greek legend of the Goddess of Love. When one sees the maintainers of the oversea route obliged to say, as Dr. Ph. J. J. Valentini does, that any one of the points of the compass may have been the direction from which this remarkable people came, one is face to face with arguments too vague to be worthy of being called arguments at all. There is no dealing with such rash generalisations. One must leave their amiable employers to get what comfort they can from them, with just this reservation: the Toltec tradition and its dates demand the acceptance of the postulate that the Toltecs arrived in Mexico in considerable numbers; for between 648 A.D., the generally accepted date of their traditionary landing, and the twelfth century, when they were expelled by the Aztecs, there is not time for a mere handful of immigrants to have metamorphosed themselves into a nation numbering many millions, as the Toltec story insists on our believing.[9] They must therefore have landed in great quantities, and such an exodus as this presupposes, well within historic times too, must have left, no matter what land they hailed from, some record behind it. No such record exists in any quarter of the globe of an exodus of even approximate date.
So far then these Toltecs are veritable spectre people, coming from nowhere, going nowhere; like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in the mid-air of Mexico's traditionary history. Let us now pass on to Chapter 2 of the Toltec romance. This is concerned with the arrival in Mexico of the militant Aztecs. Now who are the Aztecs? D. G. Brinton, Dr. Richardson, and all students of American ethnology agree in believing them to have been a branch tribe of the savage and warlike Athapascans. This view is unassailable on physical and philological grounds. Their arrival in Mexico is probably fairly accurately given by their traditions as towards the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century. Every one is agreed that at the time of their invasion they were simply barbaric warriors. They brought no building specifications with them. Nothing, in short, but a thirst for battle and new lands.
Now whom did they find in Mexico? They found a race whom they at once nicknamed "Toltecs." Here then, at last, we are getting to grips with these mysterious folk. "Toltec" is a pure Aztec or Nahuatl word, which is believed to have had a primary meaning of "those who dwelt at Tonalan," "place of the Sun" (some authorities, following the Codex Ramirez, derive it from tolin, "rush," i.e. "the place of the rushes"); but which in later Nahuatl, according to Dr. Otto Stoll, undoubtedly had the meaning of "skilled craftsman, artificer or builder." The Aztecs had never seen a building before, and they just as naturally christened the race they had conquered by an allusion to their chief characteristic,—their strange building skill,—as the coalition of Germanic tribes in the third century gained the name "Franks" from their chief characteristic, their love of freedom. What could possibly be clearer? "Toltec" is a local name, having no existence at all till the arrival of the Aztecs; a mere nickname, we shall hope to prove, for the Mexican branch of the vast family of affiliated tribes which had from prehistoric times inhabited Central America, and, a fact most important of all to grasp, inhabit it to-day. In a word, the Toltecs are the Mayans.
When you have realised all this, it is surely very easy to see how the Toltec myth, which has proved the undoing of so many earnest students, arose. The Aztecs came "out of the north." There is at least no doubt of that. More, there is every reason to believe that they came from the north-west, the very quarter so fanatically urged as the direction whence came the Toltecs. It is doubtful whether they could speak the language of the race they ousted; in fact it is by no means a bold assumption to declare they could not. With them they undoubtedly brought many traditions. When you grasp all this, and realise the further fact that Tula, the much-talked-of Toltec city, that place which is, it is suggested, identifiable with the present-day town forty miles north of Mexico City, became the first Aztec capital in their new land, and remained so till, under Moctezuma's leadership, they advanced and founded Tenochtitlan, the present city of Mexico, the blindest and most obtuse can surely see what the truth is. The whole Toltec imbroglio is the result of a confusion between the histories of two peoples. The Aztecs came from the north: the Mayans were architects. Though they were first and foremost fighters, the conquerors appear to have taken very kindly to their conquered neighbours' civilisation. Becoming in their turn architects, nothing would be more natural than that the arrogant Aztecs should have at last arrived at such an identification of themselves with the Mayans that the traditions and histories of the two races became once and for all inextricably mingled till they formed such an indivisible tangle as to defy the efforts of chroniclers to unravel.[10]
The confusion between the story of the two peoples just as naturally resulted in the Tula portion of the Toltec myth. It was in all probability the first place at which the Aztecs saw the buildings which so astonished them, as it certainly would seem to have been the place which they chose as their early capital. The importance thus attached by them to it would very naturally in the course of time give it an importance in the history of the Toltec-Mayans who had been expelled from it. As the early stories of the two peoples became confused, Tula would be traditionally believed to be the first city of the Toltecs as well as that of their conquerors. That it was not the first city built in Mexico by the Toltec-Mayans we have not the slightest doubt. We do not go so far as D. G. Brinton: we cannot agree with him that it was built by the Aztecs or Mexicans. It probably was a town in existence at the coming of the Aztecs, though quite a small settlement of a race which had by that time dotted a large part of their present territory with far greater cities. That it had any greater significance to its founders there is not a tittle of real evidence. It was simply the first town to which the Aztecs came, and around it and its past imagination ran riot. The tendency of semi-civilised peoples to exaggerate some fact of no importance into a great feat or epoch-making event is exemplified again and again in history. Thus it is natural enough that Tula should have attained a traditionary importance out of all proportion to its real place in Toltec-Mayan history. The only ultimate authorities for the Toltec theory are the two chroniclers Ixtlilxochitl (a Mexican native) and Vietia (a Spaniard), both of whom wrote their histories subsequent to the Conquest. There is no reason to believe them wilfully misleading. They simply recorded traditions then and always current. They had at their disposal the whole existing writings and traditions of their times. They had the picture-writings, and doubtless consulted the oldest and most intelligent of the Indians.
But what of these sources of knowledge? The picture-writings were simply the compilations of the Aztecs, and were of no great date.[11] Indeed it is certain that most of them were not written until the century previous to the Conquest. As to the Indians, it is obvious that such oral tradition as they had to communicate could be of very little real service to the historian. They were one and all enslaved and degraded by the Spaniards, and traditions, if not got from unmolested, unconquered natives, are always unreliable, as has been proved again and again by the missionaries working among subjugated races. Under such circumstances it is notorious that natives will tell any "fairy tales" which a fertile imagination, or a desire to ingratiate themselves with their new masters, dictates.
Such then is the flimsy foundation upon which the whole Toltec structure has been reared. Now who were the people whom the Aztecs nicknamed Toltecs? We have already declared them to have been the ancestors of the present Mayans of Yucatan and the surrounding countries—in a word, Mayans themselves. Let us see if we can get some way on the road to proof of our assertion.