6. Fanciful Analogies.
It were easy in these names, myths, and pictures, to pick out abundant analogies to the mythologies of Peru and Mexico, of the Pueblos and of the Old World. It has been done over and over again, usually with a total oversight of the only point in which such analogies have much value—the similarity disclosed the world over by independent evolutions of the religious sentiment. The effort by such resemblances to prove identity of historical origin is to be deprecated whenever the natural growth of myths and rites will explain the facts considered. For that reason I shall say nothing about “Tlaloc deities,” “serpent gods,” etc., with which so many pages of other writers have been fruitlessly taken up. That the adjacent nations of equal culture influenced the people of Yucatan to some extent, was no doubt a fact. It could not have been otherwise. But that the Mayan mythology and civilization were distinctly independent, and were only superficially touched by their neighbors, I am deeply convinced.
On the other hand, just how far the influence of this potent and personal culture of the Mayas extended, it is difficult to delimit. I have found no trace of its peculiar forms in South America, nor anywhere in North America, beyond the boundaries within which that extraordinary calendar was accepted, upon which so much of it was based; but this, as I have shown elsewhere, included not less than seven entirely different linguistic stocks.[[93]]
7. Total Number of Representations.
The actual progress toward an analysis of the pictorial elements of the Codices which the above identifications indicate, may best be shown by a few statistics.
I find that the total number of figures of men and women, or of anthropomorphic deities, which are preserved in the manuscripts, is just about 950, of which 825 are males and 125 are females.
They are distributed as follows:—
| Codex Peresianus, | 40 | males | no | females |
| Codex Cortesianus, | 157 | males | 6 | females |
| Codex Troanus, | 345 | males | 47 | females |
| Codex Dresdensis, | 283 | males | 72 | females |
| 825 | 125 |
Confining our attention to the male deities, the attributes of which have been above described, we find their pictures are distributed as follows:—[[94]]
| Peresianus. | Cortesianus. | Troanus. | Dresdensis. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Itzamna, | 4 | 30 | 32 | 130 |
| Cuculcan, | 22 | 54 | 20 | |
| Kin Ich, | 4 | 2 | 8 | 22 |
| Xaman Ek, | 7 | 20 | 20 | 5 |
| The God of Maize, | 16 | 60 | 6 | |
| Ah Puch, | 2 | 21 | 25 | 29 |
| The God of War, | 9 | 3 | 26 | 13 |
| The Black Gods, | 2 | 2 | 39 | 4 |
| Total, | 28 | 116 | 264 | 229 |