Against thy citadel.
The sky shall be red with thy burning,
Bloody shall thy couch be,
And thy king shall perish with thee.
Gasping in death, with my hand on his throat,
We shall see if again he will say:
“Thou art unworthy of my daughter,
Never shall she be thine.”
A variety of poetic production of frequent occurrence among the aborigines is the prophetic. You are aware that it is by no means peculiar to them; the oracle at Delphi, the sibylline leaves in the Capitol, the words of the Hebrew seers, even the forecasts of Nostradamus, were usually cast in poetic form. The effort to lift the veil of futurity is one ineradicable from the human breast, and faith in its possibility is universal. Those prophets who are wise, those augurs who pass the wink to each other, favor great obscurity and ambiguity in their communications, or else express themselves in such commonplaces as that man is mortal; that all beauty fadeth; that power is transitory, and the like. We find both kinds flourished in ancient America. You may remember that Montezuma in his first interview with Cortes told the Spanish invader that the arrival of a white and bearded conqueror from the East had long been predicted by Mexican soothsayers. Similar prophecies were current in Yucatan, in Peru, and in other portions of the continent. They are all easily explained, and there is no occasion either to question the fact, or to seek for them any supernatural inspiration. It would lead me away from my theme to enter into a discussion of their meaning, but I should like to read you two brief examples of them. Both are from the Maya language of Yucatan, and I have no doubt both antedate the conquest. The first, according to an expression in the poem itself, was composed in the year 1469. It was the prediction of a Maya priest at the close of the indiction or cycle which terminated in that year of our chronology.
THE PROPHECY OF PECH, PRIEST OF CHICHEN-ITZA (1469).