In the historic fragments to which I have alluded there is scant reference to miraculous events, and the gods play no part in the sober chronicle. But in the mythical cyclus we are at once translated into the sphere of the supernal. The Snake-Hill Coatepetl becomes the Aztec Olympus. On it dwells the great goddess “Our Mother amid the Serpents,” Coatlan Tonan,[[113]] otherwise called “The Serpent-skirted,” Coatlicue, with her children, The Myriad Sages, the Centzon Huitznahua.[[114]] It was her duty to sweep the Snake-Hill every day, that it might be kept clean for her children. One day while thus engaged, a little bunch of feathers fell upon her, and she hid it under her robe. It was the descent of the spirit, the divine Annunciation. When the Myriad Sages saw that their mother was pregnant, they were enraged, and set about to kill her. But the unborn babe spake from her womb, and provided for her safety, until in due time he came forth armed with a blue javelin, his flesh painted blue, and with a blue shield. His left leg was thin and covered with the plumage of the humming-bird. Hence the name was given to him “On the left, a humming-bird,” Huitzilopochtli.[[115]] Four times around the Serpent-Mountain did he drive the Myriad Sages, until nearly all had fallen dead before his dart, and the remainder fled far to the south. Then all the Mexica chose Huitzilopochtli for their god, and paid honors to the Serpent-Hill by Tula as his birthplace.[[116]]
An equally ancient and authentic myth makes Huitzilopochtli one of four brothers, born at one time of the uncreated, bi-sexual divinity, the God of our Life, Tonacatecutli, who looms dimly at the head of the Aztec Pantheon. His brothers were the black and white Tezcatlipoca and the fair-skinned, bearded Quetzalcoatl. Yet a third myth places the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl directly in Tula, and names his mother, Chimalman, a virgin, divinely impregnated, like Coatlicue, by the descending spirit of the Father of All.[[117]]
Tula was not only the birthplace, but the scene of the highest activity of all these greatest divinities of the ancient Nahuas. Around the Coatepetl and on the shores of the Tollanatl—“the Water of Tula”—as the stream is called which laves the base of the hill, the mighty struggles of the gods took place which form the themes of almost all Aztec mythology. Tulan itself is no longer the hamlet of rush houses at the foot of the Coatepec, surmounted by its pueblo of rough stone and baked brick; it is a glorious city, founded and governed by Quetzalcoatl himself, in his first avatar as Hueman, the strong-handed. “All its structures were stately and gracious, abounding in ornaments. The walls within were incrusted with precious stones or finished in beautiful stucco, presenting the appearance of a rich mosaic. Most wonderful of all was the temple of Quetzalcoatl. It had four chambers, one toward the east finished in pure gold, another toward the west lined with turquoise and emeralds, a third toward the south decorated with all manner of delicate sea-shells, and a fourth toward the north resplendent with red jasper and shells.”[[118]] The descriptions of other buildings, equally wondrous, have been lovingly preserved by the ancient songs.[[119]] What a grief that our worthy friend, M. Charnay, digging away in 1880 on the Coatepec, at the head of a gang of forty-five men, as he tells us,[[120]] unearthed no sign of these ancient glories, in which, for one, he fully believed! But, alas! I fear that they are to be sought nowhere out of the golden realm of fancy and mythical dreaming.
Nor, in that happy age, was the land unworthy such a glorious city. Where now the neglected corn-patches surround the shabby huts of Tula, in the good old time “the crops of maize never failed, and each ear was as long as a man’s arm; the cotton burst its pods, not white only, but spontaneously ready dyed to the hand in brilliant scarlet, green, blue and yellow; the gourds were so large that they could not be clasped in the arms; and birds of brilliant plumage nested on every tree!”
The subjects of Quetzalcoatl, the Toltecs, were not less marvelously qualified. They knew the virtues of plants and could read the forecast of the stars; they could trace the veins of metals in the mountains, and discern the deposits of precious stones by the fine vapor which they emit; they were orators, poets and magicians; so swift were they that they could at once be in the place they wished to reach; as artisans their skill was unmatched, and they were not subject to the attacks of disease.
The failure and end of all this goodly time came about by a battle of the gods, by a contest between Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli on the one hand, and Quetzalcoatl on the other. Quetzalcoatl refused to make the sacrifices of human beings as required by Huitzilopochtli, and the latter, with Tezcatlipoca, set about the destruction of Tula and its people. This was the chosen theme of the later Aztec bards. What the siege of Troy was to the Grecian poets, the fall of Tula was to the singers and story-tellers of Anahuac—an inexhaustible field for imagination, for glorification, for lamentation. It was placed in the remote past—according to Sahagun, perhaps the best authority, about the year 319 before Christ.[[121]] All arts and sciences, all knowledge and culture, were ascribed to this wonderful mythical people; and wherever the natives were asked concerning the origin of ancient and unknown structures, they would reply; “The Toltecs built them.”[[122]]
They fixedly believed that some day the immortal Quetzalcoatl would appear in another avatar, and would bring again to the fields of Mexico the exuberant fertility of Tula, the peace and happiness of his former reign, and that the departed glories of the past should surround anew the homes of his votaries.[[123]]
What I wish to point out in all this is the contrast between the dry and scanty historic narrative which shows Tula with its Snake-Hill to have been an early station of the Azteca, occupied in the eleventh and twelfth century by one of their clans, and the monstrous myth of the later priests and poets, which makes of it a birthplace and abode of the gods, and its inhabitants the semi-divine conquerors and civilizers of Mexico and Central America. For this latter fable there is not a vestige of solid foundation. The references to Tula and the Toltecs in the Chronicles of the Mayas and the Annals of the Kakchiquels are loans from the later mythology of the Nahuas. It is high time for this talk about the Toltecs as a mighty people, precursors of the Azteca, and their instructors in the arts of civilization, to disappear from the pages of history. The residents of ancient Tula, the Tolteca, were nothing more than a sept of the Nahuas themselves, the ancestors of those Mexica who built Tenochtitlan in 1325. This is stated as plainly as can be in the Aztec records, and should now be conceded by all. The mythical Tula, and all its rulers and inhabitants, are the baseless dreams of poetic fancy, which we principally owe to the Tezcucan poets.[[124]]