41. How are we to explain these marvelous statements? It will not do to take the short and easy road of saying they are all lies and frauds. The evidence is too abundant for us to doubt that there was skillful jugglery among the proficients in the occult arts among those nations. They could rival their colleagues in the East Indies and Europe, if not surpass them.
Moreover, is there anything incredible in the reports of the spectators? Are we not familiar with the hypnotic or mesmeric conditions in which the subject sees, hears and feels just what the master tells him to feel and see? The tricks of cutting oneself or others, of swallowing broken glass, of handling venomous reptiles, are well-known performances of the sect of the Aissaoua in northern Africa, and nowadays one does not have to go off the boulevards of Paris to see them repeated. The phenomena of thought transference, of telepathy, of clairvoyance, of spiritual rappings, do but reiterate under the clear light of the close of the nineteenth century the mystical thaumaturgy with which these children of nature were familiar centuries ago in the New World, and which are recorded of the theosophists and magicians of Egypt, Greece and Rome.[61-*] So long as many intelligent and sensible people among ourselves find all explanations of these modern phenomena inadequate and unsatisfactory, we may patiently wait for a complete solution of those of a greater antiquity.
42. The conclusion to which this study of Nagualism leads is, that it was not merely the belief in a personal guardian spirit, as some have asserted; not merely a survival of fragments of the ancient heathenism, more or less diluted by Christian teachings, as others have maintained; but that above and beyond these, it was a powerful secret organization, extending over a wide area, including members of different languages and varying culture, bound together by mystic rites, by necromantic powers and occult doctrines; but, more than all, by one intense emotion—hatred of the whites—and by one unalterable purpose—that of their destruction, and with them the annihilation of the government and religion which they had introduced.
[4-*] These words occur a number of times in the English translation, published at London in 1822, of Dr. Paul Felix Cabrera’s Teatro Critico Americano. The form nagual instead of nahual, or naual, or nawal has been generally adopted and should be preferred.
[4-†] For instance, in “The Names of the Gods in the Kiche Myths,” pp. 21, 22, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1881; Annals of the Cakchiquels, Introduction, p. 46; Essays of an Americanist, p. 170, etc.
[5-*] Historia de las Indias Occidentales, Dec. iv, Lib. viii, cap. 4.
[5-†] More especially it is the territory of the Chorti dialect, spoken to this day in the vicinity of the famous ancient city of Copan, Honduras. Cerquin lies in the mountains nearly due east of this celebrated site. On the Chorti, see Stoll, Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala, pp. 106-9.
[6-*] Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia de la Nueva España, Lib. x, cap. 9.
[6-†] Derived from teciuhtlaza, to conjure against hail, itself from teciuh, hail. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario Mexicano, sub voce.
[6-‡] Bautista, Advertencias para los Confesores, fol. 112 (Mexico, 1600).