Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1 / Essays on the Science of Religion

by F. Max Müller

Las Casas, the devoted friend of the Indians, writes as follows:

'It ought to be known that in all the republics of this country, in the kingdoms of New Spain and elsewhere, there was amongst other professions, that of the chroniclers and historians. They possessed a knowledge of the earliest times, and of all things concerning religion, the gods, and their worship. They knew the founders of cities, and the early history of their kings and kingdoms. They knew the modes of election and the right of succession; they could tell the number and characters of their ancient kings, their works, and memorable achievements whether good or bad, and whether they had governed well or ill. They knew the men renowned for virtue and heroism in former days, what wars they had waged, and how they had distinguished themselves; who had been the earliest settlers, what had been their ancient customs, their triumphs and defeats. They knew, in fact, whatever belonged to history; and were able to give an account of all the events of the past.... These chroniclers had likewise to calculate the days, months, and years; and though they had no writing like our own, they had their symbols and characters through which they understood everything; they had their great books, which were composed with such ingenuity and art that our alphabet was really of no great assistance to them.... Our priests have seen those books, and I myself have seen them likewise, though many were burnt at the instigation of the monks, who were afraid that they might impede the work of conversion. Sometimes when the Indians who had been converted had forgotten certain words, or particular points of the Christian doctrine, they began—as they were unable to read our books—to write very ingeniously with their own symbols and characters, drawing the figures which corresponded either to the ideas or to the sounds of our words. I have myself seen a large portion of the Christian doctrine written in figures and images, which they read as we read the characters of a letter; and this is a very extraordinary proof of their genius.... There never was a lack of those chroniclers. It was a profession which passed from father to son, highly respected in the whole republic; each historian instructed two or three of his relatives. He made them practise constantly, and they had recourse to him whenever a doubt arose on a point of history.... But not these young historians only went to consult him; kings, princes, and priests came to ask his advice. Whenever there was a doubt as to ceremonies, precepts of religion, religious festivals, or anything of importance in the history of the ancient kingdoms, every one went to the chroniclers to ask for information.'

In spite of the religious zeal of Dominican and Franciscan friars, a few of these hieroglyphic MSS. escaped the flames, and may now be seen in some of our public libraries, as curious relics of a nearly extinct and forgotten literature. The first collection of these MSS. and other American antiquities was due to the zeal of the Milanese antiquarian, Boturini, who had been sent by the Pope in 1736 to regulate some ecclesiastical matters, and who devoted the eight years of his stay in the New World to rescuing whatever could be rescued from the scattered ruins of ancient America. Before, however, he could bring these treasures safe to Europe, he was despoiled of his valuables by the Spanish Viceroy; and when at last he made his escape with the remnants of his collection, he was taken prisoner by an English cruiser, and lost everything. The collection, which remained at Mexico, became the subject of several lawsuits, and after passing through the hands of Veytia and Gama, who both added to it considerably, it was sold at last by public auction. Humboldt, who was at that time passing through Mexico, acquired some of the MSS., which he gave to the Royal Museum at Berlin. Others found their way into private hands, and after many vicissitudes they have mostly been secured by the public libraries or private collectors of Europe. The most valuable part of that unfortunate shipwreck is now in the hands of M. Aubin, who was sent to Mexico in 1830 by the French Government, and who devoted nearly twenty years to the same work which Boturini had commenced a hundred years before. He either bought the dispersed fragments of the collections of Boturini, Gama, and Pichardo, or procured accurate copies; and he has brought to Europe, what is, if not the most complete, at least the most valuable and most judiciously arranged collection of American antiquities. We likewise owe to M. Aubin the first accurate knowledge of the real nature of the ancient Mexican writing; and we look forward with confident hope to his still achieving in his own field as great a triumph as that of Champollion, the decipherer of the hieroglyphics of Egypt.

One of the most important helps towards the deciphering of the hieroglyphic MSS. of the Americans is to be found in certain books which, soon after the conquest of Mexico, were written down by natives who had learnt the art of alphabetic writing from their conquerors, the Spaniards. Ixtlilxochitl, descended from the royal family of Tetzcuco, and employed as interpreter by the Spanish Government, wrote the history of his own country from the earliest time to the arrival of Cortez. In writing this history he followed the hieroglyphic paintings as they had been explained to him by the old chroniclers. Some of these very paintings, which formed the text-book of the Mexican historian, have been recovered by M. Aubin; and as they helped the historian in writing his history, that history now helps the scholar in deciphering their meaning. It is with the study of works like that of Ixtlilxochitl that American philology ought to begin. They are to the student of American antiquities what Manetho is to the student of Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Berosus to the decipherer of the cuneiform inscriptions. They are written in dialects not more than three hundred years old, and still spoken by large numbers of natives, with such modifications as three centuries are certain to produce. They give us whatever was known of history, mythology, and religion among the people whom the Spaniards found in Central and South America in the possession of most of the advantages of a long-established civilisation. Though we must not expect to find in them what we are accustomed to call history, they are nevertheless of great historical interest, as supplying the vague outlines of a distant past, filled with migrations, wars, dynasties, and revolutions, such as were cherished in the memory of the Greeks at the time of Solon, and believed in by the Romans at the time of Cato. They teach us that the New World which was opened to Europe a few centuries ago, was in its own eyes an old world, not so different in character and feelings from ourselves as we are apt to imagine when we speak of the Red-skins of America, or when we read the accounts of the Spanish conquerors, who denied that the natives of America possessed human souls, in order to establish their own right of treating them like wild beasts.

The 'Popol Vuh,' or the sacred book of the people of Guatemala, of which the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg has just published the original text, together with a literal French translation, holds a very prominent rank among the works composed by natives in their own native dialects, and written down by them with the letters of the Roman alphabet. There are but two works that can be compared to it in their importance to the student of American antiquities and American languages, namely, the 'Codex Chimalpopoca' in Nahuatl, the ancient written language of Mexico, and the 'Codex Cakchiquel' in the dialect of Guatemala. These, together with the work published by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg under the title of 'Popol Vuh,' must form the starting-point of all critical inquiries into the antiquities of the American people.

The first point which has to be determined with regard to books of this kind is whether they are genuine or not: whether they are what they pretend to be—compositions about three centuries old, founded on the oral traditions and the pictographic documents of the ancient inhabitants of America, and written in the dialects as spoken at the time of Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro. What the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg has to say on this point amounts to this:—The manuscript was first discovered by Father Francisco Ximenes towards the end of the seventeenth century. He was curé of Santo-Tomas Chichicastenango, situated about three leagues south of Santa-Cruz del Quiché, and twenty-two leagues north-east of Guatemala. He was well acquainted with the languages of the natives of Guatemala, and has left a dictionary of their three principal dialects, his 'Tesoro de las Lenguas Quiché, Cakchiquel y Tzutohil.' This work, which has never been printed, fills two volumes, the second of which contains the copy of the MS. discovered by Ximenes. Ximenes likewise wrote a history of the province of the preachers of San-Vincente de Chiapas y Guatemala, in four volumes. Of this he left two copies. But three volumes only were still in existence when the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg visited Guatemala, and they are said to contain valuable information on the history and traditions of the country. The first volume contains the Spanish translation of the manuscript which occupies us at present. The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg copied that translation in 1855. About the same time a German traveller, Dr. Scherzer, happened to be at Guatemala, and had copies made of the works of Ximenes. These were published at Vienna, in 1856.[98] The French Abbé, however, was not satisfied with a mere reprint of the text and its Spanish translation by Ximenes, a translation which he qualifies as untrustworthy and frequently unintelligible. During his travels in America he acquired a practical knowledge of several of the native dialects, particularly of the Quiché, which is still spoken in various dialects by about six hundred thousand people. As a priest he was in daily intercourse with these people; and it was while residing among them and able to consult them like living dictionaries, that, with the help of the MSS. of Ximenes, he undertook his own translation of the ancient chronicles of the Quichés. From the time of the discovery of Ximenes, therefore, to the time of the publication of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, all seems clear and satisfactory. But there is still a century to be accounted for, from the end of the sixteenth century, when the original is supposed to have been written, to the end of the seventeenth, when it was first discovered by Ximenes at Chichicastenango.

These years are not bridged over. We may appeal, however, to the authority of the MS. itself, which carries the royal dynasties down to the Spanish Conquest, and ends with the names of the two princes, Don Juan de Rojas and Don Juan Cortes, the sons of Tecum and Tepepul. These princes, though entirely subject to the Spaniards, were allowed to retain the insignia of royalty to the year 1558, and it is shortly after their time that the MS. is supposed to have been written. The author himself says in the beginning that he wrote 'after the word of God (chabal Dios) had been preached, in the midst of Christianity; and that he did so because people could no longer see the 'Popol Vuh,' wherein it was clearly shown that they came from the other side of the sea, the account of our living in the land of shadow, and how we saw light and life.' There is no attempt at claiming for his work any extravagant age or mysterious authority. It is acknowledged to have been written when the Castilians were the rulers of the land; when bishops were preaching the word of Dios, the new God; when the ancient traditions of the people were gradually dying out. Even the title of 'Popol Vuh,' which the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg has given to this work, is not claimed for it by its author. He says that he wrote when the 'Popol Vuh' was no longer to be seen. Now 'Popol Vuh' means the book of the people, and referred to the traditional literature in which all that was known about the early history of the nation, their religion and ceremonies, was handed down from age to age.

It is to be regretted that the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg should have sanctioned the application of this name to the Quiché MS. discovered by Father Ximenes, and that he should apparently have translated it by 'Livre sacré' instead of 'Livre national,' or 'Libro del comun,' as proposed by Ximenes. Such small inaccuracies are sure to produce great confusion. Nothing but a desire to have a fine sounding title could have led the editor to commit this mistake, for he himself confesses that the work published by him has no right to the title 'Popol Vuh,' and that 'Popol Vuh' does not mean 'Livre sacré.' Nor is there any more reason to suppose, with the learned Abbé, that the first two books of the Quiché MS. contain an almost literal transcript of the 'Popol Vuh,' or that the 'Popol Vuh; was the original of the 'Teo-Amoxtli,' or the sacred book of the Toltecs. All we know is, that the author wrote his anonymous work because the 'Popol Vuh'—the national book, or the national tradition—was dying out, and that he comprehended in the first two sections the ancient traditions common to the whole race, while he devoted the last two to the historical annals of the Quichés, the ruling nation at the time of the Conquest in what is now the republic of Guatemala. If we look at the MS. in this light, there is nothing at all suspicious in its character and its contents. The author wished to save from destruction the stories which he had heard as a child of his gods and his ancestors. Though the general outline of these stories may have been preserved partly in the schools, partly in the pictographic MSS., the Spanish Conquest had thrown everything into confusion, and the writer had probably to depend chiefly on his own recollections. To extract consecutive history from these recollections, is simply impossible. All is vague, contradictory, miraculous, absurd. Consecutive history is altogether a modern idea, of which few only of the ancient nations had any conception. If we had the exact words of the 'Popol Vuh,' we should probably find no more history there than we find in the Quiché MS. as it now stands. Now and then, it is true, one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient dynasties of Greece, we know nothing of Greek history before the Olympiads, and very little even then. Yet the true historian does not allow himself to indulge in any illusions on this subject, and he shuts his eyes even to the most plausible reconstructions.

The same applies with a force increased a hundredfold to the ancient history of the aboriginal races of America, and the sooner this is acknowledged, the better for the credit of American scholars. Even the traditions of the migrations of the Chichimecs, Colhuas, and Nahuas, which form the staple of all American antiquarians, are no better than the Greek traditions about Pelasgians, Æolians, and Ionians; and it would be a mere waste of time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only to be destroyed again sooner or later by some Niebuhr, Grote, or Lewis.