Beliefs such as these inevitably suggest those of the older Mexico, and similarly in many of the rites of these Indians there are analogies to Aztec cult. Perhaps most striking of all is the elaborate and partly mystical adoration of the hikuli, or peyote (cacti of the genus Lophophora), to which are ascribed mantic power and the induction of ecstacy; and in which, no doubt, we see the marvellous plant which the Aztec encountered in their migration. The cult extends to tribes remote in the north and is not without a touch of welcome poetry, as in the Tarahumare song given by Lumholtz[70]—
"Beautiful lily, in bloom this morning, guard me!
Drive away sorcery! Make me grow old!
Let me reach the age at which I have to take up a walking-stick!
I thank thee for exhaling thy fragrance, there where thou art standing!"
[CHAPTER IV]
YUCATAN
I. THE MAYA
Native American civilization attained its apogee among the Maya. This is not true in a political sense, for, though at the time of the Conquest the Maya remembered a past political greatness, there is no reason to believe that it had ever been, either in power or in organization, a rival of such states as the Aztec and Inca. The Mayan cities had been confederate in their unions rather than national, aristocratic in their governments rather than monarchic; and in their greatest unity the power of their strongest rulers, the lords of Mayapan, appears to have been that of feudal suzerains, or at best of insecure tyrants. Politically the Mayan cities present somewhat the aspect of the loose-leaguing Hellenic states, and it is not without probability that in each case the looseness of the political organization was directly conducive to the intense civic pride which undoubtedly in each case fostered an extraordinary development of the arts. For in all the more intellectual tokens of culture—in art, in mathematics, in writing, and in historical records—the Mayan peoples surpassed all other native Americans, leaving in the ruins of their cities and in the profusion of their sculptured monuments such evidences of genius as only the most famous centres of Old-World antiquity can rival.
The territories of the Mayan stock are singularly compact.[71] They occupied—and their descendants now occupy—the Peninsula of Yucatan, the valley of the Usumacinta, and the cordillera rising westerly and sinking to the Pacific. The Rio Motagua, emptying into the Gulf of Honduras, and the Rio Grijalva, debouching into the Bay of Campeche, form respectively their south-eastern and western borders excepting for the fact that on the eastern coasts of Mexico, facing the Gulf of Campeche, the Huastec (and perhaps their Totonac neighbours) represent a Mayan kindred. Between this western branch and the great Mayan centre of Yucatan the coast was occupied by intrusive Nahuatlan tribes, landward from whom lay the territories of the Zoquean and Zapotecan stocks, the western neighbours of the Mayan peoples.