The people of Durango called the principal power in which they believed Meyuncame, that is to say, Maker of All Things; they had another god, Cachiripa, whose name is all we know of him. They had besides innumerable private idols, penates of all possible and impossible figures; some being stone, shaped by nature only. In one village they worshiped a great flint knife that their flint implements of every kind might be good and sure. They had gods of storm and gods of sunshine, gods of good and gods of evil, gods of everything in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. Their idols received bloody sacrifices, not always of beasts; a bowl containing beans and the cooked human flesh of an enemy was offered to them for success in war.[VI-3]
Much of the preceding paragraph belongs also to Sinaloa or cannot be exactly located more in the one province than in the other. The Sinaloas are said to have venerated above all the other gods one called Cocohuame, which is, being interpreted, Death. They worshiped also a certain Ouraba,[VI-4] which is Valor, offering him bows, arrows, and all kinds of instruments of war. To Sehuatoba, that is to say Pleasure, they sacrificed feathers, raiment, beads of glass, and women's ornaments. Bamusehua was the god of water. In some parts, it is said, there was recognized a divine element in common herbs and birds. One deity—or devil, as Ribas calls him with the exquisite courtesy that distinguishes the theosophic historian—was the especial patron of a class of wizards closely resembling the shamáns and medicine-men of the north. No one seemed to know exactly the powers of this deity, but everyone admitted their extent by recognizing with a respectful awe their effects; effects brought about through the agency of the wizards, by the use of bags, rattles, magic stones, blowings, suckings, and all that routine of sorcery with which we are already familiar. This deity was called Grandfather or Ancestor.[VI-5]
One Sinaloa nation, the Tahus, in the neighborhood of Culiacan, reared great serpents for which they had a good deal of veneration. They propitiated their gods with offerings of precious stones and rich stuffs, but they did not sacrifice men. With an altogether characteristic insinuation, the Abbé Domenech says, that though highly immoral in the main, they so highly respected women who devoted themselves to a life of celibacy, that they held great festivals in their honor—leaving the reader to suppose that the Tahus had a class of female religious who devoted themselves to a life of chastity and were respected for that reason; the truth is found to be, on referring to the author Castañeda—from whom apparently the abbé has taken this half truth and whole falsehood—that these estimable celibate women were the public prostitutes of the nation.[VI-6]
THE MEXICAN RELIGION AND ITS HISTORIANS.
The Mexican religion, as transmitted to us, is a confused and clashing chaos of fragments. If ever the great nation of Anáhuac had its Hesiod or its Homer, no ray of his light has reached the stumbling feet of research in that direction; no echo of his harmony has been ever heard by any ear less dull than that of a Zumárraga. It is given to few men to rise above their age, and it is folly to expect grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles; yet it is hard to suppress wholly some feelings of regret, in poring upon those ponderous tomes of sixteenth and seventeenth century history that touch upon Mexican religion; one pities far less the inevitable superstition and childish ignorance of the barbarian than the senility of his Christian historian and critic—there was some element of hope and evidence of attainment in what the half-civilized barbarian knew; but from what heights of Athenian, Roman, and Alexandrian philosophy and eloquence, had civilization fallen into the dull and arrogant nescience of the chronicles of the clergy of Spain.
We have already noticed[VI-7] the existence of at least two schools of religious philosophy in Mexico, two average levels of thought, the one that of the vulgar and credulous, the other that of the more enlightened and reflective. It has resulted from this that different writers differ somewhat in their opinions with regard to the precise nature and essence of that religion, some saying one thing and some another. I cannot show this more shortly and—what is much more important in a subject like this—more exactly, than by quoting a number of these opinions:
"Turning from the simple faiths of savage tribes of America, to the complex religion of the half-civilized Mexican nation, we find what we might naturally expect, a cumbrous polytheism complicated by mixture of several national pantheons, and beside and beyond this, certain appearances of a doctrine of divine supremacy. But these doctrines seem to have been spoken of more definitely than the evidence warrants. A remarkable native development of Mexican theism must be admitted, in so far as we may receive the native historian Ixtlilxochitl's account of the worship paid by Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Tezcuco, to the invisible supreme Tloque-Nahuaque, he who has all in him, the cause of causes, in whose star-roofed pyramid stood an idol, and who there received no bloody sacrifice, but only flowers and incense. Yet it would have been more satisfactory, were the stories told by this Aztec panegyrist of his royal ancestors confirmed by other records. Traces of divine supremacy in Mexican religion are especially associated with Tezcatlipoca, 'Shining Mirror,' a deity who seems in his original nature the Sun-god, and thence by expansion to have become the soul of the world, creator of heaven and earth, lord of all things, Supreme Deity. Such conceptions may, in more or less measure, have arisen in native thought, but it should be pointed out that the remarkable Aztec religious formulas collected by Sahagun, in which the deity Tezcatlipoca is so prominent a figure, show traces of Christian admixture in their material, as well as of Christian influence in their style. In distinct and absolute personality, the divine Sun in Aztec theology was Tonatiuh[VI-8] whose huge pyramid-mound stands on the plain of Teotihuacan, a witness of his worship for future ages. Beyond this the religion of Mexico, in its complex system, or congeries of great gods, such as results from the mixture and alliance of the deities of several nations, shows the solar element rooted deeply and widely in other personages of its divine mythology, and attributes especially to the sun the title of Teotl, God."[VI-9]
COMPLEXITY OF AZTEC THEOLOGY.
"It is remarkable," says Professor J. G. Müller, "that the well-instructed Acosta should have known nothing about the adoration of a highest invisible God, under the name of Teotl. And yet this adoration has been reported in the most certain manner by others, and made evident from more exact statements regarding the nature of this deity. He has been surnamed Ipalnemoan, that is, He through whom we live, and Tloquenahuaque, that is, He who is all things through himself. He has been looked upon as the originator and essence of all things, and as especially throned in the high cloud-surrounded mountains. Rightly does Wuttke contend against any conception of this deity as a monotheistic one, the polytheism of the people being considered—for polytheism and monotheism will not be yoked together; even if a logical concordance were found, the inner spirits of the principles of the two would still be opposed to each other. Another argument stands also clearly out, in the total absence of any prayers, offerings, feasts, or temples to or in the honor of this god. From this it is evident that Teotl was not a god of the common people. Yet this, on the other hand, cannot justify us—the so-frequently-occurring statements of well-informed authorities being taken into account—in denying in toto all traces of a pantheistic monotheism, as this latter may easily spring up among cultivated polytheists as a logical result and outcome of their natural religion. Nezahualcoyotl, the enlightened king of Tezcuco, adored as the cause of causes, a god without an image. The chief of the Totonac aborigines of Cempoallan had, if we may credit the speech put in his mouth by Las Casas and Herrera, an idea of a highest god and creator. This abstract idea has also here, as in other parts of America, intertwined itself with the conception of a sun-god. Hence the Mexicans named the sun-god pre-eminently Teotl; and that enlightened king of Tezcuco, who built a temple of nine stories—symbolizing the nine heavens—in honor of the stars, called the sun-god his father."[VI-10]