The religion that had taken the moon for point of departure, and in which women seem to have played the principal rôle, as priestesses, attacked formally, by this very fact, a more antique religion, a pre-diluvian religion that appears to have been Sabaism, entirely exempt from idolatry, and in which the sun received the chief homage. In the new religion, on the contrary, it was not the moon as a star, which was the real object of worship, it was the moon-land (lune-terre), it was the region of the Crescent, shrouded under the waves, whose death was wept and whose resurrection was afterward celebrated in the appearance of the isles—refuge of the shipwrecked of the grand catastrophe—of the Lesser Antilles; to the number of seven principal islands, sung, in all American legends, as the Seven Grottoes, cradle of nations.
This is the myth of Quetzalcoatl, who dies or disappears, and whose personality is represented at the outset in the isles, then successively, in all the countries whither the civilization was carried of which he was the flag. So far as I can judge at present, the priest who placed himself under the ægis of this grand name, labored solely to reform what there was of odious and barbarous in the cult of which the women had the chief direction, and under whose regime human blood flowed in waves. After the triumph of Quetzalcoatl, the men who bore his name took the direction of religion and society, which then made considerable progress in their hands.
But if we are to believe the same traditions, their preponderance had not a very long duration. The most restless and the most audacious among the partisans of the ancient order of things, raised the flag of revolt: they became the chiefs of a warlike faction, rival of the sacerdotal—a conquering faction, source of veritable royal dynasties and of the religion of the sun living and victorious, in opposition to the god entombed in the abyss. Quetzalcoatl, vanquished by Tezcatlipoca, then retired before a too-powerful enemy, and the Toltecs were dispersed among all nations. Those of them that remained coalesced with the victors, and from the accord of the aforementioned three cults, there sprang that monstrous amalgam of so many different ideas and symbols, such as is found to-day in what remains to us of the Mexican religion.
For me (and it is always the abbé that speaks), I believe I perceive the origin of the struggle, not alone in the diversity of races, but principally in the existence of two currents of contrary ideas, having had the same point of departure in the events of the great cataclysm of the Crescent Land, above referred to. Different manners of looking at these events and of commemorating them, seem to me to have marked from the beginning the starting point of two religions that lived, perhaps, side by side for centuries without the explosion of their disagreements, otherwise than by insignificant agitations. Before these two could take, with regard to each other, the proportions of a schism or a heresy, it was necessary that all the materials of which these religions are constituted had had time to elaborate themselves, and that the hieroglyphics which represented their origin had become sufficiently obscure for the priesthood to keep the vulgar from understanding them. For, if schism has brought on the struggle between and afterward the violent separation of families, this separation can not have taken place till after the entire creation of myths, the entire construction of these divine genealogies, of these poetic traditions, that are found scattered among all the peoples of the earth, but of which the complete whole does not exist, save in the history and religion of Mexico.[VII-28]
MANY CHARACTERS OF QUETZALCOATL.
Two orders of gods—the one order fallen from heaven into the abyss, becoming there the judges of the dead, and being personified in one of their number, who came to life again, symbolizing thus life and death—the other order surviving the cataclysm and symbolizing thus an imperishable life—such, at its origin, is the double character of the myth of Quetzalcoatl. But, in reality, this god he is the earth, he is the region swallowed up by the waters, he is the vanquished stifled under the weight of his adversary, under the force of the victorious wave; which adversary, which power in opposition to the first, joining itself to the fire on the blazing pile of Nanahuatl, is Tezcatlipoca, is Hercules, conqueror of enemies, is the god whose struggle is eternal as that of the ocean beating the shore, is he in whom the light becomes afterward personified, and who becomes thus the battle-flag of the opponents of Quetzalcoatl. To the dead god a victim is necessary, one that like him descends into the abyss. This victim was a young girl, chosen among those that were consecrated at the foot of the pyramid, and drowned; a custom long found as well in Egypt as at Chichen-Itza,[VII-29] and in many other countries of the world. But to the god come to life again, to the god in whom fire was personified, and immortal life, to Quetzalcoatl when he became Huitzilopochtli, victims were sacrificed, by tearing out the heart—symbol of the jet of flame issuing from the volcano—to offer it to the conquering sun, symbol of Tezcatlipoca, who first demanded holocausts of human blood.[VII-30]
Mr Tylor declares Quetzalcoatl to have been the Sun: "We may even find him identified with the Sun by name, and his history is perhaps a more compact and perfect series of solar myths than hangs to the name of any single personage in our own Aryan mythology. His mother, the Dawn or the Night, gives birth to him, and dies. His father Camaxtli is the sun, and was worshiped with solar rites in Mexico, but he is the old Sun of yesterday. The clouds, personified in the mythic race of the Mixcohuas, or "Cloud-Snakes" (the Nibelungs of the western hemisphere), bear down the old Sun and choke him, and bury him in their mountain. But the young Quetzalcoatl, the Sun of to-day, rushes up into the midst of them from below, and some he slays at the first onset, and some he leaves, rift with red wounds to die. We have the Sun boat of Helios, of the Egyptian Ra, of the Polynesian Maui. Quetzalcoatl, his bright career drawing toward its close, is chased into far lands by his kinsman Tezcatlipoca, the young Sun of to-morrow. He, too, is well known as a Sun God in the Mexican theology. Wonderfully fitting with all this, one incident after another in the life of Quetzalcoatl falls into its place. The guardians of the sacred fire tend him, his funeral pile is on the top of Orizaba, he is the helper of travelers, the maker of the calendar, the source of astrology, the beginner of history, the bringer of wealth and happiness. He is the patron of the craftsmen, whom he lights to his labor; as it is written in an ancient Sanskrit hymn, 'He steps forth, the splendor of the sky, the wide-seeing, the far-aiming, the shining wanderer; surely enlivened by the sun, do men go to their tasks and do their work.' Even his people, the Toltecs, catch from him solar qualities. Will it be even possible to grant to this famous race, in whose story the legend of Quetzalcoatl is the leading incident, anything more than a mythic existence?"[VII-31]
BRINTON ON QUETZALCOATL.
Dr Brinton is of opinion "that there were in truth many Quetzalcoatls, for his high priest always bore his name, but he himself is a pure creation of the fancy, and all his alleged history is nothing but a myth. His emblematic name, the Bird-Serpent, and his rebus and cross at Palenque, I have already explained. Others of his titles were, Ehecatl, the air; Yolcuat, the rattlesnake; Tohil, the rumbler; Huemac, the strong hand; Nanihehecatl, lord of the four winds. The same dualism reappears in him that has been noted in his analogues elsewhere. He is both lord of the eastern light and the wind.