We shall keep on the trail of a very definite clue if we attempt to descry in such evidences as we possess of archaic Mexican faith the signs of an incipient rain-cult, having its origin in a settled agricultural existence. If we glance at [[12]]the general characteristics of the numerous members of the Mexican pantheon, we find that very readily and quite naturally they group themselves into three great classes: (a) creative deities, which may be regarded as the outcome of late theological speculation, and which may, accordingly, be passed over in this place; (b) gods of growth; and (c) gods developed from specific objects and deified heavenly bodies, some of which latter were developed from gods of the chase. The “original” deities of Mexico would seem, therefore, to have presided over vegetable growth and conferred on their votaries good luck in the hunt. But as time passed, these latter also took on the attributes of gods of the cereal and vegetable food-supply, and, indeed, often seriously contested the status of the true growth-gods in the elaborate nature of the symbolic vegetal ceremonial with which their festivals were celebrated.
It is not surprising that the Valley of Mexico became the centre of a cult of which the appeal for rain was the salient characteristic. A copious supply of rainfall for the purposes of irrigation is, indeed, a necessity to the Mexican agriculturist, and a dry year in ancient Anahuac brought with it famine and misery unspeakable. Inexpressibly touching are the fervent prayers to Tlaloc, god of water, that he should not visit his displeasure upon the people by withdrawing the pluvial supply. “O our most compassionate lord … I beseech thee to look with eyes of pity upon the people of this city and kingdom, for the whole world, down to the very beasts, is in peril of destruction and disappearance and irremediable end … for the ridges of the earth suffer sore need and anguish from lack of water … with deep sighing and anguish of heart I cry upon all those that are gods of water, that are in the four quarters of the world … to come and console this poor people and to water the earth, for the eyes of all that inhabit the earth, animals as well as men, are turned towards you, and their hope is set upon you.”[11] [[13]]
DEIFICATION OF THE ELEMENTS OF GROWTH
The elements of growth, in the mind of primitive man, are four in number, the earth, grain, rain, and solar heat, and it is not remarkable that all of these came to be regarded as deified powers, and were latterly personalized in anthropomorphic form. It does not appear that the sun was at first looked upon as an agency of growth. There is, indeed, proof that in early times he was not regarded as of any importance from a calendric point of view, and that the time and festival-counts were designed upon a lunar basis.[12] It is not unlikely that, in a region where his torrid heat, if unaccompanied by rainfall, resulted in famine, he was at first regarded, if not unfavourably, at least with no special predilection. If this conclusion is correct, and we can afford to discount solar influence in the primitive Mexican cultus—or rather that adopted by the aboriginal peoples on embracing a settled agricultural existence—there remain to us the three elements of earth, grain, and rain from which to reconstruct the prototypes of the Mexican pantheon.
In Mexican myth the earth is represented as a monster known as cipactli, the pictures of which have given rise to the assumption that it is either a crocodile, a swordfish, or a dragon. We shall probably not err if we place it in the last category and see in it that great earth-monster common to the mythologies of many races, and which is most conveniently called the “earth-dragon.”[13] This sign cipactli became the first in the tonalamatl or Book of Fate, where it is connected with the creative deities and the Earth-mother, who was known by many names. Circumstances exist which seem to lend colour to the assumption that, as in other countries, the Mexican Earth-mother had at one time been regarded as forming the earth, the soil. At the terrible and picturesque festival of the Xalaquia (“She who is clothed with the sand”), the sacrificed virgin was supposed to enrich and recruit with her blood the frame of the worn-out goddess, who had [[14]]been, says Seler, “merged in the popular imagination with the all-nourisher, the all-begetter, the earth.”[14]
Perhaps the best evidence that the idea of the Earth-mother was associated with the conception of the earth-dragon is afforded by the colossal stone figure of Coatlicue, one of her manifestations, which once towered above the entrance to the temple of Uitzilopochtli in Mexico and is now housed in the Museo Naçional in that city. In this figure, as in a similar if less massive statue from Tehuacan, the characteristics of the cipactli earth-animal obtrude themselves in a wealth of scale, claw, and tusk, which although frequently described as serpentine, is only partially so, and shows traces that more than one idea was in the mind of the artist who chiselled its symbolic intricacies. In the latter of these sculptures the appearance of ferocity is most marked and is accompanied by the same dragon-like claws on hands and feet. In the mythologies of many lands the Earth-mother is represented as ferocious, insatiable, as slaying those who take part in her amours, as a riotous and outrageous demon, unnatural and destructive in her lusts and appetites, and it would seem that her Mexican phase throws light upon the reasons for this savage wantonness. In the sculpture first alluded to, and in the carving on its base, we can perceive a close resemblance to the earth-monster of the Maya peoples, especially as represented in the carvings at Copan and in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. These afford almost irrefragable proof of the correctness of the supposition regarding the fusion of the concepts of the earth-beast and the earth-mother which has been outlined.[15]
COLOSSAL STATUE OF COATLICUE. (Front.)
(Now in the Museo Naçional, Mexico.)