J. Alden Mason
The Understudy of Tezcatlipoca
This story[16] is a mirage of thin words and bodiless phrases. It paints on a film of mist things that are long ago and far away, and lifts up a pale reflection of cities and grandeurs lying below the horizon of our times, never to be resurrected in fact. It presents in a vaguely understandable fashion, strange beliefs and philosophies that a wonderful society of human beings created out of their common thought and supposed necessities.
Have you ever tried really to understand the Past, not so much the material Past of quaint costumes and accoutrements, as the immaterial Past of ideals, ambitions, and enthusiasms? Have you ever wilfully imprisoned your present spiritual being in the emotional matrix of an age that is dead? In the hall where the glum old faces of your ancestors stare out from dull frames upon your unimagined new life, have you ever paused to gaze back into those dim presentments, and to think how impossible to-day would be the quest of the Pilgrims, or of the Crusaders? And when, not so long ago, a Gothic fantasy in gently treated stone crumbled before the war-saddened eyes of the world, did this fearful thought impress itself upon you: No man in all Christendom can ever re-carve those shattered prophets or re-groin those airy arches in the dread sincerity of the first builders?
Now, it is not the stone that changes, nor the chisel, nor the loves and hates of individual men and women: it is the over-soul of society that passes. For, out of our herded life of tribe or nation, comes an over-soul that directs our hands and implants in our minds the seeds of duty, the impulses of sincerity, and the recognition of all the needs which we think are absolute, but which, in a larger view, are merely relative. The cloud forms of communal emotion that constitute these over-souls, flame and fade like the western sky and never twice assume the same shapes and colors.
In Mexico, before the steel-clad soldiers of Cortes landed at Vera Cruz, there was a civilization that ran back into a twilight of the gods. Centuries of accumulating art and ceremony had enriched the first crude thoughts of savages coming out of desert camps to abide in houses of mud and stone, amid maize stalks and squash vines. Cities and indeed, empires, had risen, flourished and fallen. There had come into being those slaves to the ideal of ritual whom we call priests, and those slaves to the ideal of political grandeur whom we call kings. And back of all these were gods to whom sacrifices were duly given for benefits received. And the people, commanded by their over-soul, raised gleaming temples on stately pyramids for their gods, and built palaces with bright gardens for their priest and kings. And, moreover, they gave honors and rewards for success in trade and war and they set the marks of class upon certain men and their children. This is a story of their sincerity....
That wise old man, bent from much climbing of temple stairs, but with the steady, believing gaze which comes from watching the stars, foretold the distant event with deceptive clarity. He was reader of the fates and keeper of the calendar in Quauhnahuac, and after grave study of his painted books he resolved the tangled interests of greater and lesser gods in the new-born child. So he said to the father and the friends who crowded round: “Let him be called Macuilquaultli, Five-eagle, after the day on which he was born, and let him be well taught in all that a chief should know. He shall acquire grace, skill, and a knowledge of all arts, for he shall come to rule in a high place. Thus it is written: he shall govern the City.”
The father of Five-eagle was a Captain among the armed men of Quauhnahuac, a bearer of standards, and a councilor in matters of state. He proudly bore the insignia of high success in war against the strange-tongued people of Tolucca. Yet, Quauhnahuac was not a city of warriors. The populous capital of the Tlahuica (as you may know from that Cuernavaca of sunlight and indolence which survives) lay deep below the mist houses of Ajusco, in a valley where waters dance and flowers flame. To be sure this people had come out from the Seven Caves with the Azteca and other tribes, but they had passed down from the cold highlands and had prospered under the benign protection of Xochivuetzalli, goddess of flowers, and patroness of all the arts that give beauty to the world and take vigor from it.