Modern scholars are not by any means so much inclined as Las Casas and the other Catholic fathers were to recognize the dogma of the Trinity and other Christian notions, which have been thought to be traceable in what the Maya people in their aboriginal condition held for faith.
The most popular of their deified heroes were Zamná and Cukulcan, not unlikely the same personage under two names, and quite likely both are correspondences of Quetzalcoatl. We can find various views and alternatives on this point among the elder and recent writers. The belief in community of attributes derives its strongest aid from the alleged disappearance of Quetzalcoatl in Goazacoalco just at the epoch when Cukulcan appeared in Yucatan. The centres of Maya worship were at Izamal, Chichen-Itza, and the island of Cozumel.
The hero-gods of the Mayas is the topic of Brinton’s fourth chapter in his American Hero Myths, with views of their historical relations of course at variance with those of Bancroft. As respects the material, he says that “most unfortunately very meagre sources of information are open to us. Only fragments of their legends and hints of their history have been saved, almost by accident, from the general wreck of their civilization.” The heroes are Itzamná, the leader of the first immigration from the east, through the ocean pathways; and Kukulcan, the conductor of the second from the west. For the first cycle of myths Brinton refers to Landa’s Relation, Cogolludo’s Yucatan, Las Casas’s Historia Apologética, involving the reports of the missionary Francisco Hernandez, and to Hieronimo Roman’s De la Republica de las Indias Occidentales.
THE TEMPLE OF MEXICO.
After plate (reduced) in Herrera.
The Kukulcan legends are considered by Brinton to be later in date and less natural in character, and Hernandez’s Report to Las Casas is the first record of them. Brinton’s theory of the myths does not allow him to identify the Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan hero-gods as one and the same, nor to show that the Aztec and Maya civilizations had more correspondence than occasional intercourse would produce; but he thinks the similarity of the statue of “Chac Mool,” unearthed by Le Plongeon at Chichen-Itza, to another found at Tlaxcala compels us to believe that some positive connection did exist in parts of the country (Anales del Museo Nacional, i. 270).[1913] “The Nahua impress,” says Bancroft (iii. 490), “noticeable in the languages and customs of Nicaragua, is still more strongly marked in the mythology. Instead of obliterating the older forms of worship, as it seems to have done in the northern parts of Central America, it has here and there passed by many of the distinct beliefs held by different tribes, and blended with the chief elements of a system which is traced to the Muyscas in South America.”
The main source of the Quiché myths and worship is the Popul Vuh, but Bancroft (iii. 474), who follows it, finds it difficult to make anything comprehensible out of its confusion of statement. But prominent among the deities seem to stand Tepeu or Gucumatz, whom it is the fashion to make the same with Quetzalcoatl, and Hurakan or Tohil, who indeed stands on a plane above Quetzalcoatl. Brinton (Myths, 156), on the contrary, connects Hurakan with Tlaloc, and seems to identify Tohil with Quetzalcoatl. Bancroft (iii. 477) says that tradition, name, and attributes connect Tohil and Hurakan, and identify them with Tlaloc.
