THE traditions of the migrations of the Chichimecs, Colhuas, and Nahuas,” says Max Müller,[785] “are no better than the Greek traditions about Pelasgians, Æolians, and Ionians, and it would be a mere waste of time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only to be destroyed again, sooner or later, by some Niebuhr, Grote, or Lewis.”
“It is yet too early,” says Bandelier,[786] “to establish a definite chronology, running farther back from the Conquest than two centuries,[787] and even within that period but very few dates have been satisfactorily fixed.”
Such are the conditions of the story which it is the purpose of this chapter to tell.
We have, to begin with, as in other history, the recognition of a race of giants, convenient to hang legends on, and accounted on all hands to have been occupants of the country in the dimmest past, so that there is nothing back of them. Who they were, whence they came, and what stands for their descendants after we get down to what in this pre-Spanish history we rather presumptuously call historic ground, is far from clear. If we had the easy faith of the native historian Ixtlilxochitl, we should believe that these gigantic Quinames, or Quinametin, were for the most part swallowed up in a great convulsion of nature, and it was those who escaped which the Olmecs and Tlascalans encountered in entering the country.[788] If all this means anything, which may well be doubted, it is as likely as not that these giants were the followers of a demi-god, Votan,[789] who came from over-sea to America,[790] found it peopled, established a government in Xibalba,—if such a place ever existed,—with the germs of Maya if not of other civilizations, whence, by migrations during succeeding times, the Votanites spread north and occupied the Mexican plateau, where they became degenerate, doubtless, if they deserved the extinction which we are told was in store for them. But they had an alleged chronicler for their early days, the writer of the Book of Votan, written either by the hero himself or by one of his descendants,—eight or nine generations in the range of authorship making little difference apparently. That this narrative was known to Francisco Nuñez de la Vega[791] would seem to imply that somebody at that time had turned it into readable script out of the unreadable hieroglyphics, while the disguises of the Spanish tongue, perhaps, as Bancroft[792] suggests, may have saved it from the iconoclastic zeal of the priests. When, later, Ramon de Ordoñez had the document,—perhaps the identical manuscript,—it consisted of a few folios of quarto paper, and was written in Roman script in the Tzendal tongue, and was inspected by Cabrera, who tells us something of its purport in his Teatro critico Americano, while Ramon himself was at the same time using it in his Historia del Cielo y de la Tierra. It was from a later copy of this last essay, the first copy being unknown, that the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg got his knowledge of what Ramon had derived from the Votan narrative, and which Brasseur has given us in several of his books.[793] That there was a primitive empire—Votanic, if you please—seems to some minds confirmed by other evidences than the story of Votan; and out of this empire—to adopt a European nomenclature—have come, as such believers say, after its downfall somewhere near the Christian era, and by divergence, the great stocks of people called Maya, Quiché, and Nahua, inhabiting later, and respectively, Yucatan, Guatemala, and Mexico. This is the view, if we accept the theory which Bancroft has prominently advocated, that the migrations of the Nahuas were from the south northward,[794] and that this was the period of the divergence, eighteen centuries ago or more, of the great civilizing stocks of Mexico and of Central America.[795] We fail to find so early a contact of these two races, if, on the other hand, we accept the old theory that the migrations which established the Toltec and Aztec powers were from the north southward,[796] through three several lines, as is sometimes held, one on each side of the Rocky Mountains, with a third following the coast. In this way such advocates trace the course of the Olmecs, who encountered the giants, and later of the Toltecs.
That the Votanic peoples or some other ancient tribes were then a distinct source of civilization, and that Palenqué may even be Xibalba, or the Nachan, which Votan founded, is a belief that some archæologists find the evidence of in certain radical differences in the Maya tongues and in the Maya ruins.[797]
In the Quiché traditions, as preserved in the Popul Vuh, and in the Annals of the Cakchiquels, we likewise go back into mistiness and into the inevitable myths which give the modern comparative mythologists so much comfort and enlightenment; but Bancroft[798] and the rest get from all this nebulousness, as was gotten from the Maya traditions, that there was a great power at Xibalba,[799]—if in Central America anywhere that place may have been,—which was overcome[800] when from Tulan[801] went out migrating chiefs, who founded the Quiché-Cakchiquel peoples of Guatemala, while others, the Yaqui,—very likely only traders,—went to Mexico, and still others went to Yucatan, thus accounting for the subsequent great centres of aboriginal power—if we accept this view.
As respects the traditions of the more northern races, there is the same choice of belief and alternative demonstration. The Olmecs, the earliest Nahua corners, are sometimes spoken of as sailing from Florida and landing on the coast at what is now Pánuco, whence they travelled to Guatemala,[802] and finally settled in Tamoanchan, and offered their sacrifices farther north at Teotihuacan.[803] This is very likely the Votan legend suited to the more northern region, and if so, it serves to show, unless we discard the whole theory, how the Votanic people had scattered. The other principal source of our suppositions—for we can hardly call it knowledge—of these times is the Codex Chimalpòpoca, of which there is elsewhere an account,[804] and from it we can derive much the same impressions, if we are disposed to sustain a preconceived notion.
The periods and succession of the races whose annals make up the history of what we now call Mexico, prior to the coming of the Spaniards, are confused and debatable. Whether under the name of Chichimecs we are to understand a distinct people, or a varied and conglomerate mass of people, which, in a generic way, we might call barbarians, is a question open to discussion.[805] There is no lack of names[806] to be applied to the tribes and bands which, according to all accounts, occupied the Mexican territory previous to the sixth century. Some of them were very likely Nahua forerunners[807] of the subsequent great influx of that race, like the Olmecs and Xicalancas, and may have been the people, “from the direction of Florida,” of whom mention has been made. Others, as some say, were eddies of those populous waves which, coming by the north from Asia, overflowed the Rocky Mountains, and became the builders of mounds and the later peoples of the Mississippi Valley,[808] passed down the trend of the Rocky Mountains, and built cliff-houses and pueblos, or streamed into the table-land of Mexico. This is all conjecture, perhaps delusion, but may be as good a supposition as any, if we agree to the northern theory, as Nadaillac[809] does, but not so tenable, if, with the contrary Bancroft,[810] we hold rather that they came from the south. We can turn from one to the other of these theorists and agree with both, as they cite their evidences. On the whole, a double compliance is better than dogmatism. It is one thing to lose one’s way in this labyrinth of belief, and another to lose one’s head.
It was the Olmecs who found the Quinames, or giants, near Puebla and Cholula, and in the end overcame them. The Olmecs built, according to one story, the great pyramid of Cholula,[811] and it was they who received the great Quetzalcoatl from across the sea, a white-bearded man, as the legends went, who was benign enough, in the stories told of him, to make the later Spaniards think, when they heard them, that he was no other than the Christian St. Thomas on his missions. When the Spaniards finally induced the inheritors of the Olmecs’ power to worship Quetzalcoatl as a beneficent god, his temple soon topped the mound at Cholula.[812] We have seen that the great Nahua occupation of the Mexican plateau, at a period somewhere from the fourth to the seventh century,[813] was preceded by some scattered tribal organizations of the same stock, which had at an early date mingled with the primitive peoples of this region. We have seen that there is a diversity of opinion as to the country from which they came, whether from the north or south. A consideration of this question involves the whole question of the migration of races in these pre-Columbian days, since it is the coming and going of peoples that form the basis of all its history.