The Popol Vuh: The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Kichés of Central America

Much that is absurd has been written concerning the antiquity of the ruined cities of Central America, and some authors have not hesitated to place their foundation in an antiquity beside which the pre-dynastic buildings of Egypt would appear quite recent. But that they were abandoned not long before the Columbian era is now generally admitted. See Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America,” chap, iii., and the works of Charnay, Maler, Maudslay, and Gordon, for modern opinion upon the subject; also the various monographs contained in the more recent volumes of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology’s annual report. That a very respectable antiquity belongs to several sites is, however, certain; and competent authorities have not hesitated to ascribe to some of the ruins an age of not less than two thousand years.

Payne has made it abundantly clear to our mind that the original seat of the Nahuatlacâ (which included both Toltecs and Aztecs) was in British Columbia (see his “History of America,” vol. ii. p. 373 et seq.). He thinks they there occupied a position southerly to that of the Athapascan stock, and were probably the first northern people to come into contact with tribes possessed of the maize plant. The knowledge of this staple, he infers, spread rapidly among the northern peoples, and induced them to hasten their southern colonisation, but it does not appear to us probable that this would be an inducement to a savage flesh-eating people averse to a life of agricultural labour. The whole question of pre-historic American migration, and of the gradual civilisation by maize of the peoples who came within its zone, is most admirably discussed in vol. xix. of “The History of North America,” by W. J. Magee and Cyrus Thomas (Philadelphia, George Barrie and Sons), published March 1908. The knowledge contained in this work is the outcome of a lifetime’s labour in the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, and its learned authors have undoubtedly produced a monumental treatise which it will take many a generation of research to supersede, if, indeed, that is possible.

The authorities for the settlement of the Toltecs in Yucatan are the Tezcucan chronicler Ixtlilxochitl, and Torquemada, who both allege that the immigrants went to Campeachy and the south.

There appear to be grounds for believing that the parent deities Xpiyacoc and Xmucane are but derivations from Gucumatz, and represent the male and female attributes of that god. In the “Popol Vuh” they are spoken of as being “covered with green feathers,” the usual description of Gucumatz; but it is, of course, possible that they may have received some of his attributes in the general jumble of myths which, we have attempted to show, exists in the first book. Gucumatz, it will be remembered, is Quetzalcohuatl in another form, and the latter is often represented in the papyri as having a woman sitting opposite to him. She does not, however, appear to be at all analogous to Messrs. Förstemann and Schellhas’s “Goddess I,” whom I take to represent the Mayan equivalent of Xmucane, and who wears on her head the knotted serpent, a reptile characteristic of Quetzalcohuatl.

The Wallam-Olum (painted records) of the Leni Lenape Indians have often been called into question as regards their authenticity, but the evidence of Lederer, Humboldt, Heckewelder, Tanner, Loskiel, Beatty, and Rafinesque, all of whom professed to have seen them, rather discounts such unbelief in their existence. They consisted of picture-writings, or hieroglyphs, each of which applied to a whole verse, or many words. The ideas were, in fact, amalgamated in a compound system, and bear exactly the same relation to written language as the American tongues did to spoken language; that is, they were of an agglutinative type, a linguistic form where several words are welded into one. There are several series, one of which records the doings of the tribes immediately subsequent to the Creation. Another series relates to their doings in America, and consists of seven songs, four of sixteen verses of four words each, and three of twenty verses of three words each “It begins at the arrival in America,” says Rafinesque (“The American Nations”), “and is continued without hardly any interruption till the arrival of the European colonists towards 1600.” But this second series is a mere meagre catalogue of kings.