CHAPTER XIV.

NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILISATION.

THE TOLTECS—IXTLILXOCHITL—THE AZTECS—AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE— AZTALAN—THE VALLEY OF MEXICO—MONTEZUMA’S CAPITAL—ITS VANISHED SPLENDOUR—MEXICAN CALENDAR—THE CALENDAR STONE—MEXICAN DEITIES —TOLTEC CIVILISATION—RACE ELEMENTS—THE TOLTEC CAPITAL— TEZCUCAN PALACES—THEIR MODERN VESTIGES—QUETZALCOATL—THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA—THE SACRED CITY—THE MOQUI INDIANS—THE HOLY CITY OF PERU—WORSHIP OF THE SUN—ASTRONOMICAL KNOWLEDGE— AGRICULTURE—THE LLAMA—WOVEN TEXTURES—SCIENCE AND ART—NATIVE INSTITUTIONS—METALLURGY—ORIGIN OF THE MEXICANS—MINGLING OF RACES.

The Toltecs play a part in the initial pages of the New World’s story akin to the fabled Cyclops of antiquity. They belong to that vague era which lies beyond all definite records, and furnish a name for the historian and the ethnologist alike to conjure with: like the Druids or the Picts of the old British antiquary, or the Phœnicians of his American disciple. Yet it is not without its value thus to discover among the nations of the New World, even a fabulous history, with its possible fragments of truth embodied in the myth. Mr. Gallatin has compiled a laborious digest of the successive migrations and dynasties of Mexico, as chronicled from elder sources, by Ixtlilxochitl, Sahagun, Veytia, Clavigero, the Mendoza Collection, the Codex Tellurianus, and Acosta.[92] The oldest dates bring the Toltec wanderers to Huehuetlapallan, A.D. 387, and close their dynasty in the middle of the tenth century; when they are superseded by Chichimecas and Tezcucans, whose joint sovereignty, by the unanimous concurrence of authorities, endured till the sixteenth century. But, meanwhile, the same authorities chronicle the foundation of Mexico or Tenochtitlan, variously in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, by Aztec conquerors; and profess to supply the dynastic chronology of Aztec power. The earliest date is not too remote for the commencement of a civilisation that has left such evidences of its later maturity; but unfortunately the various authorities differ not by years only, but by centuries. Ixtlilxochitl carries back the founding of Mexico upwards of a century farther than any other authority; and in the succeeding date, which professes to fix the election of its king, Acamapichtli, the discrepancies between him and other authorities vary from two to considerably more than two and a half centuries, and leave on the mind of the critical student impressions as unsubstantial as those pertaining to the regal dynasties of Alban and Sabine Rome. Spanish chroniclers and modern historians have striven to piece into coherent details the successive migrations into the Vale of Anahuac, and the desertion of the mythic Aztalan for the final seat of Aztec empire on the lake of Tezcuco; but their shadowy history marshals before us only shapes vague as the legends of the engulfed Atlantis.

There is something suggestive of doubt relative to much else that is greatly more modern, to find the historian of the Conquest of Mexico tracing down the migrations and conquests of the Toltecs from the seventh till the twelfth century, when the Acolhuans or Tezcucans, the Aztecs, and others, superseded them in the Great Valley. We turn to the foot-notes, so abundant in the carefully elaborated narrative of Prescott, and we find his chief or sole authority is the christianised half-breed Don Fernando de Alva, or Ixtlilxochitl, who held the office of Indian interpreter of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Compared with such an authority, Bede should be indisputable as to the details of Hengist and Horsa’s migrations, and Geoffrey of Monmouth may be quoted implicitly for the history of Arthur’s reign.

But the Aztecs, at any rate, are no mythic or fabulous race. The conquest of their land belongs to the glories of Charles V., and is contemporary with what Europe reckons as part of its modern history. The letters of its conqueror are still extant; the gossiping yet graphic marvels of his campaigns, ascribed to the pen of Bernal Diaz, a soldier of the Conquest, have been diligently ransacked for collation and supplementary detail; and the ecclesiastical chroniclers of Mexican conquest and colonisation, have all contributed to the materials out of which Prescott has woven his fascinating picture of Hernando Cortes and his great life-work. It is a marvellous historical panorama, glittering with a splendour as of the mosques and palaces of Old Granada. But a growing inclination is felt to test the Spanish chroniclers by surviving relics of that past which they have clothed for us in more than oriental magnificence; and, for this purpose, to relume that curious phase of native civilisation which the Conquest abruptly ended. Yucatan and Central America still reveal indisputable memorials of an era of native architectural skill, to which attention must be directed. But, meanwhile, it is important to note that an assumed correspondence between the architecture of Central America and that which is affirmed to have existed in Mexico at the time of the Conquest constitutes the basis of many fallacious arguments on the nature and extent of Aztec civilisation in the era of the second Montezuma. Again, the conflicting elements apparent between the barbarous rites and cannibalism ascribed to the Aztecs, and the evidences of their matured arts and high civilisation, have been the plentiful source of theories as to Toltecan and other earlier derivations for all that pertained to such manifestations of intellect and inventive genius. It is important, therefore, to determine the actual character of Mexican architecture. The remains of the extinct Mound-Builders are full of wonder for us; but the reputed magnificence of Montezuma’s capital throws their earthworks into the shade, as things pertaining to America’s childhood. Before, however, this conclusion can be accepted, it is indispensable that we test, by existing evidence, the descriptions of Mexican art and architecture handed down to us by chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A peculiar style is recognised as pertaining to the native architecture of America, which it has been the favourite fancy of American antiquaries to trace to an Egyptian or Phœnician source. Alike in general character and mode of construction, in the style of sculpture, and the hieroglyphic decorations which enrich their walls: the ruined palaces and temples of Mexico, as well as of Yucatan and Central America, have been supposed to reproduce striking characteristics of the Nile valley. But the experienced eye of Stephens saw only elements of contrast instead of comparison; and while Prescott sums up his history of Mexican conquest with this conclusion, “that the coincidences are sufficiently strong to authorise a belief that the civilisation of Anahuac was, in some degree, influenced by that of eastern Asia,” he adds, that the discrepancies are such as to carry back the communication to a period so remote as to leave its civilisation, in all its essential features, peculiar and indigenous.

It is not always easy to determine the characteristics of some of the most famous monuments of Mexican art. The ruined city of Aztalan, on the western prairies: after filling the imagination with glowing fancies of a Baalbek or Palmyra of the New World, from whence the Aztecs had transplanted the arts of an obliterated civilisation to the Mexican plateau, shrunk before the gaze of a truthful surveyor into a mere group of mounds and earthworks, presenting no other analogies than those which class them with the works of the American Mound-Builders. It may be, however, that a critical survey will reveal traits in the later Aztecs of Anahuac, rendering such an ancestral birth-land not wholly inconsistent with their actual condition when brought into contact with the civilisation of Europe. Such at least seems to be the tendency of modern disclosures; if, indeed, they do not point to the possibility that much even of the latest phase of Mexican civilisation may present closer analogies to the actual Aztalan of the Wisconsin prairies than to the fancied mother-city of the Aztecs.

Midway across the continent of North America, where it narrows towards a point between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, the civilisation of the New World appears to have converged at the close of the fifteenth century. Here the traveller from the Atlantic coast, after passing through gorgeous tropical flowers and aromatic shrubs of the deadly _tierra caliente_, emerges at length into a purer atmosphere. The vanilla, the indigo, and flowering cacao-groves are gradually left behind. The sugar-cane and the banana next disappear; and he looks down through the gorges of the elevated _tierra templada_ on the vegetation of the tropics, carpeting, and scenting with its luscious but deadly odours, the region which stretches along the Mexican Gulf. Higher still are regions where the wheat and other grains of Europe’s temperate zone replace the tall native maize; until at length he enters the _tierra fria_: climbing a succession of terraces representing every zone of temperature, till he rests on the summit of the Cordillera. Beyond this the volcanic peaks of the Andes tower into the regions of perpetual snow; while the traveller crosses the once thickly-wooded table-land into the valley of Mexico: an oval basin about sixty-seven leagues in circumference, and elevated beyond the deadly malaria and enervating heat of the coast, into a temperate climate, nearly seven thousand five hundred feet above the sea. Here, encompassed by the salt marshes of the Tezcucan Lake, stood the ancient Tenochtitlan or Mexico, “The Venice of the Aztecs.”

In the month of October 1519, Don Diego de Ordaz effected the ascent of the volcanic Popocatepetl, from whence he beheld the valley of Mexico with its curious chain of lakes; and caught a glimpse of the far-famed capital of Montezuma, with its white towers and pyramidal teocallis reflecting back the sun from their stuccoed walls. The scene seemed to realise such a dream of romance as Bernal Diaz reports of Cempoal: “The Buildings,” he says, “having been lately whitewashed and plastered, one of our horsemen was so struck with the splendour of their appearance in the sun, that he came back in full speed to Cortes to tell him that the walls of the houses were of silver!” The men of that generation which witnessed the discoveries of mighty empires, and an El Dorado beyond the known limits of the world, had their imaginations expanded to the reception of any conceivable wonders. Sir Thomas More constructed his _Utopia_ out of such materials; and Othello styles his wonderful relations “of antres vast and deserts idle,” a “traveller’s history.”

The poetical imagination of Columbus was one of the sources of his power, whereby he anticipated with undoubting faith the realisation of his grand life-work. But from the position in which Cortes was placed, it was his interest to give currency to the highly-coloured visions of his first pioneers, rather than to transmit to Europe the colder narrative of matured experience. Approaching the Mexican capital, he exclaims in his first burst of enthusiasm: “We could compare it to nothing but the enchanted scenes we had read of in _Amadis de Gaul_, from the great towers and temples, and other edifices of lime and stone which seemed to rise up out of the water.” To achieve the recognised mastery of this scene of enchantment, he had not only to conquer its Mexican lords, but to defeat his Spanish foes, and to win to his side that Emperor who, while shaping Europe’s history in one of its mightiest revolutions, could control the destinies of the New World. When reading the accounts transmitted to Spain of the gorgeous treasures of Montezuma’s palaces, we have to bear in remembrance that the treasures themselves perished in the retreat of the _noche triste_, as the city itself vanished in the final siege and capture. The very dreams of an excited imagination could become realities of the past to the narrators themselves, when every test of their truth had been swept away.

On the 9th of November 1519, Cortes made his first entry into the capital of Montezuma, and from thence he wrote to the Emperor Charles V., giving an account of the Indian metropolis, with its palaces and stately mansions, far surpassing in grandeur and beauty the ancient Moorish capital of Cordova. Conduits of solid masonry supplied the city with water, and furnished means of maintaining hanging-gardens luxurious as those of ancient Babylon. “There is one place,” says Cortes, “somewhat inferior to the rest, attached to which is a beautiful garden with balconies extending over it, supported by marble columns, and having a floor formed of jasper elegantly inlaid”; and he adds, “Within the city, the palaces of the cacique Montezuma are so wonderful that it is hardly possible to describe their beauty and extent. I can only say that in Spain there is nothing equal to them.” The population of ancient Mexico, “the greatest and noblest city of the whole New World,” as Cortes styles it, amounted, according to the lowest computation of its conquerors, to three hundred thousand; and its streets and canals were illuminated at night by the blaze from the altars of numberless teocallis that reared their pyramidal summits in the streets and squares of what Prescott fitly calls “this city of enchantment.” Vast causeways, defended by drawbridges, and wide enough for ten or twelve horsemen to ride abreast, attracted the admiring wonder of the Spaniards by the skill and geometrical precision with which they were constructed. “The great street facing the southern causeway was wide, and extended some miles in nearly a straight line through the centre of the city. A spectator standing at one end of it, as his eye ranged along the deep vista of temples, terraces, and gardens, might clearly discern the other, with the blue mountains in the distance, which, in the transparent atmosphere of the table-land, seemed almost in contact with the buildings.”[93] Near the centre of the city rose a huge pyramidal pile, dedicated to the war-god of the Aztecs, the tutelary deity of the city: second in size only to the great pyramid-temple of Cholula, and occupying the area on which now stands the Cathedral of modern Mexico. Beyond the Lake of Tezcuco stood the rival capital of that name, resplendent with a corresponding grandeur and magnificence; and the whole Mexican valley burst on the eyes of the conquerors as a beautiful vision, glittering with towns and villages, with rich gardens, and broad lakes crowded with the canoes of a thriving and busy populace.

Three centuries and a half have intervened since Cortes entered the gorgeous capital of Montezuma; and what remains now of its ancient splendour, of the wonders of its palaces, the massive grandeur of its temples, or the cyclopean solidity of its conduits and causeways? Literally, not a vestige. The city of Constantine has preserved, in spite of all the destructive vicissitudes of siege and overthrow, enduring memorials of the grandeur that pertained to the Byzantine capital more than a thousand years ago. Rome has been sacked by Goth, Hun, Lombard, and Frank; yet memorials not only of three or four centuries, but of generations before the Christian era, survive. Even Jerusalem appears to have some stones of her ancient walls still left one upon another. In spite, therefore, of the narrative of desolating erasure which describes to us the final siege and capture of Mexico, we must assume its edifices and causeways to have been for the most part more slight and fragile than the description of its conquerors implies, or some evidences of such extensive and solid masonry must have survived to our time. Yet if we look in vain for its architectural remains, evidence of another kind shows what its civilisation really was. Mr. Tylor describes the ploughed fields around it as yielding such abundance of obsidian arrow-heads, pottery, and clay figures, that it is impossible to tread on any spot where there is no relic of old Mexico within reach. He left England full of doubts as to the credibility of the historians of the conquest; but personal observation inclines him rather “to blame the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things that surrounded them.”[94]

One trustworthy memorial of this native civilisation is the famous Calendar Stone: a huge circular block of dark porphyry, disinterred in 1790 in the great square of Mexico, which discloses evidence of progress in astronomical science altogether wonderful in a people among whom civilisation was in other respects so partially developed. The Mexicans had a solar year of 365 days divided into eighteen months of twenty days each, with the five complementary days added to the last. The discrepancy between the actual time of the sun’s annual path through the heavens and their imperfect year, was regulated by the intercalation of thirteen days at the end of every fifty-second year. According to Gama, who differs from Humboldt on this point, the civil day was divided into sixteen parts; and he conceives the Calendar to have been constructed as a vertical sundial. Mexican drawings also indicate that the Aztecs were acquainted with the cause of eclipses. But beyond this our means of ascertaining the extent of their astronomical knowledge fail; while there is proof that their inquiries were zealously directed to the more favoured speculations of the astrologer, which have supplanted true science in all primitive stages of society. Mr. Stephens drew attention to

points of correspondence between the central device on the Calendar Stone, and a mask, with widely expanded eyes and tongue hanging out, prominent in the curious sacrificial scene sculptured on the Casa de Piedra at Palenque. But the correspondence amounts to little more than this, that each is a gigantic mask with protruding tongue. That of the Calendar Stone is engraved here from a cast brought home by Mr. Bullock, and now in the Collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The statues dug up along with it on the site of the great teocalli of Mexico, were buried in the court of the University, to place them beyond reach of the idolatrous rites which the Indians were inclined to pay to them. At the solicitation of Mr. Bullock they were again disinterred, to admit of his obtaining casts; and he furnishes this interesting account of the sensation excited by the restoration to light of the largest and most celebrated of the Mexican deities:—“During the time it was exposed, the court of the University was crowded with people, most of whom expressed the most decided anger and contempt. Not so, however, all the Indians. I attentively marked their countenances. Not a smile escaped them, or even a word. All was silence and attention. In reply to a joke of one of the students, an old Indian remarked, ‘It is very true we have three very good Spanish gods, but we might still have been allowed to keep a few of those of our ancestors!’ And I was informed that chaplets of flowers had been placed on the figure by natives who had stolen thither unseen in the evening.”[95]

The figure which thus reawakened patriotic sympathies in the descendants of Montezuma’s subjects is a rude disproportioned idol, strikingly contrasting with the elaborate hieroglyphical devices and well-proportioned figures and decorations which accompany the grotesque mask in the Casa de Piedra of Palenque. In the latter, the principal human figures present the remarkable profile of the ancient Central American race, as shown on a vase dug up among the ruins of Ticul (Fig. 75), with the prominent nose, retreating forehead and chin, and protruding under-lip, so essentially different from the features either of the Mexicans or northern Indians. The subject race on whom they tread are characterised by a diverse profile, with overhanging brows, a Roman nose, and a well-defined chin; while their costume is equally indicative of a different origin.

But the sculpture of the Mexican Calendar Stone embodies evidence of an amount of knowledge and skill not less interesting for us than the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Palenque tablets; and was believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakable relations to the ancient science of south-eastern Asia. Mr. Stephens has printed a curious exposition of the chronology of Yucatan, derived from native sources by Don Juan Pio Perez. From the correspondence of their mode of computing time with that adopted by the Mexicans, he assumes that it probably originated with them; but at the same time he remarks that the inhabitants of Mayapan, as the Peninsula was called at the period of Spanish invasion, divided time by calculating it almost in the same manner as their ancestors the Toltecs, differing only in the particular arrangement of their great cycles. Their year commenced on the 16th of July, an error of only forty-eight hours in advance of the precise day in which the sun returns there to the zenith, on his way to the south, and sufficiently near for astronomers who had to make their observations with the naked eye. Their calendar thus presents evidence of native and local origin. According to Humboldt, the Mexican year began in the corresponding winter half of the year, ranging from the 9th to the 28th of January; but Clavigero places its commencement from the 14th to the 26th of February.

If my ideas as to a marked inferiority in the terra-cottas and sculptures of the Mexicans, and the very questionable proofs of their architectural achievements, are correct, they tend to confirm the inference, that not to the Aztecs, but to their more civilised Toltec predecessors, must be ascribed that remarkable astronomical knowledge in the arrangement of their calendar, which exhibits a precision in the adjustment of civil to solar time, such as only a few of the most civilised nations of the Old World had attained to at that date. But, so far as an indigenous American civilisation is concerned, it matters little whether it be ascribed to Toltec or Aztec origin. Of its existence no doubt can be entertained; and there is little more room for questioning, that among races who had carried civilisation so far, there existed the capacity for its further development, independently of all borrowed aid. The fierce Dane and Norman seemed to offer equally little promise of intellectual progress in their first encroachments on the insular Saxon. But out of such elements sprung the race which outstripped the Spaniard in making of the land of Columbus a New World; and, left to its own natural progress, the valley of Anahuac, with its mingling races, might have proved a source of intellectual life to the whole continent. But modern Mexico has displaced the ancient capital of Montezuma; cathedral, convents, and churches, have usurped the sites of Aztec teocallis; its canals have disappeared, and its famous causeways are no longer laved by the waters of the Tezcucan Lake. It is even denied by those who have personally surveyed the site, that the waters of the lake can ever have overflowed the marshes around the modern capital, or stood at a much nearer point to it than they do at present.[96] Fresh doubts seem to accumulate around its mythic story. The ruined masonry of its vanished palaces and temples may be assumed to have been all swallowed up in the edifices which combine to make of the modern capital so striking an object, amid the strange scenery of its elevated tropical valley. But Mexico was not the only city, nor even the only great capital, of the valley.

In attempting to trace back the history of the remarkable population found in occupation of the Mexican territory when first invaded by the Spaniards, we learn, by means of various sources of information already referred to, but chiefly on the authority of Ixtlilxochitl’s professed interpretations of picture-writings, no longer in existence; and of traditions of old men, concerning events reaching back from seven or eight, even to twelve centuries before their own time: that the Toltecs, advancing from some unknown region of the north, entered the territory of Anahuac, “probably before the close of the seventh century.” They were, according to their historian, already skilled in agriculture and the mechanical arts, familiar with metallurgy, and endowed with all the knowledge and experience out of which grew the civilisation of Anahuac in later ages. In the time of the Conquest, extensive ruins are said to have indicated the site of their ancient capital of Tula, to the north of the Mexican valley. The tradition of such ruined cities adds confirmation to the inferences derived from those more recently explored in regions to the south; and still the name of Toltec in New Spain is synonymous with _architect_: the mythic designation of a shadowy race, such as glances fitfully across the first chapters of legendary history among the most ancient nations of Europe. But subsequent to those Pelasgi of the New World, there followed from unknown regions of the north the Chichimecas, the Tepanecs, the Acolhuans or Tezcucans, the Aztecs of Mexicans, and other inferior tribes; so that, as we approach a more definite period of history, we learn of a league between the States of Mexico and Tezcuco and the kingdom of Tlacopan, under which the Aztec capital grew into the marvellous city of temples and palaces described by Cortes and his followers. But Don Fernando de Alva claimed descent on his mother’s side from the Imperial race of Tezcuco; and he has not failed to preserve, or to create the memorials of the glory of that imperial city of the laguna. It contained upwards of four hundred stately edifices for the nobles. The magnificent palace of the Tezcucan emperor “extended from east to west, twelve hundred and thirty-four yards, and, from north to south, nine hundred and seventy-eight. It was encompassed by a wall of unburnt bricks and cement, six feet wide and nine high for one-half of the circumference, and fifteen feet high for the other half. Within this enclosure were two courts. The outer one was used as the great market-place of the city, and continued to be so until long after the Conquest. The interior court was surrounded by the council-chambers and halls of justice. There were also accommodation there for foreign ambassadors; and a spacious saloon, with apartments opening into it, for men of science and poets, who pursued their studies in this retreat, or met together to hold converse under its marble porticoes.”[97] In this style the native historian describes the glory of ancient Tezcuco. A lordly pile, provided for the fitting accommodation of the sovereigns of Mexico and Tlacopan, contained three hundred apartments, including some fifty yards square. Solid materials of stone and marble were liberally employed both on this and on the apartments of the royal harem, the walls of which were incrusted with alabasters and richly tinted stucco, or hung with gorgeous tapestries of variegated feather-work. Some two leagues distant, at Tezcotzinco, was the favourite residence of the sovereign; on a hill, “laid out in terraces, or hanging-gardens, having a flight of five hundred and twenty steps, many of them hewn in the natural porphyry. In the garden on the summit was a reservoir of water, fed by an aqueduct carried over hill and valley for several miles on huge buttresses of masonry. A large rock stood in the midst of this basin, sculptured with hieroglyphics representing the years of Nezahualcoyotl’s reign, and his principal achievements in each. On a lower level were three other reservoirs, in each of which stood a marble statue of a woman, emblematic of the three estates of the empire. Another tank contained a winged lion,”—but here the modern historian grows incredulous, and appends a (?) before proceeding in accordance with his authorities to add—“cut out of the solid rock, bearing in his mouth the portrait of the emperor.”

The authority for all this wrote in the beginning of the seventeenth century; but his narrative receives some confirmation from architectural remains still visible on the hill of Tezcotzinco. They are referred to by Latrobe and Bullock as relics of an era greatly more remote than that of Aztec civilisation; and more recently Mr. Tylor describes the hill of Tezcotzinco as terraced, and traversed by numerous roads and flights of steps cut in the rock. It is connected with another hill by an aqueduct of immense size constructed with blocks of porphyry, and with its channel lined with a hard stucco, still very perfect. Baths also remain, cut out of the solid rock; and on the summit of the hill, overlooking the ancient city, sculptured blocks of stone furnish evidence that the tales of architectural magnificence are not wholly fabulous. Mr. Christy, his travelling companion, made excavations in the neighbouring mounds, and was rewarded by the discovery of some fine idols of hard stone, and “an infinitude of pottery and small objects.” But the spirit of Spanish romance still asserts its influence. Bullock, in his _Six Months in Mexico_, describes the remains of the royal fountain of Tezcotzinco as a “beautiful basin, twelve feet long by eight wide, having a well five feet by four deep in the centre”; while Latrobe, in his _Rambles in Mexico_, reduces the dimensions of the royal bath to “perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, not large enough for any monarch bigger than Oberon to take a duck in!”

Of the great pyramid or teocalli of Huitzilopotchtli in old Mexico, no vestige now remains, unless such as is reputed to lie buried under the foundations of the cathedral which occupies its site. But time and fate have dealt more tenderly with the scarcely less famous pyramid of Cholula. The ancient city of that name, when first seen by Cortes, was said to include, within and without its walls, about forty thousand houses, or according to ordinary rules of computation, two hundred thousand inhabitants. But whatever its ancient population may have been, while the fruits of Spanish conquest have advanced it to the rank of capital of the republic of Cholula, they have left only sixteen thousand as the number of its occupants. Still, Cholula was unquestionably one of the most famous of the cities of the New World: a sacred Mecca for the pilgrims of Anahuac.

Quetzalcoatl, the milder god of the Aztec pantheon, whose worship was performed by offerings of fruits and flowers in their season, was venerated as the divine teacher of the arts of peace. His reign on earth was the golden age of Anahuac, when its people learned from him agriculture, metallurgy, and the art of government. But their benefactor, according to the tradition handed down to the Aztecs by an elder people whom they had superseded, incurred the wrath of another of the gods. As he passed on his way to abandon the land to the rule of the terrible Huitzilopotchtli, he paused at the city of Cholula; and while he tarried there, the great teocalli was reared and dedicated to his worship. But the benevolent deity could not remain within reach of the avenger. After spending twenty years among them, teaching the people the arts of civilisation, he proceeded onward till he reached the ocean; and there embarking in a vessel, made of serpents’ skins, his followers watched his retreating bark on its way to the sacred isle of Tlapallan. But the tradition lived on among the Mexicans that the bark of the good deity would revisit their shores; and this fondly cherished belief materially contributed to the success of the Spaniards, when their huge-winged ships bore the beings of another world to the mainland of the Mexican Gulf. The legend bears all the marks of anciently derived hero-worship, in which love for a lost benefactor framed for itself a deified embodiment of his virtues. This, however, is important to note, that Aztec traditions assigned the pyramid of Cholula to an older race and era than their own. It was there when they entered the plateau; and the arts of the divine metallurgist were taught, not to them but to the Toltecs, whom they superseded. Nevertheless, the deity shared in their worship; his image occupied a shrine on the summit of the pyramid of Cholula when the Spaniards first visited the holy city; and the undying flame flung its radiance far into the night, to keep alive the memory of the good deity, who was one day to return and restore the golden age.

The present appearance of the great teocalli very partially justifies the reference made by Prescott to it as “that tremendous mound on which the traveller still gazes with admiration as the most colossal fabric in New Spain, rivalling in dimensions, and somewhat resembling in form, the pyramidal structures of ancient Egypt.” If it ever was a terraced pyramid, time and the elements have nearly effaced the traces of its original outline. On the authority of Humboldt, it is described as a pyramidal mound of stone and earth, deeply incrusted with alternate strata of brick and clay, which “had the form of the Mexican teocallis, that of a truncated pyramid facing with its four sides the cardinal points, and divided by the same number of terraces.” But the _adobe_ of the Mexican, which is frequently styled brick, is nothing more than a mass of unbaked clay, or even mud. If such, therefore, is the supposed brick which alternated with the other materials of the mound, we can the more readily reconcile the seeming contradictions of observers. One of the latest thus describes the impression produced on his mind: “Right before me, as I rode along, was a mass of trees, of evergreen foliage, presenting indistinctly the outline of a pyramid, which ran up to the height of about two hundred feet, and was crowned by an old stone church, and surmounted by a tall steeple. It was the most attractive object in the plain; it had such a look of uncultivated nature in the midst of grain fields. It would have lost half its attractiveness had it been the stiff and clumsy thing which the picture represents it to be.” It is accordingly described by Mr. R. A. Wilson, in his _Mexico and its Religion_, as no more than “the finest Indian mound on this continent,” rising to a height of about two hundred feet, and crowned by an old stone church. But careful examination satisfied Mr. Tylor that it still retains the traces of a terraced teocalli. The church on its summit, dedicated to Our Lady _de los Remedios_, is served by a priest of the blood of the Cholulans; and the masonry and architectural skill which it displays have no doubt somewhat to do with their absence elsewhere; for if the clergy found the teocalli cased like the pyramidal terraces of Central America, with cut stone steps and facings, there can be little doubt they would go no further for a quarry for their intended church.

To the north of the Mexican valley ancient ruins arrest the gaze of the traveller, onward even to California. On the Rio Colorado and its tributaries, ruins of great extent, surveyed by recent exploring parties, are described as built with large stones, nicely wrought, and accurately squared. But nothing in their style of architecture suggests a common origin with the ruins of Mexico or Central America. They are large and plain structures, with massive walls, evidently built for defence, and with no traces of the ornamentation which abounds on the ruins of Yucatan. The Moqui Indians, the supposed remnant of the ancient builders, still construct their dwellings of stone with considerable art and skill. They are a gentle and intelligent race, small of stature, with fine black hair; and differ essentially from the Indians of the North-west. Their villages are included in one common stone structure, generally of a quadrangular form, with solid, unpierced walls externally, and accessible only by means of a ladder. These hive-like colonies are usually placed, for further defence, on the summits of the lofty plateaus, which in the region of New Mexico are detached by the broad cañons with which that remarkable region is intersected. By such means this ingenious people seek protection from the wild tribes with which they are surrounded. Thus permanently settled, while exposed to the assaults of marauders, the Moquis cultivate the soil, raise corn, beans, cotton, and more recently vegetables derived from intercourse with the Mexicans. They have also their flocks of sheep and goats; and weave their dyed wools into a variety of substantial and handsome dresses. But only a small remnant now survives, occupying seven villages on the range of the Rio del Norte.[98]

Throughout New California ruined structures of stone, and sometimes of clay abound. The _Casas grandes_, as they are called, appear to have been defensive structures like the Moqui villages. Captain Johnston describes one, called the Casa de Montezuma, on the river Gila, which measured fifty feet by forty, and had been form storeys high. It is indeed worthy of note that while we find throughout the continent, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, scarcely a vestige of ante-Columbian stone architecture: traces of it increase upon us with every new exploration of the country that lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, and merges towards the south into the seats of ancient native civilisation and matured architectural skill.

But the Southern Continent had also its seat of a remarkable native civilisation; which, like that of Mexico, derived some of its most striking characteristics from the physical aspects of the country in which it originated. The peculiar natural advantages of Peru resulted from the settlement of a people on the lofty plateaus of the Andes, but within the tropics, where at each successive elevation a different climate was secured. Such products as the mercantile navies of Northern Europe gather from many distant shores, were there brought within the compass of an industrious population: who fed their flocks on the cold crests of the sierra; cultivated their gardens and orchards on its higher plateaus; and gathered the luxuriant products of the tropics from the country that for them lay, for the most part, beneath the clouds, and spread away from the lowest slopes of the Andes to the neighbouring shores of the Pacific. The character of the people, and the nature of the civilisation of this remarkable country, presented many striking contrasts to the customs and institutions of the Mexicans, and they have generally been assumed as of totally independent origin.

Peru has her historic traditions, no less than Mexico; and her native historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant, through his mother, from the royal line of the Incas: who plays for them the part which Fernando de Alva did for his Tezcucan ancestry. Seen through such a medium, the traditions of the Inca race expand into gorgeous pages of romance; and the institutions of European chivalry and medieval polity are grafted on the strange usages of an Indian nation, remarkable for its own well-matured commonwealth, and unique phases of native-born civilisation. Sabaism constituted the essential element of Peruvian religious faith, and gave form and colour to the national rites and traditions. Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, their mythic instructors in the arts of agriculture, weaving, and spinning, were the Children of the Sun; their high religious festivals were determined by the solstices and equinoxes; and Quito, the holy city, which lay immediately under the Equator, had within it the pillar of the sun, where its vertical rays threw no shadow at noon, and they believed the god of light to seat himself in full effulgence in his temple. The sacred pillar stood in the centre of a circle described within the court of the great temple, traversed by a diameter drawn from east to west, by means of which the period of the equinoxes was determined; and both then, and at the solstices, the pillar was hung with garlands, and offerings of fruit and flowers were made to the divine luminary and parent of mankind. The title of the sovereign Inca was the Child of the Sun; and the territory of the empire was divided into three portions, of which one, constituting the lands of the Sun, maintained the costly ceremonial of public worship, with the temples and their numerous priests and vestal virgins. The national traditions pointed to the Valley of Cuzco as the original seat of native civilisation. There their mythic Manco Capac founded the city of that name; on the highlands around it a number of columns were reared which served for taking azimuths, and by measuring their shadows the precise time of the solstices were determined.

Besides the divine honours paid to the sun, the Peruvians worshipped the host of heaven, and dedicated temples to the thunder and lightning, and to the rainbow, as the wrathful and benign messengers of the supreme solar deity. It might naturally be anticipated that a nation thus devoted to astronomical observations, and maintaining a sacred caste exclusively for watching solar and stellar phenomena, would have attained to considerable knowledge in that branch of science. Apparently, however, the facilities which their equatorial position afforded for determining the few indispensable periods in their calendar, removed the stimulus to further progress; and not only do we find them surpassed in this respect by the Muyscas, occupying a part of the same great southern plateau, who regulated their calendar on a system presenting considerable points of resemblance to that of the Aztecs; but they remained to the last in ignorance of the true causes of eclipses, and regarded such phenomena with the same superstitious and apprehensive wonder as has affected the untutored savage mind in all ages. One historian, indeed, affirms that they recognised the actual length of the solar year, and regulated their chronology by a series of cycles of decades of years, centuries, and decades of centuries, the last of which constituted the grand cycle or great year of the sun.[99] This is only confuted by a reference to the silence of earlier authorities, and the absence of all evidence on the subject; and may serve to remind us how partial is the knowledge we possess of the intellectual development of this singularly interesting people, among whom science was essentially esoteric.

Prescott seeks to account for the very imperfect nature of the astronomical science of Peru, by the fact, that the Peruvian priesthood were drawn exclusively from the body of the Incas: a privileged order of nobility who claimed divine origin, and were the less tempted to seek in superior learning the exclusive rights of an intellectual aristocracy. But other reasons help to explain this singular intellectual condition of a nation, which had in so many other directions made remarkable progress in civilisation. The very fact that astronomy constituted, as it were, the national religion, placed it beyond the reach of scientific speculation, among a people with whom blasphemy against the sun, and malediction of the Inca, were alike punished with death. The impediments to Galileo’s astronomical discoveries were trifling compared with those which must have beset the presumptuous Inca priest who ventured to deny the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth; or to explain, by the simple interposition of the moon between themselves and the sun, the mysterious and malign infirmities with which it constituted a part of the national creed to believe their supreme deity was afflicted during a solar eclipse. But another cause also tended to retard the progress of the Peruvians in the intelligent solution of astronomical phenomena. Among the ancient Egyptians we find the division of the year determined by the changes of the Nile; and their year regulated by applications of astronomical science, minutely interwoven with their sacred and civil institutions. But the phenomena of the seasons, which have fostered with every other civilised nation the accurate observation of the astronomical divisions of time, and the determination of the recurring festivals dependent on seed-time and harvest, were almost inoperative, where, among a people specially devoted to agriculture, each season and every temperature could be commanded by a mere change of elevation under the vertical sun of the equator.

The Peruvians, however, must be tried by their own standards of excellence. Manco Capac, their mythic civiliser, was no war-god, like the Mexitli of the ferocious Aztecs. Agriculture was the special art introduced by him; and husbandry was pursued among them on principles which modern science has only recently fully developed in Europe. There alone, in all the New World, the plough was in use; and the Inca himself, on one of the great annual festivals, consecrated the labours of the husbandman by turning up the earth with a golden ploughshare. Artificial irrigation was carried out on a gigantic scale by means of aqueducts and tunnels of great extent, the ruins of which still attest the engineering skill of their constructors. The virtues of _guano_, which are now so well appreciated by the agriculturists of Europe, were familiar to the Peruvian farmer; and as the country of the Incas included, at its various levels, nearly all varieties of climate and production, from the cocoa and palm that fringed the borders of the Pacific, to the pasture of their mountain flocks on the verge of the high regions of perpetual snow: a systematic succession of public fairs, regulated, like all else, by the supreme government, afforded abundant opportunities for the interchange of their diverse commodities.

Such a country, if any, could dispense with commerce, and attain to considerable advancement without a representative currency or circulating medium. Gold, which was so abundant, served only for barbaric pomp and decoration. Silver was accessible in such quantities, that Pizarro found in it a substitute for iron to shoe the horses of his cavalry. Copper and tin in like manner abounded in the mountains; and the Peruvians had learned to alloy the copper both with tin and silver, for greater utility in its application to the useful arts. Bartholomew Ruiz, it will be remembered, found on board the _balsa_ first met by him off the Peruvian coast, a pair of balances for weighing the precious metals; and the repeated discovery of well-adjusted silver balances in tombs of the Incas, confirms the evidence that they made use of weights in determining the value of their commodities. The Peruvians were thus in possession of a mode of exchange, which, for their purposes, was superior to that of the currency of the Mexicans, in the absence of any such means of ascertaining the exact apportionment of commodities produced for sale.

Progress in agriculture was accompanied by a corresponding development of the resources of a pastoral people. Vast flocks of sheep ranged the mountain pastures of the Andes, under the guidance of native shepherds; while the Peruvians alone, of all the races of the New World, had attained to that important stage in civilisation which precedes the employment of machinery, by their use of the lower animals in economising human labour. The llama, trained as a beast of burden, carried its light load along the steep paths of the Cordilleras, or on the great highways of Peru.

As the mythic Manco Capac was the instructor of the nation in agriculture, so also the divine daughter of the Sun introduced the arts of weaving and spinning. Such traditions serve at least to indicate the favourite directions of the national taste and skill, which were displayed in the manufacture of a variety of woollen articles of ingenious patterns and the utmost delicacy of texture. Numerous examples of the woven textures of the Peruvians have been recovered from their ancient graves at Atacama and elsewhere; though it cannot be assumed that in these we have specimens of the rare and costly fabrics which excited the wondering admiration of the early Spaniards. In the arid soil and tropical climate of the great desert of Atacama, articles which prove the most perishable in northern latitudes are found, after the lapse of centuries, in perfect preservation. Of these I had an opportunity of examining a collection recovered by Mr. J. H. Blake from ancient huacas explored by him, and now preserved in his cabinet at Boston. They include specimens of cloth, wrought in dyed woollen thread, and sewed in regular and ornamental designs. Each piece is woven of the exact size which was required for the purpose in view, and some of them furnish proofs of ingenious skill in the art of weaving. The threads consist of two or more strands of dyed llama-wool twisted together; and elaborate patterns are woven into a soft and delicate web. The accompanying figure, though grotesque, is a good specimen of a complicated feat achieved in dyed woollen threads on the ancient Peruvian loom. It was found in a grave at Atacama, along with many other relics described in a subsequent chapter. Mr. Blake remarks, in reference to the discoveries of this class which rewarded his researches:—“In forming an opinion of the degree of skill displayed in the arts of spinning and weaving, by these specimens, it should be borne in mind that the implements in use were of the simplest contrivance. The only ones which have been discovered are simple distaffs; and among the articles obtained from the Atacama graves were several formed of wood and stone, such as are still in use among the Indians of Peru at the present day. Weaving on the loom has not been introduced among them. The warp is secured by stakes driven into the ground, and the filling-in is inserted by the slow process of passing it by hand over and under each thread alternately.” It would be a grave error, however, to assume that we possess in such relics, recovered from the ordinary graves formed in the loose sand of the desert, the highest achievements of Peruvian skill. On the contrary, regarding them, as we must, as fair specimens of the common woollen tissues of the country, they confirm the probability that the costly hangings, and beautifully wrought robes of the Inca and his nobles, fully justified the admiration with which they are referred to by Spanish writers of the sixteenth century.

Marvellous specimens of ceramic art are also noted among the manufactures ascribed to the Peruvians before the conquest, surpassing anything found in the common cemeteries of the race; but the proofs which exist of the ingenuity expended by the ancient potter on utensils in daily use, render probable the accounts of such rare _chef-d’œuvres_ executed by their cunningest workmen for the imperial service. So also we read of animals and plants wrought with wonderful delicacy, in gold and silver; and scattered with profuse magnificence about the apartments of the Peruvian nobles. Such specimens of goldsmiths’ work no longer survive; but still the huacas of the ancient race are ransacked for golden ornaments, which prove considerable metallurgic skill, and leave no room to doubt that gold and silver were moulded and graven into many ingenious forms. Science and art had indeed made wonderful advances among this remarkable people; though with them, as with the Chinese, they were more frequently expended in the gratification of a craving for display, than in realising triumphs of much practical value. Nevertheless, Peruvian civilisation had wrought out for itself many elements of progress adapted to its native soil. Its astronomical science admits, indeed, of no comparison with that of Mexico; and in lieu of the artistic picture-writing of the Mexicans, it employed the quipus, an artificial system of mnemonics not greatly superior to the Red Indian wampum, to which it bears considerable resemblance. In this it contrasts with the matured hieroglyphical inscriptions of Central America and Yucatan, which preserve evidences of progress in advance of the highest civilisation of the Aztecs and the Incas, and indeed of all but the most civilised nations of ancient or modern centuries. But this higher phase of intellectual development must be reserved for consideration in its relations to the psychology of the whole continent.

The remarkable system of national polity doubtless originated in part from the docile nature still manifested by the descendants of the Peruvian people; and, when viewed in this connection, it furnishes some key to the peculiar characteristics of their civilisation. Their government was a sacerdotal sovereignty, with an hereditary aristocracy, and a system of castes more absolute seemingly than that of the Egyptians or Hindus. Something of the partial and unprogressive development of the Chinese mingled in the ancient Peruvians along with numerous other traits of resemblance to that singular people. Unlike the Mexicans, we see in their whole polity, arts, and social life, institutions of indigenous growth. It would be difficult to limit the centuries during which such a people may have handed on from generation to generation the slowly brightening torch. Their own traditions, preserved with the help of quipus and national ballads, are valueless on this point. But their institutions reveal some remarkable evidences of a people preserving many traits of social infancy, alongside of such matured arts and habits as could only grow up together around the undisturbed graves of many generations. Offerings of fruits and flowers took the place of the bloody human sacrifices of Aztec worship; but the suttee rites, which disclose their traces everywhere in the sepulchral usages of primitive nations, were retained in full force. The simple solidity of megalithic art gave an equally primitive character to their architecture, notwithstanding its application to many practical purposes of life; and the precious metals, though existing in unequalled profusion, were retained to the last solely for their contribution to barbaric splendour. The habits of pastoral life, by means of which the foremost nations of the Old World appear to have emerged out of barbarism, were with them modified by the haunts of flocks peculiar to the strange region of mountain and plateau, where also they carried the next step in human progression, that of agriculture, to a degree of perfection probably never surpassed. They had advanced metallurgy through all its stages, up to that which preceded the use of iron; and with the help of their metal tools, displayed a remarkable skill in many mechanical arts. They did no more, because, under their peculiar local circumstances and the repressive influences of the mild despotism of Inca rule, they had achieved all that they required.

A gentle people found abundant occupation in tilling the soil, without being oppressed by a labour which was lightened by the frequently recurring festivals of a joyous, and, in some respects, elevating national faith. Nor is it difficult to conceive of such a people continuing to pursue the even tenor of their way, with scarcely perceptible progression, through all the subsequent centuries since their discovery to Europe: had not the hand of the conqueror ruthlessly overthrown the structure reared by many generations, and quenched the lamp of native civilisation. The conquerors of the sixteenth century have given expression to the astonishment with which they beheld everywhere evidences of order, contentment, and prosperity; and while the architectural magnificence of Montezuma’s capital has so utterly disappeared as to suggest the doubt if it ever existed: the traveller along the ancient routes of Peruvian industry still sees on every hand ruins, not only of temples, palaces, and strongholds, but of terraced declivities, military roads, causeways, aqueducts, and other public works, that astonish him by the solidity of their construction and the grandeur of their design. But between these two great divisions of the western hemisphere, in the curiously insulated region of Central America, traces of ancient civilisation abound, with evidences of a higher, if not longer enduring development than either. The closing annals both of Mexico and Peru have acquired a vivid interest from the incidents of Spanish conquest; and retain many romantic associations connected with the lustre of their conquerors. But the interest which attaches to Central America and Yucatan derives little value from history. There, under the luxuriant forests of that tropical region, may still be studied the monuments of a lettered people, and the sculptures and symbolic inscriptions of an extinct faith, amid ruins which appear to have been already abandoned to decay before Cortes explored the peninsula in his lust of conquest. Their basso-relievos preserve the physiognomy of a race essentially diverse from the Mexicans; and their sculptured hieroglyphics show a process of inscription very far in advance of the picture-writing of the Aztecs. The magnitude and solidity of the ruins of Peru still attest the practical aim of works wrought there on a grand scale, and for purposes of more obvious utility than those of the Central American peninsula; and the characteristics of some of the Peruvian crania suggest striking analogies with the peculiar physiognomy of the northern basso-relievos, such as are no longer recognisable when we turn to the Mexican race.

Nothing pertaining to the northern continent east of the Rocky Mountains presents any counterpart to Peruvian architecture, sculpture, or the ingenious modelling of the potter’s art; or suggests affinities in language or astronomical science, to Peru or Central America; unless it be the remarkable remains of the Mound-Builders. But with Mexico it is otherwise. In the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic the stock is to be sought, from which on many grounds it appears most reasonable to trace the predominant Mexican race of the era of the Conquest. They were inheritors, not originators of the civilisation of the plateau. But while the traditions of the Aztecs appear to point to a migration from the north, the Toltecs whom they displaced can be assigned on no tangible evidence to a similar origin. Amid many diversities recognisable among the nations of the New World, the forest and prairie tribes, now clustering chiefly in the North-west, are the representatives of one great subdivision, the source of which may be sought in that northern hive stretching westward towards Behring Strait and the Aleutian Islands, with possible indications of an Asiatic origin. But for the more intellectual nations whose ancient monuments lie to the south of the Rio Grande del Norte, the most probable source appears to be the southern plateaus of the Peruvian Cordilleras. In the copper regions of the north the abundant metal supplied all wants too readily to stimulate to further progress; but the southern region rises through every change of climate under the vertical rays of the equator; and its rocky steeps are veined with exhaustless treasures of metallic ores, in such a condition as to lead man on step by step from the infantile perception of the native metal as a ductile stone, to the matured intelligence of the metallurgist, mingling and fusing the contiguous ores into his most convenient and useful alloys. A branch of the same race, moving northward along the isthmus, may account for the abundant architectural remains of the central peninsula, consistently with its ethnographic traces; while beyond this, to the northward, we see in the conflicting elements of Mexican civilisation, the confluence of races from north and south, and the mingling of their diverse arts and customs under the favouring influences which the vale of Anahuac supplied.

[92] _American Ethnological Society’s Transactions_, vol. i. p. 162.

[93] Prescott’s _Conquest of Mexico_, B. III. ch. ix.

[94] _Anahuac_, p. 147.

[95] Bullock’s _Six Months in Mexico_, p. 111.

[96] Topographical View of the Valley, Wilson’s _New History of Mexico_, p. 452.

[97] Prescott’s _Conquest of Mexico_, B. I. chap. vi.

[98] Dr. Latham speaks of the Moquis as a people that “no living writer seems to have seen.”—_Varieties of Man_, p. 394. But the above information communicated to me by Professor Newberry, is the result of his own personal observations. He showed me also specimens of their woven dresses, manifesting considerable skill, and exhibiting great taste in the arrangement of their bright colours. They have recently been greatly reduced by small-pox.

[99] Montesino’s _Mém. Antiquas MS._, lib. ii. cap. 7; cited by Prescott.