Latin American Mythology

Top face of the monolith known as the "Dragon" or the "Great Turtle" of Quirigua. This is one of the group of stelae and "altars" which mark the ceremonial courts of this vanished Maya city (see Plate XXIII); and is perhaps the master-work not only of Mayan, but of aboriginal American art. The top of the stone here figured shows a highly conventionalized daemon or dragon mask, surrounded by a complication of ornament.

The north and south (here lower and upper) faces of the monument contain representations of divinities; on the south face is a mask of the " god with the ornamented nose " (possibly Ahpuch, the death god), and on the north, seated within the open mouth of the Dragon, the teeth of whose upper jaw appear the top face of the monument, is carved a serene, Buddha-like divinity shown in Plate XXV. The Maya date corresponding, probably, to 525 A. D. appears in a glyphic inscription on the shoulder of the Dragon. The monument is fully described by W. H. Holmes, Art and Archaeology, Vol. IV, No. 6.

IN aim and plan the present volume is made to accord as nearly as may be with the earlier-written volume on the mythology of the North American Indians. Owing to divergence of the materials, some deviations of method have been necessary, but in their main lines the two books correspond in form as they are continuous in matter. In each case the author has aimed primarily at a descriptive treatment, following regional divisions, and directed to essential conceptions rather than to exhaustive classification; and in each case it has been, not the specialist in the field, but the scholar with kindred interests and the reader of broadly humane tastes whom the author has had before him.

The difficulties besetting the composition of both books have been analogous, growing chiefly from the vast diversities of the sources of material; but these difficulties are decidedly greater for the Latin-American field. The matter of spelling is one of the more immediate. In general, the author has endeavoured to adhere to such of the rules given in Note I of Mythology of All Races, Vol. X (pp. 267-68), as may be applicable, seeking the simplest plausible English forms and continuing literary usage wherever it is well established, both for native and for Spanish names (as Montezuma, Cortez). Consistency is pragmatically impossible in such a matter; but it is hoped that the foundational need, that of identification, is not evaded.

The problem of an appropriate bibliography has proven to be of the hardest. To the best of the author's belief, there exists, aside from that here given, no bibliography aiming at a systematic classification of the sources and discussions of the mythology of the Latin-American Indians, as a whole.

There are, indeed, a considerable number of special bibliographies, regional in character, for which every student must be grate- ful; and it is hoped that not many of the more important of these have failed of inclusion in the bibliographical division devoted to "Guides"; but for the whole field, the appended bibliography is pioneer work, and subject to the weaknesses of all such attempts. The principles of inclusion are:

(i) All works upon which the text of the volume directly rests. These will be found cited in the Notes, where are also a few references to works cited for points of an adventitious character, and therefore not included in the general bibliography.

(2) A more liberal inclusion of English and Spanish than of works in other languages, the one for accessibility, the other for source importance.

(3) An effort to select only such works as have material directly pertinent to the mythology, not such as deal with the general culture, of the peoples under consideration, a line most difficult to draw. In respect to bibliography, it should be further stated that it is the intent to enter the names of Spanish authors in the forms approved by the rules of the Real Academia, while it has not seemed important to follow other than the English custom in either text or notes. It is certainly the author's hope that the labour devoted to the assembling of the bibliography will prove helpful to students generally, and it is his belief that those wishing an introduction to the more important sources for the various regions will find of immediate help the select bibliographies given in the Notes, for each region and chapter.

The illustrations should speak for themselves. Care has been taken to reproduce works which are characteristic of the art as well as of the mythic conceptions of the several peoples; and since, in the more civilized localities, architecture also is significantly associated with mythic elements, a certain number of pictures are of architectural subjects.

It remains to express the numerous forms of indebtedness which pertain to a work of the present character. Where they are a matter of authority, it is believed that the references to the Notes will be found fully to cover them; and where illus- trations are the subject, the derivation is indicated on the tissues. In the way of courtesies extended, the author owes recognition to staff-members of the libraries of Harvard and Northwestern Universities, to the Peabody Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the University of Nebraska. His personal obligations are due to Professor Frank S. Philbrick, of the Northwestern University Law School, and to the Assistant Curator of the Academy of Pacific Coast History, Dr. Herbert I. Priestley, for valuable suggestions anent the bibliography, and to Dr. Hiram Bingham, of the Yale Peruvian Expedition, for his courtesy in furnishing for reproduction the photographs represented by Plates XXX and XXXVIII. His obligations to the editor of the series are, it is trusted, understood.

The manuscript of the present volume was prepared for the printer by November of 1916. The ensuing outbreak of war delayed publication until the present hour. In the intervening period a number of works of some importance appeared, and the author has endeavoured to incorporate as much as was essential of this later criticism into the body of his work, a matter difficult to make sure. The war also has been respon- sible for the editor's absence in Europe during the period in which the book has been put through the press, and the duty of oversight has fallen upon the author who is, therefore, responsible for such editorial delinquencies as may be found.

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER. LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, November 17, 1919.

INTRODUCTION

THERE is an element of obvious incongruity in the use of the term "Latin American" to designate the native Indian myths of Mexico and of Central and South America. Unfortunately, we have no convenient geographical term which embraces all those portions of America which fell to Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, and in default of this, the term designating their culture, Latin in character, has come into use aptly enough when its application is to transplanted Iberian institutions and peoples, but in no logical mode relating to the aborigines of these regions. More than this, there are no aboriginal unities of native culture and ideas which follow the divisions made by the several Caucasian conquests of the Americas. It is primarily as consequence of their conquest by Spaniards that Mexico and Central America fall with the southern continent in our thought; from the point of view of their primitive ethnology there is little evidence (at least for recent times) ¹ of southern influence until Yucatan and Guatemala are passed. There are, to be sure, striking resemblances between the Mexican and Andean aboriginal civilizations; and there are, again, broad similarities between the ideas and customs of the less advanced tribes of the two continents, such that we may correctly infer a certain racial character as typical of all American Indians; but amid these similarities there are grouped differences which, as between the continents, are scarcely less distinctive than are their fauna and flora, say, calumet and eagle's plume as against blowgun and parrot's feather, and these hold level for level: the Amazonian and the Inca are as distinctively South American as the Mississippian and the Aztec are distinctively North American.

Were the divisions in a treatment of American Indian myth to follow the rationale of pre-Columbian ethnography, ² the key-group would be found in the series of civilized or semicivilized peoples of the mainly mountainous and plateau regions of the western continental ridge, roughly from Cancer to Capricorn, or with outlying spurs from about 35 North (Zufii and Hop!) to near 35 South (Calchaqui-Diaguite). Within this region native American agriculture originated, and along with agriculture were developed the arts of civilization in the forms characteristic of America; while from the several centres of the key-group agriculture and attendant arts passed on into the plains and forests regions and the great alluvial valleys of the two continents and into the archipelago which lies between them. In each continent there is a region the Boreal and the Austral beyond the boundaries of the native agriculture, and untouched by the arts of the central civilizations, yet showing an unmistakable community of ideas, of which (primitive and vague as they are) recurrent instances are to be found among the intervening groups. Thus the plat and configuration of autochthonous America divides into cultural zones that are almost those of the hemispherical projection, and into altitudes that are curiously parallel to the continental altitudes: the higher civilizations of the plateaux, the more or less barbarous cultures of the unstable tribes of the great river basins, and the primitive development of the wandering hordes of the frigid coasts. The primitive stage may be assumed to be the foundational one throughout both continents, and it is virtually repeated in the least advanced groups of all regions; the intermediate stage (except in such enigmatical groups as that of the North-West Coast Indians of North America) appears to owe much to definite acculturation as a consequence of the spread of the arts and industries developed by the most advanced peoples.

Moreover, the outer unities of mode of life are reflected by inner communities of thought; for there are unmistakable kinships of idea, not only throughout the civilized group, but also in the whole range of the regions affected by its arts; while underlying these and outcropping at the poles, there is a definable stratum of virtually identical primitive thought. Nevertheless, these unities are cut across by differences, partly environmental and partly historical in origin, which give, as said above, distinctive character to the parallel groups of the two continents. One might, indeed, say that the cultural division is twinned, north and south, with a certain primacy, as of elder birth and clear superiority in the northern groups; for, on the whole, the Maya is superior to the Inca, just as the Iroquois and Sioux are superior to Carib and Araucanian, and the Eskimo to the Fuegian.

Such, in loose form, is the native configuration of American culture and hence of native American thought, and without question a desirable mode of treating the latter would be to follow this natural chart. Nevertheless, there are reasons which fully justify, in the study of native ideas, the bringing together in a single treatment of all the materials relating to the peoples of Latin America. The most obvious of these reasons is the unity of the descriptive literature, in its earlier and primary works almost wholly Spanish. It is not merely that such writers as Las Casas, Acosta, Herrera, and Gomara pass ubiquitously from region to region of the Spanish conquests, now north, now south, in the course of their narratives; it is rather that a certain colouristic harmony is derived from what might be termed the linguistic prejudices of their tongue, which, therefore, they share with those Spanish chroniclers whose field of description is limited to some one region. The mere fact that the ideas of an Indian nation are first described by a sixteenth century Spaniard friar, bishop, or cavalier gives to them the flavour of their translation and context, and thus establishes a sort of community between all groups of ideas so described. Nor need this be matter for regret: primitive thought, with its burning concreteness and its lack of relational expression, is as truly untranslatable into analytical languages as poetry is untranslatable; and it is, on the whole, good fortune to have, as it were, but one linguistic colour cast upon so large a body of aboriginal ideas.

Further what may not be to the liking of the ethnologist, but is certainly of high zest to the lover of romance the Spanish colour is quite as much in the nature of imagination as in the hue of expression. No book on Latin American mythology could be complete without description of those truly Latinian fables which the discoverers brought with them to the New World, and there, wedding them to native traditions (ill-heard and fabulously repeated), soon created such a realm of gorgeous marvel as glamoured the age with fantasy and set the coolest heads to mad adventure. In such names as Antilles, Brazil, the Amazon, Old World myths are fixed in New World geography; and beyond these there is the whole series of fantastic tales with which the Spaniard, in a sort of imaginative munificence, has enriched the literature and the romantic resources of this world of ours. The Fountain of Eternal Youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Island of the Amazons and the marvellous virtues of the Amazon Stone, El Dorado ("the Gilded Man"), the treasure cities of Manoa and Omagua, the lost empire of the Gran Moxo and the Gran Paytiti, Patagonian giants, and "men whose heads do grow between their shoulders," and finally, most wide-spread of all, the miracles of the robed and bearded white man who, long ago, had come to teach the Indian a new way of life and a purer worship and had left the cross to be his sign, in whom no pious mind could see other than the blessed Saint Thomas: all these were in part a freight of the caravels, and they represent collectively a chapter second to none in mythopoesy. There is no match for this cargo of imported fantasy in the parts of America colonized by the English and the French.

This, however, need not be accredited merely to cooler blood and calmer race: the North American colonies belong to the seventeenth century, a good hundred years after the Spaniards had completed their most golden conquests, and for the Spaniard, no less than for the others, the hour of intoxication and extravagance had by then gone by leaving its flamboyant tones to warm the colours of succeeding times. Thus it is that Latin American myth is in no faint degree truly Latinian.

But while there is a certain Old World seasoning in Latin American myth, native traditions are, of course, the substantial material of the study. This material is striking and various. It embraces the usual substrata of demoniac beliefs and animistic credulities, and above these such elaborate formations as the Aztec and Maya pantheons, with their amazing astral and calendric interpretations, or the enigmatic and fervid religion of Peru. Many of the stories are little more than vocal superstitions; others, such as the conquering of death in the Popul Fuh, the Brazilian tale of the release of the imprisoned night, or the superb Surinam legend of Maconaura and Anuana'itu, will compare, both for dramatic power and subtle suggestion, with the best that the world can show. There is, of course, the constant difficulty of deciding where myth clearly emerges from the misty realm of folk-lore, and, at the other extreme, where it is succeeded by science and religion; but this difficulty is more theoretic than practical: in its central character mythology is present wherever there are animating gods operant in the body of nature, and myth is present wherever spirits or deities are shown as dramatically interacting causes. With a few possible exceptions (the possibility being probably but the expression of our ignorance), all American Indians are mythopoets, whose mythology is characterized in characterizing their beliefs.

The practical problem of handling and apportioning the subject-matter is similar to that presented in the case of North America, and rather more difficult. In the first place, it were idle to undertake the mere narration of stories and superstitions without some delineation of the conditions of the life and culture of those who make them; frequently, the whole relevance of the tale is to the manner of life. In the next place, the feasible mode of apportionment, by regional divisions, is made difficult not only by the vastness of some of the regions, but even more so by the unevenness of culture, and hence of the range of ideas. If the lines were drawn on the scale of Old World studies, Mexico (Nahua and Maya) and Peru would each deserve a volume; and the proportionately slight attention which they receive in the present work is due partly to the need of giving reasonable space to other regions, partly to the fact that the myths of these fallen empires are already represented by an accessible literature. Still a third problem has to do with the order in which the matters should be presented. From the point of view of native affinities, the logical step from the Antilles is to the Orinoco and Guiana region (that is, from Chapter I to Chapter VIII). ³ But since, in beginning with the Antilles, one is really following the course of discovery seeing, as it were, with Spanish eyes the natural continuation is on to Mexico and Peru, and thence to the more slowly uncovered regions of central South America. This procedure, also, follows a certain bibliographical trend: the relative importance of Spanish authors is much less for the latter chapters of the book, and the sources of material, in general, are of later origin.

Finally, a word might be said with respect to interpretation. No matter how conscientiously one may aim at straight narration, the mere need for coherence will compel some interpreting; while every translation is, in its degree, an interpretation (and one literally impossible). Besides and beyond all this, there are the prepossessions of the recorders to be taken into account honest men who interpret according to their lights. There are the Biblical prepossessions of the early Padres, for whom the Tower of Babel and the Dispersion were recent and real events: granting a Noachian Deluge of the thoroughness which they had in mind, nothing could be more rational than were their readings of aboriginal legends of events of a kindred nature, or than their speculations as to what' sons of Shem the Indians might be. There are the traditionary visions of migratory descendants of the Lost Tribes, of far-wandering Buddhist monks, of sea-faring Orientals, and forgotten Atlantideans ; and there is the wonderful Euhemerism of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg (ever the more admirable in the more reading) neither the first nor the last of his tribe, but assuredly the most gifted of them all. There are, again, the theological biases of missionaries, for whom the devil is seldom far and God is generally near; and there are the no less ingrained prejudices of the anthropologists who serenely Tylorize and fetishize the most recalcitrant materials, and of the philologists who solarize and astralize because the model was once set for them. America has proven an abundant field for the illustration of all these methods of reading the riddle of man's fancy; and it is scarcely to be desired that one should report the matters without some reflection of the colourations. But, in sooth, how could myth be myth apart from meaning?

Which leads (by no devious routing of reflection) to some consideration of the meaning of mythology and of our interest in it. Such interest may be of any of several types. A first, and still persistent, interest, and one to which we owe, for America, from Ramon Pane onward, more actual material than to any other, is the desire of the Christian missionary to discover in the native mind those points of approach and elements of community which will best enable him to spread the faith of Christendom. In many cases, of course, the missionary is seized with a purely speculative zeal for recording facts, but it is usually possible in such records to detect the influence of the impulse which first brought him into the field, and which, it may be added, makes of his services a matter for the gratitude of all who follow him. A second interest, which is often not sharply divorced from the first, as instanced in Missionary Brett's poetizing of the myths of the Guiana Indians, ⁴is the aesthetic and imaginative. What classical mythology has done for the art and poetry of Christian Europe all men know: Dante and Milton, Botticelli and Michelangelo are only less its debtors than are Homer and Phidias. Further, the Renaissance curiosity, with its passion for the antique gems and heathen gods whose forms so stimulated its own expressions, was at its height when America was discovered and conquered; and it is small wonder that that interest was transformed, where the marvel of the New World was in question, into a wave of American exotism which rose to its crest in the humanitarian enthusiasm of the eighteenth century. ⁵

In our own day this interest is continuing, more soberly but not less fruitfully, in a deliberate effort on the part of artists, of poets, and of musicians to discover the elements of lasting beauty in the native arts and mythic themes. From a certain point of view there is a peril in the aesthetic interest: most investigators consciously or unconsciously possess it, and most recorders of native myths consciously or unconsciously dress their materials with the suaver forms of expression which the cultivated languages of Europe have developed. There is, in other words, some untruth to aboriginal thought in the desire to find or inject art where the original motive was realistic, or, if aesthetic, governed by a taste foreign to our own. On the other hand, we recognize readily enough that the real creative gain, in an artistic sense, must come from an amalgamation, and with such an example of artistic achievement through amalgamation as is afforded by the Renaissance, we can but hope that the more intimate adoption of the ideas and motives of American Indian art into our own aesthetic consciousness may yet result in an American Renaissance no less notable.

A third interest in American mythology is that of the anthropologists, by whom the domain is today most cultivated. Here the foundation is scientific curiosity and the modes are those of the natural and historical sciences. This type of interest, of course, determines its own problems and methods. For example, to it we owe most of the exact recording and minute analysis of materials: the preservation of texts in the native tongues, and the careful application of ethnological and archaeological observations to their interpretation. Naturally, the key-problem here is of the origin and distribution of the American Indian peoples, and the reconstruction of their history, both physical and ideational, wherein recent advances have been veritably in the nature of strides. Along with this problem of distribution and genesis there has coexisted the complementary question of the influence of nature (human and environmental) upon the forms of expression a question to which one might ascribe three facets, the philological, the sociological, and the more strictly bionomic, with its strong Darwinian leanings. Ultimately the two complemental problems resolve into an effort to read human nature, as human nature is reflected in its express reactions to the complex world by which it is modified even while it offers a conserving resistance, born of the strength of its traditions and of racial solidarity. This means, at the bottom, an interest in human psychology.

It is here that the anthropological interest in mythology passes over into the philosophical. Philosophy strives to achieve, as it were, a generalized autobiography of the human mind. It starts, inevitably, with psychology, and with those elemental unities of experience which our senses (inner and outer) determine for us; it goes on to try to discover the range and fullness of meaning of all the variations of human experience. Philosophers are interested in mythology, therefore, primarily from a psychological standpoint: they are interested in reading the mind's complexion, as mythopoesy reflects it; in analyzing out the images of sense in human thought, the images of instinct, of kind and kin, of speech and number; and again in reviewing the natural reactions of the human spirit to the visible and sensible world, with its seasons and cycles and evident metamorphoses, reactions which start, apparently, with a dreamy consciousness of the fluid and incoherent character of an outer, man-environing world, and culminate in a sense of the allegory and drama of things physical, and the discovery of a thinking self, still hazy as to its powers and its limitations. The biographic tale is a long one; it begins in savagery and continues on into the highest civilization; it is today unfinished, and so long as man lives and thinks must continue unfinished; but it is not without form, and its continuities become the more obvious with the extension of our knowledge of men.

It should be added that each of the interests which have been named shares in or leads to that final interest which is most appropriate to all, namely, a common concern for human welfare. The missionary interest is obviously actuated by this from the very beginning, and, as applied to America, it has produced (in Las Casas and his many notable successors) a truly wonderful series of apostolic figures in themselves a moving revelation of the possibilities of human nature. Hardly less striking is the humanitarianism which has accompanied the aesthetic interest one need but mention Montaigne's sympathetic curiosity, Rousseau, fantastic in his eighteenth century credulity, Chateaubriand, with his "epic of the man of nature," or Fenimore Cooper's idealization of the savage chivalrous, while the curiosity of the anthropologist and the philosopher, as must all honest curiosity about things human, leads at the last to understanding and sympathy, and ultimately to an active desire to preserve the manifest good which enlightens every chapter in the narrative of human progress.

Finally, it is perhaps worth observing that America affords a field of truly unique profit for all of these interests. The long isolation of its inhabitants from the balance of mankind, the variety of the forms and levels of their native achievement, the intrinsic value to humanity at large of what they did achieve, both in material and ideal modes, all unite to give to the races of the New Hemisphere an almost other-world distinction from the Old World peoples from whose midst (in some remote day) they doubtless sprang. It is true that the resemblances between the modes of life and the bent of thought in the two Worlds are as striking and numerous as their divergences; but this fact is in itself of the highest significance in that it emphasizes that fundamental unity, spiritual as well as physical, which is of the whole human brotherhood.

It is surely apparent that one book cannot satisfy all the interests which have been here defined. It is possible, however, that a description which should show what, in the main, are the materials to be found and how they are distributed with reference to accessible sources of study might well contribute to all. Nothing more ambitious than this is in the plan of the present work.

NOTES

1. That there is an ultimate community of culture and thought between the Andean and Mexican regions can hardly be doubted. Furthermore, it is not merely primitive, but belongs to an era of some advancement in the arts. Spinden (Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America [New York, 1917], and elsewhere) has termed the early stage the "archaic period," and he plausibly argues for its Mexican origination and southward migration. But at any rate since near the beginning of the Christian Era the civilizations of the two regions have developed in virtual independence.

2. The most admirable general introduction to the whole subject of American ethnography is Wissler, The American Indian (New York, 1917).

3. The transition from the Antilles to Guiana is, however, rather more marked than is that from the Orinoco to the Amazonian regions. Virtually the whole South American region bounded by the Andes, the Caribbean Sea, and the Argentinian Pampas is one ethnographically; so that, in the present work, Chapters VIII and IX are descriptive of a single region. However, the great rivers have always been natural routes of exploration, and this has given to the river systems an ethnographically factitious, but bibliographically real differentiation.

4. Wm. Henry Brett, Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians of British Guiana (London, no date).

5. For a history of this interesting movement in certain phases of European culture see Gilbert Chinard, UExotisme americain (Paris, 1911).

Adapted From The Mythology Of All Races, Volume XI