Atlantic Monthly | Page 2

du Mexique et de l'Am��rique Centrale." (Paris, 1857.) M. de Bourbourg spent many years in Central America, studying the face of the country and the languages of the Indian tribes, and investigating the ancient picture-writing and the remains of the wonderful ruins of that region. Probably no stranger has ever enjoyed better opportunities of reading the ancient manuscripts and studying the dialects of the Central American races. With these helps he has prepared a groundwork for the history of the early civilized peoples of our American continent,--a history, it should be remembered, ending where Prescott's begins,--reaching back, possibly, as far as the earliest invasions of the Huns, and one of whose fixed dates is at the time of the Antonines. He has ventured to lift, at length, the veil from our mysterious and confused American antiquity. It is an especial merit of M. de Bourbourg, in this stage of the investigation, that he has attempted to do no more. He has collected and collated facts, but has sought to give us very few theories. The stable philosophical conclusions he leaves for later research, when time shall have been afforded for fuller comparison.
There is an incredible fascination to many minds in these investigations into the traditions and beliefs of antiquity. We feel in their presence that they are the oldest things; the most ancient books, or buildings, or sculptures are modern by their side. They represent the childish instincts of the human mind,--its gropings after Truth,--its dim ideals and shadowings forth of what it hopes will be. They are the earliest answers of man to the great questions, WHENCE and WHITHER?
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The most ancient people of Central America, according to M. de Bourbourg,--a people referred to in all the oldest traditions, but of whom everything except the memory has passed away,--are the Quinames. Their rule extended over Mexico and Guatemala, and there is reason to suppose that they attained to a considerable height of civilization. The only accounts of their origin are the oral traditions repeated to the Spaniards by the Indians of Yucatan,--traditions relating that the fathers of this great nation came from the East, and that God had delivered them from the pursuit of their enemies and had opened to them a way over the sea. Other traditions reveal to us the Quinames as delivered up to the most unnatural vices of ancient society. Whether the Cyclopean ruins scattered over the continent,--vast masses of stone placed one upon another without cement, which existed before the splendid cities whose ruins are yet seen in Central America,--whether these are the work of this race, or of one still older, is entirely uncertain.
The most ancient language of Central America, the ground on which all the succeeding languages have been planted, is the Maya. Even the Indian languages of to-day are only combinations of their own idioms with this ancient tongue. Its daughter, the Tzendale, transmits many of the oldest and most interesting religious beliefs of the Indian tribes.
All the traditions, whether in the Quiche, the Mexican, or the Tzendale, unite in one somewhat remarkable belief,--in the reverent mention of an ancient Deliverer or Benefactor; a personage so enveloped in the halo of religious sentiment and the mist of remote antiquity, that it is difficult to distinguish his real form. With the Tzendale his name is Votan;[A] among the many other names in other languages, Quetzalcohuatl is the one most distinctive. Sometimes he appears as a wise and dignified legislator, arrived suddenly among an ignorant people from on unknown country, to instruct them in agriculture, the arts, and even in religion. He bears suffering in their behalf, patiently labors for them, and, when at length he has done his work, departs alone from amid the weeping crowd to the country of his birth. Sometimes he is the mediator between Deity and men; then again, a personification of the Divine wisdom and glory; and still again, the noble features seem to be transmuted in the confused tradition into the countenance of Divinity. Whether this mysterious person is only the American embodiment of the Hope of all Nations, or whether he was truly a wise and noble legislator, driven by some accident to these shores from a foreign country, and afterwards glorified by the gratitude of his people, is uncertain, though our author inclines naturally to the latter supposition. The expression of the Tzendale tradition, "Votan is the first man whom God sent to divide and distribute these lands of America," (Vol. I. p. 42,) indicates that he found the continent inhabited, and either originated the distribution of property or became a conqueror of the country. The evidence of tradition would clearly prove that at the arrival of Votan the great proportion of the inhabitants, from the Isthmus of Panama to the