Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

Grant us repose, a glorious repose, peace and prosperity! the perfection of life and of our being grant to us, O Hurakan!"
What country and what sun nourished this worship and gave origin to this great people is as uncertain as all other facts of the early American history. They came from the East, the tradition says; they landed, it seems certain, at Panuco, near the present port of Tampico, from seven barks or ships. Other traditions represent them as accompanied by sages with venerable beards and flowing robes. They finally settled somewhere on the coast between Campeachy and the river Tabasco, and founded the ancient city of Xicalanco. Their chief, who in the reverent affection of the nation became afterwards their Deity, was Quetzalcohuatl. The myths which surround his name reveal to us a wise legislator and noble benefactor. He is seen instructing them in the arts, in religion, and finally in agriculture, by introducing the cultivation of maize and other cereals.
Whether he had become the object of envy among the people, or whether he felt that his work was done, it appears, so far as the vague traditions can be understood, that he at length determined to return to the unknown country whence he had come. He gathered his brethren around him and thus addressed them:--"Know," said he, "that the Lord your God commands you to dwell in these lands which he hath subjected to you this day. For him, he returns whence he has come. But he goes only to return later; for he will visit you again, when the time shall have arrived in which the world shall have come to an end.[C] In the mean while wait, ye others, in these countries, with the hope of seeing him again!...Thus farewell, while we depart with our God!"
[Footnote C: This is the expression of the legend, and certainly points to the ideas of the Eastern hemisphere. The coincidence with the legends of Hiawatha and the Finnish Wainamoinen will be remarked.--EDD.]
We will not follow the interesting narrative of the destruction of the ancient empire of the Votanides by the Nahoas or Toltecs; nor the account of the dispersion of these latter over Guatemala, Yucatan, and even among the mountains of California. This last revolution presents the first precise date which scholars have yet been able to assign to early American history; it probably occurred A.D. 174.
With the account of the invasion of the Aztec plateau by the Chichemees, a barbarian tribe of the Toltec family, in the middle of the seventh century, or of the establishment of the Toltec monarchy in Anahuac, we will not delay our readers, as these events bring us down to the period of authentic history, on which we have information from other sources.
"From the moment," says M. de Bourbourg, "in which we see the supremacy of the cities of Culhuacan and Tollan rise over the cities of the Aztec plateau dates the true history of this country; but this history is, to speak the truth, only a grand episode in the annals of this powerful race [the Toltec]. In the course of a wandering of seven or eight centuries, it overturns and destroys everything in order to build on the ruins of ancient kingdoms its own civilization, science, and arts; it traverses all the provinces of Mexico and Central America, leaving everywhere traces of its superstitions, its culture, and its laws, sowing on its passage kingdoms and cities, whose names are forgotten to-day, but whose mysterious memorials are found again in the monuments scattered under the forest vegetation of ages and in the different languages of all the peoples of these countries."--Vol. I. p. 209.
M. de Bourbourg fitly closes his interesting volumes--from which we have here given a r��sum�� of only the opening chapters--with a remarkable prophecy, made in the court of Yucatan by the high-priest of Mani. According to the tradition, this pontiff, inspired by a supernatural vision, betook himself to Mayapan and thus addressed the king:--"At the end of the Third Period, [A.D. 1518-1542,] a nation, white and bearded, shall come from the side where the sun rises, bearing with it a sign, [the cross,] which shall make all the Gods to flee and fall. This nation shall rule all the earth, giving peace to those who shall receive it in peace and who will abandon vain images to adore an only God, whom these bearded men adore." (Vol. II. p. 594.) M. de Bourbourg does not vouch for the pure origin of the tradition, but suggests that the wise men of the Quiche empire already saw that it contained in itself the elements of destruction, and had already heard rumors of the wonderful white race which was soon to sweep away the last vestiges of the Central American governments.
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