I have to acknowledge the courtesy of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which placed in my hands a valuable collection of illustrations and allowed me to select from these at my discretion. The pictures chosen include the drawings used as tailpieces to chapters; others, usually half-tones, are duly acknowledged where they occur.
LEWIS SPENCE
Edinburgh: July 1913
The Descent of Quetzalcoatl
CHAPTER I:
THE CIVILISATION OF MEXICO
The Civilisations of the New World
There is now no question as to the indigenous origin of the civilisations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. Upon few subjects, however, has so much mistaken erudition been lavished. The beginnings of the races who inhabited these regions, and the cultures which they severally created, have been referred to nearly every civilised or semi-civilised nation of antiquity, and wild if fascinating theories have been advanced with the intention of showing that civilisation was initiated upon American soil by Asiatic or European influence. These speculations were for the most part put forward by persons who possessed but a merely general acquaintance with the circumstances of American aboriginal civilisation, and who were struck by the superficial resemblances which undoubtedly exist between American and Asiatic peoples, customs, and art-forms, but which cease to be apparent to the Americanist, who perceives in them only such likenesses as inevitably occur in the work of men situated in similar environments and surrounded by similar social and religious conditions.
The Maya of Yucatan may be regarded as the most highly civilised of the peoples who occupied the American continent before the advent of Europeans, and it is usually their culture which we are asked to believe had its seat of origin in Asia. It is unnecessary to refute this theory in detail, as that has already been ably accomplished.1 But it may be remarked that the surest proof of the purely native origin of American civilisation is to be found in the unique nature of American art, the undoubted result of countless centuries of isolation. American language, arithmetic, and methods of time-reckoning, too, bear no resemblance to other systems, European or Asiatic, and we may be certain that had a civilising race entered America from Asia it would have left its indelible impress upon things so intensely associated with the life of a people as well as upon the art and architecture of the country, for they are as much the product of culture as is the ability to raise temples.
Evidence of Animal and Plant Life
It is impossible in this connection to ignore the evidence in favour of native advancement which can be adduced from the artificial production of food in America. Nearly all the domesticated animals and cultivated food-plants found on the continent at the period of the discovery were totally different from those known to the Old World. Maize, cocoa, tobacco, and the potato, with a host of useful plants, were new to the European conquerors, and the absence of such familiar animals as the horse, cow, and sheep, besides a score of lesser animals, is eloquent proof of the prolonged isolation which the American continent underwent subsequent to its original settlement by man.
Origin of American Man
An Asiatic origin is, of course, admitted for the aborigines of America, but it undoubtedly stretched back into that dim Tertiary Era when man was little more than beast, and language as yet was not, or at the best was only half formed. Later immigrants there certainly were, but these probably arrived by way of Behring Strait, and not by the land-bridge connecting Asia and America by which the first-comers found entrance. At a later geological period the general level of the North American continent was higher than at present, and a broad isthmus connected it with Asia. During this prolonged elevation vast littoral plains, now submerged, extended continuously from the American to the Asiatic shore, affording an easy route of migration to a type of man from whom both the Mongolian branches may have sprung. But this type, little removed from the animal as it undoubtedly was, carried with it none of the refinements of art or civilisation; and if any resemblances occur between the art-forms or polity of its equal descendants in Asia and America, they are due to the influence of a remote common ancestry, and not to any later influx of Asiatic civilisation to American shores.
Traditions of Intercourse with Asia
The few traditions of Asiatic intercourse with America are, alas! easily dissipated. It is a dismal business to be compelled to refute the dreams of others. How much more fascinating would American history have been had Asia sowed the seeds of her own peculiar civilisation in the western continent, which would then have become a newer and further East, a more glowing and golden Orient! But America possesses a fascination almost as intense when there falls to be considered the marvel of the evolution of her wondrous civilisations—the flowers of progress of a new, of an isolated world.
The idea that the “Fu-Sang” of the Chinese annals alluded to America was rendered illusory by Klaproth, who showed its identity with a Japanese island. It is not impossible that Chinese and Japanese vessels may have drifted on to the American coasts, but that they sailed thither of set purpose is highly improbable. Gomara, the Mexican historian, states that those who served with Coronado’s expedition in 1542 saw off the Pacific coast certain ships having their prows decorated with gold and silver, and laden with merchandise, and these they supposed to be of Cathay or China, “because they intimated by signs that they had been thirty days on their voyage.” Like most of these interesting stories, however, the tale has no foundation in fact, as the incident cannot be discovered in the original account of the expedition, published in 1838 in the travel-collection of Ternaux-Compans.
Legends of European Intercourse
We shall find the traditions, one might almost call them legends, of early European intercourse with America little more satisfactory than those which recount its ancient connection with Asia. We may dismiss the sagas of the discovery of America by the Norsemen, which are by no means mere tradition, and pass on to those in which the basis of fact is weaker and the legendary interest more strong. We are told that when the Norsemen drove forth those Irish monks who had settled in Iceland, the fugitives voyaged to “Great Ireland,” by which many antiquarians of the older school imagine the author of the myth to have meant America. The Irish Book of Lismore recounts the voyage of St. Brandan, Abbot of Cluainfert, in Ireland, to an island in the ocean which Providence had intended as the abode of saints. It gives a glowing account of his seven years’ cruise in western waters, and tells of numerous discoveries, among them a hill of fire and an endless island, which he quitted after an unavailing journey of forty days, loading his ships with its fruits, and returning home. Many Norse legends exist regarding this “Greater Ireland,” or “Huitramanna Land” (White Man’s Land), among them one concerning a Norseman who was cast away on its shores, and who found there a race of white men who went to worship their gods bearing banners, and “shouting with a loud voice.” There is, of course, the bare possibility that the roving Norsemen may have on occasions drifted or have been cast away as far south as Mexico, and such an occurrence becomes the more easy of belief when we remember that they certainly reached the shores of North America.
The Legend of Madoc
A much more interesting
