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 illustrations 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 responsible 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 semi-civilized peoples of the mainly mountainous and plateau regions of the western continental ridge, roughly from Cancer to Capricorn, or with outlying spurs from about 35º North (Zuñi and Hopi) to near 35º South (Calchaqui-Diaguité). 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 Gómara 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
