Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/343

 with their original laws, customs, towns, and temples, among the folds of the distant mountains in the bosom of our unexplored Continent!

Note.—The Mexican Cosmogony has four periods, when it is alleged that all mankind, with the exception of two or three individuals, perished.

In this deluge all perished, with the exception of Centeotl, and his wife Xochiquetzalli, who escaped in a canoe.

I have already, at page 28, presented you an account of a Toltec legend, showing how one of the giants, called Xelhua, and his six brethren, were saved from deluge on the mountain of Tlaloc, while all the rest of mankind perished in the waters or were transformed into fish.

Josephus, quoting from the 96th book of Nicholas of Damascus, says "there is a great mountain in Armenia, over Mingus, called Baris, upon which, it is reported, that many who fled at the time of the deluge were saved: and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore on the top of it: and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man whom Moses, the legislator of the Jews wrote".

In the construction, form and object of the Mexican teocallis, there is striking analogy to the tumuli and pyramids of the world. According to Herodotus, the temple of Belus was a pyramid, built of brick and asphaltum, solid throughout, (πυργος στερος,) and it had eight stories. A temple (ναος) was erected on the top, and another at its base. In like manner, in the Mexican Teocallis, the tower (ναος) was distinguished from the temple on the platform: a distinction clearly pointed out in the letters of Cortéz. Diodores Siculus states, that the Babylonian temple served as an observatory to the Chaldeans: so, the Mexican priests, says Humboldt, made observations on the stars from the summit of the teocallis, and announced to the people, by the sound of the horn, the hour of the night. The pyramid of Belus was at once a temple and a tomb. In like manner, the tumulus (χωμα) of Calisto in Arcadia, described by Pausanias as a cone, made by the hands of man, but covered with vegetation, bore on its top the temple of Diana. The teocallis were also temples and tombs: and the plain in which are built the houses of the sun and moon at Teotihuacan, is called the path of the dead. The group of pyramids at Gheeza and Sakkara in Egypt, the triangular pyramid of the queen of the Scythians, mentioned by Diodorus: the fourteen Etruscan, pyramids which are said to have been inclosed in the labyrinth of king Porsenna at Closium: the tumulus of Alyattes at Lydia, (see Modern Traveller, Syria and Asia Minor. Vol ii. P. 153;) the sepulchers of Scandinavian king Gormus and his queen Daneboda: and the tumuli found in Virginia, Canada and Peru, in which numerous galleries, built with stone and communicating with each by shafts, fill up the interior of artificial hills;—are referred to by the learned traveler as sepulchral monuments of similar character, but differing from the teocallis in not being, at the same time, surmounted with temples. It is perhaps too hastily assumed, however, that none of these were destined to serve as bases for altars: and the assertion is much too unqualified, that "the pagodas of the Hindostan have nothing in common with the Mexican temples. That the Tanjore, notwithstanding that the altar is not at the top, bears a striking analogy in other respects to the teocallis"—See Researches. Vol. i. pp. 81-107; ''Pol. Essay''. vol.ii. pp. 146-149; ''Mod. Traveler'', vol. vi. P. 341.