Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/86

72 bird, in this case the woodpecker. The inference is that the humming-bird, whose name enters into that of Huitzilopochtli, and whose feathers were worn on his heel, had been the totem of an Aztec kindred before Huitzilopochtli, like Picus, was anthropomorphised. "Before this god was represented in human form, he was merely a little humming-bird, Huitziton; but as the anthropomorphic processes advanced, the bird became an attribute, emblem, or symbol of the deity." If Huitzilopochtli is said to have given the Aztecs fire, that boon is usually regarded by many races, from Normandy to Australia, as the present given to men by a bird; for example, the fire-crested wren. Thus understood, the ornithological element in Huitzilopochtli is purely totemic. While accepting the reduction of him to a humming-bird, M. Réville ingeniously concludes that he was "a derivative form of the sun, and especially of the sun of the fair season." If the bird was worshipped, it was not as a totem, but as "the divine messenger of the spring," like "the plover among the Latins."

Though his germ, so to speak, is totemic, and his department war, Huitzilopochtli was caught into the tide of larger and more cosmical conceptions, and his festivals indicate that he was regarded as a deity presiding over the year's renewal.

Attempts have been made, with no great success, to