Page:Myths of Mexico and Peru.djvu/180



The Mexican Idea of the Creation

N the year and in the day of the clouds," writes Garcia in his Origin de los Indias, professing to furnish the reader with a translation of an original Mixtec picture-manuscript, "before ever were years or days, the world lay in darkness. All things were orderless, and a water covered the slime and ooze that the earth then was." This picture is common to almost all American creation-stories. The red man in general believed the habitable globe to have been created from the slime which arose above the primeval waters, and there can be no doubt that the Nahua shared this belief. We encounter in Nahua myth two beings of a bisexual nature, known to the Aztecs as Ometecutli-Omeciuatl (Lords of Duality), who were represented as the deities dominating the genesis of things, the beginning of the world. We have already become acquainted with them in Chapter II (see p. 104), but we may recapitulate. These beings, whose individual names were Tonacatecutli and Tonacaciuatl (Lord and Lady of our Flesh), occupy the first place in the calendar, a circumstance which makes it plain that they were regarded as responsible for the origin of all created things. They were invariably represented as being clothed in rich, variegated garments, symbolical of light. Tonacatecutli, the male principle of creation or world-generation, is often identified with the sun- or fire-god, but there is no reason to consider him as symbolical of anything but the sky. The firmament is almost universally regarded by American 118