Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/108

98 fountain of all good. Subordinate to him were a number of minor deities, and opposed to him a father of all evil. There was a paradise for the abode of the just after death, and a place of darkness and torment for the wicked. There was an intermediate place. There had been a common mother of all men, always pictorially represented as in company with a serpent. Her name was Cioacoatl, or the serpent woman, and it was held that "by her sin came into the world." She had twin children, and in an Aztec picture preserved in the Vatican at Rome those children are represented as quarreling. The Mexicans believed in a universal deluge, from which only one family (that of Coxcox) escaped. Nevertheless, they spoke of a race of wicked giants, who had survived the flood and built a pyramid in order to reach the clouds; the gods frustrated their design by raining fire upon it. Tradition associated the great pyramid at Cholula with this event. The traditions of Cioacoatl, Coxcox, the giants, and the pyramid at Cholula are extremely like a confused acquaintance with biblical narratives.

The points of resemblance with real Christianity were too numerous and too peculiar to permit the supposition that the similarity was accidental and unreal. The only difficulty was to account for the possession of Christian knowledge by a people so remote and outlandish or rather to trace the identity of Quetzatcoatl, the undoubted teacher of the Mexicans. Their choice lay between the devil and St. Thomas. However respectable the claims of the former, it is clear enough that St. Thomas was not Quetzatcoatl and had never been in Mexico. He was dragged in at all because the Spaniards long cherished the idea that America was a part of India, and St. Thomas was styled the Apostle of India on the authority of an ancient and pious but very doubtful tradition. The weakness of the case for St. Thomas secured a preference for the claims of the devil, and the consensus of Spanish opinion favored the idea that Quetzatcoatl was the devil himself, who, aroused by the losses which Christ had inflicted upon him in the Old World, had sought compensation in the New, and had beguiled the Mexicans into the acceptance of a blasphemous mockery of the religion of Christ more wicked and damnatory than the worst form of paganism.

Lord Kingsborough makes the suggestion that Quetzatcoatl was no other than Christ himself, and in support of this maintains that the phonetic rendering in the Mexican language of the two words "Jesus-Christ" would be as nearly as possible "Quetzat-Coatl." He does not mean to say that Christ was ever in Mexico; but his suggestion is that the Mexicans, having obtained an early knowledge of Christianity and become acquainted with the name and character of its divine founder, imagined in subsequent ages