Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/41

 indeed he believed, and we have been driven seriously to think that the stone of the museum was made a little after the year 700 A.D., by the hands of a people who, on account of their knowledge in the arts and sciences, have left fame in the traditions as learned and artistic.

For fuller measure! The year 699 was a 13-ácatl, the date indicated by the tails of the serpents in whose heads and bodies we have read so simply the number 5,096. Whatever chronological tables, those of Veytia, for example, corroborate this assertion. There is nothing venturous, in the presence of so many and such circumstances in claiming that the monument dates from 1,200 years back and that it was sculptured in record of the most famous assembly of Toltec astronomers, meeting of which this relief seems the imperishable official record. As we think how it has resisted the destructive agencies of the past five hundred years, we hope that it may defy the kiss of one and of many myriads.

There is another circumstance suggesting the Toltec origin of the stone, at least as concerns the ideas represented: the importance which the planet Venus has in the relief. Quetzalcóatl was the symbol of the star; Quetzalcóatl changed himself into Vesper, states the fragment attributed to Olmos, Hystoyre du Mechique; Quetzalcóatl was the evening star, declares the commentators of Codex Vaticanus A. Ah well, Quetzalcóatl was pre-eminently the product, the most perfect personification of that race. Son of Ixtacmixcóatl, "the serpent of the white clouds" (the Milky Way), tradition says that this personage was one of the brothers engendered by the divine creator, that is to say, one of the original races, called Olmecas, Xicalancas, etc. The Codex Dehesa confirms the legend, since it shows the last beginning their pilgrimage into the heavens. It would not be the first people that has deified its progenitors! Quetzalcóatl is then the representative of the Toltecs, its symbol, its metaphorical incarnation, and the Toltec priests and kings were accustomed to adopt his name. And Quetzalcóatl is also the evening star. Already we have been able to explain to ourselves that they deified him, and that from his movements combined with those of the star of day they made the basis of their chronological system, the basis of their calendar. This being the product of the thirteens and the twenties arranged by cycles of 52 and of 104 years, it obviously results that the adorers of the star are the inventors of the system, the true inventors of the tonalámatl. Logical, in truth, that the symbols of the star should figure in a prominent part of the cyclographic stone!