Page:The Annals of the Cakchiquels.djvu/17

Rh These four brothers were noble youths, born of one mother, who sallied forth from Tulan, the golden city of the sun, and divided between them all the land from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the confines of Nicaragua, in other words, all the known world.

The occurrence of the Aztec name of the City of Light, Tulan (properly, Tonatlan), in these accounts, as they were rehearsed by the early converted natives, naturally misled historians to adopt the notion that these divine culture heroes were "Toltecs," and even in the modern writings of the Abbé Brasseur (de Bourbourg), of M. Désiré Charnay, and others, this unreal people continue to be set forth as the civilizers of Central America.

No supposition could have less support. The whole alleged story of the Toltecs is merely an euhemerized myth, and they are as pure creations of the fancy as the giants and fairies of mediæval romance. They have no business in the pages of sober history.

The same blending of their most ancient legends with those borrowed from the Aztecs, recurs in the records of the pure Mayas of Yucatan. I have shown this, and explained it at considerable length in the first volume of this series, to which I will refer the reader who would examine the question in detail.