98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 pic- 

 torially 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 uni- 

 versal deluge, from which only one family (that of Coxcox) es- 

 caped. 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 peo- 

 ple 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 re- 

 spectable 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 compensa- 

 tion in the New, and had beguiled the Mexicans into the accept- 

 ance 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 



