452 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



Among the Central American nations sun animals originating in 

 the zodiac include the Eagle, the Turtle, the Deer, the Bat, the 

 Jaguar, etc., some being more important than others. The Jaguar 

 is, indeed, the most important sun animal from Mexico to Peru; 

 perhaps it would be closer to say that the Jaguar is the sun. The 

 Eagle comes next, and it may be that the importance of this bird 

 is partly derived from other associations than the zodiac. In a 

 Mixtec manuscript we see the Eagle and the Turtle acting as mes- 

 sengers in delivering the blood and hearts of sacrificial victims to 

 the sun. The Deer is pictured as the sun-bearer, and the Rabbit 

 carries the moon or resides within it. 



WHAT SUN MYTHS TELL US 



There are other associations involving men and animals with the 

 sun which develop out of myths and ceremonial usages. A good 

 story may incorporate knowledge, or it may be an acceptable sub- 

 stitute for knowledge. Ethnologists working among primitive peoples 

 find that myths furnish important leads in many fields of research 

 even though they contradict each other. Some myths try to explain 

 how the universe was created, who was responsible as creator, how 

 modifications making things better or worse were introduced. Myths 

 may even explain the nature of the sun and other heavenly bodies: 

 for instance the sun may be a person or an object that is carried. 

 The sun may be either male or female, and the moon as well. These 

 two orbs may be brother and sister, husband and wife, or they may 

 be friends or enemies in various mythical explanations and they 

 may have adventures taking them far from astronomical orbits. 



Mythology once was explained as an esoteric art in which demi- 

 gods act out subtle allegories of nature. Some justification for 

 this belief is found in Persian, Greek, Roman, and Teutonic tales 

 which survive in polished literary forms ; also there are really prim- 

 itive tales in which aspects of nature are personified. For several 

 generations the fashion held to psychoanalyze nearly all myths into 

 sun myths, explaining broadcast features not by transmission in 

 social intercourse but by reinventions with the psychic unity of 

 man as a controlling factor. 



Illustrating how far this kind of explanation formerly was carried, 

 Brinton even explained the Toltecs, a civilized nation who ruled in 

 Mexico and Central America before the Aztecs, as part and parcel 

 of a sun myth. He admitted that the inhabitants of a certain 

 Mexican town might have been called Toltecs but denied them any 

 supremacy either in power or the arts. Their empire, he insisted, 

 was a baseless fable, the product of a tendency to merge ancestors 

 into divinities and of a confusion between ToUan, City of the Toltecs, 



