NATURE 



529 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1875 



BANCROFTS ''RACES OF THE PACIFIC 

 STATES" 

 The Native Races of the Pacific States of N'orth America. 

 By Hubert Howe Bancroft. Vol. ii. Civilised Nations. 

 Vol. iii. Myths and Languages. (London : Longmans 

 and Co., 1875.) 



THE publication of this great anthropological work 

 gees' on rapidly, and no doubt the two remaining 

 volumes will be out in a few months. Every reader must 

 be glad that the author departs more and more from his 

 original plan of making his book a mere museum of com- 

 piled information, and now makes some attempt towards 

 interpreting the mythical and religious puzzles of Mexico 

 and Central America. The introductory essays on the phi- 

 losophy of civilisation and religion may not be of startling 

 originality, but at any rate they are the deliberately 

 adopted conclusions of a writer with an unusually large 

 knowledge of the facts. Mr. Bancroft has evidently 

 come, like so many thinkers of this generation, under the 

 genial influence of Emerson. To his mind, the world 

 seems animated by a " Soul of Progress," individual men 

 •working on unknowingly, and often against their will, 

 towards a mysterious end which is the goal of civilisation. 

 The two apparently oppugnant agencies of good and evil 

 tend together toward one end ; " Night or day, love or 

 crime, leads all souls to the good." At one stage of civili- 

 sation blind faith is essential to give strength to man's 

 belief, till at another stage scepticism has to come in and 

 destroy the scaffolding of superstition, leaving the mental 

 fabric which has been reared by its means. War and 

 tyranny do the work of consolidating nations and founding 

 political institutions, till the time comes when, having done 

 their work in promoting good, they may themselves be 

 cast out for being evil. Institutions which were at first 

 the essentials of civihsation become, as man advances, a 

 drag on his progress, and have to be abolished. The 

 union of Church and State, of superstition and despotism^ 

 a union still necessarily kept up in iome of the more 

 backward civilisations, was in barbarous ages a real 

 means of moral and intellectual advance from a wilder 

 and lower state. Thus we see in every phase of develop- 

 ment the result of a social evolution, but where it is to 

 end, whither it is tending, we cannot tell as yet, nor can 

 we yet fully understand its guiding laws, for "like all 

 other progressional phenomena, they wait not upon man ; 

 they are self- creative, and force themselves upon the mind 

 age after age, slowly but surely, as the intellect is able to 

 receive them." 



One really stands in need of some such hopeful theory 

 of social evolution, in reading the details of Mexican 

 religion. The chapter on Public Festivals is a sickening 

 catalogue of horrors. It begins mildly with the priests 

 scarifying and mutilating themselves, especially by boring 

 holes in their tongues to pass sticks through. Then 

 comes the sacrifice of a number of sucking infants, who 

 were carried in procession on gorgeous litters to be slain 

 on the mountains and in the lake, some of the bodies 

 being brought back as a delicacy for the priests and 

 nobles. Then an account of a festival, where the 

 Jiuman victims, having had their hearts cut out in the 

 Vol. XII.— No. 312 



usual way on the sacrificial stone, were then flayed ; their 

 flesh was eaten at a banquet, and the lads of the colleges 

 dressed up in their skins and went about singing, dancing, 

 and asking for contributions : " those who refused to give 

 anything received a stroke in the face from the dangling 

 arm." A liltle later comes the feast of the Fire-god, 

 where the priests carried captives naked and bound, on 

 their shoulders up to the top of the temple, and pitched 

 them into a huge fire of glowing coals, where they watched 

 them writhe and crackle till it was time to rake the almost 

 dead bodies out and cut them open ; the proceedings 

 ended with a dance and climbing a maypole. Even at 

 the harvest festival, an occasion of jollity, when every- 

 body danced and feasted, these sanguinary religionists 

 brought out a criminal, put him between two immense 

 stones balanced opposite each other, and let them fall 

 together so as to smash him. 



It is not easy, in the present condition of Sociology, to 

 account for this monstrous development of cruelly in the 

 Mexican religion. The people seem not to have been 

 either wicked or hard-hearted in their private life, but to 

 have been the same mild and rather stolid people that 

 their descendants still remain. The Aztec criminal code 

 was indeed of the severest, and even Draco might have 

 scrupled to have a man beaten to death with clubs for 

 getting drunk, or to make stealing a tobacco-pouch a 

 capital crime. But there is nothing extraordinary in a 

 barbarous government trying to stamp out even small 

 offences by ferocious punishments. That these lose 

 much of their effect by the public mind becoming too 

 habituated to them, is a discovery which comes at a 

 higher stage of statecraft. The state of civil society in 

 ancient Mexico was on the whole like that of many other 

 half-civilised communities. It was their religion which was 

 exceptional, in the enormous frequency of human sacrifice 

 combined with cannibalism, it being the ordinary motive 

 for war to obtain a supply of captives for victims. 

 The nearest parallel is to be found in nations of 

 West Africa, where human sacrifice and cannibalism 

 form a great part of the religious observances. The 

 Dahoman custom of dividing the human victim, the 

 blood for the fetish, the head for the king, the body for 

 the people, reminds us of similar arrangements described 

 by Mr. Bancroft in Central America. On the other hand, 

 the rehgion of Mexico, unlike those of West Africa, was 

 one in which asceticism and self-torture prevailed both 

 among priests and people. They fasted long and severely 

 in their religious rites, and were everlastingly drawing 

 blood from their bodies with aloe- thorns and obsidian 

 knives, piercing their tongues as a penance for evil speak- 

 ing, and other pnrts of their bodies for appropriate sins. 

 This religious ordinance is almost peculiar to the group 

 of connected nations of Mexico and Central America, 

 and thus has a certain ethnological interest. The Mexi- 

 can combination of religious austerity and cruelty may be 

 instructively compared with that which developed itself 

 in mediaeval Europe. 



Mr. Bancroft is inclined to think that the civilisation of 

 Mexico and Central America had sunk somewhat from its 

 highest point at the time of the Spanish discovery. He 

 believes in the high culture of the famous traditional Tol- 

 tecs, who were of the same stock with their successors 

 the Aztecs, both belongy;»g to the wide Mexican race to 



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