NOTES. CX111 



to which the successive days of the week take their names from the planet 

 which rules over the first hour of the day; so that we have alternately to take 

 a member of the periodical planetary series of seven members, and to pass over 

 or omit 28 members. Now, in a periodical series, it is indifferent whether 

 we omit a certain number of members, or this number augmented by any 

 multiple of the number of members in the period (which in this case is 7). 

 By omitting 23 ( = 3x7 + 2) members in the second method, that of the 

 planetary hours, we are conducted therefore to the same result as by the first 

 method of the decans, in which only two members were passed over. 



I have already referred in the preceding note ( 5f& ) ) to the remarkable re- 

 semblance between the fourth day of the week, dies Mercurii, the Indian 

 Budb.a-va.ra, and the old Saxon Wodanes-dag. (Jacob Grimm, Deutsche My- 

 thologie, 1844, Bd. i. S. 114.) The identity asserted by Sir Wm. Jones between 

 Buddha and Odin, Woden, Wuotan or Wotan, so celebrated in northern heroic 

 Sagas, and in the history of northern civilisation, may perhaps be rendered 

 still more interesting by remembering the name of Wotau as that of a half- 

 mythical, half-historical personage in the central parts of the New Continent, 

 respecting whom I collected many notices in my work on the Monuments and 

 Myths of the Aborigines of America (Vues des Cordilleres et Monumens des 

 Peuples indigenes de 1'Ame'rique, T. i. p. 208 and 382384; T. ii. p. 356). 

 According to the traditions of the natives of Chiapa and Soconusco, this Ame- 

 rican Wotan was the grandson of the man who in the great inundation saved 

 himself in a boat and renewed the race of mankind. He caused great build- 

 ings to be constructed, during the erection of which (as during that of the 

 Mexican pyramid of Cholula), confusion of tongues, strife, and dispersion of 

 tribes ensued. His name passed (like the name of Odin in the Germanic North) 

 into the Calendar-system of the natives of Chiapa. One of the five-day periods, 

 four of which formed the month of the Chiapaneks, as well as of the Aztecs, 

 was called after him. While, among the Aztecs, the names and the signs of 

 the different days were taken from animals and plants, the natives of Chiapa 

 (properly, Teochiapan) designated the days of the month by the names of 

 twenty leaders, who, coming from the North, had conducted them thus far 

 towards the South. The four most heroic of these leaders Wotan or Wodan, 

 Lambat, Been, and Chinar gave their names to the opening days of the small 

 periods, or weeks of five days, a post which among the Aztecs was occupied 

 by the symbols of the four elements. Wotan and the other leaders belonged 

 incontestably to the race of the Toltecs, whose invasion took place in the 

 seventh century. Ixtlilxochitl (his Christian name was Fernando de Alva), 



