418 COSMOS. 



Although the number of the visible planets amounted, 

 according to the earliest limitation, to five, and subsequently, 

 by the addition of the large discs of the Sun and Moon, 



the natives of Chiapa (properly Teochiapan,) assigned to the 

 days of the month the names of twenty chieftains who, coming 

 from the north, had led them so far southwards. The names 

 of the four most heroic, Wotan or Wodan, Lambat, Been, and 

 Chinax, commenced the small periods of five-day weeks, as 

 did the symbols of the four elements among the Aztecs. 

 Wotan and the other chieftains indisputably belonged to the 

 race of the Tolteks, who invaded the country in the seventh 

 century. Ixtlilxochitl (his Christian name was Fernando de 

 Alva) the first historian of his people, (the Aztecs,) says dis- 

 tinctly, in the manuscripts which he completed as early as the 

 beginning of the sixteenth century, that the province of 

 Teochiapan and the whole of Guatemala were peopled by 

 Tolteks, from one coast to the other ; indeed, in the beginning 

 of the conquest of the Spaniards, a family was still living in 

 the village Teopixca, who boasted of being descended from 

 Wotan. The bishop of Chiapa, Francisco Nunez de la Vega, 

 who presided over a provincial council in Guatemala, has in 

 his Preamlulo de las Constituciones Dioccsanas, collected a 

 great deal of information respecting the American tradition 

 of Wotan. It is also still very undecided whether the tra- 

 dition of the first Scandinavian Odin (Odinn, Othinus) or 

 Wuotan, who is said to have emigrated from the banks of the 

 Don, has an historical foundation. (Jacob Grimm, Deutsche 

 Mythologie^ Bd. i. pp. 120-150). The identity of the Ame- 

 rican and Scandinavian Wotan, certainly not founded on mere 

 resemblance of sound, is still quite as doubtful as the identity 

 of Wuotan (Odinn) and Buddha, or that of the names of the 

 founder of Buddhist religion and the planet Budha. 



The assumption of the existence of a seven-day Peruvian week, 

 which is so often brought forward as a Semitic resemblance in 

 the division of time in both continents, is founded upon a mere 

 error, as has been already proved by Father Acosta, (Hist, 

 natural y moral delas Indicts, 1591, lib. vi. cap. 3,) who visited 

 Peru soon after the Spanish conquest; and the Inca, Gar- 



