98 COSMOS. 



(Jupiter and Mars) originated, as Salmasius has shown, with 

 his ordinary acuteness, from letters, and were very different 

 from ours ; the present form reaches scarcely beyond the fif- 



a great number of notes in my work on the monuments an d myths of 

 the natives of America (Vv.es des Cordilleres et Monumens des Pe2iple$ 

 Indigenes de VAmirique, tom. i., p. 208, and 382-384 ; tom. ii., p. 356). 

 This American Wotan is, according to the ti-aditions of the natives of 

 Chiapa and Soconusco, the gi-andson of the man vv^ho saved his life in 

 a boat during the great dehige, and renewred the human race ; he com- 

 menced the erection of large buildings, during which time ensued a 

 confusion of languages, war, and dispersion of races, as in the erection 

 of the Mexican pyramids of Cholula. His name was also transferred 

 to the calendar of the natives of Chiapa, as was the name of Odin in 

 the north of Germany. One of the five-day periods — four of which 

 formed the month of the people of Chiapa and the Aztecs — was named 

 after him. While the names and signs of the days among the Aztecs 

 were taken from animals and plants, 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 southward. 

 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 distinctly, 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 

 Preambulo de las Constituciones Diocesanas, collected a great deal of 

 information respecting the American tradition of Wotan. It is also still 

 very undecided whether the tradition 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., p. 120-150.) The identity of the Ameri- 

 can and Scandinavian Wotan, certainly not founded on mere resem- 

 blance of sound, is still quite as doubtful as the identity of Wuotan 

 (Odinn) and Buddha, or that of the names of the founder of the Bud 

 dhist religion and the planet Budha. 



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

 is 80 often brought forward as a Semitic resemblance in the division of 

 time in both continents, is founded upon a mere error, as has been al 

 ready proved by Father Acosta {Hist. Natural y Moral de las India$ 

 1591, lib. vi., cap. 3), who visited Peru soon after the Spanish conquest 

 and the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega, himself coi-rects his previous state 

 ment (parte i., lib. ii., c. 35) by distinctly saying there were three fes 

 tivals in each of the months which were reckoned after the moon, and 

 that the people should work eight days and rest upon the ninth (parte 

 i., lib. vi., cap. 23). The so-called Peruvian weeks, therefore, con 

 disted of nine days. (See my Vues det CordilUn§, tom. i., p. 341-343 



