GROWTH AND DECLINE OE CULTURE. 153 



armies, and Quetzalcohuatl said lie must begone to tlie land of 

 Tlapallan, for Heaven willed tliat lie should visit otlier coun- 

 tries, to spread tliere tlie liglit of his doctrine ; but when his 

 mission was done, he would return and spend his old age with 

 them. So he departed and went down a river on his ship to 

 the sea, and there he disappeared. The sunlight glows on the 

 snow-covered peak of Orizaba long after the lands below are 

 wi-apped in darkness, and there, some said, his body was car- 

 ried, and rose to heaven in the smoke of the funeral pile, and 

 when he vanished, the sun for a time refused to show himself 

 again. 



How dim the meaning of these tales had grown among the 

 Mexicans, when Montezuma thought he saw in Cortes and the 

 Spanish ships the return of the great ruler and his age of gold. 

 Quetzalcohuatl had come back already many a time, to bring 

 light, and joy, and work, upon the earth, for he was the Sun. 

 We may even find him identified with the Sun by name, and 

 his history is perhaps a more compact and perfect series of 

 solar myths than hangs to the name of any single personage 

 in our own Aryan mythology. His mother, the Dawn or the 

 Night, gives birth to him, and dies. His father Camaxtli is 

 the Sun, and was worshipped with solar rites in Mexico, but 

 he is the old Sun of yesterday. The clouds, personified in the 

 mythic race of the Mixcohuas, or " Cloud- Snakes" (the Nibe- 

 lungs of the western hemisphere), bear down the old Sun and 

 choke him, and bury him in their mountain. But the young 

 Quetzalcohuatl, the Sun of to-day, rushes up into the midst of 

 them from below, and some he slays at the first onset, and 

 some he leaves, rift with red wounds, to die. We have the 

 Sun-boat of Helios, of the Egyptian Ea, of the Polynesian 

 Mani. Quetzalcohuatl, his bright career drawing towards its 

 close, is chased into far lands by his kinsman Tetzcatlipoca, 

 the young Sun of to-morrow. He, too, is well-known as a Sun- 

 god in the Mexican theology. Wonderfully fitting with all 

 this, one incident after another in the life of Quetzalcohuatl 

 falls into its place. The guardians of the sacred fire tend him, 

 his funeral pile is on the top of Orizaba, he is the helper of 

 travellers, the maker of the calendar, the source of astrology. 



