The Discovery of America Part 9

[Sidenote: Aztec priesthood: human sacrifices.]

No feature of the advance is more noteworthy than the development of the medicine-men into an organized priesthood.[128] The presence of this priesthood and its ritual was proclaimed to the eyes of the traveller in ancient Mexico by the numerous tall truncated pyramids (_teocallis_), on the flat summits of which men, women, and children were sacrificed to the G.o.ds. This custom of human sacrifice seems to have been a characteristic of the middle period of barbarism, and to have survived, with diminis.h.i.+ng frequency, into the upper period. There are abundant traces of its existence throughout the early Aryan world, from Britain to Hindustan, as well as among the ancient Hebrews and their kindred.[129] But among all these peoples, at the earliest times at which we can study them with trustworthy records, we find the custom of human sacrifice in an advanced stage of decline, and generally no longer accompanied by the custom of cannibalism in which it probably originated.[130] Among the Mexicans, however, when they were first visited by the Spaniards, cannibalism flourished as nowhere else in the world except perhaps in Fiji, and human sacrifices were conducted on such a scale as could not have been witnessed in Europe without going back more than forty centuries.

[Footnote 128: The priesthood was not hereditary, nor did it form a caste. There was no hereditary n.o.bility in ancient Mexico, nor were there any hereditary vocations, as "artisans,"

"merchants," etc. See Bandelier, _op. cit._ p. 599.]

[Footnote 129: See the copious references in Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, ii. 340-371; Mackay, _Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews_, ii. 406-434; Oort and Hooykaas, _The Bible for Young People_, i. 30, 189-193; ii. 102, 220; iii. 21, 170, 316, 393, 395; iv. 85, 226. Ghillany, _Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebraer_, Nuremberg, 1842, treats the subject with much learning.]

[Footnote 130: Spencer, _Princip. Sociol._, i. 287; Tylor, _op.

cit._ ii. 345.]

The custom of sacrificing captives to the G.o.ds was a marked advance upon the practice in the lower period of barbarism, when the prisoner, unless saved by adoption into the tribe of his captors, was put to death with lingering torments. There were occasions on which the Aztecs tortured their prisoners before sending them to the altar,[131] but in general the prisoner was well-treated and highly fed,--fatted, in short, for the final banquet in which the wors.h.i.+ppers partic.i.p.ated with their savage deity.[132] In a more advanced stage of development than that which the Aztecs had reached, in the stage when agriculture became extensive enough to create a steady demand for servile labour, the practice of enslaving prisoners became general; and as slaves became more and more valuable, men gradually succeeded in compounding with their deities for easier terms,--a ram, or a kid, or a bullock, instead of the human victim.[133]

[Footnote 131: Mr. Prescott, to avoid shocking the reader with details, refers him to the twenty-first canto of Dante's Inferno, _Conquest of Mexico_, vol. i. p. 64.]

[Footnote 132: See below, vol. ii. p. 283.]

[Footnote 133: The victim, by the offer of which the wrath of the G.o.d was appeased or his favour solicited, must always be some valued possession of the sacrificer. Hence, e. g., among the Hebrews "wild animals, as not being property, were generally considered unfit for sacrifice." (Mackay, _op. cit._ ii. 398.) Among the Aztecs (Prescott, _loc. cit._) on certain occasions of peculiar solemnity the clan offered some of its own members, usually children. In the lack of prisoners such offerings would more often be necessary, hence one powerful incentive to war. The use of prisoners to buy the G.o.d's favour was to some extent a subst.i.tute for the use of the clan's own members, and at a later stage the use of domestic animals was a further subst.i.tution. The legend of Abraham and Isaac (_Genesis_, xxii. 1-14) preserves the tradition of this latter subst.i.tution among the ancient Hebrews. Compare the Boeotian legend of the temple of Dionysos Aigobolos:--[Greek: thyontes gar to theo proechthesan pote hypo methes es hybrin, hoste kai tou Dionysou ton hierea apokteinousin; apokteinantas de autika epelabe nosos loimodes; kai sphisin aphiketo hama ek Delphon, to Dionyso thyein paida horaion; etesi de ou pollois hysteron ton theon phasin aiga hiereion hypallaxai sphisin anti tou paidos.]

Pausanias, ix. 8. A further stage of progress was the subst.i.tution of a mere inanimate symbol for a living victim, whether human or brute, as shown in the old Roman custom of appeasing "Father Tiber" once a year by the ceremony of drowning a lot of dolls in that river. Of this significant rite Mommsen aptly observes, "Die Ideen gottlicher Gnade und Versohnbarkeit sind hier ununterscheidbar gemischt mit der frommen Schlauigkeit, welche es versucht den gefahrlichen Herrn durch scheinhafte Befriedigung zu berucken und abzufinden." _Romische Geschichte_, 4e Aufl., 1865, Bd. i. p. 176. After reading such a remark it may seem odd to find the writer, in a footnote, refusing to accept the true explanation of the custom; but that was a quarter of a century ago, when much less was known about ancient society than now.]

[Sidenote: Aztec slaves.]

The ancient Mexicans had not arrived at this stage, which in the Old World characterized the upper period of barbarism. Slavery had, however, made a beginning among the Aztecs. The nucleus of the small slave-population of Mexico consisted of _outcasts_, persons expelled from the clan for some misdemeanour. The simplest case was that in which a member of a clan failed for two years to cultivate his garden-plot.[134] The delinquent member was deprived, not only of his right of user, but of all his rights as a clansman, and the only way to escape starvation was to work upon some other lot, either in his own or in some other clan, and be paid in such pittance from its produce as the occupant might choose to give him. This was slavery in embryo. The occupant did not own this outcast labourer, any more than he owned his lot; he only possessed a limited right of user in both labourer and lot.

To a certain extent it was "adverse" or exclusive possession. If the slave ran away or was obstinately lazy, he could be made to wear a wooden collar and sold without his consent; if it proved too troublesome to keep him, the collared slave could be handed over to the priests for sacrifice.[135] In this cla.s.s of outcasts and their masters we have an interesting ill.u.s.tration of a rudimentary phase of slavery and of private property.

[Footnote 134: Bandelier, _op. cit._ p. 611.]

[Footnote 135: There was, however, in this extreme case, a right of sanctuary. If the doomed slave could flee and hide himself in the _tecpan_ before the master or one of his sons could catch him, he became free and recovered his clan-rights; and no third person was allowed to interfere in aid of the pursuer. Torquemada, _Monarquia indiana_, ii. 564-566.]

[Sidenote: The Aztec family.]

At this point it is worthy of note that in the development of the family the Aztecs had advanced considerably beyond the point attained by Shawnees and Mohawks, and a little way toward the point attained in the patriarchal family of the ancient Romans and Hebrews. In the Aztec clan (which was exogamous[136]) the change to descent in the male line seems to have been accomplished before the time of the Discovery. Apparently it had been recently accomplished. Names for designating family relations.h.i.+ps remained in that primitive stage in which no distinction is made between father and uncle, grandchildren and cousins. The family was still too feebly established to count for much in the structure of society, which still rested firmly upon the clan.[137] Nevertheless the marriage bonds were drawn much tighter than among Indians of the lower status, and penalties for incontinence were more severe. The wife became her husband's property and was ent.i.tled to the protection of his clan.

All matrimonial arrangements were controlled by the clan, and no member of it, male or female, was allowed to remain unmarried, except for certain religious reasons. The penalty for contumacy was expulsion from the clan, and the same penalty was inflicted for such s.e.xual irregularities as public opinion, still in what we should call quite a primitive stage, condemned. Men and women thus expelled went to swell the numbers of that small cla.s.s of outcasts already noted. With men the result, as we have seen, was a kind of slavery; with women it was prost.i.tution; and it is curious to see that the same penalty, entailing such a result, was visited alike upon unseemly frailty and upon refusal to marry. In either case the sin consisted in rebellion against the clan's standards of proper or permissible behaviour.

[Footnote 136: Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific States_, vol. ii. p. 251.]

[Footnote 137: Bandelier, _op. cit._ pp. 429, 570, 620.]

[Sidenote: Aztec property.]

The inheritance in the male line, the beginnings of individual property in slaves, the tightening of the marriage bond, accompanied by the condemnation of sundry irregularities heretofore tolerated, are phenomena which we might expect to find a.s.sociated together. They are germs of the upper status of barbarism, as well as of the earliest status of civilization more remotely to follow. The common cause, of which they are the manifestations, is an increasing sense of the value and importance of personal property. In the Old World this sense grew up during a pastoral stage of society such as the New World never knew, and by the ages of Abraham and Agamemnon[138] it had produced results such as had not been reached in Mexico at the time of the Discovery. Still the tendency in the latter country was in a similar direction. Though there was no notion of real estate, and the house was still clan-property, yet the number and value of articles of personal owners.h.i.+p had no doubt greatly increased during the long interval which must have elapsed since the ancestral Mexicans entered upon the middle status. The mere existence of large and busy market-places with regular and frequent fairs, even though trade had scarcely begun to emerge from the stage of barter, is sufficient proof of this. Such fairs and markets do not belong to the Mohawk chapter in human progress. They imply a considerable number and diversity of artificial products, valued as articles of personal property. A legitimate inference from them is the existence of a certain degree of luxury, though doubtless luxury of a barbaric type.

[Footnote 138: I here use these world-famous names without any implication as to their historical character, or their precise date, which are in themselves interesting subjects for discussion. I use them as best symbolizing the state of society which existed about the northern and eastern sh.o.r.es of the eastern Mediterranean, several centuries before the Olympiads.]

[Sidenote: Mr. Morgan's rules.]

It is at this point, I think, that a judicious critic will begin to part company with Mr. Morgan. As regards the outward aspect of the society which the Spaniards found in Mexico, that eminent scholar more than once used arguments that were inconsistent with principles of criticism laid down by himself. At the beginning of his chapter on the Aztec confederacy Mr. Morgan proposed the following rules:--

"The histories of Spanish America may be trusted in whatever relates to the acts of the Spaniards, and to the acts and personal characteristics of the Indians; in whatever relates to their weapons, implements and utensils, fabrics, food and raiment, and things of a similar character.

"But in whatever relates to Indian society and government, their social relations and plan of life, they are nearly worthless, because they learned nothing and knew nothing of either. We are at full liberty to reject them in these respects and commence anew; using any facts they may contain which harmonize with what is known of Indian society."[139]

[Footnote 139: Morgan, _Ancient Society_, p. 186, note.]

Perhaps it would have been better if the second of these rules had been somewhat differently worded; for even with regard to the strange society and government, the Spanish writers have recorded an immense number of valuable facts, without which Mr. Bandelier's work would have been impossible. It is not so much the _facts_ as the _interpretations_ of the Spanish historians that are "nearly worthless," and even their misinterpretations are interesting and instructive when once we rightly understand them. Sometimes they really help us toward the truth.

[Sidenote: Mr. Morgan sometimes disregarded his own rules: "Montezuma's Dinner."]

The broad distinction, however, as stated in Mr. Morgan's pair of rules, is well taken. In regard to such a strange form of society the Spanish discoverers of Mexico could not help making mistakes, but in regard to utensils and dress their senses were not likely to deceive them, and their statements, according to Mr. Morgan, may be trusted. Very good.

But as soon as Mr. Morgan had occasion to write about the social life of the Aztecs, he forgot his own rules and paid as little respect to the senses of eye-witnesses as to their judgment. This was amusingly ill.u.s.trated in his famous essay on "Montezuma's Dinner."[140] When Bernal Diaz describes Montezuma as sitting on a low chair at a table covered with a white cloth, Mr. Morgan declares that it could not have been so,--there were no chairs or tables! On second thought he will admit that there may have been a wooden block hollowed out for a stool, but in the matter of a table he is relentless. So when Cortes, in his despatch to the emperor, speaks of the "wine-cellar" and of the presence of "secretaries" at dinner, Mr. Morgan observes, "Since cursive writing was unknown among the Aztecs, the presence of these secretaries is an amusing feature in the account. The wine-cellar also is remarkable for two reasons: firstly, because the level of the streets and courts was but four feet above the level of the water, which made cellars impossible; and, secondly, because the Aztecs had no knowledge of wine.

An acid beer (_pulque_), made by fermenting the juice of the maguey, was a common beverage of the Aztecs; but it is hardly supposable that even this was used at dinner."[141]

[Footnote 140: _North Amer. Review_, April, 1876. The substance of it was reproduced in his _Houses and House-Life_, chap. x.]

[Footnote 141: _Houses and House-Life_, p. 241.]

To this I would reply that the fibre of that same useful plant from which the Aztecs made their "beer" supplied them also with paper, upon which they were in the habit of writing, not indeed in cursive characters, but in hieroglyphics. This kind of writing, as well as any other, accounts for the presence of secretaries, which seems to me, by the way, a very probable and characteristic feature in the narrative.

From the moment the mysterious strangers landed, every movement of theirs had been recorded in hieroglyphics, and there is no reason why notes of what they said and did should not have been taken at dinner. As for the place where the _pulque_ was kept, it was a venial slip of the pen to call it a "wine-cellar," even if it was not below the ground. The language of Cortes does not imply that he visited the "cellar;" he saw a crowd of Indians drinking the beverage, and supposing the great house he was in to be Montezuma's, he expressed his sense of that person's hospitality by saying that "his wine-cellar was open to all." And really, is it not rather a captious criticism which in one breath chides Cortes for calling the beverage "wine," and in the next breath goes on to call it "beer"? The _pulque_ was neither the one nor the other; for want of any other name a German might have called it beer, a Spaniard would be more likely to call it wine. And why is it "hardly supposable"

that _pulque_ was used at dinner? Why should Mr. Morgan, who never dined with Montezuma, know so much more about _such things_ than Cortes and Bernal Diaz, who did?[142]

[Footnote 142: Mr. Andrew Lang asks some similar questions in his _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, vol. ii. p. 349, but in a tone of impatient contempt which, as applied to a man of Mr.

Morgan's calibre, is hardly becoming.]

[Sidenote: The reaction against uncritical and exaggerated statements.]

The Spanish statements of facts are, of course, not to be accepted uncritically. When we are told of cut slabs of porphyry inlaid in the walls of a room, we have a right to inquire how so hard a stone could be cut with flint or copper chisels,[143] and are ready to entertain the suggestion that some other stone might easily have been mistaken for porphyry. Such a critical inquiry is eminently profitable, and none the less so when it brings us to the conclusion that the Aztecs did succeed in cutting porphyry. Again, when we read about Indian armies of 200,000 men, pertinent questions arise as to the commissariat, and we are led to reflect that there is nothing about which old soldiers spin such unconscionable yarns as about the size of the armies they have thrashed. In a fairy tale, of course, such suggestions are impertinent; things can go on anyhow. In real life it is different. The trouble with most historians of the conquest of Mexico has been that they have made it like a fairy tale, and the trouble with Mr. Morgan was that, in a wholesome and much-needed spirit of reaction, he was too much inclined to dismiss the whole story as such. He forgot the first of his pair of rules, and applied the second to everything alike. He felt "at full liberty to reject" the testimony of the discoverers as to what they saw and tasted, and to "commence anew," reasoning from "what is known of Indian society." And here Mr. Morgan's mind was so full of the kind of Indian society which he knew more minutely and profoundly than any other man, that he was apt to forget that there could be any other kind. He overlooked his own distinction between the lower and middle periods of barbarism in his attempt to ignore or minimize the points of difference between Aztecs and Iroquois.[144] In this way he did injustice to his own brilliant and useful cla.s.sification of stages of culture, and in particular to the middle period of barbarism, the significance of which he was the first to detect, but failed to realize fully because his attention had been so intensely concentrated upon the lower period.

[Footnote 143: For an excellent account of ancient Mexican knives and chisels, see Dr. Valentini's paper on "Semi-Lunar and Crescent-Shaped Tools," in _Proceedings of Amer. Antiq.

Soc._, New Series, vol. iii. pp. 449-474. Compare the very interesting Spanish observations on copper hatchets and flint chisels in Clavigero, _Historia antigua_, tom. i. p. 242; Mendieta, _Historia ecclesiastica indiana_, tom. iv. cap. xii.]

[Footnote 144: It often happens that the followers of a great man are more likely to run to extremes than their master, as, for example, when we see the queen of pueblos rashly described as "a collection of mud huts, such as Cortes found and dignified with the name of a city." _Smithsonian Report_, 1887, part i. p. 691. This is quite inadmissible.]

[Sidenote: Importance of the middle period of barbarism.]

In truth, the middle period of barbarism was one of the most important periods in the career of the human race, and full of fascination to the student, as the unfading interest in ancient Mexico and the huge ma.s.s of literature devoted to it show. It spanned the interval between such society as that of Hiawatha and such as that of the Odyssey. One more such interval (and, I suspect, a briefer one, because the use of iron and the development of inheritable wealth would accelerate progress) led to the age that could _write_ the Odyssey, one of the most beautiful productions of the human mind. If Mr. Morgan had always borne in mind that, on his own cla.s.sification, Montezuma must have been at least as near to Agamemnon as to Powhatan, his att.i.tude toward the Spanish historians would have been less hostile. A Moqui pueblo stands near the lower end of the middle period of barbarism; ancient Troy stood next the upper end. Mr. Morgan found apt ill.u.s.trations in the former; perhaps if he had lived long enough to profit by the work of Schliemann and Bandelier, he might have found equally apt ones in the latter. Mr.

Bandelier's researches certainly show that the ancient city of Mexico, in point of social development, stood somewhere between the two.

How that city looked may best be described when we come to tell what its first Spanish visitors saw. Let it suffice here to say that, upon a reasonable estimate of their testimony, pleasure-gardens, menageries and aviaries, fountains and baths, tessellated marble floors, finely wrought pottery, exquisite featherwork, brilliant mats and tapestries, silver goblets, dainty spices burning in golden censers, varieties of highly seasoned dishes, dramatic performances, jugglers and acrobats, ballad singers and dancing girls,--such things were to be seen in this city of snake-wors.h.i.+pping cannibals. It simulated civilization as a tree-fern simulates a tree.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ground-plan of so-called "House of the Nuns" at Uxmal.]

[Sidenote: Mexicans and Mayas.]

In its general outlines the account here given of Aztec society and government at the time of the Discovery will probably hold true of all the semi-civilized communities of the Mexican peninsula and Central America. The pueblos of Mexico were doubtless of various grades of size, strength, and comfort, ranging from such structures as Zuni up to the city of Mexico. The cities of Chiapas, Yucatan, and Guatemala, whose ruins, in those tropical forests, are so impressive, probably belong to the same cla.s.s. The Maya-Quiche tribes, who dwelt and still dwell in this region, were different in stock-language from their neighbours of Mexico; but there are strong reasons for believing that the two great groups, Mexicans and Mayas, arose from the expansion and segmentation of one common stock, and there is no doubt as to the very close similarity between the two in government, religion, and social advancement. In some points the Mayas were superior. They possessed a considerable literature, written in highly developed hieroglyphic characters upon maguey paper and upon deerskin parchment, so that from this point of view they stood upon the threshold of civilization as strictly defined.[145] But, like the Mexicans, they were ignorant of iron, their society was organized upon the principle of gentilism, they were cannibals and sacrificed men and women to idols, some of which were identical with those of Mexico. The Mayas had no conception of property in land; their buildings were great communal houses, like pueblos; in some cases these so-called palaces, at first supposed to be scanty remnants of vast cities, were themselves the entire "cities;" in other cases there were doubtless large composite pueblos fit to be called cities.

[Footnote 145: This writing was at once recognized by learned Spaniards, like Las Casas, as entirely different from anything found elsewhere in America. He found in Yucatan "letreros de ciertos caracteres que en otra ninguna parte," Las Casas, _Historia apologetica_, cap. cxxiii. For an account of the hieroglyphics, see the learned essays of Dr. Cyrus Thomas, _A Study of the Ma.n.u.script Troano_, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1882; "Notes on certain Maya and Mexican MSS.," _Third Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, pp. 7-153; "Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices,"