12. MYTHOLOGY. Prior to the Euro pean occupation Mexico and Central America were inhabited by races possessing a long his tory and a semi-historical mythology, manifold in its ramifications and rich in its internal de velopment. Within this mythology was the very heart of those nations and peoples, for round it clustered their social and political, in stitutions and their industrial life. Though it differed with the different peoples,. funda mentally it was everywhere similar. 'the same thing had taken place in Mexico that had happened to the mythologies of the Indo European races in Europe. Different tribes of the same great linguistic family had separated from one another and, in their migrations from place to place, during the more or less nomadic stages of their existence, they had, later on, come together again. During these wanderings they had forgotten one another and when they met again it was as alien peoples. Yet so similar were their institutions, languages, re ligious beliefs and the general course of their existence that they frequently blended and be came more or less one people. This happened to the remnant of the Toltecs left on the up land plateaux of Mexico after the overthrow of their empire; to the Chichimecas and to the various other tribes forming the Aztec Empire at the time of the Conquest.
After their long migrations from their primitive home, migrations which covered cen turies, the Nahuatl races met as strangers in the valley of Mexico and surrounding country. The blending to which we have just referred was imperfect. Thus among the Toltecs we find the deity to whom most deference was paid was Quetzalcoatl; among the Aztecs it was Huitzilopochtli, god of war; among the Texcocans, Tezcatlipoca, god of the air; among the Tlaxcalans, Camaxtli; among the Otomi, Mixcoatl, god of the chase. Like the Romans, the Greeks and many other civilized peoples of pre-Christian times, the Mexicans were accus tomed to adopt the gods of other races with whom they came into contact, more especially if the mythology of these races was closely re lated to their own. The natural result was the
very curious mingling of mythologies. Huitzi lopochtli, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca were all gods of the air, and they have so many characteristics in common there is little doubt they were originally one tribal divinity com mon to all the people who spoke the Nahuatl tongue at a time prior to the separation of the tribes. In fact, in Mexican mythology, these three gods are represented as brothers, and in every part of the Aztec Empire where Nahuatl was spoken they were the foremost divinities. In Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), where Huitzilopochtli was all powerful, in his great temple, a statue and an altar had been erected to Quetzalcoatl, At Cholula, the heart of the Aztec empire, stood the greatest of the pyramids of Mexico, with its famous shrine, both erected to the worship of the Feathered Serpent god of the Toltecs. But its worship pers were not confined to the remnants of the Toltecs who had become incorporated into the Mexican nation. Peoples of various races, Aztecs, Colhuas, Zapotecasi Mixtecas, traveled from the 'furthest confines of the empire and from beyond it to pay their devotions at the shrine of this once powerful divinity. Yet in Cholula, where the cult of Quetzalcoatl was all powerful, Huitzilopochtli also held a place by the side of the Toltec god himself.
In Texcoco, the reputed centre of the ad vanced culture of the Mexican Empire, while Tezcatlipoca occupied the place of most im portance in the native pantheon, just below him and Huitzilopochtli. As the superior culture, refinement and intelligence of the Texcocans gradually came to exert an all powerful influence over the rest of the Aztec Empire,. their chief divinity, little by little, gained more importance in the Nahuatl pan theon, until at last he secured recognition which gave him, among the nobles and cultured class at least, a standing above that of the other tribal gods.