[Footnote 1: I refer to the statue which Dr. LePlongeon was pleased to name "Chac Mool." See the _Estudio acerca de la Estatua llamada Chac-Mool ó rey tigre_, by Sr. Jesus Sanchez, in the _Anales del Museo Nacional de Mexico_, Tom. i. p. 270. There was a divinity worshiped in Yucatan, called Cum-ahau, lord of the vase, whom the _Diccionario de Motul_, MS. terms, "Lucifer, principal de los demónios." The name is also given by Pio Perez in his manuscript dictionary in my possession, but is omitted in the printed copy. As Lucifer, the morning star, was identified with Quetzalcoatl in Mexican mythology, and as the word _cum_, vase, Aztec _comitl_, is the same in both tongues, there is good ground to suppose that this lord of the vase, the "prince of devils," was the god of fertility, common to both cults.] The version of the tradition which made Kukulcan arrive from the West, and at his disappearance return to the West--a version quoted by Landa, and which evidently originally referred to the westward course of the sun, easily led to an identification of him with the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, by those acquainted with both myths. The probability seems to be that Kukulcan was an original Maya divinity, one of their hero-gods, whose myth had in it so many similarities to that of Quetzalcoatl that the priests of the two nations came to regard the one as the same as the other. After the destruction of Mayapan, about the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Aztec mercenaries were banished to Canul, and the reigning family (the Xiu) who supported them became reduced in power, the worship of Kukulcan fell, to some extent, into disfavor. Of this we are informed by Landa, in an interesting passage.