{*} [The name may possibly have referred to the whispered oracles and intimations in dreams--such as “a little bird of the air” is still fabled to convey--by which, according to the legend, the deity had guided his people in their migrations and conquests. That it had a symbolical meaning will hardly be doubted, and M. Brasseur de Bourbourg, who had originally explained it as “Huitzil the Left-handed,”--the proper name of a deified hero with the addition of a descriptive epithet,--has since found one of too deep an import to be briefly expounded or easily understood. (Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (Paris, 1868), p. 201, et al.) _Mexitl_, another name of the same deity, is translated “the hare of the aloes.” In some accounts the two are distinct personages. Mythological science rejects the legend, and regards the Aztec war-god as a “nature-deity,” a personification of the lightning, this being a natural type of warlike might, of which the common symbol, the serpent, was represented among the decorations of the idol. (Myths of the New World, p. 118.) More commonly he has been identified with the sun, and Mr. Tylor, while declining “to attempt a general solution of this inextricable compound parthenogenetic deity,” notices the association of his principal festival with the winter’s solstice, and the fact that his paste idol was then shot through with an arrow, as tending to show that the life and death of the deity were emblematic of the year’s, “while his functions of war-god may have been of later addition.” Primitive Culture, tom. ii. 279.--K.] [102] [For the Aztec myths our most valuable authority is the Historia de los Méxicanos por sus Pinturas, by Ramirez de Fuen-leal. This is taken directly from the sacred books of the Aztecs as explained by survivors of the Conquest. Bandelier, Archæological Tour, calls it the earliest statement of the Nahua myths. The other “sources” are Motolinía, Mendieta, Sahagun, Ixtlilxochitl, and Torquemada. Bancroft, Native Races, vol. iii. ch. 7, sums them up admirably. Brinton, Myths of the New World, thinks Quetzalcoatl “a pure creature of the fancy.” Bandelier, whose presentation of the subject is most full and complete (Archæological Tour), agrees with Prescott that Quetzalcoatl began his career as leader of a migration southward. His principal sojourn was at Cholula. See also Payne, New World Called America, vol. i. pp. 588-596. P. de Roo, History of America before Columbus, vol. i. ch. xxii and xxiii, gives a very full presentation of the legend. He writes from the point of view of a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. His conclusion is that Quetzalcoatl was a Christian prelate, and that Christian doctrines were introduced into aboriginal America by European immigrants.--M.]