The faith of the Zuñis, with its metaphysics, its devoutness and its magic ritual, may seem a kind of introduction to the magic, the ritual and the piety of the ancient Aztecs. The latter may have grown, in a long course of forgotten ages, out of elements like those of the Zuñi practice, combined with the atrocious cruelty of the warrior tribes of the north. Perhaps in no race is the extreme contrast between low myth, and the highest speculation, that of "the Eternal thinking himself out into space," so marked as among the Zuñis. The highly abstract conception of Ahonawilona was unknown to Europeans when this work first appeared. CHAPTER XV. MEXICAN DIVINE MYTHS European eye-witnesses of Mexican ritual--Diaz, his account of temples and Gods__Sahagun, his method--Theories of the god Huitzilopochtli--Totemistic and other elements in his image and legend--Illustrations from Latin religion-- "God-eating"--The calendar--Other gods--Their feasts and cruel ritual--Their composite character--Parallels from ancient classical peoples--Moral aspects of Aztec gods. The religion of the Mexicans was a compound of morality and cruelty so astonishing that its two aspects have been explained as the contributions of two separate races. The wild Aztecs from the north are credited with having brought to a high pitch of organised ritual the ferocious customs of the Red Indians. The tortures which the tribes inflicted on captives taken in war were transmuted into the cannibal sacrifices and orgies of bloodshed with which the Aztec temples reeked. The milder elements, again, the sense of sin which found relief in confession and prayer, are assigned to the influence of Mayas, and especially of Toltecs, a shadowy and perhaps an imaginary people. Our ignorance of Mexican history before the Spanish conquest is too deep to make any such theory of the influence of race on religion in Mexico more than merely plausible. The facts of ritual and of myth are better known, thanks to the observations of such an honest soldier as Bernal Diaz and such a learned missionary as Sahagun. The author of the _Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España_ was a Spanish Franciscan, and one of the earliest missionaries (1529) in Mexico. He himself describes the method by which he collected his information about the native religion. He summoned together the chief men of one of the provinces, who, in turn, chose twelve old men well seen in knowledge of the Mexican practices and antiquities. Several of them were also scholars in the European sense, and had been taught Latin. The majority of the commission collected and presented "pictures which were the writings formerly in use among them," and the "grammarians" or Latin-learned Aztecs wrote in European characters and in Aztec the explanations of these designs. When Sahagun changed his place of residence, these documents were again compared, re-edited and enlarged by the assistance