The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations: A Comparative Research Based on a Study of the Ancient Mexican Religious, Sociological, and Calendrical SystemsNuttall, Zelia
Religion
The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations: A Comparative Research Based on a Study of the Ancient Mexican Religious, Sociological, and Calendrical Systems
Deferring further discussion of this interesting matter I will but draw
attention to Mr. Stewart Culin’s important study of “American Indian
Games,”(43) which clearly establishes their “interrelation” and at the
same time proves that they were based, as first distinctly insisted upon
by Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, on the central idea and that of the four
quarters of the world. Mr. Culin has gone so far as to fix the place of
origin of the “platter or dice class of games which he has found recorded
as existing among some 61 American tribes, in the arid region of the
southwestern United States and Northern or Central Mexico,” and to
conceive that “in ancient Mexico we find traces of its highest
development.”
I place the utmost value upon Mr. Culin’s painstaking and conscientious
researches and regard them as strongly corroborating my views exposed in
the preceding pages. His identification of the pictured diagram in the
Féjérvary Codex, as the counting circuit of the Four Quarters, with a
presiding god in the middle, as in Zuñi, does credit to his perspicacity.
I agree with him in considering that this chart could have been employed
after the Conquest for a game or for divination, but trust that, upon
perusal of this paper, he will admit that primarily the Féjérvary diagram
expressed the native scheme of government and the calendar, which was no
other than a means of ruling the classes by binding each of these to a
special day and totemic sign. Each of the twenty classes or clans had its
day, known by a particular sign which was also its totemic mark. As the
day-signs recurred periodically, the chief or head of each clan became its
living representative, assumed a totemistic costume and became the “living
image of the ancestral teotl,” or god of his people, of whose activity he
rendered account to the central government. It is significant that the
common native title for lords or chieftains was “tlatoque,” literally,
“the speakers,” and that they were closely designated as the spokesmen of
his people, who habitually kept silence in his presence.
The fact that the names and signs of the days are identical with the
totemic tribal distinctions imposed for governmental reasons, is one which
I shall proceed to demonstrate more fully. Meanwhile attention is now
drawn to the chapter on the 7-day period in Dr. Daniel G. Brinton’s
“Native Calendar of Central America and Mexico,” in which he surmises that
the tribal divisions of the Cakchiquels “were drawn from the numbers of
the Calendar.”
According to the native records the institution of the Calendar was
simultaneous with that of tribal organization and a minute study of both
features reveals that it could not have been otherwise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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