THE GODS OF MEXICO

gradations in office, and a pantheon which had obviously been formed by the collocation of the deities of provincial and dependent tribes and peoples around a nucleus composed of the national and departmental gods of the Aztecâ. The great temple-area of Mexico-Tenochtitlan harboured a bewildering array of gods, many of which possessed separate shrines and ministrants. An intensive examination of the alien elements represented, however, tends to prove the identity of many of them with the gods of the Aztecâ, a similarity which, in numerous instances, was manifest to that people themselves and which was the result of tribal affinity or basic resemblance in religious conception. Nevertheless a residuum of unrelated deities remained, which might, perhaps, be accounted for by positing the existence of two markedly different cultures or tendencies in Mexico, barbarous and civilized. This may imply that the opposing influences which gave rise to these variations were alien to each other racially, or it may indicate that, whereas one had remained in an environment of barbarism, the other had developed and enlarged its theological and even its mythical conceptions in the light of the necessities of an advancing material civilization. Whence the seeds of that civilization came is, as has been said, matter of controversy. The existence of a system of monachism in Mexico would seem to indicate a non-American origin. Elements common to both aspects of this interesting faith were sufficiently numerous in Mexican religion. Thus the so-called Chichimecs, or rude hunters of the steppes to the north of the Valley of Mexico, retained in their pristine form the simple beliefs and the ungraded pantheon, which in the case of the more advanced tribes of cognate origin rapidly took shape as a great State religion under the influences of a more complex social system, the stimulus of alien religious conceptions, and above all, of a priesthood skilled in the reduction of theological and mythical material to dogma. This cult, although composed of elements perhaps at first conflicting in aim and character, had yet arrived at a comparative degree of homogeneity and had evolved an intricate and exacting ritual