cult was a relatively late institution in Mexico, although in some parts of the country it may have flourished for generations before it became popular in Tenochtitlan. Slightly elaborating our former reasons for this statement, we may indicate: (1) The name Tonatiuh appears in the myths of the origin of the sun as that of the luminary, but not of a god. (2) The circumstance that Tonatiuh was regarded by the Mexicans as a “heaven,” a Valhalla, to which the warriors slain in sacrifice betook themselves after death, and therefore represented a place of reward, a class of myth which is nearly always of comparatively late origin, and is the fruit of mature speculation. (3) The fact that Tonatiuh was closely identified with the warrior caste and therefore with human sacrifice, which was a late introduction and the paramount reason for the existence of that caste. (4) That the original Calendar was a lunar one. But these and other considerations will be dealt with more fully when we undertake the elucidation of the sun-god’s characteristics.
The amalgamation of the solar cult and of the Quetzalcoatl cult (representing the later and earlier “civilized” elements in Mexican religion) with the rain-cult is not an isolated phenomenon in the world’s religious history. The analogy of the fusion of the Osirian cult of Egypt with that of Ra will occur to everyone in this connection, and as the theology of the priests of the more aristocratic faith became in the event subsidiary in real importance to that of the far more popular Osirian worship, in the same manner the Quetzalcoatl cult, and in some measure the solar, were of much less real significance in Mexican life generally than the earlier popular belief. The solar worship seems to have successfully and naturally identified itself with the rain-cult, as also did the Quetzalcoatl religion. The myth which described Quetzalcoatl as the founder or inventor of the tonalamatl or Book of Fate24 probably records an effort on the part of his priesthood to identify their cult with the popular agricultural religion or to systematize or reduce to symbolic form an idea which until that time had probably existed in an uncertain and chaotic condition in the popular mind. For even if the tonalamatl