THE GODS OF MEXICO

lived roamed the steppes, and proof abounds that the customs of the chase strongly influenced the religious ideas of the early Nahua. Certain of their gods, indeed, seem to have been developed from cervine forms, for among barbarous races the animal worshipped is that which provides the tribe with its staple food, or, more correctly, a great eponymous figure of that animal is adored—for example, the Great Deer, who sends the smaller deer to keep the savage in life. In like manner barbarous fisherfolk are wont to worship the Great Fish, which sends them its progeny or its subjects to serve as food. These deer gods or hunting gods in some way connected with the deer—Itzpapalotl, Itzcuêyê, Mixcoatl, Camaxtli—had also stellar or solar attributes. The deer was slain by the obsidian weapon, which, therefore, came to be regarded as the magical weapon, that by which food was procured. In the course of time it assumed a sacred significance, the hunting gods themselves came to wield it, and it was thought of as coming from the stars or the heavens where the gods dwelt, in precisely the same manner as flint arrowheads were regarded by the peasantry of Europe as “elf-arrows” or “thunder-stones”—that is, as something supernatural, falling from above.