him to make some definite statement regarding the true meaning and import of his religion ere he returned to his place, he might, perhaps, reply: “If we had not worshipped the gods and sacrificed to them, nourished them with blood and pleasured them with gifts, they would have ceased to watch over our welfare, and would have withheld the maize and water which kept us in life. The rain would not have fallen and the crops would not have come to fruition.”1 If he employed some such terms as these, our phantom would outline the whole purport of the system which we call Mexican religion, the rude platform on which was raised the towering superstructure of rite and ceremony, morality and tradition, a part of which we are about to examine.
The writer who undertakes the description of any of the great faiths of the world usually presupposes in his readers a certain acquaintance with the history and conditions of the people of whose religion he treats. But the obscurity which surrounded all questions relating to Mexican antiquity until the beginning of this century formerly made it essential that any view of its religious phase should be prefaced by an account of the peoples who professed it, their racial affinities, and the country they occupied. This necessity no longer exists. The ground has been traversed so often of late, and I have covered it so frequently in previous works,2 that I feel only a brief account of these conditions is necessary here, such, in a word, as will enable the reader to realize circumstances of race, locality, and period.
The people whose religious ideas this book attempts to describe were the Nahua of pre-Colombian Mexico, a race by no means extinct, despite the oft-repeated assertions of popular novelists, and which is now usually classed as a branch of the great Uto-Aztecan family of the North American Indian stock. They spoke, and their descendants still speak, a language known as the Nahuatl, or Nahuatlatolli (“speech of those who live by rule” or “by ritual observance”). At the era of the Spanish invasion of their country in 1519 they had succeeded in overrunning and reducing