fecundating efficacy as a water-bearing god was also taken into consideration. In the Sahagun MS. in the Academia de la Historia, Madrid, is a passage which reads when translated: “They say that he made, created, and formed us whose creatures we are, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, and he made the heaven, the sun, the earth.” The Anales de Quauhtitlan or Codex Chimalpopca,4 too, relates how Quetzalcoatl created the four classes of humanity, the men of the four “suns” or periods of the world, and how men were made by him on the day “7 wind,” and, as we shall see, the work of creation in detail is alluded to in the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, as effected by him and by Tezcatlipocâ. Lastly, we find in the Creative Council of the Quiche heaven, Hurakan, who is none other than Tezcatlipocâ, a deity closely connected with Quetzalcoatl in at least one Mexican creation myth.
THE “AGES” OF MEXICAN COSMOGONY
Having thus satisfied ourselves regarding the creative personnel of the Mexican pantheon, and preserving further proof of the constructive character of certain of these deities until we come to discuss them individually, we may proceed to examine such myths as tell of the formation of the world. In the belief of the Mexicans the earth was not destined to receive its present inhabitants, although occupied by man-like beings, until it had undergone a series of cataclysms or partial destructions, regarding the precise incidence and even the number of which there is a marked difference of opinion on the part of the older authorities.
The interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus states that “in the first age” (or “Sun,” as these periods were called by the Nahua of Mexico) “water reigned until at last it destroyed the world.… This age, according to their computation, lasted 4,008 years, and on the occurrence of that great deluge they say that men were changed into fish, named Tlacamichin, which signifies men-fish.”5 The second age, he tells us, lasted for 4,010