-[+]] These appear to have been different from
among the Zapotecs. It was necessary that the youth should have a name
bearing a higher number than that of the maiden, and also "that they
should be related;" probably this applied only to certain formal
marriages of the rulers which were obliged to be within the same _gens_.

=13.= I have referred in some detail to the rites and superstitions
connected with the Calendar because they are all essential parts of
Nagualism, carried on far into Christian times by the priests of this
secret cult, as was fully recognized by the Catholic clergy. Wherever
this calendar was in use, the Freemasonry of Nagualism extended, and its
ritual had constant reference to it. Our fullest information about it
does not come from central Mexico, but further south, in the region
occupied by the various branches of the Mayan stock, by the ancestors of
some one of which, perhaps, this singular calendar, and the symbolism
connected with it, were invented.

One of the most important older authorities on this subject is Francisco
Nunez de la Vega, a learned Dominican, who was appointed Bishop of
Chiapas and Soconusco in 1687, and who published at Rome, in 1702, a
stately folio entitled "_Constituciones Dioecesanas del Obispado de
Chiappa_," comprising discussions of the articles of religion and a
series of pastoral letters. The subject of Nagualism is referred to in
many passages, and the ninth Pastoral Letter is devoted to it. As this
book is one of extreme rarity, I shall make rather lengthy extracts from
it, taking the liberty of condensing the scholastic prolixity of the
author, and omitting his professional admonitions to the wicked.

He begins his references to it in several passages of his Introduction
or _Preambulo_, in which he makes some interesting statements as to the
use to which the natives put their newly-acquired knowledge of writing,
while at the same time they had evidently not forgotten the ancient
method of recording ideas invented by their ancestors.

The Bishop writes:

"The Indians of New Spain retain all the errors of their time of
heathenism preserved in certain writings in their own languages,
explaining by abbreviated characters and by figures painted in a
secret cypher[17-*] the places, provinces and names of their early
rulers, the animals, stars and elements which they worshiped, the
ceremonies and sacrifices which they observed, and the