-known symbols for the North and Fire and that the Vatican commentator
identifies the celestial parent as "Seven-Flowers." What is more, Duran
(vol. I, pp. 8 and 9) relates that the native race was organized into
seven separate tribes and that these "claimed to have come out of 'seven
caves' (Chicom-oztoc) which were situated in Teo-Culhuacan or Aztlan 'a
land of which all men know that it is in the North.' " Now Teo-Culhuacan
is composed of the word Teotl, which designated the stars, the sun, the
gods and, by extension, something divine or celestial. Culhua (_cf._
Coloa) means something bent over or recurved, or the action of describing
a circle by moving around something, and _can_ means "the place of" in
Nahuatl. This locality is represented in the picture-writings by a strange
and impossible mountain with a recurved summit (fig. 26, no. 1). Aztlan
literally means "the land of whiteness, brightness, light." In Duran's
Atlas the seven caves are represented as containing men and women--the
progenitors of the seven tribes. The order in which these are described,
in the Mexican myth, as having issued from the caves, is instructive and
sheds light upon the provenance and purpose of the tradition. It
represents the Mexicans as the superior predestined race who remained in
their cave the "longest, by divine command," their "god having promised
them this land." The tradition relates that six tribes reached and settled
down in the central plateau of Mexico, 302 years before the Aztecs
arrived, under the leadership of Huitzilopochtli an oracular divinity,
whose commandments were transmitted to the people by four priests (Duran,
chap. II).

In my opinion it is impossible to study the above and supplementary data
without realizing that the native race assigned its origin to a dual
star-divinity, associated with the Tecpatl, the symbol for the North and
for Fire. The peculiarity that the divinity is designated as
Seven-flowers, and that there were seven tribes, indicates that the native
idea was that each tribe came from one of the seven stars in Ursa Major or
Minor. The Aztecs seem to have claimed for themselves the descent from the
superior star, the central one, and to have thus justified or supported
their ultimate establishment of a central government which ruled over the
other six tribes.

[Illustration.]

Figure 26.

The assumption that the native race claim