e instructive account of aboriginal history than this
simple native record preserved by Landa, which so clearly reveals amongst
other details that the Mexican culture-hero was an actual personage, a
Maya high-priest who had been a ruler at Chichen-Itza. In this connection
it is interesting to collate another chapter of Landa's work in which he
reports what the oldest Indians narrated to him about Chichen-Itza, of
which I give the following somewhat abbreviated translation: Three
brothers came there in olden times from the west and having assembled
together a large number of people, ruled them for some years with much
justice and peace.(54) They paid great honor to their god and built many
beautiful edifices.... They lived without wives in purity and virtue and
as long as they did this they were esteemed and obeyed by all. In course
of time one of them possibly died, but is said by the Indians to have gone
out of the country. Whatever may have been the cause of his absence the
remaining rulers immediately began to show partiality and to institute
such licentious and abominable customs that they were finally execrated by
the people who rebelled and killed them, and then disbanded and abandoned
the capital, "although this was most beautiful and was surrounded by
fertile provinces."(55)

The principal edifice at Chichen-Itza was a pyramid temple which had four
stairways facing the cardinal points. It contained a circular temple which
was named after the builder Kukulcan and had four doorways opening to the
four quarters of heaven.

If I have dwelt again upon Kukulcan=Quetzalcoatl, it is because, between
the writers who interpret the records concerning him as a sun or star-myth
and those who identify him as the abstract deity whose name he bore as a
title only, or as St. Thomas or a mythical Norseman, ancient America is
being deprived of its most remarkable historical personage.

Collated with the Maya traditional records, the Mexican accounts agree and
supply missing evidence. Whilst the Mayas state that their ruler and
legislator went to Mexico and even record his Mexican name, Montezuma
informs Cortes that "his ancestors had been conducted to Mexico by a
ruler, Quetzalcoatl, whose vassals they were and who having established
them in a colony returned to his native land. Later on he returned and
wished them to leave with him but they chose to remain, having married
women of the country, raised families and built towns. No