cs
perished at the conquest. The survivors were more or less converted to
Catholicism, and in their writings probably put the best face possible
on the native religion. Like the Spanish clergy, their instructors,
they were inclined to explain away their national gods by a system of
euhemerism, by taking it for granted that the gods and culture-heroes
had originally been ordinary men, worshipped after their decease. This
is almost invariably the view adopted by Sahagun. Side by side with the
confessions, as it were, of the clergy and cultivated classes coexisted
the popular beliefs, the myths of the people, partaking of the nature of
folk-lore, but not rejected by the priesthood.

Both strata of belief are represented in the surviving cosmogonic
myths of the Aztecs. Probably we may reckon in the first or learned and
speculative class of tales the account of a series of constructions and
reconstructions of the world. This idea is not peculiar to the higher
mythologies, the notion of a deluge and recreation or renewal of things
is almost universal, and even among the untutored Australians there are
memories of a flood and of an age of ruinous winds. But the theory of
definite epochs, calculated in accordance with the Mexican calendar,
of epochs in which things were made and re-made, answers closely to
the Indo-Aryan conception of successive kalpas, and can only have been
developed after the method of reckoning time had been carried to some
perfection. "When heaven and earth were fashioned, they had already been
four times created and destroyed," say the fragments of what is called
the Chimalpopoca manuscript. Probably this theory of a series of kalpas
is only one of the devices by which the human mind has tried to cheat
itself into the belief that it can conceive a beginning of things. The
earth stands on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and it is going
too far to ask what the tortoise stands on. In the same way the world's
beginning seems to become more intelligible or less puzzling when it is
thrown back into a series of beginnings and endings. This method also
was in harmony with those vague ideas of evolution and of the survival
of the fittest which we have detected in myth. The various tentative
human races of the Popol Vuh degenerated or were destroyed because they
did not fulfil the purposes for which they were made. In Brahmanic myth
we shall see that type after type was condemned and perished because it
wa