File:The myths of Mexico and Peru (1913) (14783792472).jpg

Identifier: mythsofmexicoper01spen (find matches)
Title: The myths of Mexico and Peru
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors: Spence, Lewis, 1874-1955
Subjects: Indians of Mexico Indian mythology Indians of Mexico Indians of South America Indian mythology Indians of South America
Publisher: New York, T. Y. Crowell company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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laws and religions prove them to have been the equals of most of the Asiatic nations of antiquity, and the superiors of the primitive races of Europe, who entered into the heritage of civilisation through the gateway of the East. The aborigines of ancient America had evolved for themselves a system of writing which at the period of their discovery was approaching the alphabetic type, a mathematical system unique and by no means despicable, and an architectural science in some respects superior to any of which the Old World could boast. Their legal codes were reason-able and founded upon justice ; and if their religions were tainted with cruelty, it was a cruelty which they regarded as inevitable, and as the doom placed upon them by sanguinary and Insatiable deities and not by any human agency. In comparing the myths of the American races with the deathless stories of Olympus or the scarcely less classic tales of India, frequent resemblances and analogies cannot fail to present themselves, and these328
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He saw a very beautiful girl crying bitterly William Sewell 328 CONCLUSION are of value as illustrating the circumstance that in every quarter of the globe the mind of man has shaped for itself a system of faith based upon similar principles. But in the perusal of the myths and beliefs of Mexico and Peru we are also struck with the strange-ness and remoteness alike of their subject-matter and the type of thought which they present. The result of centuries of isolation is evident in a profound contrast of atmosphere. It seems almost as if we stood for a space upon the dim shores of another planet, spec-tators of the doings of a race of whose modes of thought and feeling we were entirely ignorant. For generations these stories have been hidden,along with the memory of the gods and folk of whom they tell, beneath a thick dust of neglect, displaced here and there only by the efforts of antiquarians working singly and unaided. Nowadays many well-equipped students are striving to add to our knowledge

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