Mesoamerican · English · 1882
The Native Races of the Pacific States, Volume III: Myths and Languages
Hubert Howe Bancroft
A compilation rather than a witness, and valuable here for exactly that: Bancroft sets Sahagún, Durán, Torquemada, Clavigero, Acosta, Motolinía and the Vatican Codex side by side on the same god and lets them disagree in print. His chapters on Tezcatlipoca and Tlaloc amount to a source apparatus with the sources named, which is what the corpus wants from a nineteenth-century encyclopaedist and the only thing it takes from him. He is not cited below for Mictlantecuhtli or for Xibalba, where he is summarising the Popol Vuh the corpus already carries and would be a second citation of a single text.
Read The Native Races of the Pacific States, Volume III: Myths and Languages in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 4
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | Carried with his ceremonial, his festivals and his deputy Paynal, and with J. G. Müller's summary of the competing Huitzilopochtli myths — their origin, relation and signification — reported as competing rather than harmonised. | |
| — | — | The most-named figure in the volume, and the one where Bancroft's method pays: the accounts of him are irreconcilable and he prints them that way. | |
| — | — | Given the longest treatment of any Mexican god in the volume, built around the prayers addressed to him in time of pestilence, of war, and for those in authority — with a chapter arguing over whether those prayers are genuine, which is a nineteenth-century compiler doing source criticism on the material he is compiling. | |
| — | — | God of water, especially of rain, and of mountains, with the prayer in time of drought and the disagreements of Clavigero, Gama, Ixtlilxochitl, Camargo, Motolinía, Mendieta and the Vatican Codex set out beside each other. |
