Chapter II: Part I: Pre-Hispanic

It is a unique truth that to trace the origin of Mexican popular art as it exists today, it is necessary to consult first the archaeologists and scientists. In this country the past is interwoven visibly with the present, living and potent. The latter day life of the native is an anachronism. To account for him, archaeology and ethnology must combine in what appears to be an ill-rewarded search for beginnings. It is not possible to settle the question of the ancient races of Mexico, to close the book and pronounce clearly on a dead civilization, as in other countries where the earth is giving up her entombed cities.

The descendants of the early Mexicans have survived the buried temples of their culture and are here, almost pure in strain, spiritually remote, stubbornly individual after centuries of alien domination.

They have given way before foreign conquest with reservations. They outwardly conformed to a religion imposed upon them, and mingled ancient significances with its new rituals.

They patiently wrought in the arts after the design of the strangers, and continued thereby an almost unbroken record of their own racial soul. Here is an art, almost unknown in the world today, a survival from internal wars, conquests, many fusions; an actual thing of full breathing vitality and meaning. Always the foreign influences have been assimilated and transformed slowly into something incorruptibly Mexican, personal to the race.

The first concern of the scientist is to discover the origin, the first impulse of the artist is to apprehend the spirit. If the artist has more nearly achieved his aim, it is maybe because his task is simpler. He perceives and accepts the fundamental kinship of all human beings on the plane of natural emotion.

They are agreed in this essential: the problem of the native is the problem of Mexico today. His future is invaluable, and must be secured. Modern sentiment of humanity and economic wisdom alike declare that the Indio has in the life of today his rights, his uses and his destiny.

For this it is necessary to arrive at an understanding of him. The one approach to such an eventuality is by way of comprehending first his contribution to society ... and his contribution is beauty. A strange thing, sufficiently marvelous, of miraculous import. While we are attempting to explain him, he fulfills himself in his desert silences, unaware that he is enigma.

Scientific theory regarding the origin of the Mexican is at once less sure and more dogmatic than the artistic. One may say with all high regard to the devoted and serious research of the students and historians of Mexico, that each man has an individual theory, compounded of many fallible ingredients. He is committed to faith in his works with an intensity once the property of religious fanaticism. This Sphynx of countries, which for every fragment of authentic history yields two riddles, is an enormous field of travail for the enthusiast who will die in defense of his facts. Each of them proves his contention by his own illumined faith, defended by his carefully gathered and rigidly arranged group of theories beginning where all theories of origins must begin: on hypothesis.

This lends to their conclusions that quality of fantasy, of speculation and myth creativeness that has always marked the ideas of man pitiably eager to explain himself to himself, to open eternity with the key of his human imagination. But their work has this permanent value: they have brought out of the earth records in stone, unaccountable things in the main, but lasting documents for further study.

A certain student will tell you there were five successive civilizations in Mexico; it is true he has collected five curiously unrelated types of masks and faces modelled in clay from several cities and from varying depths. The doubter may go to these cities and dig them out for himself.

Another declares, and will show you charts to make it clear, that only two distinct types of culture existed here: the Maya and the Nahoa, so-called. Still others maintain that the races of ancient Mexico derived from the Chinese in the very dawn of time, and would raise the Atlantis to make a footpath for the migratory tribes across the sea. This last body of believers is almost large enough to found a school of archeology and ethnology of its own.

They point to slant eyes, to anatomical character, to a gold colored skin surviving in the several tribes, in the Otomis, in the Mixtecas, in the early Maya. In effect, their contention is based on religious faith; it is not possible that in old time there were rival gods, each creating after his own fashion. The obscure monotheism in the soul of modern man declares the early man in the valley of Anahuac must be in some way blood brother to the human beings cradled in Mother Asia.

They seek to account for this common Asiatic origin by comparison of hieroglyphics, motifs of design, by feature and customs and dress. They restore that vanished pathway of islands across the sea, which, if they did not form a complete bridge, created channels narrow enough for peoples to navigate them in small boats. This was, they admit, in the dawn; if they came so early as that, their kinship with the east is a remote thing, a mere sharing of common humanity.

Analogies founded on comparisons so general have proved misleading. Those individuals who have studied origins in Egypt first find in the Mexican culture startling resemblances to the architecture and art motifs of the Early Egyptians. Scientists declare that virtually every culture of ancient Europe and Asia reveal some circuitous kinship with the inhabitants of Mexico.

These resemblances appertain to the humanity of all races. The fixed dates of the Mexican culture vary from the Glacial epoch of the extremists to the five centuries B. C. of the conservatives. Science is hopelessly divided in point of time; but whatever the period of their emergence into civilization, they followed the natural process of growth. They may have been parallel with the same development in Europe and Asia, or they may have progressed in a slower rhythm, governed by different climatic conditions and their insurmountable isolation from the rest of the world.

In important details they differ entirely. These differences give significance and depth to their culture. The resemblances are casual.

A study of early design, for example, shows us that circles and wavy lines, labyrinths, swastikas and angles existed as basic motives among those peoples whom we are accustomed to call primitive. I submit that they existed as the simple universal expressions of emotions and perceptions that animated the awakening soul of man, the natural idiom of primary understanding. The individual use of these perceptions were developed differently by the growth of human personality limited and directed by its environment.

A child of today, fragrant of civilization that he is, yet sees his world first with the eyes of innocence. He draws by instinct a straight line. A wavy line is water, a round circle serves variously to express his feelings for a flower, a head, a moon. He draws these things because they are the first planes and outlines the human eye apprehends.

In his terrors the child is primitive man. He fears flood, fire, lightning, the mysterious and awful portents of nature. He creates superstitions about his birth, his emotions, his sex. I submit that these instinctive gropings make all men akin, and that they derive from within the individual. A race in China and a race in Mexico, emerging into the adolescence of civilization, would do similar things because those are the things all the men in the world did in the beginning.

Since conclusions as to the history of the early races of Mexico must be based on choice of sources of information guided by personal faith and judgment, I have contrived the following mosaic of selected theories and data from many writers, offering it not as dogma, but merely as one possible combination on which to base further study.

Three distinct race-groups formed the early civilizations of Mexico: the Otomí, the Maya and the Nahoa. Of these the Otomí is believed to have been the oldest, the most migratory and warlike. Their exact rôle in the history of primitive Mexico is so ill defined it would not be profitable to attempt even the most nebulous outline here.

Of the Mayas much is surmised. They came probably from North America in a migration that covered several centuries. The year of Our Lord 162 is the date assigned for the beginning of this pilgrimage of a race.

At the close of the second century following, they were settled in Yucatan, with territories including parts of Chiapas and Tabasco, possessed of a splendid culture that dominated Honduras, Guatemala, Peru, parts of North and Central America.

The Nahoa influence at about the same period embraced nearly all the valley of Anahuac, the central mesa of Mexico. At the time of the Conquest, the Mayas had long since vanished, while the Nahoa civilization had reached its final growth about the year 1400, and was in a gradual decline. The Aztecs, a migratory and aggressive tribe who came to the valley of Anahuac about the end of the thirteenth century, were responsible for the breaking down of the gentler Nahoa culture. The Aztecs assimilated the Nahoa arts as the Romans did those of the Greeks, adding the vigor and solidity of their military organization to the body of Nahoa culture, investing the arts of the decaying peoples with a harsher outline.

The true foundation of Mexican art is, however, a combination of these two primary cultures, the Maya and the Nahoa. Throughout the states of Oaxaca and Jalisco today, this influence is still astonishingly pure and powerful.

They were at first two totally different types of art. The practical difference was in method. All Maya stone carving was in bas-relief, marked by a finished nervous style and exquisite detail of design. The Nahoa sculpture was three dimensional, less fantastic, bolder in execution. The spiritual differences were expressed as freely: the Maya was devotional and religious, the Nahoa vividly objective and personal.

If it is not possible to fix dates and descents with certainty, we have unlimited opportunity to study the remains of their architecture and kindred art forms, the infallible signs whereby we may discover the temper and intellectual level of a race.

In this study, the important fact to consider is a psychological one. The early peoples of Mexico were dominated by the idea and practice of religion. In every tribe, at every stage of their racial progress and decay, faith in their gods was the compelling impulse of their lives. Priests were the guardians of the national spirit, the instructors of the young, the final authorities who governed the people in all matters of moral conduct even to the smallest personal details of daily living.

Among the Aztecs even to the early part of the sixteenth century there were thirteen principal deities, and more than two hundred inferior gods. They ranked in importance from the War God Huitzilopotchli to the humble little household deity charged with the responsibility of bringing daily good fortune and happiness to the family under whose roof he was a guest.

Five thousand priests waited on the will of these gods, serving at altars which reflected their holiest ideal of beauty, in temples set stone upon stone by the hands of unquestioning faith.

The nature of any art is determined by the medium of expression. The medium of the early Mexican was stone. If they had song and poetry and musical instruments, there is little to record that they were considered as important forms. A few songs have survived, notably those of the last Emperor of Texcoco, but he was comparatively of modern times. The Nahoas made picture writing and carved panels to tell of their wars, their feasts, their games, their victories and religious ceremonies. They expressed themselves primarily in sculpture as the Celts did in great songs and legends. The old Irish people were like the Jews in this: they describe their gods and praise them in words. The Mexicans carved the images of their deities in stone, and left them for us to see and touch and wonder at, and to make our own legends about them.

From this concern, this preoccupation with the will of the gods, there sprang a strange and terrible beauty, destined to remain as the sole record of a splendid race. The sculpture, the architecture, the decorations of the Nahoas and Mayas are symbols of the racial mind, and that mind was, above all, religious.

In the simplicity of the attitudes of these images, we understand that the worship of the Mexican was a completely honest thing. Keeping their gods alive and appeased was the difficult work of men bent on surviving in a world filled with hostile forces. They shared this fear of the unknown with all races of men fated to experiment with the incalculable mysteries for the first time, with no guide except human curiosity, no weapon except human valor.

The cruelties of their faith, so much discussed and theorised about, were then only the cruelties shared with a terror-stricken world of men. They would have discovered, finally, that the sun would rise even though no victim was sacrificed on their altars. Not hatred of humanity, but love of their gods prompted them to their ritual sacrifices. The intimate and precious possession of life was the ideal offering to their gods for the well-being of the race. The merely physical cruelties were incidental and necessary. Moral cruelty was unknown. It came later in other races, through different dogmas, with the decadence of the religious spirit.

With this in mind, we will examine their sculptured images.

The Maya civilization was the most advanced and important of all the old social structures of Mexico. They seem to have vanished mysteriously at the height of their beauty, for a sustained perfection of form marks their art from the first known example to the end.

The early bas-relief panels in the temples at Palenque, of which the best known are the tablets of the Foliated Cross, are sophisticated and delicate in design. The later image of Chac-Mool (called first the Maya Bacchus, now identified as the Tiger King) is as restrained, as classic and cool in modelling as only a race old in culture, or young and supremely innocent, can produce. But always it is civilized--the exaggerations of savagery are unknown.

The Nahoas followed a more natural process, upbuilding to a pinnacle of beauty and declining into over-ripeness.

To a fantastic degree they possessed the grotesque sense at once the property of very primitive and very decadent minds. In art, we begin with distortions of beauty and we end with them. But the grotesqueries differ in precisely the degree of separation between innocence and decaying wisdom.

In their sculpture we encounter these several phases of development. We find at first an innocent, artless animality, the crude efforts of a child to portray the human form, the shapes of beasts and birds and imaginary creatures, done with particularity and frankness.

The gods are monsters, the modelled portraits of men are masks with holes gouged to represent eyes and mouths. The figures squat with enormous hands dangling between knees upraised in the primitive seated position.

A period followed in which the Nahoas produced a caste of builders and artists so advanced their generic name has been mistakenly applied to the entire nation: the Toltecs. They created stylised, chaste and lovely images in crystal, in jade and in stone. The architecture of this period was massive, with an abundance of bas-relief carving in stone, more severe in design than that of the Mayas, and of great depth in cutting. The Toltecs had no iron nor steel tools for this work; they used only tempered copper and the flint-like volcanic glass called obsidian.

In this epoch began the growth of a desire and necessity for beauty not wholly religious in meaning. Purely decorative objects sold in the public markets took the form of carved amulets meant more for adornments than to ward off evil; masks for festivals, beads of jade and jadeite skilfully cut and polished, jewels of gold and copper, girdles and headdresses, all came into use for the sake of their own beauty rather than because of religious symbolism.

Human portraits in stone and clay, many of them gorgeously colored have been found in profusion in every buried city of ancient Mexico. In the middle period of the Nahoa culture an aristocratic and civilized beauty marks these faces modelled clearly and delicately under splendid headdresses. Balance and proportion, sanity and graciousness mark the work of this epoch. It was the high point of Nahoa culture. The century was that of Our Lord 1200, yet it all seems as far away as the Flood itself. The Nahoa heroes of that time, the later poet King of Texcoco, seem to be one with the spacious myths of antiquity, akin to Dana and Pan and the warriors Homer sung. Mexico was the final stronghold of the great pagan gods, and even to the very day of the beginning of the Conquest there still clings about them the atmosphere of legendary remoteness.

A familiar flavor of the miraculous is in the religious accounts of the later times, as recorded by the first Spanish priests. Whether these are authentic myths, or a corruption of them due to the decline of the race at the time of the Spanish invasion, or imperfect translations by the historians new to the Mexican languages, we cannot be certain.

The myth of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was once a man, and became the culture deity of the Nahoas, runs like this: Chimalma, a holy woman of the Nahoas, swallowed a small stone of jadeite, and later was delivered of a son, conceived thus immaculately, who was very wise and good and gentle from his childhood. When he grew up, he taught the people the wisdom and beauty of holy living, besides the crafts or weaving and metal work, and the sowing of the fields. He incurred the wrath of the wicked among his people, and went away by the sea in a skiff of magic serpent skins. For this reason he has become associated in a mysterious, half-spoken legend, with the waves of the sea, and with a feathered serpent: In what way it is impossible to discover from the endless versions I have read. He vowed to the people that he would return, and charged them to receive him as a god at his second coming.

This legend so influenced the minds of the Nahoas, and later the Aztecs, it opened the way for that tragic and mistaken reception of Cortés and his soldiers, who came by way of the sea in the precise manner Quetzalcoatl had foretold.

Another legend concerned with the immaculate mortal conception of Immortals is told of Huitzolopotchli, the god of war, who wears on his left foot the feathers of the humming bird. His mother saw rolling before her in the wind a bundle of brightly colored feathers. She placed them in her bosom, and a short while after discovered herself to be pregnant of a god. He was born full grown, with war dress and shield and helmet of green plumes.

This may or may not be an authentic Mexican myth. But the legend of the creation of man is unique, original, austere as a Nahoa god in stone, unmarred by evidences of modern revision. A young god stood in the valley of Anahuac, near a place now called Acolman, and shot an arrow of obsidian toward the noonday sun. It soared and descended, and when it touched the earth, it sprang up again a living man. Though it may be told in two lines, it is the most innocent and splendid legend I have found in any mythology.

It is above all a happy legend. There is no death nor sin in it. Man is created in a blaze of light, his being compounded of sun warmth and clean arrow point, touching earth and receiving there the divine essential energy of life. Not even among the Norse peoples have I found a legend more epically simple and great than this.

This version of creation gives us a glimpse of another soul than the dark and ritualistic one discovered in the old codices representing sacrifices, and in the tales told by the Spaniards. We have become habited to think of these people as being always a stern and terrible race, fixed and immalleable of soul as their idols, with ponderous headdresses crushing their frowning brows.

Those headdresses were contrived of paper and plumes and flowers, and the wearers of them loved color as the Israelites loved perfumes and spices. Their houses and robes, their votive cups, their temples and their gods were all splashed with the most vivid hues. Examine any insignificant clay figure today, recovered from the earth, not yet broken from its mold, and you find it brilliant with stains, sulphurous reds and yellows, burning blues and greens. This use of color is found alike in the remains of Atzcapotzalco, in Teotihuacán near the Pyramides, in Yucatán, and in the Tarascan figurines of terra cotta, found in Cheran. Strange designs of animals, flowers and birds give life and rhythm to color in vases and flowers and pots.

In the arts of dyeing, the Nahoas surpassed the others. They had mineral and vegetable and animal color, and after the Conquest their dye secrets became very valuable to the world.

Their special discovery was a small insect which yielded a fine quality of purple and red dye, now called cochineal. A thick lusterless white made from calcined stones was also originated by the Nahoas, and is still used by the Mexicans in decorating certain kinds of pottery. We shall see how their use of primary color has survived in other ways also.

Engels and other scientists have been pleased to classify the early peoples of Mexico as semi-barbarous because of their lack of domestic animals, I believe they have overlooked the essential fact: they had no beasts of burden nor domesticated milk-giving animals because such beasts were not indigenous here. Their habit was to make pets of small creatures, chiefly monkeys, a species of diminutive leopard called _ocelotl_, and that strange breed of hairless dog, the _ixchuintli_, of which it is recorded they could not bark until taught the art by imported European dogs.

It is true that here devolved on human beings that burden of physical labor shared between man and beasts in other lands. But the attitude of the Mexicans toward animals and slaves was that of a race abreast with the civilization of their epoch. Men were not more enslaved for this lack of beasts than they were in countries that possessed both species of burden-bearing animals.

Their system of measuring time was original and distinctive. We have the symmetrical and beautiful Calendar stone of the Aztecs as enduring testimony to the perfection of their calculations. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, they discovered that the Aztec Calendar was only five hours late by the sun, while the Christian Calendar of Pope Leo the Great failed of precision by eleven days. Prescott gives an exact account of their measurement of time:

“... The Aztecs adjusted their civil year by the solar. They divided it into eighteen months of twenty days each. Both months and days were expressed by peculiar hieroglyphics, those of the former intimating the season of the year, like the French months at the period of the Revolution, Five complementary days, as in Egypt, were added to make up the full number of three hundred sixty-five. They belonged to no month, and were regarded as peculiarly unlucky. A month was divided into four weeks, of five days each, on the last of which was the public fair or market day. This arrangement, different from that of the nations of the Old Continent, has the advantage of giving an equal number of days to each month, and of comprehending entire weeks, without a fraction, both in the months and in the year.

“As the year is composed of nearly six hours more than three hundred and sixty-five days, there still remains an excess, which, like other nations who have framed a calendar, they provided for by intercalation; not indeed, every fourth year, as the Europeans, but at longer intervals, like some of the Asiatics. They waited until the expiration of fifty-two vague years, when they interposed twelve days, or rather, twelve and a half, this being the number that had fallen in arrear. Had they inserted thirteen, it would have been too much, since the annual excess over three hundred sixty-five is about eleven minutes less than six hours....” (Conquest of Mexico: Prescott: Vol. I, Page 73.) They had, in a word, calculated with such minute precision that more than five centuries must elapse before the loss of an entire day.

Their system of numerals has been explained by Rivas Palacio in contrast to the Hindu and Aryan systems. Whereas, in the latter methods of computation, the essential numeral is five, and the perfect number 100, in the Nahoa system (which served all Mexico) the essential numeral was four, and the perfect number was eighty, arrived at thus: four plus one equals five; five times four equals twenty; and twenty times four equals eighty.

Their religious symbolism is equally distinct. Though the Nahoas employed characters similar to those of the Asiatics and Aryans, they differed in spirit. Their sign of the cross, for example, found designed on the walls of temples, or carved in stone, was their symbol of the four cardinal points of the compass; more simply still, of the four winds of heaven.

Various explanations have been offered of this mystical sign. Religious writers have woven legends of primitive saints, who were even prophesied in Revelations, who came to Mexico in the early Christian era. Scientists have sought to identify it with its phallic significance in the secret rituals of primitive peoples.

Their great feathered serpent was likewise free from the secret meaning of other ancients, and was a familiar symbol of godhead. The serpent and the sun are mysteriously related in Mexican mythology, probably with some distant association of ideas between the life-giving sun and fruitfulness, but there is no definite surviving legend explaining these things.

Their social customs were marked by one tremendously important difference from the world of their time. The position of women was that of a completely civilized race. The legal or religious bondage of women was unknown. They served with honor as priestesses, and had a responsible share in the education of the children. Every evidence is that they enjoyed a cleanly human equality in society utterly foreign to the ideals that governed the relations between men and women of the European and Asiatic races.

Their sense of rhythm in design was, and remains, unique. The basis of Greek design, for example, is the crossed line. There existed no crossed line in all Maya or Nahoa art. Even to this day it does not appear in the pure designs used by the Mexican craftsmen. When it is used at all, it is foreign, added since the sixteenth century.

Their line of beauty is the bold flaring circle, the uninterrupted whirling of a leaf in the wind. This is why a design on a Guadalajara jug today gives the impression of one unbroken harmonious line from top to bottom.

In architecture, they had no arch, that fundamental outline in all construction of Europe and the Orient. A square topped portal, or two beams contrived to form a shallow inverted angle, was their conception of a doorway. A pointed arch without a keystone was to them an ideal expression of beauty. In this method perfect examples exist in the ruins of Mitla and Chichen Itzá, of which the arch of Labnáh, in Yucatán, is the most beautiful.

As we have seen, these peoples resembled their human brothers in all elemental ideals. Students and scientists pronounce on the vessels of aragonite, the cloudy Mexican onyx, found in the Isle of Sacrificios, near Vera Cruz. They say they are Greek in feeling and line. They say the Maya art is Babylonish; that the headdresses of the old Nahoas are Egyptian; that the character writing on the walls of the Pyramides in Teotihuacán are Chinese....

All these things do veritably have a surface resemblance to the art creations of all races. But in their profound, racial significance they were spontaneous and original. In nothing more than their early arts do they resolve themselves into a people whose developed psychology followed patterns unknown to both Europe and Asia.

Colonial Art