sacrifice.”
Mr. Bullock, who made a valuable collection of Mexican antiquities, describes
an idol, “the goddess of war,” on which Cortez and his followers may possibly
have looked:
“This monstrous idol,” he says, “is, with its pedestal, twelve feet high, and four
feet wide. Its form is partly human and partly composed of rattlesnakes and the
tiger. The head, enormously wide, seems that of two rattlesnakes united; the
fangs hanging out of the mouth, on which the still-palpitating hearts of the
unfortunate victims were rubbed as an act of the most acceptable oblation. The
body is that of a deformed man, the place of arms being supplied by the heads of
rattlesnakes, placed on square plinths, and united by fringed ornaments. Round
the waist is a girdle, which was originally encrusted with gold; and beneath this,
reaching nearly to the ground, and partly covering its deformed cloven feet, a
drapery entirely composed of wreathed rattlesnakes, which the natives call “a
garment of serpents.... Between the feet, descending from the body, another
wreathed serpent rests his head upon the ground.”
“The only worship,” says Mr. Deane,[48] “which can vie with that of the Serpent
in antiquity or universality, is the adoration of the SUN. But uniformly with the
progress of the Solar superstitions has advanced the sacred serpent from Babylon
to Peru. If the worship of the Sun, therefore, was the first deviation from the
truth, the worship of the Serpent was one of the first innovations of idolatry.
Whatever doubt may exist as to which was the first error, little doubt can arise as
to the primitive and antediluvian character of both. For in the earliest heathen
records we find them inexplicably interwoven as the first of superstitions. Thus
Egyptian mythology informs us, that Helios (the Sun) was the first of the
Egyptian gods; for in early history, kings and gods are generally confounded.
But Helios married Ops, the serpent deity, and became father of Osiris, Isis,
Typhœus, Apollo, and Venus: a tradition which would make the superstitions
coeval. This fable being reduced to more simple laws, informs us, that the Sun,
having married the Serpent, became, by this union, the father of Adam and Eve,
the Evil Spirit, the Serpent-solar deity, and Lust; which appears to be a
confusion of Scriptural truths, in which chronological order is sacrificed from
the simplification of a fable. But—ex pede Herculem—from the small fragments
of the truth which are here combined, we may judge of the original dimensions
of the knowledge whose ruins are thus heaped together. We may conclude that,
since idolatry, lust, the serpent, and the evil spirit, are here said to have been
synchronous with the First Man and Woman, the whole fable is little more than a