Yucatan presents a strange spectacle to the ethnologist. The native race, which in nearly every other part of the American continent has disappeared before the white invaders or else become their acknowledged inferior, has there gained the upper hand. The native language has ousted the Spanish to that extent that whole villages of whites speak Maya only, and the fortunes of war in the last generation have sided so much with the native braves that they have regained undisputed possession of by far the larger part of the peninsula.
Is there to be recognized in this a revival of that inherent energy which prompted their ancestors to the construction of the most remarkable specimens of native architecture on the continent, and to the development of a ripe social and political fabric?
It can scarcely be doubted; but, however that may be, such considerations cannot fail to excite our interest in all that relates to a race of such plucky persistence.
As throwing a side-light on their mental constitution, their superstitions and folk-lore merit attention. I happen to have some material on this which has never been published, and some more which has only appeared in mediums quite inaccessible even to diligent students. Of the former are a manuscript by the Licentiate Zetina of Tabasco, a native of Tihosuco, and some notes on the subject by Don Jose Maria Lopez, of Merida, and the late Dr. Carl Hermann Berendt; while of the latter a report by Don Bartholomé Granado de Baeza, _cura_ of Yaxcabá, written in 1813, and an article of later date by the learned cura, Estanislao Carrillo, are particularly noteworthy.[190] From these sources I have gathered what I here present, arranging and studying the facts they give with the aid of several dictionaries of the tongue in my possession.
These Mayas, as the natives called themselves, were converted at the epoch of the conquest (about 1550) to Christianity in that summary way which the Spaniards delighted in. If they would not be baptized they were hanged or drowned; and, once baptized, they were flogged if they did not attend mass, and burned if they slid back to idol-worship. They were kept in the densest ignorance, for fear they should learn enough to doubt. Their alleged Christianity was therefore their ancient heathenism under a new name, and brought neither spiritual enlightenment nor intellectual progress. As a recent and able historian of Yucatan has said, “the only difference was that the natives were changed from pagan idolaters to Christian idolaters.”[191]