Of the Mexicans we learn from a trustworthy author: "Tambien usaban alguna manera de comunion ó recepcion del sacramento, y es que hacian unos idolitos chiquitos de semilla de bledos ó cenizos, ó de otras yerbas, y ellos mismos se los recibian, como cuerpo ó memoria de sus dioses."[373]
Mendieta wrote his Historia Eclesiástica Indiana in 1596, "al tiempo que esto escribo (que es por Abril del año de noventa y seis)"[374] and again,[375] "al tiempo que yo esto escribo."
The Mexicans, in the month of November, had a festival in honor of Tezcatlipuca. "Hacian unos bollos de masa de maíz y semejante de agenjos, aunque son de otra suerte que los de acá, y echábanlos á cocer en ollas con agua sola. Entre tanto que hervian y se cocian los bollos, tañian los muchachos un atabal ... y después comíanselos con gran devocion."[376]
Gomara's statement, that while these cakes of maize and wormwood seed were cooking the young men were beating on drums, would find its parallel in any account that might be written of the behavior of the Zuñi, while preparing for their sacred feasts. The squaws grind the meal to be used on these occasions to the accompaniment of singing by the medicine-men and much drumming by a band of assistants selected from among the young men and boys.
Mr. Francis La Flèche, a nearly full-blood Omaha Indian, read before the Anthropological Society of Washington, D. C., in 1888, a paper descriptive of the funeral customs of his people, in which he related that when an Indian was supposed to be threatened with death the medicine-men would go in a lodge sweat-bath with him and sing, and at the same time "pronouncing certain incantations and sprinkling the body of the client with the powder of the artemisia, supposed to be the food of the ghosts."[377]
To say that a certain powder is the food of the ghosts of a tribe is to say indirectly that the same powder was once the food of the tribe's ancestors.
The Peruvians seem to have made use of the same kind of sacrificial cakes kneaded with the blood of the human victim. We are told that in the month of January no strangers were allowed to enter the city of Cuzco, and that there was then a distribution of corn cakes made with the blood of the victim, which were to be eaten as a mark of alliance with the Inca. "Les daban unos Bollos de Maíz, con sangre de el sacrificio, que comian, en señal de confederacion con el Inga."[378]