The Mythology of All Races, Vol. 11: Latin-American

Long before European contact, the peoples of Mexico, the Andes, and the Antilles built cosmologies of staggering ambition, worlds born from blood and sacrifice, gods who demanded everything and granted everything, creation stories that still echo across millennia. This 1916 volume was among the first serious English-language attempts to map that vast mythological terrain, gathering the creation myths, divine pantheons, and ritual traditions of the Taíno, Aztec, and Inca peoples before the twentieth century swept more of them away. Alexander confronts the essential difficulty at the outset: there is no single "Latin American" mythology, only a constellation of distinct cultural systems bound together by geography and historical collision. What emerges is a scholarly portrait of belief systems that were still living, still practiced, even as colonialism and modernity pressed against them. For anyone seeking to understand the pre-Columbian world not as a museum exhibit but as a constellation of vital, complex spiritual traditions, this remains an indispensable starting point.