The Myths of Mexico & Peru

At a time when the civilizations of ancient Mexico and Peru were dismissed as primitive or forgotten, Lewis Spence assembled the first serious English-language study of their mythologies. The result reads less like a dry academic treatise and more like a passionate argument for the significance of these cultures. Spence draws on chroniclers, explorers, and the fragmentary indigenous records that survived colonization to reconstruct the great cycles of creation and destruction, the blood-soaked rituals of the Aztec gods, the cosmic hierarchies of the Maya, and the imperial mythology of the Inca. What emerges is a world where the divine bleeds into the human: Quetzalcoatl's mysterious disappearance, the five suns that underpin Aztec cosmology, the mummified kings who still rule from beyond the grave. Spence writes with evident admiration, sometimes straining against the limits of his era's sources, but his enthusiasm is infectious. This book laid groundwork for a century of archaeology that would vindicate his belief in these civilizations' sophistication.