Note 849 — Chapter III

Brinton’s Amer. Hero Myths, 139, etc. See, on the prevalence of the idea of the return at some time of the hero-god, Brinton’s Myths of the New World, p. 160. “We must remember,” he says, “that a fiction built on an idea is infinitely more tenacious of life than a story founded on fact.” Brinton (Myths, 188) gathers from Gomara, Cogolludo, Villagutierre, and others, instances to show how prevalent in America was the presentiment of the arrival and domination of a white race,—a belief still prevailing among their descendants of the middle regions of America who watch for the coming of Montezuma (Ibid. p. 190). Brinton does not seem to recognize the view held by many that the Montezuma of the Aztecs was quite a different being from the demi-god of the Pueblas of New Mexico.