Note 422 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
We should be guilty of a fault if we were to convey the idea that no deluge legend other than this was current among the Aztecs. The Codex Chimalpopoca records a flood in which mankind were drowned and turned into fishes. In Mr. Bancroft’s graceful rendering we learn that “the waters and sky drew near each other; in a single day all was lost, the day Four Flower consumed all that there was of our flesh. And this was the year Ce-Calli; on the first day, Nahui-Atl, all was lost. The very mountains were swallowed up in the flood, and the waters remained, lying tranquil during fifty and two spring-times. But before the flood began, Titlacahuan had warned the man Nata and his wife Nena, saying: Make now no more pulque, but hollow out to yourselves a great cypress, into which you shall enter when, in the month Tozoztli, the waters shall near the sky. Then they entered into it, and when Titlacahuan had shut them in, he said to the man: Thou shalt eat but a single ear of maize, and thy wife but one also. And when they had finished eating, each an ear of maize, they prepared to set forth, for the waters remained tranquil and their log moved no longer; and opening it they began to see the fishes. Then they lit a fire by rubbing pieces of wood together and they roasted fish.” The account states that the deities then descended and transformed the fishes into dogs. (Brasseur de Bourbourg, Hist. Nat. Civ., tom. i, pp. 425–7. Bancroft, vol. iii, pp. 69, 70.) We cannot with gravity give the Tezpi legend preserved in Michoacan. If the reader will refer to the Mosaic account of the flood, he will only need to substitute the name of Tezpi for Noah, a vulture for the raven, and a humming-bird for the dove, and the Tezpi legend substantially will be before him. Of course the detail of the Mosaic account is wanting; nevertheless it is certain that the Tezpi legend is the product of the fancy of some over-zealous priest, who thought he could see a stricter analogy between the Nahua deluge tradition and the Scriptural account than really exists.