[Footnote 1:  P. Francisco Xavier Alegre, Historia de la Compania de Jesus en la Nueva Espana, Tomo i, pp. 91, 92 (Mexico, 1841).  The authorities whom Alegre quotes are P.P.  Alonso de la Rea, Cronica de Mechoacan (Mexico, 1648), and D. Basalenque, Cronica de San Augustin de Mechoacan (Mexico, 1673).  I regret that I have been unable to find either of these books in any library in the United States.  It is a great pity that the student of American history is so often limited in his investigations in this country, by the lack of material.  It is sad to think that such an opulent and intelligent land does not possess a single complete library of its own history.]

The king of the Tarascos was considered merely the vicegerent of the absent hero-god, and ready to lay down the sceptre when Curicaberis should return to earth.

We do not know whether the myth of the Four Brothers prevailed among the Tarascos; but there is hardly a nation on the continent among whom the number Four was more distinctly sacred.  The kingdom was divided into four parts (as also among the Itzas, Qquichuas and numerous other tribes), the four rulers of which constituted, with the king, the sacred council of five, in imitation, I can hardly doubt, of the hero-god, and the four deities of the winds.

The goddess of water and the rains, the female counterpart of Curicaberis, was the goddess Cueravaperi.  “She is named,” says the authority I quote, “in all their fables and speeches.  They say that she is the mother of all the gods of the earth, and that it is she who bestows the harvests and the germination of seeds.”  With her ever went four attendant goddesses, the personifications of the rains from the four cardinal points.  At the sacred dances, which were also dramatizations of her supposed action, these attendants were represented by four priests clad respectively in white, yellow, red and black, to represent the four colors of the clouds.[1] In other words, she doubtless bore the same relation to Curicaberis that Ixchel did to Itzamna in the mythology of the Mayas, or the rainbow goddess to Arama in the religious legends of the Moxos.[2] She was the divinity that presided over the rains, and hence over fertility and the harvests, standing in intimate relation to the god of the sun’s rays and the four winds.

[Footnote 1:  Relacion de las Ceremonias y Ritos, etc., de Mechoacan, in the Coleccion de Documentos para la Historia de Espana, vol. liii, pp. 13, 19, 20.  This account is anonymous, but was written in the sixteenth century, by some one familiar with the subject.  A handsome MS. of it, with colored illustrations (these of no great value, however), is in the Library of Congress, obtained from the collection of the late Col.  Peter Force.]

[Footnote 2:  See above, chapter iv, Sec.1]

The Kiches of Guatemala were not distant relatives of the Mayas of Yucatan, and their mythology has been preserved to us in a rescript of their national book, the Popol Vuh.  Evidently they had borrowed something from Aztec sources, and a flavor of Christian teaching is occasionally noticeable in this record; but for all that it is one of the most valuable we possess on the subject.