[Footnote 1:  The Names of the Gods in the Kiche Myths, Central America, by Daniel G. Brinton, M.D., in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for 1881.]

Few of our hero-myths have given occasion for wilder speculation than that of Votan.  He was the culture hero of the Tzendals, a branch of the Maya race, whose home was in Chiapas and Tabasco.  Even the usually cautious Humboldt suggested that his name might be a form of Odin or Buddha!  As for more imaginative writers, they have made not the least difficulty in discovering that it is identical with the Odon of the Tarascos, the Oton of the Othomis, the Poudan of the East Indian Tamuls, the Vaudoux of the Louisiana negroes, etc.  All this has been done without any attempt having been made to ascertain the precise meaning and derivation of the name Votan.  Superficial phonetic similarities have been the only guide.

We are not well acquainted with the Votan myth.  It appears to have been written down some time in the seventeenth century, by a Christianized native.  His manuscript of five or six folios, in the Tzendal tongue, came into the possession of Nunez de la Vega, Bishop of Chiapas, about 1690, and later into the hands of Don Ramon Ondonez y Aguiar, where it was seen by Dr. Paul Felix Cabrera, about 1790.  What has become of it is not known.

No complete translation of it was made; and the extracts or abstracts given by the authors just named are most unsatisfactory, and disfigured by ignorance and prejudice.  None of them, probably, was familiar with the Tzendal tongue, especially in its ancient form.  What they tell us runs as follows:—­

At some indefinitely remote epoch, Votan came from the far East.  He was sent by God to divide out and assign to the different races of men the earth on which they dwell, and to give to each its own language.  The land whence he came was vaguely called ualum uotan, the land of Votan.

His message was especially to the Tzendals.  Previous to his arrival they were ignorant, barbarous, and without fixed habitations.  He collected them into villages, taught them how to cultivate the maize and cotton, and invented the hieroglyphic signs, which they learned to carve on the walls of their temples.  It is even said that he wrote his own history in them.

He instituted civil laws for their government, and imparted to them the proper ceremonials of religious worship.  For this reason he was also called “Master of the Sacred Drum,” the instrument with which they summoned the votaries to the ritual dances.

They especially remembered him as the inventor of their calendar.  His name stood third in the week of twenty days, and was the first Dominical sign, according to which they counted their year, corresponding to the Kan of the Mayas.

As a city-builder, he was spoken of as the founder of Palenque, Nachan, Huehuetlan—­in fact, of any ancient place the origin of which had been forgotten.  Near the last mentioned locality, Huehuetlan in Soconusco, he was reported to have constructed an underground temple by merely blowing with his breath.  In this gloomy mansion he deposited his treasures, and appointed a priestess to guard it, for whose assistance he created the tapirs.