How far they borrowed from the fertile mythology of their Nahuatl visitors is not easily answered.  That the circular temple in Mayapan, with four doors, specified by Landa as different from any other in Yucatan, was erected to Quetzalcoatl, by or because of the Aztec colony there, may plausibly be supposed when we recall how peculiarly this form was devoted to his worship.  Again, one of the Maya chronicles—­that translated by Pio Perez and published by Stephens in his Travels in Yucatan—­opens with a distinct reference to Tula and Nonoal, names inseparable from the Quetzalcoatl myth.  A statue of a sleeping god holding a vase was disinterred by Dr. Le Plongeon at Chichen Itza, and it is too entirely similar to others found at Tlaxcala and near the city of Mexico, for us to doubt but that they represented the same divinity, and that the god of rains, fertility and the harvests.[1]

[Footnote 1:  I refer to the statue which Dr. LePlongeon was pleased to name “Chac Mool.”  See the Estudio acerca de la Estatua llamada Chac-Mool o rey tigre, by Sr.  Jesus Sanchez, in the Anales del Museo Nacional de Mexico, Tom. i. p. 270.  There was a divinity worshiped in Yucatan, called Cum-ahau, lord of the vase, whom the Diccionario de Motul, MS. terms, “Lucifer, principal de los demonios.”  The name is also given by Pio Perez in his manuscript dictionary in my possession, but is omitted in the printed copy.  As Lucifer, the morning star, was identified with Quetzalcoatl in Mexican mythology, and as the word cum, vase, Aztec comitl, is the same in both tongues, there is good ground to suppose that this lord of the vase, the “prince of devils,” was the god of fertility, common to both cults.]

The version of the tradition which made Kukulcan arrive from the West, and at his disappearance return to the West—­a version quoted by Landa, and which evidently originally referred to the westward course of the sun, easily led to an identification of him with the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, by those acquainted with both myths.

The probability seems to be that Kukulcan was an original Maya divinity, one of their hero-gods, whose myth had in it so many similarities to that of Quetzalcoatl that the priests of the two nations came to regard the one as the same as the other.  After the destruction of Mayapan, about the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Aztec mercenaries were banished to Canul, and the reigning family (the Xiu) who supported them became reduced in power, the worship of Kukulcan fell, to some extent, into disfavor.  Of this we are informed by Landa, in an interesting passage.