Research source

From this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a division which never existed except in…

Date of account: Revised nineteenth-century edition
Source: The Myths of the New World A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America
Reference: The Myths of the New World A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America · selected passage 33
Rights: public_domain
Language: English comparative scholarship drawing on Indigenous American sources
Translation: Daniel G. Brinton
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

From this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a division which never existed except in the imagination of Europeans

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

From this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a division which never existed except in the imagination of Europeans. When Torquemada adds that _seven_ hero gods ruled in Chicomoztoc and were the progenitors of all its inhabitants, when one of them turns out to be Xelhua, the giant who with six others escaped the flood by ascending the mountain of Tlaloc in the terrestrial paradise and afterwards built the pyramid of Cholula, and when we remember that in one of the flood-myths _seven_ persons were said to have escaped the waters, the whole narrative acquires a fabulous aspect that shuts it out from history, and brands it as one of those fictions of the origin of man from the earth so common to the race.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

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