Some Books of the Week
WE admit to being surprised that Ancient Rites and Ceremonies, by Grace Keith Murray (Alston Rivers, 10s. 6d.), should have reached a second edition. What Mrs. Murray's public is it is difficult to judge, but it cannot bea critical public. She surveys a number of ancient or primitive cultures in separate chapters of a few pages each, and even if everything which she writes were accurate, the book would still have little or no value. No culture is described at all completely, but a few bizarre or unusual elements have been selected, torn from their context and presented to credulous readers as a picture of a curious people. But worse still, in no single chapter that we have tested is Mrs. Murray to be relied upon for the accuracy of her facts. The errors are too numerous to detail here, and we can only suppose that she has been misled by untrustworthy authorities. She has certainly neglected the most recent material which was open to her in her account of the Hottentots, for example. As for her chapter headed,
Ancient Nations of Central America," no one reading it would realize that there was any difference between Maya and Aztec religion, that the Aztec and Maya calendars were not the same, what the Aztec owed to the Maya, and what was the place of the Toltecs. Montezuma did not surrender to the Spaniards in the belief that they were descendants of the Toltces. It was believed that the Spaniards were reincarna- tions of the god, Quetzalcoatl, and the Spaniards were assisted by Toltecs revolting from their masters.
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