The Myths of the New World

So it is with the story the Algonkins tell of their hero Manibozho, who, in the opinion of a well-known writer, “is always placed in antagonism to a great serpent, a spirit of evil.”[66 - Squier, The Serpent Symbol in America.] It is to the effect that after conquering many animals, this famous magician tried his arts on the prince of serpents. After a prolonged struggle, which brought on the general deluge and the destruction of the world, he won the victory. The first authority we have for this narrative is even later than Cusic; it is Mr. Schoolcraft in our own day; the legendary cause of the deluge as related by Father Le Jeune, in 1634, is quite dissimilar, and makes no mention of a serpent; and as we shall hereafter see, neither among the Algonkins nor any other Indians, was the serpent usually a type of evil, but quite the reverse.[67 - Both these legends will be analyzed in a subsequent chapter, and an attempt made not only to restore them their primitive form, but to explain their meaning.]

The comparatively late introduction of such views into the native legends finds a remarkable proof in the myths of the Quiches, which were committed to writing in the seventeenth century. They narrate the struggles between the rulers of the upper and the nether world, the descent of the former into Xibalba, the Realm of Phantoms, and their victory over its lords, One Death and Seven Deaths. The writer adds of the latter, who clearly represent to his mind the Evil One and his adjutants, “in the old times they did not have much power; they were but annoyers and opposers of men, and in truth they were not regarded as gods. But when they appeared it was terrible. They were of evil, they were owls, fomenting trouble and discord.” In this passage, which, be it said, seems to have impressed the translators very differently, the writer appears to compare the great power assigned by the Christian religion to Satan and his allies, with the very much less potency attributed to their analogues in heathendom, the rulers of the world of the dead.[68 - Compare the translation and remarks of Ximenes, Or. de los Indios de Guat., p. 76, with those of Brasseur, Le Livre Sacré des Quichés, p. 189.]

A little reflection will convince the most incredulous that any such dualism as has been fancied to exist in the native religions, could not have been of indigenous growth. The gods of the primitive man are beings of thoroughly human physiognomy, painted with colors furnished by intercourse with his fellows. These are his enemies or his friends, as he conciliates or insults them. No mere man, least of all a savage, is kind and benevolent in spite of neglect and injury, nor is any man causelessly and ceaselessly malicious. Personal, family, or national feuds render some more inimical than others, but always from a desire to guard their own interests, never out of a delight in evil for its own sake. Thus the cruel gods of death, disease, and danger, were never of Satanic nature, while the kindliest divinities were disposed to punish, and that severely, any neglect of their ceremonies. Moral dualism can only arise in minds where the ideas of good and evil are not synonymous with those of pleasure and pain, for the conception of a wholly good or a wholly evil nature requires the use of these terms in their higher, ethical sense. The various deities of the Indians, it may safely be said in conclusion, present no stronger antithesis in this respect than those of ancient Greece and Rome.

CHAPTER III.

THE SACRED NUMBER, ITS ORIGIN AND APPLICATIONS

The number Four sacred in all American religions, and the key to their symbolism.—Derived from the Cardinal Points.—Appears constantly in government, arts, rites, and myths.—The Cardinal Points identified with the Four Winds, who in myths are the four ancestors of the human race, and the four celestial rivers watering the terrestrial Paradise.—Associations grouped around each Cardinal Point.—From the number four was derived the symbolic value of the number Forty, and the Sign of the Cross.

EVERY one familiar with the ancient religions of the world must have noticed the mystic power they attach to certain numbers, and how these numbers became the measures and formative quantities, as it were, of traditions and ceremonies, and had a symbolical meaning nowise connected with their arithmetical value. For instance, in many eastern religions, that of the Jews among the rest, seven was the most sacred number, and after it, four and three. The most cursory reader must have observed in how many connections the seven is used in the Hebrew Scriptures, occurring, in all, something over three hundred and sixty times, it is said. Why these numbers were chosen rather than others has not been clearly explained. Their sacred character dates beyond the earliest history, and must have been coeval with the first expressions of the religious sentiment. Only one of them, the FOUR, has any prominence in the religions of the red race, but this is so marked and so universal, that at a very early period in my studies I felt convinced that if the reason for its adoption could be discovered, much of the apparent confusion which reigns among them would be dispelled.

Such a reason must take its rise from some essential relation of man to nature, everywhere prominent, everywhere the same. It is found in the adoration of the cardinal points.

The red man, as I have said, was a hunter; he was ever wandering through pathless forests, coursing over boundless prairies. It seems to the white race not a faculty, but an instinct that guides him so unerringly. He is never at a loss. Says a writer who has deeply studied his character: “The Indian ever has the points of the compass present to his mind, and expresses himself accordingly in words, although it shall be of matters in his own house.”[69 - Buckingham Smith, Gram. Notices of the Heve Language, p. 26 (Shea’s Lib. Am. Linguistics).]

The assumption of precisely four cardinal points is not of chance; it is recognized in every language; it is rendered essential by the anatomical structure of the body; it is derived from the immutable laws of the universe. Whether we gaze at the sunset or the sunrise, or whether at night we look for guidance to the only star of the twinkling thousands that is constant to its place, the anterior and posterior planes of our bodies, our right hands and our left coincide with the parallels and meridians. Very early in his history did man take note of these four points, and recognizing in them his guides through the night and the wilderness, call them his gods. Long afterwards, when centuries of slow progress had taught him other secrets of nature—when he had discerned in the motions of the sun, the elements of matter, and the radicals of arithmetic a repetition of this number—they were to him further warrants of its sacredness. He adopted it as a regulating quantity in his institutions and his arts; he repeated it in its multiples and compounds; he imagined for it novel applications; he constantly magnified its mystic meaning; and finally, in his philosophical reveries, he called it the key to the secrets of the universe, “the source of ever-flowing nature.”[70 - I refer to the four “ultimate elementary particles” of Empedocles. The number was sacred to Hermes, and lay at the root of the physical philosophy of Pythagoras. The quotation in the text is from the “Golden Verses,” given in Passow’s lexicon under the word τετρακτὺς: ναι μα τον ἁμετερᾳ ψυχᾳ παραδοντα τετρακτυν, παγαν αεναου φυσεως “The most sacred of all things,” said this famous teacher, “is Number; and next to it, that which gives Names;” a truth that the lapse of three thousand years is just enabling us to appreciate.]

In primitive geography the figure of the earth is a square plain; in the legend of the Quiché’s it is “shaped as a square, divided into four parts, marked with lines, measured with cords, and suspended from the heavens by a cord to its four corners and its four sides.”[71 - Ximenes, Or. de los Indios, etc., p. 5.] The earliest divisions of territory were in conformity to this view. Thus it was with ancient Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and China;[72 - See Sepp, Heidenthum und dessen Bedeutung für das Christenthum, i. p. 464 sqq., a work full of learning, but written in the wildest vein of Joseph de Maistre’s school of Romanizing mythology.] and in the new world, the states of Peru, Araucania, the Muyscas, the Quichés, and Tlascala were tetrarchies divided in accordance with, and in the first two instances named after, the cardinal points. So their chief cities—Cuzco, Quito, Tezcuco, Mexico, Cholula—were quartered by streets running north, south, east, and west. It was a necessary result of such a division that the chief officers of the government were four in number, that the inhabitants of town and country, that the whole social organization acquired a quadruplicate form. The official title of the Incas was “Lord of the four quarters of the earth,” and the venerable formality in taking possession of land, both in their domain and that of the Aztecs, was to throw a stone, to shoot an arrow, or to hurl a firebrand to each of the cardinal points.[73 - Brasseur, Hist. du Mexique, ii. p. 227, Le Livre Sacré des Quichés, introd. p. ccxlii. The four provinces of Peru were Anti, Cunti, Chincha, and Colla. The meaning of these names has been lost, but to repeat them, says La Vega, was the same as to use our words, east, west, north, and south (Hist. des Incas, lib. ii. cap. 11).] They carried out the idea in their architecture, building their palaces in squares with doors opening, their tombs with their angles pointing, their great causeways running in these directions. These architectural principles repeat themselves all over the continent; they recur in the sacred structures of Yucatan, in the ancient cemetery of Teo-tihuacan near Mexico, where the tombs are arranged along avenues corresponding exactly to the parallels and meridians of the central tumuli of the sun and moon;[74 - Humboldt, Polit. Essay on New Spain, ii. p. 44.] and however ignorant we are about the mound builders of the Mississippi valley, we know that they constructed their earthworks with a constant regard to the quarters of the compass.

Nothing can be more natural than to take into consideration the regions of the heavens in the construction of buildings; I presume that at any time no one plans an edifice of pretensions without doing so. Yet this is one of those apparently trifling transactions which in their origin and applications have exerted a controlling influence on the history of the human race.

When we reflect how indissolubly the mind of the primitive man is welded to his superstitions, it were incredible that his social life and his architecture could thus be as it were in subjection to one idea, and his rites and myths escape its sway. As one might expect, it reappears in these latter more vividly than anywhere else. If there is one formula more frequently mentioned by travellers than another as an indispensable preliminary to all serious business, it is that of smoking, and the prescribed and traditional rule was that the first puff should be to the sky, and then one to each of the corners of the earth, or the cardinal points.[75 - This custom has been often mentioned among the Iroquois. Algonkins, Dakotas, Creeks, Natchez, Araucanians, and other tribes. Nuttall points out its recurrence among the Tartars of Siberia also. (Travels, p. 175.)] These were the spirits who made and governed the earth, and under whatever difference of guise the uncultivated fancy portrayed them, they were the leading figures in the tales and ceremonies of nearly every tribe of the red race. These were the divine powers summoned by the Chipeway magicians when initiating neophytes into the mysteries of the meda craft. They were asked to a lodge of four poles, to four stones that lay before its fire, there to remain four days, and attend four feasts. At every step of the proceeding this number or its multiples were repeated.[76 - Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, v. pp. 424 et seq.] With their neighbors the Dakotas the number was also distinctly sacred; it was intimately inwoven in all their tales concerning the wakan power and the spirits of the air, and their religious rites. The artist Catlin has given a vivid description of the great annual festival of the Mandans, a Dakota tribe, and brings forward with emphasis the ceaseless reiteration of this number from first to last.[77 - Letters on the North American Indians, vol. i., Letter 22.] He did not detect its origin in the veneration of the cardinal points, but the information that has since been furnished of the myths of this stock leaves no doubt that such was the case.[78 - Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, iv. p. 643 sq. “Four is their sacred number,” says Mr. Pond (p. 646). Their neighbors, the Pawnees, though not the most remote affinity can be detected between their languages, coincide with them in this sacred number, and distinctly identified it with the cardinal points. See De Smet, Oregon Missions, pp. 360, 361.]

Proximity of place had no part in this similarity of rite. In the grand commemorative festival of the Creeks called the Busk, which wiped out the memory of all crimes but murder, which reconciled the proscribed criminal to his nation and atoned for his guilt, when the new fire was kindled and the green corn served up, every dance, every invocation, every ceremony, was shaped and ruled by the application of the number four and its multiples in every imaginable relation. So it was at that solemn probation which the youth must undergo to prove himself worthy of the dignities of manhood and to ascertain his guardian spirit; here again his fasts, his seclusions, his trials, were all laid down in fourfold arrangement.[79 - Benj. Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country, pp. 75, 78: Savannah, 1848. The description he gives of the ceremonies of the Creeks was transcribed word for word and published in the first volume of the American Antiquarian Society’s Transactions as of the Shawnees of Ohio. This literary theft has not before been noticed.]

Not alone among these barbarous tribes were the cardinal points thus the foundation of the most solemn mysteries of religion. An excellent authority relates that the Aztecs of Micla, in Guatemala, celebrated their chief festival four times a year, and that four priests solemnized its rites. They commenced by invoking and offering incense to the sky and the four cardinal points; they conducted the human victim four times around the temple, then tore out his heart, and catching the blood in four vases scattered it in the same directions.[80 - Palacios, Des. de la Prov. de Guatemala, pp. 31, 32, ed. Ternaux-Compans.] So also the Peruvians had four principal festivals annually, and at every new moon one of four days’ duration. In fact the repetition of the number in all their religious ceremonies is so prominent that it has been a subject of comment by historians. They have attributed it to the knowledge of the solstices and equinoxes, but assuredly it is of more ancient date than this. The same explanation has been offered for its recurrence among the Nahuas of Mexico, whose whole lives were subjected to its operation. At birth the mother was held unclean for four days, a fire was kindled and kept burning for a like length of time, at the baptism of the child an arrow was shot to each of the cardinal points. Their prayers were offered four times a day, the greatest festivals were every fourth year, and their offerings of blood were to the four points of the compass. At death food was placed on the grave, as among the Eskimos, Creeks, and Algonkins, for four days (for all these nations supposed that the journey to the land of souls was accomplished in that time), and mourning for the dead was for four months or four years.[81 - All familiar with Mexican antiquity will recall many such examples. I may particularly refer to Kingsborough, Antiqs. of Mexico, v. p. 480, Ternaux-Compans’ Recueil de pièces rel. à la Conq. du Mexique, pp. 307, 310, and Gama, Des. de las dos Piedras que se hallaron en la plaza principal de Mexico, ii. sec. 126 (Mexico, 1832), who gives numerous instances beyond those I have cited, and directs with emphasis the attention of the reader to this constant repetition.]

It were fatiguing and unnecessary to extend the catalogue much further. Yet it is not nearly exhausted. From tribes of both continents and all stages of culture, the Muyscas of Columbia and the Natchez of Louisiana, the Quichés of Guatemala and the Caribs of the Orinoko, instance after instance might be marshalled to illustrate how universally a sacred character was attached to this number, and how uniformly it is traceable to a veneration of the cardinal points. It is sufficient that it be displayed in some of its more unusual applications.

It is well known that the calendar common to the Aztecs and Mayas divides the month into four weeks, each containing a like number of secular days; that their indiction is divided into four periods; and that they believed the world had passed through four cycles. It has not been sufficiently emphasized that in many of the picture writings these days of the week are placed respectively north, south, east, and west, and that in the Maya language the quarters of the indiction still bear the names of the cardinal points, hinting the reason of their adoption.[82 - Albert Gallatin, Trans. Am. Ethnol. Soc., ii. p. 316, from the Codex Vaticanus, No. 3738.] This cannot be fortuitous. Again, the division of the year into four seasons—a division as devoid of foundation in nature as that of the ancient Aryans into three, and unknown among many tribes, yet obtained in very early times among Algonkins, Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Aztecs, Muyscas, Peruvians, and Araucanians. They were supposed to be produced by the unending struggles and varying fortunes of the four aerial giants who rule the winds.

We must seek in mythology the key to the monotonous repetition and the sanctity of this number; and furthermore, we must seek it in those natural modes of expression of the religious sentiment which are above the power of blood or circumstance to control. One of these modes, we have seen, was that which led to the identification of the divinity with the wind, and this it is that solves the enigma in the present instance. Universally the spirits of the cardinal points were imagined to be in the winds that blew from them. The names of these directions and of the corresponding winds are often the same, and when not, there exists an intimate connection between them. For example, take the languages of the Mayas, Huastecas, and Moscos of Central America; in all of them the word for north is synonymous with north wind, and so on for the other three points of the compass. Or again, that of the Dakotas, and the word tate-ouye-toba, translated “the four quarters of the heavens,” means literally, “whence the four winds come.”[83 - Riggs, Gram. and Dict. of the Dakota Lang., s. v.] It were not difficult to extend the list; but illustrations are all that is required. Let it be remembered how closely the motions of the air are associated in thought and language with the operations of the soul and the idea of God; let it further be considered what support this association receives from the power of the winds on the weather, bringing as they do the lightning and the storm, the zephyr that cools the brow, and the tornado that levels the forest; how they summon the rain to fertilize the seed and refresh the shrivelled leaves; how they aid the hunter to stalk the game, and usher in the varying seasons; how, indeed, in a hundred ways, they intimately concern his comfort and his life; and it will not seem strange that they almost occupied the place of all other gods in the mind of the child of nature. Especially as those who gave or withheld the rains were they objects of his anxious solicitation. “Ye who dwell at the four corners of the earth—at the north, at the south, at the east, and at the west,” commenced the Aztec prayer to the Tlalocs, gods of the showers.[84 - Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, in Kingsborough, v. p. 375.] For they, as it were, hold the food, the life of man in their power, garnered up on high, to grant or deny, as they see fit. It was from them that the prophet of old was directed to call back the spirits of the dead to the dry bones of the valley. “Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, thus saith the Lord God, come forth from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” (Ezek. xxxvii. 9.)

In the same spirit the priests of the Eskimos prayed to Sillam Innua, the Owner of the Winds, as the highest existence; the abode of the dead they called Sillam Aipane, the House of the Winds; and in their incantations, when they would summon a new soul to the sick, or order back to its home some troublesome spirit, their invocations were ever addressed to the winds from the cardinal points—to Pauna the East and Sauna the West, to Kauna the South and Auna the North.[85 - Egede, Nachrichten von Grönland, pp. 137, 173, 285. (Kopenhagen, 1790.)]

As the rain-bringers, as the life-givers, it were no far-fetched metaphor to call them the fathers of our race. Hardly a nation on the continent but seems to have had some vague tradition of an origin from four brothers, to have at some time been led by four leaders or princes, or in some manner to have connected the appearance and action of four important personages with its earliest traditional history. Sometimes the myth defines clearly these fabled characters as the spirits of the winds, sometimes it clothes them in uncouth, grotesque metaphors, sometimes again it so weaves them into actual history that we are at a loss where to draw the line that divides fiction from truth.

I shall attempt to follow step by step the growth of this myth from its simplest expression, where the transparent drapery makes no pretence to conceal its true meaning, through the ever more elaborate narratives, the more strongly marked personifications of more cultivated nations, until it assumes the outlines of, and has palmed itself upon the world as actual history.

This simplest form is that which alone appears among the Algonkins and Dakotas. They both traced their lives back to four ancestors, personages concerned in various ways with the first things of time, not rightly distinguished as men or gods, but very positively identified with the four winds. Whether from one or all of these the world was peopled, whether by process of generation or some other more obscure way, the old people had not said, or saying, had not agreed.[86 - Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. p. 139, and Indian Tribes, iv. p. 229.]

It is a shade more complex when we come to the Creeks. They told of four men who came from the four corners of the earth, who brought them the sacred fire, and pointed out the seven sacred plants. They were called the Hi-you-yul-gee. Having rendered them this service, the kindly visitors disappeared in a cloud, returning whence they came. When another and more ancient legend informs us that the Creeks were at first divided into four clans, and alleged a descent from four female ancestors, it will hardly be venturing too far to recognize in these four ancestors the four friendly patrons from the cardinal points.[87 - Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country, pp. 81, 82, and Blomes, Acc. of his Majesty’s Colonies, p. 156, London, 1687, in Castiglioni, Viaggi nelle Stati Uniti, i. p. 294.]

The ancient inhabitants of Haiti, when first discovered by the Spaniards, had a similar genealogical story, which Peter Martyr relates with various excuses for its silliness and exclamations at its absurdity. Perhaps the fault lay less in its lack of meaning than in his want of insight. It was to the effect that men lived in caves, and were destroyed by the parching rays of the sun, and were destitute of means to prolong their race, until they caught and subjected to their use four women who were swift of foot and slippery as eels. These were the mothers of the race of men. Or again, it was said that a certain king had a huge gourd which contained all the waters of the earth; four brothers, who coming into the world at one birth had cost their mother her life, ventured to the gourd to fish, picked it up, but frightened by the old king’s approach, dropped it on the ground, broke it into fragments, and scattered the waters over the earth, forming the seas, lakes, and rivers, as they now are. These brothers in time became the fathers of a nation, and to them they traced their lineage.[88 - Peter Martyr, De Reb. Ocean., Dec. i. lib. ix. The story is also told more at length by the Brother Romain Pane, in the essay on the ancient histories of the natives he drew up by the order of Columbus. It has been reprinted with notes by the Abbé Brasseur, Paris, 1864, p. 438 sqq.] With the previous examples before our eyes, it asks no vivid fancy to see in these quaternions once more the four winds, the bringers of rain, so swift and so slippery.

The Navajos are a rude tribe north of Mexico. Yet even they have an allegory to the effect that when the first man came up from the ground under the figure of the moth-worm, the four spirits of the cardinal points were already there, and hailed him with the exclamation, “Lo, he is of our race.”[89 - Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, iv. p. 89.] It is a poor and feeble effort to tell the same old story.

The Haitians were probably relatives of the Mayas of Yucatan. Certainly the latter shared their ancestral legends, for in an ancient manuscript found by Mr. Stephens during his travels, it appears they looked back to four parents or leaders called the Tutul Xiu. But, indeed, this was a trait of all the civilized nations of Central America and Mexico. An author who would be very unwilling to admit any mythical interpretation of the coincidence, has adverted to it in tones of astonishment: “In all the Aztec and Toltec histories there are four characters who constantly reappear; either as priests or envoys of the gods, or of hidden and disguised majesty; or as guides and chieftains of tribes during their migrations; or as kings and rulers of monarchies after their foundation; and even to the time of the conquest, there are always four princes who compose the supreme government, whether in Guatemala, or in Mexico.”[90 - Brasseur, Le Liv. Sac., Introd., p. cxvii.] This fourfold division points not to a common history, but to a common nature. The ancient heroes and demigods, who, four in number, figure in all these antique traditions, were not men of flesh and blood, but the invisible currents of air who brought the fertilizing showers.

They corresponded to the four gods Bacab, who in the Yucatecan mythology were supposed to stand one at each corner of the world, supporting, like gigantic caryatides, the overhanging firmament. When at the general deluge all other gods and men were swallowed by the waters they alone escaped to people it anew. These four, known by the names of Kan, Muluc, Ix, and Cauac, represented respectively the east, north, west, and south, and as in Oriental symbolism, so here each quarter of the compass was distinguished by a color, the east by yellow, the south by red, the west by black, and the north by white. The names of these mysterious personages, employed somewhat as we do the Dominical letters, adjusted the calendar of the Mayas, and by their propitious or portentous combinations was arranged their system of judicial astrology. They were the gods of rain, and under the title Chac, the Red Ones, were the chief ministers of the highest power. As such they were represented in the religious ceremonies by four old men, constant attendants on the high priest in his official functions.[91 - Diego de Landa, Rel. de las Cosas de Yucatan, pp. 160, 206, 208, ed. Brasseur. The learned editor, in a note to p. 208, states erroneously the disposition of the colors, as may be seen by comparing the document on p. 395. This dedication of colors to the cardinal points is universal in Central Asia. The geographical names of the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Yellow Sea or Persian Gulf, and the White Sea or the Mediterranean, are derived from this association. The cities of China, many of them at least, have their gates which open toward the cardinal points painted of certain colors, and precisely these four, the white, the black, the red, and the yellow, are those which in Oriental myth the mountain in the centre of Paradise shows to the different cardinal points. (Sepp, Heidenthum und Christenthum, i. p. 177.) The coincidence furnishes food for reflection.] In this most civilized branch of the red race, as everywhere else, we thus find four mythological characters prominent beyond all others, giving a peculiar physiognomy to the national legends, arts, and sciences, and in them once more we recognize by signs infallible, personifications of the four cardinal points and the four winds.

They rarely lose altogether their true character. The Quiché legends tell us that the four men who were first created by the Heart of Heaven, Hurakan, the Air in Motion, were infinitely keen of eye and swift of foot, that “they measured and saw all that exists at the four corners and the four angles of the sky and the earth;” that they did not fulfil the design of their maker “to bring forth and produce when the season of harvest was near,” until he blew into their eyes a cloud, “until their faces were obscured as when one breathes on a mirror.” Then he gave them as wives the four mothers of our species, whose names were Falling Water, Beautiful Water, Water of Serpents, and Water of Birds.[92 - Le Livre Sacré des Quichés, pp. 203-5, note.] Truly he who can see aught but a transparent myth in this recital, is a realist that would astonish Euhemerus himself.

There is in these Aztec legends a quaternion besides this of the first men, one that bears marks of a profound contemplation on the course of nature, one that answers to the former as the heavenly phase of the earthly conception. It is seen in the four personages, or perhaps we should say modes of action, that make up the one Supreme Cause of All, Hurakan, the breath, the wind, the Divine Spirit. They are He who creates, He who gives Form, He who gives Life, and He who reproduces.[93 - The analogy is remarkable between these and the “quatre actes de la puissance generatrice jusqu’à l’entier developpément des corps organisés,” portrayed by four globes in the Mycenean bas-reliefs. See Guigniaut, Religions de l’Antiquité, i. p. 374. It were easy to multiply the instances of such parallelism in the growth of religious thought in the Old and New World, but I designedly refrain from doing so. They have already given rise to false theories enough, and moreover my purpose in this work is not “comparative mythology.”] This acute and extraordinary analysis of the origin and laws of organic life, clothed under the ancient belief in the action of the winds, reveals a depth of thought for which we were hardly prepared, and is perhaps the single instance of anything like metaphysics among the red race. It is clearly visible in the earlier portions of the legends of the Quichés, and is the more surely of native origin as it has been quite lost on both their translators.

Go where we will, the same story meets us. The empire of the Incas was attributed in the sacred chants of the Amautas, the priests assigned to take charge of the records, to four brothers and their wives. These mythical civilizers are said to have emerged from a cave called Pacari tampu, which may mean “the House of Subsistence,” reminding us of the four heroes who in Aztec legend set forth to people the world from Tonacatepec, the mountain of our subsistence; or again it may mean—for like many of these mythical names it seems to have been designedly chosen to bear a double construction—the Lodgings of the Dawn, recalling another Aztec legend which points for the birthplace of the race to Tula in the distant orient. The cave itself suggests to the classical reader that of Eolus, or may be paralleled with that in which the Iroquois fabled the winds were imprisoned by their lord.[94 - Müller, Amer. Urreligionen, p. 105, after Strahlheim, who is, however, no authority.] These brothers were of no common kin. Their voices could shake the earth and their hands heap up mountains. Like the thunder god, they stood on the hills and hurled their sling-stones to the four corners of the earth. When one was overpowered he fled upward to the heaven or was turned into stone, and it was by their aid and counsel that the savages who possessed the land renounced their barbarous habits and commenced to till the soil. There can be no doubt but that this in turn is but another transformation of the Protean myth we have so long pursued.[95 - Müller, ubi supra, pp. 308 sqq., gives a good résumé of the different versions of the myth of the four brothers in Peru.]

There are traces of the same legend among many other tribes of the continent, but the trustworthy reports we have of them are too scanty to permit analysis. Enough that they are mentioned in a note, for it is every way likely that could we resolve their meaning they too would carry us back to the four winds.[96 - The Tupis of Brazil claim a descent from four brothers, three of whose names are given by Hans Staden, a prisoner among them about 1550, as Krimen, Hermittan, and Coem; the latter he explains to mean the morning, the east (le matin, printed by mistake le mutin, Relation de Hans Staden de Homberg, p. 274, ed. Ternaux-Compans, compare Dias, Dicc. da Lingua Tupy, p. 47). Their southern relatives, the Guaranis of Paraguay, also spoke of the four brothers and gave two of their names as Tupi and Guarani, respectively parents of the tribes called after them (Guevara, Hist. del Paraguay, lib. i. cap. ii., in Waitz). The fourfold division of the Muyscas of Bogota was traced back to four chieftains created by their hero god Nemqueteba (A. von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, p. 246). The Nahuas of Mexico much more frequently spoke of themselves as descendants of four or eight original families than of seven (Humboldt, ibid., p. 317, and others in Waitz, Anthropologie, iv. pp. 36, 37). The Sacs or Sauks of the Upper Mississippi supposed that two men and two women were first created, and from these four sprang all men (Morse, Rep. on Ind. Affairs, App. p. 138). The Ottoes, Pawnees, “and other Indians,” had a tradition that from eight ancestors all nations and races were descended (Id., p. 249). This duplication of the number probably arose from assigning the first four men four women as wives. The division into clans or totems which prevails in most northern tribes rests theoretically on descent from different ancestors. The Shawnees and Natchez were divided into four such clans, the Choctaws, Navajos, and Iroquois into eight, thus proving that in those tribes also the myth I have been discussing was recognized.]

Let no one suppose, however, that this was the only myth of the origin of man. Far from it. It was but one of many, for, as I shall hereafter attempt to show, the laws that governed the formations of such myths not only allowed but enjoined great divergence of form. Equally far was it from being the only image which the inventive fancy hit upon to express the action of the winds as the rain bringers. They too were many, but may all be included in a twofold division, either as the winds were supposed to flow in from the corners of the earth or outward from its central point. Thus they are spoken of under such figures as four tortoises at the angles of the earthly plane who vomit forth the rains,[97 - Mandans in Catlin, Letts. and Notes, i. p. 181.] or four gigantic caryatides who sustain the heavens and blow the winds from their capacious lungs,[98 - The Mayas, Cogolludo, Hist. de Yucathan, lib. iv. cap. 8.] or more frequently as four rivers flowing from the broken calabash on high, as the Haitians, draining the waters of the primitive world,[99 - The Navajos, Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, iv. p. 89.] as four animals who bring from heaven the maize,[100 - The Quichés, Ximenes, Or. de los Indios, p. 79.] as four messengers whom the god of air sends forth, or under a coarser trope as the spittle he ejects toward the cardinal points which is straightway transformed into wild rice, tobacco, and maize.[101 - The Iroquois, Müller, Amer. Urreligionen, p. 109.]

Constantly from the palace of the lord of the world, seated on the high hill of heaven, blow four winds, pour four streams, refreshing and fecundating the earth. Therefore, in the myths of ancient Iran there is mention of a celestial fountain, Arduisur, the virgin daughter of Ormuzd, whence four all nourishing rivers roll their waves toward the cardinal points; therefore the Thibetans believe that on the sacred mountain Himavata grows the tree of life Zampu, from whose foot once more flow the waters of life in four streams to the four quarters of the world; and therefore it is that the same tale is told by the Chinese of the mountain Kouantun, by the Brahmins of Mount Meru, and by the Parsees of Mount Albors in the Caucasus.[102 - For these myths see Sepp, Das Heidenthum und dessen Bedeutung für das Christenthum, i. p. 111 sqq. The interpretation is of course my own.] Each nation called their sacred mountain “the navel of the earth;” for not only was it the supposed centre of the habitable world, but through it, as the fœtus through the umbilical cord, the earth drew her increase. Beyond all other spots were they accounted fertile, scenes of joyous plaisance, of repose, and eternal youth; there rippled the waters of health, there blossomed the tree of life; they were fit trysting spots of gods and men. Hence came the tales of the terrestrial paradise, the rose garden of Feridun, the Eden gardens of the world. The name shows the origin, for paradise (in Sanscrit, para desa) means literally high land. There, in the unanimous opinion of the Orient, dwelt once in unalloyed delight the first of men; thence driven by untoward fate, no more anywhere could they find the path thither. Some thought that in the north among the fortunate Hyperboreans, others that in the mountains of the moon where dwelt the long lived Ethiopians, and others again that in the furthest east, underneath the dawn, was situate the seat of pristine happiness; but many were of opinion that somewhere in the western sea, beyond the pillars of Hercules and the waters of the Outer Ocean, lay the garden of the Hesperides, the Islands of the Blessed, the earthly Elysion.

It is not without design that I recall this early dream of the religious fancy. When Christopher Columbus, fired by the hope of discovering this terrestrial paradise, broke the enchantment of the cloudy sea and found a new world, it was but to light upon the same race of men, deluding themselves with the same hope of earthly joys, the same fiction of a long lost garden of their youth. They told him that still to the west, amid the mountains of Paria, was a spot whence flowed mighty streams over all lands, and which in sooth was the spot he sought;[103 - Peter Martyr, De Reb. Ocean., Dec. iii., lib. ix. p. 195; Colon, 1574.] and when that baseless fabric had vanished, there still remained the fabled island of Boiuca, or Bimini, hundreds of leagues north of Hispaniola, whose glebe was watered by a fountain of such noble virtue as to restore youth and vigor to the worn out and the aged.[104 - Ibid., Dec. iii., lib. x. p. 202.] This was no fiction of the natives to rid themselves of burdensome guests. Long before the white man approached their shores, families had started from Cuba, Yucatan, and Honduras in search of these renovating waters, and not returning, were supposed by their kindred to have been detained by the delights of that enchanted land, and to be revelling in its seductive joys, forgetful of former ties.[105 - Florida was also long supposed to be the site of this wondrous spring, and it is notorious that both Juan Ponce de Leon and De Soto had some lurking hope of discovering it in their expeditions thither. I have examined the myth somewhat at length in Notes on the Floridian Peninsula, its Literary History, Indian Tribes, and Antiquities, pp. 99, 100: Philadelphia, 1859.]

Perhaps it was but another rendering of the same belief that pointed to the impenetrable forests of the Orinoko, the ancient homes of the Caribs and Arowacks, and there located the famous realm of El Dorado with its imperial capital Manoa, abounding in precious metals and all manner of gems, peopled by a happy race, and governed by an equitable ruler.

The Aztec priests never chanted more regretful dirges than when they sang of Tulan, the cradle of their race, where once it dwelt in peaceful indolent happiness, whose groves were filled with birds of sweet voices and gay plumage, whose generous soil brought forth spontaneously maize, cocoa, aromatic gums, and fragrant flowers. “Land of riches and plenty, where the gourds grow an arm’s length across, where an ear of corn is a load for a stout man, and its stalks are as high as trees; land where the cotton ripens of its own accord of all rich tints; land abounding with limpid emeralds, turquoises, gold, and silver.”[106 - Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. iii. cap. iii.] This land was also called Tlalocan, from Tlaloc, the god of rain, who there had his dwelling place, and Tlapallan, the land of colors, or the red land, for the hues of the sky at sunrise floated over it. Its inhabitants were surnamed children of the air, or of Quetzalcoatl, and from its centre rose the holy mountain Tonacatepec, the mountain of our life or subsistence. Its supposed location was in the east, whence in that country blow the winds that bring mild rains, says Sahagun, and that missionary was himself asked, as coming from the east, whether his home was in Tlapallan; more definitely by some it was situated among the lofty peaks on the frontiers of Guatemala, and all the great rivers that water the earth were supposed to have their sources there.[107 - Le Livre Sacré des Quichés, Introd., p. clviii.] But here, as elsewhere, its site was not determined. “There is a Tulan,” says an ancient authority, “where the sun rises, and there is another in the land of shades, and another where the sun reposes, and thence came we; and still another where the sun reposes, and there dwells God.”[108 - Memorial de Tecpan Atitlan, in Brasseur, Hist. du Mexique, i. p. 167. The derivation of Tulan, or Tula, is extremely uncertain. The Abbé Brasseur sees in it the ultima Thule of the ancient geographers, which suits his idea of early American history. Hernando De Soto found a village of this name on the Mississippi, or near it. But on looking into Gallatin’s vocabularies, tulla turns out to be the Choctaw word for stone, and as De Soto was then in the Choctaw country, the coincidence is explained at once. Buschmann, who spells it Tollan, takes it from tolin, a rush, and translates, juncetum, Ort der Binsen. Ueber die AztekischenOrstnamen, p. 682. Those who have attempted to make history from these mythological fables have been much puzzled about the location of this mystic land. Humboldt has placed it on the northwest coast, Cabrera at Palenque, Clavigero north of Anahuac, etc. etc. Aztlan, literally, the White Land, is another name of wholly mythical purport, which it would be equally vain to seek on the terrestrial globe. In the extract in the text, the word translated God is Qabavil, an old word for the highest god, either from a root meaning to open, to disclose, or from one of similar form signifying to wonder, to marvel; literally, therefore, the Revealer, or the Wondrous One (Vocab. de la Lengua Quiché, p. 209: Paris, 1862).]

The myth of the Quichés but changes the name of this pleasant land. With them it was Pan-paxil-pa-cayala, where the waters divide in falling, or between the waters parcelled out and mucky. This was “an excellent land, full of pleasant things, where was store of white corn and yellow corn, where one could not count the fruits, nor estimate the quantity of honey and food.” Over it ruled the lord of the air, and from it the four sacred animals carried the corn to make the flesh of men.[109 - Ximenes, Or. de los Indios, p. 80, Le Livre Sacré, p. 195.]

Once again, in the legends of the Mixtecas, we hear the old story repeated of the garden where the first two brothers dwelt. It lay between a meadow and that lofty peak which supports the heavens and the palaces of the gods. “Many trees were there, such as yield flowers and roses, very luscious fruits, divers herbs, and aromatic spices.” The names of the brothers were the Wind of Nine Serpents and the Wind of Nine Caverns. The first was as an eagle, and flew aloft over the waters that poured around their enchanted garden; the second was as a serpent with wings, who proceeded with such velocity that he pierced rocks and walls. They were too swift to be seen by the sharpest eye, and were one near as they passed, he was only aware of a whisper and a rustling like that of the wind in the leaves.[110 - Garcia, Origen de los Indios, lib. iv. cap. 4.]

Wherever, in short, the lust of gold lured the early adventurers, they were told of some nation a little further on, some wealthy and prosperous land, abundant and fertile, satisfying the desire of the heart. It was sometimes deceit, and it was sometimes the credited fiction of the earthly paradise, that in all ages has with a promise of perfect joy consoled the aching heart of man.

It is instructive to study the associations that naturally group themselves around each of the cardinal points, and watch how these are mirrored on the surface of language, and have directed the current of thought. Jacob Grimm has performed this task with fidelity and beauty as regards the Aryan race, but the means are wanting to apply his searching method to the indigenous tongues of America. Enough if in general terms their mythological value be determined.

When the day begins, man wakes from his slumbers, faces the rising sun, and prays. The east is before him; by it he learns all other directions; it is to him what the north is to the needle; with reference to it he assigns in his mind the position of the three other cardinal points.[111 - Compare the German expression sich orientiren, to right oneself by the east, to understand one’s surroundings.] There is the starting place of the celestial fires, the home of the sun, the womb of the morning. It represents in space the beginning of things in time, and as the bright and glorious creatures of the sky come forth thence, man conceits that his ancestors also in remote ages wandered from the orient; there in the opinion of many in both the old and new world was the cradle of the race; there in Aztec legend was the fabled land of Tlapallan, and the wind from the east was called the wind of Paradise, Tlalocavitl.

From this direction came, according to the almost unanimous opinion of the Indian tribes, those hero gods who taught them arts and religion, thither they returned, and from thence they would again appear to resume their ancient sway. As the dawn brings light, and with light is associated in every human mind the ideas of knowledge, safety, protection, majesty, divinity, as it dispels the spectres of night, as it defines the cardinal points, and brings forth the sun and the day, it occupied the primitive mind to an extent that can hardly be magnified beyond the truth. It is in fact the central figure in most natural religions.

The west, as the grave of the heavenly luminaries, or rather as their goal and place of repose, brings with it thoughts of sleep, of death, of tranquillity, of rest from labor. When the evening of his days was come, when his course was run, and man had sunk from sight, he was supposed to follow the sun and find some spot of repose for his tired soul in the distant west. There, with general consent, the tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico supposed the happy hunting grounds; there, taught by the same analogy, the ancient Aryans placed the Nerriti, the exodus, the land of the dead. “The old notion among us,” said on one occasion a distinguished chief of the Creek nation, “is that when we die, the spirit goes the way the sun goes, to the west, and there joins its family and friends who went before it.”[112 - Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country, p. 80.]

In the northern hemisphere the shadows fall to the north, thence blow cold and furious winds, thence come the snow and early thunder. Perhaps all its primitive inhabitants, of whatever race, thought it the seat of the mighty gods.[113 - See Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache, p. 681] A floe of ice in the Arctic Sea was the home of the guardian spirit of the Algonkins;[114 - De Smet, Oregon Missions, p. 352.] on a mountain near the north star the Dakotas thought Heyoka dwelt who rules the seasons; and the realm of Mictla, the Aztec god of death, lay where the shadows pointed. From that cheerless abode his sceptre reached over all creatures, even the gods themselves, for sooner or later all must fall before him. The great spirit of the dead, said the Ottawas, lives in the dark north,[115 - Bressani, Relation Abrégé, p. 93.] and there, in the opinion of the Monquis of California, resided their chief god, Gumongo.[116 - Venegas, Hist. of California, i. p. 91: London, 1759.]

Unfortunately the makers of vocabularies have rarely included the words north, south, east, and west, in their lists, and the methods of expressing these ideas adopted by the Indians can only be partially discovered. The east and west were usually called from the rising and setting of the sun as in our words orient and occident, but occasionally from traditional notions. The Mayas named the west the greater, the east the lesser debarkation; believing that while their culture hero Zamna came from the east with a few attendants, the mass of the population arrived from the opposite direction.[117 - Cogolludo, Hist. de Yucathan, lib. iv. cap. iii.] The Aztecs spoke of the east as “the direction of Tlalocan,” the terrestrial paradise. But for north and south there were no such natural appellations, and consequently the greatest diversity is exhibited in the plans adopted to express them. The north in the Caddo tongue is “the place of cold,” in Dakota “the situation of the pines,” in Creek “the abode of the (north) star,” in Algonkin “the home of the soul,” in Aztec “the direction of Mictla” the realm of death, in Quiché and Quichua, “to the right hand;”[118 - Alexander von Humboldt has asserted that the Quichuas had other and very circumstantial terms to express the cardinal points drawn from the positions of the son (Ansichten der Natur, ii. p. 368). But the distinguished naturalist overlooked the literal meaning of the phrases he quotes for north and south, intip chaututa chayananpata and intip chaupunchau chayananpata, literally, the sun arriving toward the midnight, the sun arriving toward the midday. These are evidently translations of the Spanish hacia la media noche, hacia el medio dia, for they could not have originated among a people under or south of the equatorial line.] while for the south we find such terms as in Dakota “the downward direction,” in Algonkin “the place of warmth,” in Quiché “to the left hand,” while among the Eskimos, who look in this direction for the sun, its name implies “before one,” just as does the Hebrew word kedem, which, however, this more southern tribe applied to the east.

We can trace the sacredness of the number four in other curious and unlooked-for developments. Multiplied into the number of the fingers—the arithmetic of every child and ignorant man—or by adding together the first four members of its arithmetical series (4 + 8 + 12 + 16), it gives the number forty. This was taken as a limit to the sacred dances of some Indian tribes, and by others as the highest number of chants to be employed in exorcising diseases. Consequently it came to be fixed as a limit in exercises of preparation or purification. The females of the Orinoko tribes fasted forty days before marriage, and those of the upper Mississippi were held unclean the same length of time after childbirth; such was the term of the Prince of Tezcuco’s fast when he wished an heir to his throne, and such the number of days the Mandans supposed it required to wash clean the world at the deluge.[119 - Catlin, Letters and Notes, i., Letter 22; La Hontan, Mémoires, ii. p. 151; Gumilla, Hist. del Orinoco, p. 159]

No one is ignorant how widely this belief was prevalent in the old world, nor how the quadrigesimal is still a sacred term with some denominations of Christianity. But a more striking parallelism awaits us. The symbol that beyond all others has fascinated the human mind, THE CROSS, finds here its source and meaning. Scholars have pointed out its sacredness in many natural religions, and have reverently accepted it as a mystery, or offered scores of conflicting and often debasing interpretations. It is but another symbol of the four cardinal points, the four winds of heaven. This will luminously appear by a study of its use and meaning in America.

The Catholic missionaries found it was no new object of adoration to the red race, and were in doubt whether to ascribe the fact to the pious labors of Saint Thomas or the sacrilegious subtlety of Satan. It was the central object in the great temple of Cozumel, and is still preserved on the bas-reliefs of the ruined city of Palenque. From time immemorial it had received the prayers and sacrifices of the Aztecs and Toltecs, and was suspended as an august emblem from the walls of temples in Popoyan and Cundinamarca. In the Mexican tongue it bore the significant and worthy name “Tree of Our Life,” or “Tree of our Flesh” (Tonacaquahuitl). It represented the god of rains and of health, and this was everywhere its simple meaning. “Those of Yucatan,” say the chroniclers, “prayed to the cross as the god of rains when they needed water.” The Aztec goddess of rains bore one in her hand, and at the feast celebrated to her honor in the early spring victims were nailed to a cross and shot with arrows. Quetzalcoatl, god of the winds, bore as his sign of office “a mace like the cross of a bishop;” his robe was covered with them strown like flowers, and its adoration was throughout connected with his worship.[120 - On the worship of the cross in Mexico and Yucatan and its invariable meaning as representing the gods of rain, consult Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. des Chichimeques, p. 5; Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. i. cap. ii.; Garcia, Or. de los Indios, lib. iii. cap. vi. p. 109; Palacios, Des. de la Prov. de Guatemala, p. 29; Cogolludo, Hist. de Yucathan, lib. iv. cap. ix.; Villagutierre Sotomayor, Hist. de el Itza y de el Lacandon, lib. iii. cap. 8; and many others might be mentioned.] When the Muyscas would sacrifice to the goddess of waters they extended cords across the tranquil depths of some lake, thus forming a gigantic cross, and at their point of intersection threw in their offerings of gold, emeralds, and precious oils.[121 - Rivero and Tschudi, Peruvian Antiquities, p. 162, after J. Acosta.] The arms of the cross were designed to point to the cardinal points and represent the four winds, the rain bringers. To confirm this explanation, let us have recourse to the simpler ceremonies of the less cultivated tribes, and see the transparent meaning of the symbol as they employed it.

When the rain maker of the Lenni Lenape would exert his power, he retired to some secluded spot and drew upon the earth the figure of a cross (its arms toward the cardinal points?), placed upon it a piece of tobacco, a gourd, a bit of some red stuff, and commenced to cry aloud to the spirits of the rains.[122 - Loskiel, Ges. der Miss. der evang. Brüder, p. 60.] The Creeks at the festival of the Busk, celebrated, as we have seen, to the four winds, and according to their legends instituted by them, commenced with making the new fire. The manner of this was “to place four logs in the centre of the square, end to end, forming a cross, the outer ends pointing to the cardinal points; in the centre of the cross the new fire is made.”[123 - Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country, p. 75. Lapham and Pidgeon mention that in the State of Wisconsin many low mounds are found in the form of a cross with the arms directed to the cardinal points. They contain no remains. Were they not altars built to the Four Winds? In the mythology of the Dakotas, who inhabited that region, the winds were always conceived as birds, and for the cross they have a native name literally signifying “the musquito hawk spread out” (Riggs, Dict. of the Dakota, s. v.). Its Maya name is vahom che, the tree erected or set up, the adjective being drawn from the military language and implying as a defence or protection, as the warrior lifts his lance or shield (Landa, Rel. de las Cosas de Yucatan, p. 65).]

As the emblem of the winds who dispense the fertilizing showers it is emphatically the tree of our life, our subsistence, and our health. It never had any other meaning in America, and if, as has been said,[124 - Squier, The Serpent Symbol in America, p. 98.] the tombs of the Mexicans were cruciform, it was perhaps with reference to a resurrection and a future life as portrayed under this symbol, indicating that the buried body would rise by the action of the four spirits of the world, as the buried seed takes on a new existence when watered by the vernal showers. It frequently recurs in the ancient Egyptian writings, where it is interpreted life; doubtless, could we trace the hieroglyph to its source, it would likewise prove to be derived from the four winds.