The Myths of the New World

The Navajo who has been deputed to carry a dead body to burial, holds himself unclean until he has thoroughly washed himself in water prepared for the purpose by certain ceremonies.[167 - Senate Report on Condition of Indian Tribes, p. 358: Washington, 1867.] A bath was an indispensable step in the mysteries of Mithras, the initiation at Eleusis, the meda worship of the Algonkins, the Busk of the Creeks, the ceremonials of religion everywhere. Baptism was at first always immersion. It was a bath meant to solemnize the reception of the child into the guild of mankind, drawn from the prior custom of ablution at any solemn occasion. In both the object is greater purity, bodily and spiritual. As certainly as there is a law of conscience, as certainly as our actions fall short of our volitions, so certainly is man painfully aware of various imperfections and shortcomings. What he feels he attributes to the infant. Avowedly to free themselves from this sense of guilt the Delawares used an emetic (Loskiel), the Cherokees a potion cooked up by an order of female warriors (Timberlake), the Takahlies of Washington Territory, the Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians, auricular confession. Formulize these feelings and we have the dogmas of “original sin,” and of “spiritual regeneration.” The order of baptism among the Aztecs commenced, “O child, receive the water of the Lord of the world, which is our life; it is to wash and to purify; may these drops remove the sin which was given to thee before the creation of the world, since all of us are under its power;” and concluded, “Now he liveth anew and is born anew, now is he purified and cleansed, now our mother the Water again bringeth him into the world.”[168 - Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. vi. cap. 37.]

A name was then assigned to the child, usually that of some ancestor, who it was supposed would thus be induced to exercise a kindly supervision over the little one’s future. In after life should the person desire admittance to a superior class of the population and had the wealth to purchase it—for here as in more enlightened lands nobility was a matter of money—he underwent a second baptism and received another name, but still ostensibly from the goddess of water.[169 - Ternaux-Compans, Pièces rel. à la Conq. du Mexique, p. 233.]

In Peru the child was immersed in the fluid, the priest exorcised the evil and bade it enter the water, which was then buried in the ground.[170 - Velasco, Hist. de la Royaume de Quito, p. 106, and others.] In either country sprinkling could take the place of immersion. The Cherokees believe that unless the rite is punctually performed when the child is three days old, it will inevitably die.[171 - Whipple, Rep. on the Indian Tribes, p. 35. I am not sure that this practice was of native growth to the Cherokees. This people have many customs and traditions strangely similar to those of Christians and Jews. Their cosmogony is a paraphrase of that of Genesis (Squier, Serp. Symbol, from Payne’s MSS.); the number seven is as sacred with them as it was with the Chaldeans (Whipple, u. s.); and they have improved and increased by contact with the whites. Significant in this connection is the remark of Bartram, who visited them in 1773, that some of their females were “nearly as fair and blooming as European women,” and generally that their complexion was lighter than their neighbors (Travels, p. 485). Two explanations of these facts may be suggested. They may be descendants in part of the ancient white race near Cape Hatteras, to whom I have referred in a previous note. More probably they derived their peculiarities from the Spaniards of Florida. Mr. Shea is of opinion that missions were established among them as early as 1566 and 1643 (Hist. of Catholic Missions in the U. S., pp. 58, 73). Certainly in the latter half of the seventeenth century the Spaniards were prosecuting mining operations in their territory (See Am. Hist. Mag., x. p. 137).]

As thus curative and preservative, it was imagined that there was water of which whoever should drink would not die, but live forever. I have already alluded to the Fountain of Youth, supposed long before Columbus saw the surf of San Salvador to exist in the Bahama Islands or Florida. It seems to have lingered long on that peninsula. Not many years ago, Coacooche, a Seminole chieftain, related a vision which had nerved him to a desperate escape from the Castle of St. Augustine. “In my dream,” said he, “I visited the happy hunting grounds and saw my twin sister, long since gone. She offered me a cup of pure water, which she said came from the spring of the Great Spirit, and if I should drink of it, I should return and live with her forever.”[172 - Sprague, Hist. of the Florida War, p. 328.] Some such mystical respect for the element, rather than as a mere outfit for his spirit home, probably induced the earlier tribes of the same territory to place the conch-shell which the deceased had used for a cup conspicuously on his grave,[173 - Basanier, Histoire Notable de la Floride, p. 10.] and the Mexicans and Peruvians to inter a vase filled with water with the corpse, or to sprinkle it with the liquid, baptizing it, as it were, into its new associations.[174 - Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. iii. app. cap. i.; Meyen, Ueber die Ureinwohner von Peru, p. 29.] It was an emblem of the hope that should cheer the dwellings of the dead, a symbol of the resurrection which is in store for those who have gone down to the grave.

The vase or the gourd as a symbol of water, the source and preserver of life, is a conspicuous figure in the myths of ancient America. As Akbal or Huecomitl, the great or original vase, in Aztec and Maya legends it plays important parts in the drama of creation; as Tici (Ticcu) in Peru it is the symbol of the rains, and as a gourd it is often mentioned by the Caribs and Tupis as the parent of the atmospheric waters.

As the Moon is associated with the dampness and dews of night, an ancient and wide-spread myth identified her with the Goddess of Water. Moreover, in spite of the expostulations of the learned, the common people the world over persist in attributing to her a marked influence on the rains. Whether false or true, this familiar opinion is of great antiquity, and was decidedly approved by the Indians, who were all, in the words of an old author, “great observers of the weather by the moon.”[175 - Gabriel Thomas, Hist. of West New Jersey, p. 6: London, 1698.] They looked upon her not only as forewarning them by her appearance of the approach of rains and fogs, but as being their actual cause.

Isis, her Egyptian title, literally means moisture; Ataensic, whom the Hurons said was the moon, is derived from the word for water; and Citatli and Atl, moon and water, are constantly confounded in Aztec theology. Their attributes were strikingly alike. They were both the mythical mothers of the race, and both protect women in child-birth, the babe in the cradle, the husbandman in the field, and the youth and maiden in their tender affections. As the transfer of legends was nearly always from the water to its lunar goddess, by bringing them in at this point their true meaning will not fail to be apparent.

We must ever bear in mind that the course of mythology is from many gods toward one, that it is a synthesis not an analysis, and that in this process the tendency is to blend in one the traits and stories of originally separate divinities. As has justly been observed by the Mexican antiquarian Gama: “It was a common trait among the Indians to worship many gods under the figure of one, principally those whose activities lay in the same direction, or those in some way related among themselves.”[176 - Gama, Des. de las dos Piedras, etc., i. p. 36.]

The time of full moon was chosen both in Mexico and Peru to celebrate the festival of the deities of water, the patrons of agriculture,[177 - Garcia, Or. de los Indios, p. 109.] and very generally the ceremonies connected with the crops were regulated by her phases. The Nicaraguans said that the god of rains, Quiateot, rose in the east,[178 - Oviedo, Rel. de la Prov. de Nicaragua, p. 41. The name is a corruption of the Aztec Quiauhteotl, Rain-God.] thus hinting how this connection originated. At a lunar eclipse the Orinoko Indians seized their hoes and labored with exemplary vigor on their growing corn, saying the moon was veiling herself in anger at their habitual laziness;[179 - Gumilla, Hist. del Orinoco, ii. cap. 23.] and a description of the New Netherlands, written about 1650, remarks that the savages of that land “ascribe great influence to the moon over crops.”[180 - Doc. Hist. of New York, iv. p. 130.] This venerable superstition, common to all races, still lingers among our own farmers, many of whom continue to observe “the signs of the moon” in sowing grain, setting out trees, cutting timber, and other rural avocations.

As representing water, the universal mother, the moon was the protectress of women in child-birth, the goddess of love and babes, the patroness of marriage. To her the mother called in travail, whether by the name of “Diana, diva triformis” in pagan Rome, by that of Mama Quilla in Peru, or of Meztli in Anahuac. Under the title of Yohualticitl, the Lady of Night, she was also in this latter country the guardian of babes, and as Teczistecatl, the cause of generation.[181 - Gama, Des. de las dos Piedras, ii. p. 41; Gallatin, Trans. Am. Ethnol. Soc., i. p. 343.]

Very different is another aspect of the moon goddess, and well might the Mexicans paint her with two colors. The beneficent dispenser of harvests and offspring, she nevertheless has a portentous and terrific phase. She is also the goddess of the night, the dampness, and the cold; she engenders the miasmatic poisons that rack our bones; she conceals in her mantle the foe who takes us unawares; she rules those vague shapes which fright us in the dim light; the causeless sounds of night or its more oppressive silence are familiar to her; she it is who sends dreams wherein gods and devils have their sport with man, and slumber, the twin brother of the grave. In the occult philosophy of the middle ages she was “Chief over the Night, Darkness, Rest, Death, and the Waters;”[182 - Adrian Van Helmont, Workes, p. 142, fol.: London, 1662.] in the language of the Algonkins, her name is identical with the words for night, death, cold, sleep, and water.[183 - The moon is nipa or nipaz; nipa, I sleep; nipawi, night; nip, I die; nepua, dead; nipanoue, cold. This odd relationship was first pointed out by Volney (Duponceau, Langues de l’Amérique du Nord, p. 317). But the kinship of these words to that for water, nip, nipi, nepi, has not before been noticed. This proves the association of ideas on which I lay so much stress in mythology. A somewhat similar relationship exists in the Aztec and cognate languages, miqui, to die, micqui, dead, mictlan, the realm of death, te-miqui, to dream, cec-miqui, to freeze. Would it be going too far to connect these with metzli, moon? (See Buschmann, Spuren der Aztekischen Sprache im Nördlichen Mexico, p. 80.)]

She is the evil minded woman who thus brings diseases upon men, who at the outset introduced pain and death in the world—our common mother, yet the cruel cause of our present woes. Sometimes it is the moon, sometimes water, of whom this is said: “We are all of us under the power of evil and sin, because we are children of the Water,” says the Mexican baptismal formula. That Unktahe, spirit of water, is the master of dreams and witchcraft, is the belief of the Dakotas.[184 - Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, vol. iii. p. 485.] A female spirit, wife of the great manito whose heart is the sun, the ancient Algonkins believed brought death and disease to the race; “it is she who kills men, otherwise they would never die; she eats their flesh and knaws their vitals, till they fall away and miserably perish.”[185 - Rel. de la Nouv. France, 1634, p. 16.] Who is this woman? In the legend of the Muyscas it is Chia, the moon, who was also goddess of water and flooded the earth out of spite.[186 - Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, p. 21.] Her reputation was notoriously bad. The Brazilian mother carefully shielded her infant from the lunar rays, believing that they would produce sickness;[187 - Spix and Martius, Travels in Brazil, ii. p. 247.] the hunting tribes of our own country will not sleep in its light, nor leave their game exposed to its action. We ourselves have not outgrown such words as lunatic, moon-struck, and the like. Where did we get these ideas? The philosophical historian of medicine, Kurt Sprengel, traces them to the primitive and popular medical theories of ancient Egypt, in accordance with which all maladies were the effects of the anger of the goddess Isis, the Moisture, the Moon.[188 - Hist. de la Médecine, i. p. 34.]

We have here the key to many myths. Take that of Centeotl, the Aztec goddess of Maize. She was said at times to appear as a woman of surpassing beauty, and allure some unfortunate to her embraces, destined to pay with his life for his brief moments of pleasure. Even to see her in this shape was a fatal omen. She was also said to belong to a class of gods whose home was in the west, and who produced sickness and pains.[189 - Gama, Des. de las dos Piedras, etc., ii. pp. 100-102. Compare Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. i. cap. vi.] Here we see the evil aspect of the moon reflected on another goddess, who was at first solely the patroness of agriculture.

As the goddess of sickness, it was supposed that persons afflicted with certain diseases had been set apart by the moon for her peculiar service. These diseases were those of a humoral type, especially such as are characterized by issues and ulcers. As in Hebrew the word accursed is derived from a root meaning consecrated to God, so in the Aztec, Quiché, and other tongues, the word for leprous, eczematous, or syphilitic, means also divine. This bizarre change of meaning is illustrated in a very ancient myth of their family. It is said that in the absence of the sun all mankind lingered in darkness. Nothing but a human sacrifice could hasten his arrival. Then Metzli, the moon, led forth one Nanahuatl, the leprous, and building a pyre, the victim threw himself in its midst. Straightway Metzli followed his example, and as she disappeared in the bright flames the sun rose over the horizon.[190 - Codex Chimalpopoca, in Brasseur, Hist. du Mexique, i. p. 183. Gama and others translate Nanahuatl by el buboso, Brasseur by le syphilitique, and the latter founds certain medical speculations on the word. It is entirely unnecessary to say to a surgeon that it could not possibly have had the latter meaning, inasmuch as the diagnosis between secondary or tertiary syphilis and other similar diseases was unknown. That it is so employed now is nothing to the purpose. The same or a similar myth was found in Central America and on the Island of Haiti.] Is not this a reference to the kindling rays of the aurora, in which the dark and baleful night is sacrificed, and in whose light the moon presently fades away, and the sun comes forth?

Another reaction in the mythological laboratory is here disclosed. As the good qualities of water were attributed to the goddess of night, sleep, and death, so her malevolent traits were in turn reflected back on this element. Other thoughts aided the transfer. In primitive geography the Ocean Stream coils its infinite folds around the speck of land we inhabit, biding its time to swallow it wholly. Unwillingly did it yield the earth from its bosom, daily does it steal it away piece by piece. Every evening it hides the light in its depths, and Night and the Waters resume their ancient sway. The word for ocean (mare) in the Latin tongue means by derivation a desert, and the Greeks spoke of it as “the barren brine.” Water is a treacherous element. Man treads boldly on the solid earth, but the rivers and lakes constantly strive to swallow those who venture within their reach. As streams run in tortuous channels, and as rains accompany the lightning serpent, this animal was occasionally the symbol of the waters in their dangerous manifestations. The Huron magicians fabled that in the lakes and rivers dwelt one of vast size called Angont, who sent sickness, death, and other mishaps, and the least mite of whose flesh was a deadly poison. They added—and this was the point of the tale—that they always kept on hand portions of the monster for the benefit of any who opposed their designs.[191 - Rel. de la Nouv. France, 1648, p. 75.] The legends of the Algonkins mention a rivalry between Michabo, creator of the earth, and the Spirit of the Waters, who was unfriendly to the project.[192 - Charlevoix is in error when he identifies Michabo with the Spirit of the Waters, and may be corrected from his own statements elsewhere. Compare his Journal Historique, pp. 281 and 344: ed. Paris, 1740.] In later tales this antagonism becomes more and more pronounced, and borrows an ethical significance which it did not have at first. Taking, however, American religions as a whole, water is far more frequently represented as producing beneficent effects than the reverse.

Dogs were supposed to stand in some peculiar relation to the moon, probably because they howl at it and run at night, uncanny practices which have cost them dear in reputation. The custom prevailed among tribes so widely asunder as Peruvians, Tupis, Creeks, Iroquois, Algonkins, and Greenland Eskimos to thrash the curs most soundly during an eclipse.[193 - Bradford, American Antiquities, p. 833; Martius, Von dem Rechtszustande unter den Ureinwohnern Brasiliens, p. 32; Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, i. p. 271.] The Creeks explained this by saying that the big dog was swallowing the sun, and that by whipping the little ones they could make him desist. What the big dog was they were not prepared to say. We know. It was the night goddess, represented by the dog, who was thus shrouding the world at midday. The ancient Romans sacrificed dogs to Hecate and Diana, in Egypt they were sacred to Isis, and thus as traditionally connected with night and its terrors, the Prince of Darkness, in the superstition of the middle ages, preferably appeared under the form of a cur, as that famous poodle which accompanied Cornelius Agrippa, or that which grew to such enormous size behind the stove of Dr. Faustus. In a better sense, they represented the more agreeable characteristics of the lunar goddess. Xochiquetzal, most fecund of Aztec divinities, patroness of love, of sexual pleasure, and of childbirth, was likewise called Itzcuinan, which, literally translated, is bitch-mother. This strange and to us so repugnant title for a goddess was not without parallel elsewhere. When in his wars the Inca Pachacutec carried his arms into the province of Huanca, he found its inhabitants had installed in their temples the figure of a dog as their highest deity. They were accustomed also to select one as his living representative, to pray to it and offer it sacrifice, and when well fattened, to serve it up with solemn ceremonies at a great feast, eating their god substantialiter. The priests in this province summoned their attendants to the temples by blowing through an instrument fashioned from a dog’s skull.[194 - La Vega, Hist. des Incas, liv. vi. cap. 9.] This canine canonization explains why in some parts of Peru a priest was called by way of honor allco, dog![195 - Lett. sur les Superstitions du Pérou, p. 111.] And why in many tombs both there and in Mexico their skeletons are found carefully interred with the human remains. Wherever the Aztec race extended they seem to have carried the adoration of a wild species, the coyote, the canis latrans of naturalists. The Shoshonees of New Mexico call it their progenitor,[196 - Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, iv. p. 224.] and with the Nahuas it was in such high honor that it had a temple of its own, a congregation of priests devoted to its service, statues carved in stone, an elaborate tomb at death, and is said to be meant by the god Chantico, whose audacity caused the destruction of the world. The story was that he made a sacrifice to the gods without observing a preparatory fast, for which he was punished by being changed into a dog. He then invoked the god of death to deliver him, which attempt to evade a just punishment so enraged the divinities that they immersed the world in water.[197 - Chantico, according to Gama, means “Wolf’s Head,” though I cannot verify this from the vocabularies within my reach. He is sometimes called Cohuaxolotl Chantico, the snake-servant Chantico, considered by Gama as one, by Torquemada as two deities (see Gama, Des. de las dos Piedras, etc., i. p. 12; ii. p. 66). The English word cantico in the phrase, for instance, “to cut a cantico,” though an Indian word, is not from this, but from the Algonkin Delaware gentkehn, to dance a sacred dance. The Dutch describe it as “a religious custom observed among them before death” (Doc. Hist. of New York, iv. p. 63). William Penn says of the Lenape, “their worship consists of two parts, sacrifice and cantico,” the latter “performed by round dances, sometimes words, sometimes songs, then shouts; their postures very antic and differing.” (Letter to the Free Society of Traders, 1683, sec. 21.)]

During a storm on our northern lakes the Indians think no offering so likely to appease the angry water god who is raising the tempest as a dog. Therefore they hasten to tie the feet of one and toss him overboard.[198 - Charlevoix, Hist. Gén. de la Nouv. France, i. p. 394: Paris, 1740. On the different species of dogs indigenous to America, see a note of Alex. von Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur., i. p. 134. It may be noticed that Chichimec, properly Chichimecatl, the name of the Aztec tribe who succeeded the ancient Toltecs in Mexico, means literally “people of the dog,” and was probably derived from some mythological fable connected with that animal.] One meets constantly in their tales and superstitions the mysterious powers of the animals, and the distinguished actions he has at times performed bear usually a close parallelism to those attributed to water and the moon.

Hunger and thirst were thus alleviated by water. Cold remained, and against this fire was the shield. It gives man light in darkness and warmth in winter; it shows him his friends and warns him of his foes; the flames point toward heaven and the smoke makes the clouds. Around it social life begins. For his home and his hearth the savage has but one word, and what of tender emotion his breast can feel, is linked to the circle that gathers around his fire. The council fire, the camp fire, and the war fire, are so many epochs in his history. By its aid many arts become possible, and it is a civilizer in more ways than one. In the figurative language of the red race, it is constantly used as “an emblem of peace, happiness, and abundance.”[199 - Narr. of the Captiv. of John Tanner, p. 362. From the word for fire in many American tongues is formed the adjective red. Thus, Algonkin, skoda, fire, miskoda, red; Kolosch, kan, fire, kan, red; Ugalentz, takak, fire, takak-uete, red; Tahkali, cūn, fire, tenil-cūn, red; Quiche, cak, fire, cak, red, etc. From the adjective red comes often the word for blood, and in symbolism the color red may refer to either of these ideas. It was the royal color of the Incas, brothers of the sun, and a llama swathed in a red garment was the Peruvian sacrifice to fire (Garcia, Or. de los Indios, lib. iv. caps. 16, 19). On the other hand the war quipus, the war wampum, and the war paint were all of this hue, boding their sanguinary significance. The word for fire in the language of the Delawares, Nanticokes, and neighboring tribes puzzles me. It is taenda or tinda. This is the Swedish word taenda, from whose root comes our tinder. Yet it is found in vocabularies as early as 1650, and is universally current to-day. It has no resemblance to the word for fire in pure Algonkin. Was it adopted from the Swedes? Was it introduced by wandering Vikings in remote centuries? Or is it only a coincidence?] To extingish an enemy’s fire is to slay him; to light a visitor’s fire is to bid him welcome. Fire worship was closely related to that of the sun, and so much has been said of sun worship among the aborigines of America that it is well at once to assign it its true position.

A generation ago it was a fashion very much approved to explain all symbols and myths by the action of this orb on nature. This short and easy method with mythology has, in Carlylian phrase, had its bottom pulled from under it in these later times. Nowhere has it manifested its inefficiency more palpably than in America. One writer, while thus explaining the religions of the tribes of colder regions and higher latitudes, denies sun worship among the natives of hot climates; another asserts that only among the latter did it exist at all; while a third lays down the maxim that the religion of the red race everywhere “was but a modification of Sun or Fire worship.”[200 - Compare D’Orbigny, L’Homme Américain, i. p. 243, Müller, Amer. Urreligionen, p. 51, and Squier, Serpent Symbol in America, p. 111. This is a striking instance of the confusion of ideas introduced by false systems of study, and also of the considerable misapprehension of American mythology which has hitherto prevailed.] All such sweeping generalizations are untrue, and must be so. No one key can open all the arcana of symbolism. Man devised means as varied as nature herself to express the idea of God within him. The sun was but one of these, and not the first nor the most important. Fear, said the wise Epicurean, first made the gods. The sun with its regular course, its kindly warmth, its beneficent action, no wise inspires that sentiment. It conjures no phantasms to appal the superstitious fancy, and its place in primitive mythology is conformably inferior. The myths of the Eskimos and northern Athapascas omit its action altogether. The Algonkins by no means imagined it the highest god, and at most but one of his emblems.[201 - La Hontan, Voy. dans l’Amér. Sept., p. ii. 127; Rel. Nouv. France, 1637, p. 54.] That it often appears in their prayers is true, but this arose from the fact that in many of their dialects, as well as in the language of the Mayas and others, the word for heaven or sky was identical with that for sun, and the former, as I have shown, was the supposed abode of deity, “the wigwam of the Great Spirit.”[202 - Copway, Trad. Hist. of the Ojibway Nation, p. 165. Kesuch in Algonkin signifies both sky and sun (Duponceau, Langues de l’Amér. du Nord, p. 312). So apparently does kin in the Maya.] The alleged sun worship of the Cherokees rests on testimony modern, doubtful, and unsupported.[203 - Payne’s manuscripts quoted by Mr. Squier in his Serpent Symbol in America were compiled within this century, and from the extracts given can be of no great value.] In North America the Natchez alone were avowed worshippers of this luminary. Yet they adored it under the name Great Fire (wah sil), clearly pointing to a prior adoration of that element. The heliolatry organized principally for political ends by the Incas of Peru, stands alone in the religions of the red race. Those shrewd legislators at an early date officially announced that Inti, the sun, their own elder brother, was ruler of the cohorts of heaven by like divine right that they were of the four corners of the earth. This scheme ignominiously failed, as every attempt to fetter the liberty of conscience must and should. The later Incas finally indulged publicly in heterodox remarks, and compromised the matter by acknowledging a divinity superior even to their brother, the sun, as we have seen in a previous chapter.

The myths of creation never represent the sun as anterior to the world, but as manufactured by the “old people” (Navajos), as kindled and set going by the first of men (Algonkins), or as freed from some cave by a kindly deity (Haitians). It is always spoken of as a fire; only in Peru and Mexico had the precession of the equinoxes been observed, and without danger of error we can merge the consideration of its worship almost altogether in that of this element.[204 - The words for fire and sun in American languages are usually from distinct roots, but besides the example of the Natchez I may instance to the contrary the Kolosch of British America, in whose tongue fire is kan, sun, kakan (gake, great), and the Tezuque of New Mexico, who use tah for both sun and fire.]

The institutions of a perpetual fire, of obtaining new fire, and of burning the dead, prevailed extensively in the New World. In the present discussion the origin of such practices, rather than the ceremonies with which they were attended, have an interest. The savage knew that fire was necessary to his life. Were it lost, he justly foreboded dire calamities and the ruin of his race. Therefore at stated times with due solemnity he produced it anew by friction or the flint, or else was careful to keep one fire constantly alive. These not unwise precautions soon fell to mere superstitions. If the Aztec priest at the stated time failed to obtain a spark from his pieces of wood, if the sacred fire by chance became extinguished, the end of the world or the destruction of mankind was apprehended. “You know it was a saying among our ancestors,” said an Iroquois chief in 1753, “that when the fire at Onondaga goes out, we shall no longer be a people.”[205 - Doc. Hist. of New York, ii. p. 634.] So deeply rooted was this notion, that the Catholic missionaries in New Mexico were fain to wink at it, and perform the sacrifice of the mass in the same building where the flames were perpetually burning, that were not to be allowed to die until Montezuma and the fabled glories of ancient Anahuac with its heathenism should return.[206 - Emory, Milt’yReconnoissanceof New Mexico, p. 30.] Thus fire became the type of life. “Know that the life in your body and the fire on your hearth are one and the same thing, and that both proceed from one source,” said a Shawnee prophet.[207 - Narrative of John Tanner, p. 161.] Such an expression was wholly in the spirit of his race. The greatest feast of the Delawares was that to their “grandfather, the fire.”[208 - Loskiel, Ges. der Miss. der evang. Brüder, p. 55.] “Their fire burns forever,” was the Algonkin figure of speech to express the immortality of their gods.[209 - Nar. of John Tanner, p. 351.] “The ancient God, the Father and Mother of all Gods,” says an Aztec prayer, “is the God of the Fire which is in the centre of the court with four walls, and which is covered with gleaming feathers like unto wings;”[210 - Sahagun, Hist. Nueva España, lib. vi. cap. 4.] dark sayings of the priests, referring to the glittering lightning fire borne from the four sides of the earth.

As the path to a higher life hereafter, the burning of the dead was first instituted. It was a privilege usually confined to a select few. Among the Algonkin-Ottawas, only, those of the distinguished totem of the Great Hare, among the Nicaraguans none but the caciques, among the Caribs exclusively the priestly caste, were entitled to this peculiar honor.[211 - Letts. Edifiantes et Curieuses, iv. p. 104, Oviedo; Hist. du Nicaragua, p. 49; Gumilla, Hist. del Orinoco, ii. cap. 2.] The first gave as the reason for such an exceptional custom, that the members of such an illustrious clan as that of Michabo, the Great Hare, should not rot in the ground as common folks, but rise to the heavens on the flames and smoke. Those of Nicaragua seemed to think it the sole path to immortality, holding that only such as offered themselves on the pyre of their chieftain would escape annihilation at death;[212 - Oviedo, Hist. Gen. de las Indias, p. 16, in Barcia’s Hist. Prim.] and the tribes of upper California were persuaded that such as were not burned at death were liable to be transformed into the lower orders of brutes.[213 - Presdt’s Message and Docs. for 1851, pt. iii. p. 506.] Strangely, enough, we thus find a sort of baptism by fire deemed essential to a higher life beyond the grave.

Another analogy strengthened the symbolic force of fire as life. This is that which exists between the sensation of warmth and those passions whose physiological end is the perpetuation of the species. We see how native it is to the mind from such coarse expressions as “hot lust,” “to burn,” “to be in heat,” “stews,” and the like, figures not of the poetic, but the vulgar tongue. They occur in all languages, and hint how readily the worship of fire glided into that of the reproductive principle, into extravagances of chastity and lewdness, into the shocking orgies of the so-called phallic worship.

Some have supposed that a sexual dualism pervades all natural religions and this too has been assumed as the solution of all their myths. It has been said that the action of heat upon moisture, of the sun on the waters, the mysteries of reproduction, and the satisfaction of the sexual instincts, are the unvarying themes of primitive mythology. So far as the red race is concerned, this is a most gratuitous assumption. The facts that have been eagerly collated by Dulaure and others to bolster such a detestable theory lend themselves fairly to no such interpretation.

There existed, indeed, a worship of the passions. Apparently it was grafted upon or rose out of that of fire by the analogy I have pointed out. Thus the Mexican god of fire was supposed to govern the generative proclivities,[214 - Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, i. cap. 13.] and there is good reason to believe that the sacred fire watched by unspotted virgins among the Mayas had decidedly such a signification. Certainly it was so, if we can depend upon the authority of a ballad translated from the original immediately after the conquest, cited by the venerable traveller and artist Count de Waldeck. It purports to be from the lover of one of these vestals, and referring to her occupation asks with a fine allusion to its mystic meaning—

“O vièrge, quand pourrai-je te posséder pour ma compagne cherie?
Combien de temps faut-il encore que tes vœux soient accomplis?
Dis-moi le jour qui doit devancer la belle nuit où tous deux,
Alimenterons le feu qui nous fit naitre et que nous devons perpetuer.”[215 - Voyage Pittoresque dans le Yucatan, p. 49.]

There is a bright as well as a dark side even to such a worship. In Mexico, Peru, and Yucatan, the women who watched the flames must be undoubted virgins; they were usually of noble blood, and must vow eternal chastity, or at least were free to none but the ruler of the realm. As long as they were consecrated to the fire, so long any carnal ardor was degrading to their lofty duties. The sentiment of shame, one of the first we find developed, led to the belief that to forego fleshly pleasures was a meritorious sacrifice in the eyes of the gods. In this persuasion certain of the Aztec priests practised complete abscission or entire discerption of the virile parts, and a mutilation of females was not unknown similar to that immemorially a custom in Egypt.[216 - Davila Padilla, Hist. de la Prov. de Santiago de Mexico, lib. ii. cap. 88 (Brusselas, 1625); Palacios, Des. de Guatemala, p. 40; Garcia, Or. de los Indios, p. 124. To such an extent did the priests of the Algonkin tribes who lived near Manhattan Island carry their austerity, such uncompromising celibates were they, that it is said on authority as old as 1624, that they never so much as partook of food prepared by a married woman. (Doc. Hist. New York, iv. p. 28.)] Such enforced celibacy was, however, neither common nor popular. Circumcision, if it can be proven to have existed among the red race—and though there are plenty of assertions to that effect, they are not satisfactory to an anatomist—was probably a symbolic renunciation of the lusts of the flesh. The same cannot be said of the very common custom with the Aztec race of anointing their idols with blood drawn from the genitals, the tongue, and the ears. This was simply a form of those voluntary scarifications, universally employed to mark contrition or grief by savage tribes, and nowhere more in vogue than with the red race.

There was an ancient Christian heresy which taught that the true way to conquer the passions was to satiate them, and therefore preached unbounded licentiousness. Whether this agreeable doctrine was known to the Indians I cannot say, but it is certainly the most creditable explanation that can be suggested for the miscellaneous congress which very often terminated their dances and ceremonies. Such orgies were of common occurrence among the Algonkins and Iroquois at a very early date, and are often mentioned in the Jesuit Relations; Venegas describes them as frequent among the tribes of Lower California; and Oviedo refers to certain festivals of the Nicaraguans, during which the women of all rank extended to whosoever wished just such privileges as the matrons of ancient Babylon, that mother of harlots and all abominations, used to grant even to slaves and strangers in the temple of Melitta, as one of the duties of religion. But in fact there is no ground whatever to invest these debauches with any recondite meaning. They are simply indications of the thorough and utter immorality which prevailed throughout the race. And a still more disgusting proof of it is seen in the frequent appearance among diverse tribes of men dressed as women and yielding themselves to indescribable vices.[217 - Martius, Von dem Rechtzustande unter den Ureinwohnern Brasiliens, p. 28, gives many references.] There was at first nothing of a religious nature in such exhibitions. Lascivious priests chose at times to invest them with some such meaning for their own sensual gratification, just as in Brazil they still claim the jus primænoctis.[218 - Id. ibid., p. 61.] The pretended phallic worship of the Natchez and of Culhuacan, cited by the Abbé Brasseur, rests on no good authority, and if true, is like that of the Huastecas of Panuco, nothing but an unrestrained and boundless profligacy which it were an absurdity to call a religion.[219 - Le Livre Sacré des Quichés, Introd., pp. clxi., clxix.] That which Mr. Stephens attempts to show existed once in Yucatan,[220 - Travels in Yucatan, i. p. 434.] rests entirely by his own statement on a fancied resemblance of no value whatever, and the arguments of Lafitau to the same effect are quite insufficient. There is a decided indecency in the remains of ancient American art, especially in Peru (Meyen), and great lubricity in many ceremonies, but the proof is altogether wanting to bind these with the recognition of a fecundating principle throughout nature, or, indeed, to suppose for them any other origin than the promptings of an impure fancy. I even doubt whether they often referred to fire as the deity of sexual love.

By a flight of fancy inspired by a study of oriental mythology, the worship of the reciprocal principle in America has been connected with that of the sun and moon, as the primitive pair from whose fecund union all creatures proceeded. It is sufficient to say if such a myth exists among the Indians—which is questionable—it justifies no such deduction; that the moon is often mentioned in their languages merely as the “night sun;” and that in such important stocks as the Iroquois, Athapascas, Cherokees, and Tupis, the sun is said to be a feminine noun; while the myths represent them more frequently as brother and sister than as man and wife; nor did at least the northern tribes regard the sun as the cause of fecundity in nature at all, but solely as giving light and warmth.[221 - Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, v. pp. 416, 417.]

In contrast to this, so much the more positive was their association of the THUNDER-STORM as that which brings both warmth and rain with the renewed vernal life of vegetation. The impressive phenomena which characterize it, the prodigious noise, the awful flash, the portentous gloom, the blast, the rain, have left a profound impression on the myths of every land. Fire from water, warmth and moisture from the destructive breath of the tempest, this was the riddle of riddles to the untutored mind. “Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness.” It was the visible synthesis of all the divine manifestations, the winds, the waters, and the flames.

The Dakotas conceived it as a struggle between the god of waters and the thunder bird for the command of their nation,[222 - Mrs. Eastman, Legends of the Sioux, p. 161.] and as a bird, one of those which make a whirring sound with their wings, the turkey, the pheasant, or the nighthawk, it was very generally depicted by their neighbors, the Athapascas, Iroquois, and Algonkins.[223 - Rel. de la Nouv. France, 1634, p. 27; Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, ii. p. 116; Ind. Tribes, v. p. 420.] As the herald of the summer it was to them a good omen and a friendly power. It was the voice of the Great Spirit of the four winds speaking from the clouds and admonishing them that the time of corn planting was at hand.[224 - De Smet, Western Missions, p. 135; Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, i. p. 319.] The flames kindled by the lightning were of a sacred nature, proper to be employed in lighting the fires of the religious rites, but on no account to be profaned by the base uses of daily life. When the flash entered the ground it scattered in all directions those stones, such as the flint, which betray their supernal origin by a gleam of fire when struck. These were the thunderbolts, and from such an one, significantly painted red, the Dakotas averred their race had proceeded.[225 - Mrs. Eastman, Legends of the Sioux, p. 72. By another legend they claimed that their first ancestor obtained his fire from the sparks which a friendly panther struck from the rocks as he scampered up a stony hill (McCoy, Hist. of Baptist Indian Missions, p. 364).] For are we not all in a sense indebted for our lives to fire? “There is no end to the fancies entertained by the Sioux concerning thunder,” observes Mrs. Eastman. They typified the paradoxical nature of the storm under the character of the giant Haokah. To him cold was heat, and heat cold; when sad he laughed, when merry groaned; the sides of his face and his eyes were of different colors and expressions; he wore horns or a forked headdress to represent the lightning, and with his hands he hurled the meteors. His manifestations were fourfold, and one of the four winds was the drum-stick he used to produce the thunder.[226 - Mrs. Eastman, ubi sup., p. 158; Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, iv. p. 645.]

Omitting many others, enough that the sameness of this conception is illustrated by the myth of Tupa, highest god and first man of the Tupis of Brazil. During his incarnation, he taught them agriculture, gave them fire, the cane, and the pisang, and now in the form of a huge bird sweeps over the heavens, watching his children and watering their crops, admonishing them of his presence by the mighty sound of his voice, the rustling of his wings, and the flash of his eye. These are the thunder, the lightning, and the roar of the tempest. He is depicted with horns; he was one of four brothers, and only after a desperate struggle did he drive his fraternal rivals from the field. In his worship, the priests place pebbles in a dry gourd, deck it with feathers and arrows, and rattling it vigorously, reproduce in miniature the tremendous drama of the storm.[227 - Waitz, Anthropologie, iii. p. 417; Müller, Am. Urrelig., p. 271.]

As nations rose in civilization these fancies put on a more complex form and a more poetic fulness. Throughout the realm of the Incas the Peruvians venerated as creator of all things, maker of heaven and earth, and ruler of the firmament, the god Ataguju. The legend was that from him proceeded the first of mortals, the man Guamansuri, who descended to the earth and there seduced the sister of certain Guachemines, rayless ones, or Darklings, who then possessed it. For this crime they destroyed him, but their sister proved pregnant, and died in her labor, giving birth to two eggs. From these emerged the twin brothers, Apocatequil and Piguerao. The former was the more powerful. By touching the corpse of his mother he brought her to life, he drove off and slew the Guachemines, and, directed by Ataguju, released the race of Indians from the soil by turning it up with a spade of gold. For this reason they adored him as their maker. He it was, they thought, who produced the thunder and the lightning by hurling stones with his sling; and the thunderbolts that fall, said they, are his children. Few villages were willing to be without one or more of these. They were in appearance small, round, smooth stones, but had the admirable properties of securing fertility to the fields, protecting from lightning, and, by a transition easy to understand, were also adored as gods of the Fire, as well material as of the passions, and were capable of kindling the dangerous flames of desire in the most frigid bosom. Therefore they were in great esteem as love charms.

Apocatequil’s statue was erected on the mountains, with that of his mother on one hand, and his brother on the other. “He was Prince of Evil and the most respected god of the Peruvians. From Quito to Cuzco not an Indian but would give all he possessed to conciliate him. Five priests, two stewards, and a crowd of slaves served his image. And his chief temple was surrounded by a very considerable village whose inhabitants had no other occupation than to wait on him.” In memory of these brothers, twins in Peru were deemed always sacred to the lightning, and when a woman or even a llama brought them forth, a fast was held and sacrifices offered to the two pristine brothers, with a chant commencing: A chuchu cachiqui, O Thou who causest twins, words mistaken by the Spaniards for the name of a deity.[228 - On the myth of Catequil see particularly the Lettre sur les Superstitions du Pérou, p. 95 sqq., and compare Montesinos, Ancien Pérou, chaps. ii., xx. The letters g and j do not exist in Quichua, therefore Ataguju should doubtless read Ata-chuchu, which means lord, or ruler of the twins, from ati root of atini, I am able, I control, and chuchu, twins. The change of the root ati to ata, though uncommon in Quichua, occurs also in ata-hualpa, cock, from ati and hualpa, fowl. Apo-Catequil, or as given by Arriaga, another old writer on Peruvian idolatry, Apocatequilla, I take to be properly apu-ccatec-quilla, which literally means chief of the followers of the moon. Acosta mentions that the native name for various constellations was catachillay or catuchillay, doubtless corruptions of ccatec quilla, literally “following the moon.” Catequil, therefore, the dark spirit of the storm rack, was also appropriately enough, and perhaps primarily, lord of the night and stars. Piguerao, where the g appears again, is probably a compound of piscu, bird, and uira, white. Guachemines seems clearly the word huachi, a ray of light or an arrow, with the negative suffix ymana, thus meaning rayless, as in the text, or ymana may mean an excess as well as a want of anything beyond what is natural, which would give the signification “very bright shining.” (Holguin, Arte de la Lengua Quichua, p. 106: Cuzco, 1607.) Is this sister of theirs the Dawn, who, as in the Rig Veda, brings forth at the cost of her own life the white and dark twins, the Day and the Night, the latter of whom drives from the heavens the far-shooting arrows of light, in order that he may restore his mother again to life? The answer may for the present be deferred. It is a coincidence perhaps worth mentioning that the Augustin monk who is our principal authority for this legend mentions two other twin deities, Yamo and Yama, whose names are almost identical with the twins Yama and Yami of the Veda.]

Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant of the Incas, has preserved an ancient indigenous poem of his nation, presenting the storm myth in a different form, which as undoubtedly authentic and not devoid of poetic beauty I translate, preserving as much as possible the trochaic tetrasyllabic verse of the original Quichua:—

“Beauteous princess,
Lo, thy brother
Breaks thy vessel
Now in fragments.
From the blow come
Thunder, lightning,
Strokes of lightning.
And thou, princess,
Tak’st the water,
With it rainest,
And the hail, or
Snow dispensest.
Viracocha,
World constructor,
World enliv’ner,
To this office
Thee appointed,
Thee created.”[229 - Hist. des Incas, liv. ii. cap. 28, and corrected in Markham’s Quichua Grammar.]

In this pretty waif that has floated down to us from the wreck of a literature now forever lost, there is more than one point to attract the notice of the antiquary. He may find in it a hint to decipher those names of divinities so common in Peruvian legends, Contici and Illatici. Both mean “the Thunder Vase,” and both doubtless refer to the conception here displayed of the phenomena of the thunder-storm.[230 - The latter is a compound of tici or ticcu, a vase, and ylla, the root of yllani, to shine, yllapantac, it thunders and lightens. The former is from tici and cun or con, whence by reduplication cun-un-un-an, it thunders. From cun and tura, brother, is probably derived cuntur, the condor, the flying thunder-cloud being looked upon as a great bird also. Dr. Waitz has pointed out that the Araucanians call by the title con, the messenger who summons their chieftains to a general council.]

Again, twice in this poem is the triple nature of the storm adverted to. This is observable in many of the religions of America. It constitutes a sort of Trinity, not in any point resembling that of Christianity, nor yet the Trimurti of India, but the only one in the New World the least degree authenticated, and which, as half seen by ignorant monks, has caused its due amount of sterile astonishment. Thus, in the Quiché legends we read: “The first of Hurakan is the lightning, the second the track of the lightning, and the third the stroke of the lightning; and these three are Hurakan, the Heart of the Sky.”[231 - Le Livre Sacré, p. 9. The name of the lightning in Quiché is cak ul ha, literally, “fire coming from water.”] It reappears with characteristic uniformity of outline in Iroquois mythology. Heno, the thunder, gathers the clouds and pours out the warm rains. Therefore he was the patron of husbandry. He was invoked at seed time and harvest; and as purveyor of nourishment he was addressed as grandfather, and his worshippers styled themselves his grandchildren. He rode through the heavens on the clouds, and the thunderbolts which split the forest trees were the stones he hurled at his enemies. Three assistants were assigned him, whose names have unfortunately not been recorded, and whose offices were apparently similar to those of the three companions of Hurakan.[232 - Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 158.]

So also the Aztecs supposed that Tlaloc, god of rains and the waters, ruler of the terrestrial paradise and the season of summer, manifested himself under the three attributes of the flash, the thunderbolt, and the thunder.[233 - “El rayo, el relámpago, y el trueno.” Gama, Des. de las dos Piedras, etc., ii. p. 76: Mexico, 1832.]

But this conception of three in one was above the comprehension of the masses, and consequently these deities were also spoken of as fourfold in nature, three and one. Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the thunder god was usually ruler of the winds, and thus another reason for his quadruplicate nature was suggested. Hurakan, Haokah, Tlaloc, and probably Heno, are plural as well as singular nouns, and are used as nominatives to verbs in both numbers. Tlaloc was appealed to as inhabiting each of the cardinal points and every mountain top. His statue rested on a square stone pedestal, facing the east, and had in one hand a serpent of gold. Ribbons of silver, crossing to form squares, covered the robe, and the shield was composed of feathers of four colors, yellow, green, red, and blue. Before it was a vase containing all sorts of grain; and the clouds were called his companions, the winds his messengers.[234 - Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, lib. vi. cap. 23. Gama, ubi sup. ii. 76, 77.] As elsewhere, the thunderbolts were believed to be flints, and thus, as the emblem of fire and the storm, this stone figures conspicuously in their myths. Tohil, the god who gave the Quichés fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint-stone. He is distinctly said to be the same as Quetzalcoatl, one of whose commonest symbols was a flint (tecpatl). Such a stone, in the beginning of things, fell from heaven to earth, and broke into 1600 pieces, each of which sprang up a god;[235 - Torquemada, ibid., lib. vi. cap. 41.] an ancient legend, which shadows forth the subjection of all things to him who gathers the clouds from the four corners of the earth, who thunders with his voice, who satisfies with his rain “the desolate and waste ground, and causes the tender herb to spring forth.” This is the germ of the adoration of stones as emblems of the fecundating rains. This is why, for example, the Navajos use as their charm for rain certain long round stones, which they think fall from the cloud when it thunders.[236 - Senate Report on the Indian Tribes, p. 358: Washington, 1867.]