The Myths of the New World Part 8

[119-3] "I have examined many Indians in reference to these details,"

says the narrator, an Augustin monk writing in 1554, "and they have all confirmed them as eye-witnesses" (_Lettre sur les Superst.i.tions du Perou_, p. 106, ed. Ternaux-Compans. This doc.u.ment is very valuable).

[120-1] _Narrative of John Tanner_, p. 355; Henry, _Travels_, p. 176.

[120-2] Torquemada, _Monarquia Indiana_, lib. vi. cap. 31.

CHAPTER V.

THE MYTHS OF WATER, FIRE, AND THE THUNDER-STORM.

Water the oldest element.--Its use in purification.--Holy water.--The Rite of Baptism.--The Water of Life.--Its symbols.--The Vase.--The Moon.--The latter the G.o.ddess of love and agriculture, but also of sickness, night, and pain.--Often represented by a dog.--Fire wors.h.i.+p under the form of Sun wors.h.i.+p.--The perpetual fire.--The new fire--Burning the dead.--A wors.h.i.+p of the pa.s.sions, but no s.e.xual dualism in myths, nor any phallic wors.h.i.+p in America.--Synthesis of the wors.h.i.+p of Fire, Water, and the Winds in the THUNDER-STORM, personified as Haokah, Tupa, Catequil, Contici, Heno, Tlaloc, Mixcoatl, and other deities, many of them triune.

The primitive man was a brute in everything but the susceptibility to culture; the chief market of his time was to sleep, fight, and feed; his bodily comfort alone had any importance in his eyes; and his G.o.ds were nothing, unless they touched him here. Cold, hunger, thirst, these were the hounds that were ever on his track; these were the fell powers he saw constantly s.n.a.t.c.hing away his fellows, constantly aiming their invisible shafts at himself. Fire, food, and water were the G.o.ds that fought on his side; they were the chief figures in his pantheon, his kindliest, perhaps his earliest, divinities.

With a nearly unanimous voice mythologies a.s.sign the priority to water.

It was the first of all things, the parent of all things. Even the G.o.ds themselves were born of water, said the Greeks and the Aztecs.

Cosmogonies reach no further than the primeval ocean that rolled its sh.o.r.eless waves through a timeless night.

"Omnia pontus erant, deerant quoque litora ponto."

Earth, sun, stars, lay concealed in its fathomless abysses. "All of us,"

ran the Mexican baptismal formula, "are children of Chalchihuitlycue, G.o.ddess of Water," and the like was said by the Peruvians of Mama Cocha, by the Botocudos of Taru, by the natives of Darien of Dobayba, by the Iroquois of Ataensic--all of them mothers of mankind, all personifications of water.

How account for such unanimity? Not by supposing some ancient intercourse between remote tribes, but by the uses of water as the originator and supporter, the essential prerequisite of life. Leaving aside the a.n.a.logy presented by the motherly waters which nourish the unborn child, nor emphasizing how indispensable it is as a beverage, the many offices this element performs in nature lead easily to the supposition that it must have preceded all else. By quenching thirst, it quickens life; as the dew and the rain it feeds the plant, and when withheld the seed perishes in the ground and forests and flowers alike wither away; as the fountain, the river, and the lake, it enriches the valley, offers safe retreats, and provides store of fishes; as the ocean, it presents the most fitting type of the infinite. It cleanses, it purifies; it produces, it preserves. "Bodies, unless dissolved, cannot act," is a maxim of the earliest chemistry. Very plausibly, therefore, was it a.s.sumed as the source of all things.

The adoration of streams, springs, and lakes, or rather of the spirits their rulers, prevailed everywhere; sometimes avowedly because they provided food, as was the case with the Moxos, who called themselves children of the lake or river on which their village was, and were afraid to migrate lest their parent should be vexed;[124-1] sometimes because they were the means of irrigation, as in Peru, or on more general mythical grounds. A grove by a fountain is in all nature wors.h.i.+p the ready-made shrine of the sylphs who live in its limpid waves and chatter mysteriously in its shallows. On such a spot in our Gulf States one rarely fails to find the sacrificial mound of the ancient inhabitants, and on such the natives of Central America were wont to erect their altars (Ximenes). Lakes are the natural centres of civilization. Like the lacustrine villages which the Swiss erected in ante-historic times, like ancient Venice, the city of Mexico was first built on piles in a lake, and for the same reason--protection from attack. Security once obtained, growth and power followed. Thus we can trace the earliest rays of Aztec civilization rising from lake Tezcuco, of the Peruvian from Lake t.i.ticaca, of the Muyscas from Lake Guatavita.

These are the centres of legendary cycles. Their waters were hallowed by venerable reminiscences. From the depths of t.i.ticaca rose Viracocha, mythical civilizer of Peru. Guatavita was the bourne of many a foot-sore pilgrim in the ancient empire of the Zac. Once a year the high priest poured the collective offerings of the mult.i.tude into its waves, and anointed with oils and glittering with gold dust, dived deep in its midst, professing to hold communion with the G.o.ddess who there had her home.[125-1]

Not only does the life of man but his well-being depends on water. As an ablution it invigorates him bodily and mentally. No inst.i.tution was in higher honor among the North American Indians than the sweat-bath followed by the cold douche. It was popular not only as a remedy in every and any disease, but as a preliminary to a council or an important transaction. Its real value in cold climates is proven by the sustained fondness for the Russian bath in the north of Europe. The Indians, however, with their usual superst.i.tion attributed its good effects to some mysterious healing power in water itself. Therefore, when the patient was not able to undergo the usual process, or when his medical attendant was above the vulgar and routine practice of his profession, it was administered on the infinitesimal system. The quack muttered a formula over a gourd filled from a neighboring spring and sprinkled it on his patient, or washed the diseased part, or sucked out the evil spirit and blew it into a bowl of water, and then scattered the liquid on the fire or earth.[125-2]

The use of such "holy water" astonished the Romanist missionaries, and they at once detected Satan parodying the Scriptures. But their astonishment rose to horror when they discovered among various nations a rite of baptism of appalling similarity to their own, connected with the imposing of a name, done avowedly for the purpose of freeing from inherent sin, believed to produce a regeneration of the spiritual nature, nay, in more than one instance called by an indigenous word signifying "to be born again."[126-1] Such a rite was of immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees, Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians. Had the missionaries remembered that it was practised in Asia with all these meanings long before it was chosen as the sign of the new covenant, they need have invoked neither Satan nor Saint Thomas to explain its presence in America.

As corporeal is near akin to spiritual pollution, and cleanliness to G.o.dliness, ablution preparatory to engaging in religious acts came early to have an emblematic as well as a real significance. The water freed the soul from sin as it did the skin from stain. We should come to G.o.d with clean hands and a clean heart. As Pilate washed his hands before the mult.i.tude to indicate that he would not accept the moral responsibility of their acts, so from a similar motive a Natchez chief, who had been persuaded against his sense of duty not to sacrifice himself on the pyre of his ruler, took clean water, washed his hands, and threw it upon live coals.[126-2] When an ancient Peruvian had laid bare his guilt by confession, he bathed himself in a neighboring river and repeated this formula:--

"O thou River, receive the sins I have this day confessed unto the Sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear."[127-1]

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.[127-2] A bath was an indispensable step in the mysteries of Mithras, the initiation at Eleusis, the meda wors.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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."[128-1]

A name was then a.s.signed 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 cla.s.s of the population and had the wealth to purchase it--for here as in more enlightened lands n.o.bility was a matter of money--he underwent a second baptism and received another name, but still ostensibly from the G.o.ddess of water.[128-2]

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.[128-3] 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.[128-4]

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."[129-1] 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-sh.e.l.l which the deceased had used for a cup conspicuously on his grave,[129-2] 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 a.s.sociations.[130-1] 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 a.s.sociated with the dampness and dews of night, an ancient and wide-spread myth identified her with the G.o.ddess 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."[130-2] 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 t.i.tle, 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 G.o.ddess, 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 G.o.ds toward one, that it is a synthesis not an a.n.a.lysis, 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 wors.h.i.+p many G.o.ds under the figure of one, princ.i.p.ally those whose activities lay in the same direction, or those in some way related among themselves."[131-1]

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,[131-2]

and very generally the ceremonies connected with the crops were regulated by her phases. The Nicaraguans said that the G.o.d of rains, Quiateot, rose in the east,[131-3] 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;[132-1] 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."[132-2] This venerable superst.i.tion, 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 G.o.ddess 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 t.i.tle of Yohualticitl, the Lady of Night, she was also in this latter country the guardian of babes, and as Teczistecatl, the cause of generation.[132-3]

Very different is another aspect of the moon G.o.ddess, 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 G.o.ddess 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 G.o.ds 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;"[133-1] in the language of the Algonkins, her name is identical with the words for night, death, cold, sleep, and water.[133-2]

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.[133-3] 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[TN-4] their vitals, till they fall away and miserably perish."[134-1] Who is this woman? In the legend of the Muyscas it is Chia, the moon, who was also G.o.ddess of water and flooded the earth out of spite.[134-2] Her reputation was notoriously bad. The Brazilian mother carefully s.h.i.+elded her infant from the lunar rays, believing that they would produce sickness;[134-3] 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 G.o.ddess Isis, the Moisture, the Moon.[134-4]

We have here the key to many myths. Take that of Centeotl, the Aztec G.o.ddess of Maize. She was said at times to appear as a woman of surpa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s of G.o.ds whose home was in the west, and who produced sickness and pains.[134-5] Here we see the evil aspect of the moon reflected on another G.o.ddess, who was at first solely the patroness of agriculture.

As the G.o.ddess 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 G.o.d_, so in the Aztec, Quiche, and other tongues, the word for _leprous_, _eczematous_, or _syphilitic_, means also _divine_. This bizarre change of meaning is ill.u.s.trated 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.[135-1] 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 G.o.ddess 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.[136-1]

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.[136-2] In later tales this antagonism becomes more and more p.r.o.nounced, 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.[137-1] 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 G.o.ddess, 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 superst.i.tion 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 G.o.ddess. Xochiquetzal, most fecund of Aztec divinities, patroness of love, of s.e.xual pleasure, and of childbirth, was likewise called _Itzcuinan_, which, literally translated, is _b.i.t.c.h-mother_. This strange and to us so repugnant t.i.tle for a G.o.ddess 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 G.o.d _substantialiter_. The priests in this province summoned their attendants to the temples by blowing through an instrument fas.h.i.+oned from a dog's skull.[138-1] This canine canonization explains why in some parts of Peru a priest was called by way of honor _allco_, dog![138-2] 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,[138-3] 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 G.o.d Chantico, whose audacity caused the destruction of the world. The story was that he made a sacrifice to the G.o.ds without observing a preparatory fast, for which he was punished by being changed into a dog. He then invoked the G.o.d of death to deliver him, which attempt to evade a just punishment so enraged the divinities that they immersed the world in water.[139-1]

During a storm on our northern lakes the Indians think no offering so likely to appease the angry water G.o.d who is raising the tempest as a dog. Therefore they hasten to tie the feet of one and toss him overboard.[139-2] One meets constantly in their tales and superst.i.tions 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 s.h.i.+eld. 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."[140-1] To extingish[TN-5] an enemy's fire is to slay him; to light a visitor's fire is to bid him welcome. Fire wors.h.i.+p was closely related to that of the sun, and so much has been said of sun wors.h.i.+p among the aborigines of America that it is well at once to a.s.sign it its true position.

A generation ago it was a fas.h.i.+on very much approved to explain all symbols and myths by the action of this...o...b..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 lat.i.tudes, denies sun wors.h.i.+p among the natives of hot climates; another a.s.serts 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 wors.h.i.+p."[141-1] 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds. The sun with its regular course, its kindly warmth, its beneficent action, no wise inspires that sentiment. It conjures no phantasms to appal the superst.i.tious 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 G.o.d, and at most but one of his emblems.[142-1] 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."[142-2] The alleged sun wors.h.i.+p of the Cherokees rests on testimony modern, doubtful, and unsupported.[142-3] In North America the Natchez alone were avowed wors.h.i.+ppers 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 wors.h.i.+p almost altogether in that of this element.[143-1]

The inst.i.tutions 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 superst.i.tions. 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."[144-1] 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 ma.s.s 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.[144-2] 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.[144-3] Such an expression was wholly in the spirit of his race. The greatest feast of the Delawares was that to their "grandfather, the fire."[144-4] "Their fire burns forever," was the Algonkin figure of speech to express the immortality of their G.o.ds.[144-5] "The ancient G.o.d, the Father and Mother of all G.o.ds," says an Aztec prayer, "is the G.o.d of the Fire which is in the centre of the court with four walls, and which is covered with gleaming feathers like unto wings;"[144-6] 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 inst.i.tuted. 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 ent.i.tled to this peculiar honor.[145-1] The first gave as the reason for such an exceptional custom, that the members of such an ill.u.s.trious 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;[145-2] 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.[145-3] Strangely, enough, we thus find a sort of baptism by fire deemed essential to a higher life beyond the grave.

Another a.n.a.logy strengthened the symbolic force of fire as life. This is that which exists between the sensation of warmth and those pa.s.sions whose physiological end is the perpetuation of the species. We see how native it is to the mind from such coa.r.s.e expressions as "hot l.u.s.t," "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 wors.h.i.+p of fire glided into that of the reproductive principle, into extravagances of chast.i.ty and lewdness, into the shocking orgies of the so-called phallic wors.h.i.+p.

Some have supposed that a s.e.xual dualism pervades all natural religions and this too has been a.s.sumed 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 s.e.xual instincts, are the unvarying themes of primitive mythology. So far as the red race is concerned, this is a most gratuitous a.s.sumption.

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 wors.h.i.+p of the pa.s.sions. Apparently it was grafted upon or rose out of that of fire by the a.n.a.logy I have pointed out. Thus the Mexican G.o.d of fire was supposed to govern the generative proclivities,[146-1] 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--