INDIAN CONCEPTS OF THE SUN — STIRLING 389 



failed to develop a feeling that the passage of time was worth record- 

 ing. The so-called historical calendars, annals, winter counts, notched 

 sticks, and the like are concerned with the recording of events in a 

 vague historical sense and are not really time reckoning. Moreover 

 they were simply intended as memory jogs to a few individuals and 

 were not understood by the people in general. 



To some tribes, such as the Nootka of Vancouver Island, the sun 

 evidently looked like a disk. Apparently this was true of the Aztecs 

 and other Mexican tribes who in stone carving and metallurgy repre- 

 sent the sun as a disk. To other groups it appeared round like a ball, 

 as among the Californians and some Panamanian tribes who carved 

 representations of the sun in the form of a sphere. To others who 

 thought of the firmament as a solid dome-shaped roof, the sun ap- 

 peared to be a round hole through which the light came. A similar 

 idea, like that held by some of the southern Californian tribes, is 

 that a round spot was cleaned off on the sky by the finger of some 

 mythical character, much as one might clean a spot on a dirty window 

 pane letting the light through. 



Many tribes thought of the sun as the actual person of a deity, while 

 others thought of it as an inanimate luminous object controlled by 

 the deity, but not being the deity itself. Therefore when the sun god 

 is mentioned among some Indians it refers directly to the sun, while 

 among others it refers to the deity who controls the sun. The thought 

 of the sun as an inanimate object is not as common as the other, and 

 curiously enough is held by the more primitive groups such as some 

 of the California Indians, where the sun is bandied about by various 

 mythic animals like a loose football. 



The sun is probably the most universally venerated deity among the 

 aboriginal American Indians. Nevertheless there are many tribes 

 where the sun is considered of very minor importance. On the other 

 hand there are many groups who regard it as their principal deity. In 

 general the sun is most venerated among the agricultural tribes, and the 

 more highly advanced the group, the more important does the sun be- 

 come. Thus the peak of sun worship is found among the Inca, the 

 Maya, and the Aztecs, and the sun deity partakes much more of the 

 nature of an abstraction than is the case among the more primitive 

 tribes. 



The moon, among many Indian groups, is regarded as a powerful 

 being, yet frequently wielding an influence that is evil or dangerous, 

 whereas the sun is usually beneficent. In most cases the sun is 

 masculine and the moon feminine, but this is far from being a uni- 

 versal concept. The Eskimo, the Cherokee, and the Yuchi, to name 

 a few, regard the sun as the woman and the moon as the man. In the 

 southwestern part of the United States among the Pueblo Indians and 

 neighboring tribes, and also in southern Alaska and British Columbia, 



