400 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 194 5 



to select lucky and unlucky days, and their astronomical observations 

 were so accurate that they were able to foretell eclipses. Among all 

 these tribes there was a tendency to transfer the attributes of other 

 nature gods to the sun as the Sun God grew in importance. 



However, it is interesting to note that as between the Aztecs and the 

 Inca, ritualistic attitudes toward the sun differed widely. In each 

 instance we have a picture of polytheism in the process of turning into 

 monotheism through increased recognition of the vital role played by 

 the sun in the life and affairs of man. 



The next stage in this process is where the astronomical sun is more 

 or less completely divorced from the god which developed from the sun, 

 to become a supreme god of life, culminating in the recent stages of 

 civilization where the mechanistic or astronomical concept of the uni- 

 verse supplies the explanation of the heavenly bodies, and the god 

 idea is completely separated from immediate connection with them. 



In one sense this completes a curious cycle, since otherwise it is only 

 among the most primitive tribes that we find the sun regarded as an 

 inanimate object. 



Among the American Indians this cycle was never completed, but 

 reached its greatest advance among the Middle American agricultural 

 civilizations. 



The range of ideas concerning the sun varied from the naive idea 

 that it was a ball of fire, convenient, but not essential, to man, to the 

 elaborate astronomical concepts of the Maya, who, while they did not 

 understand the true nature of the universe, nevertheless observed so 

 accurately the movements of the heavenly bodies that they had worked 

 out the periods of the sun, the moon, and the planets more accurately 

 than any other people in the world up to their time. 



It would be interesting, though futile, to speculate on what their 

 achievements might have been had not European civilization inter- 

 vened. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

 Adair^ James. 



1775. The history of the American Indians. London. 

 Barrett, S. A. 



1933. Porno myths. Bull. Public Mus. City of Milwaukee, vol. 25. 

 Frazer, Sir James George. 



1926. The worship of nature, vol. 1. New York. 

 Gifford, E. W., and Block, G. H. 



1930. California^ Indian nights entertainments. Glendale. 

 Parsons, Elsie Clews. 



1939. Pueblo Indian religion. Univ. Chicago Publ. Anthrop., Ethnol. Ser. 

 Steward, Julian H. 



1943. Some western Shoshoni myths. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. Bull. 136, Anthrop 

 Pap. No. 31. 

 Swanton, John R. 



1911. Indian tribes of the lower Mississippi Valley and adjacent coast of the 

 Gulf of Mexico. Bur. Amer. Elhuol. Bull. 43. 



