THE ABORIGINES OF NORTH AMERICA. 241 
India; but the ceremonials remind us of the ritual of the 
temple in Jerusalem, and the circumcision, baptism, and other 
rites impress us with avery strange sense of recognition. We 
are greatly amazed as we think of the resemblance, and do not 
wonder that the superstitious Spaniards went to work to 
destroy these symbols of worship, thinking that the devil had 
counterfeited the Bible and presented it to these barbaric 
races. The Orientalists look upon the hieroglyphics of the Hast 
and study for words, but they do not often find in mythology, 
archeology, or philology, such striking resemblances to the 
Jewish ritual as we in America do in these very barbaric 
ornaments, symbols, and ceremoniesof the American Aborigines. 
Many of the Orientalists reduce the religious symbols, myths, 
and expressions of the eastern races to an allegory, and recog- 
nise in them a primitive sun-worship. In this way they 
interpret Egyptian, Hindoo, and Scandinavian mythology, but 
in America the sun-worship is on the face of things, and the 
moral or personal conceptions are in the background. The 
sacrifices are in their details appalling and full of cruelties, 
but the superstitions at the back of them point to a fearful 
sense of sin. The personifications which are common among 
all the tribes of America and the mythologies which are full of 
personal exploits, show that the divinity in America was always 
regarded as a person. We have no “bright heavens,” no 
All-father, no “shining sky,” no “ thundering Jupiter,” no 
“mighty celestial power”; but the divinity is a hero with 
divine attributes and supernatural powers, or an animal with 
human attributes. It seems sometimes as if the ‘cul- 
ture-heroes” were all of them of the same general character, 
full of remarkable exploits, possessing natural traits, but 
endowed with supernatural powers. We cannot dwell now 
upon the culture-heroes who introduced civilisation, but will 
only refer to them briefly. The White-God of the Aztecs, 
Quetzalcoatl, the bearded god of the Toltecs, the Manco-Capac 
of Peru, Virococha cf Quito, the Montezuma of the Zunis were 
all personal divinities. Below these, among the wild tribes, are 
divinities with human attributes and with human history. 
The Mano-bozho of the Mandans, the Hiawatha Atotarho 
of the Iroquois, the Glooskap of the Abenakis, the Michabo 
of the Algonquins, the loskeha of the Hurons,—all had 
human attributes. Other divinities were prevalent among 
these tribes, but the chief Law-giver and controller of the 
tribes was a culture-hero. Still lower than these was the 
animal divinity who was the creator or restorer, but who was 
represented as the great ‘‘ master of life.’ The conception of 
