re is little
question that taking men as a whole they are mainly optimistic in
their judgments respecting the gifts of earth and the glories of
heaven. Mr. Brinton, in reference to the imagined destructiveness of
the water deity, writes: "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.
Taking, however, American religions as a whole, water is far more
frequently represented as producing beneficent effects than the
reverse." [262]

"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, 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, thus hinting how this
connection originated." [263] "The Muyscas of the high plains of
Bogota were once, they said, savages without agriculture, religion,
or law; but there came to them from the east an old and bearded
man, Bochica, the child of the sun, and he taught them to till the
fields, to clothe themselves, to worship the gods, to become a
nation. But Bochica had a wicked, beautiful wife, Huythaca, who
loved to spite and spoil her husband's work; and she it was who
made the river swell till the land was covered by a flood, and but a
few of mankind escaped upon the mountain tops. Then Bochica was
wroth, and he drove the wicked Huythaca from the earth, and made
her the moon, for there had been no moon before; and he cleft the
rocks and made the mighty cataract of Tequendama, to let the
deluge flow away. Then, when the land was dry, he gave to the
remnant of mankind the year and its periodic sacrifices, and the
worship of the sun. Now the people who told this myth had not
forgotten, what indeed we might guess without their help, that
Bochica was himself Zuhe, the sun, and Huytheca, the sun's wife,
the moon." [264] This interesting and instructive legend, to which
we alluded before in a brief quotation from Mr. Brinton, is worthy
of reproduction in its fuller form, and fitly concludes our moon
mythology and worship, as it presents a synoptical view of the chief
points to which our attention has been turned. It shows us primitive
or primeval man, the dawn of civilization, the daybreak of religion,
the upgrowth of national