he passions,
but no sexual dualism in myths, nor any phallic worship in
America.--Synthesis of the worship 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 gods 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 snatching away his fellows, constantly aiming their
invisible shafts at himself. Fire, food, and water were the gods 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 assign the priority to water.
It was the first of all things, the parent of all things. Even the gods
themselves were born of water, said the Greeks and the Aztecs.
Cosmogonies reach no further than the primeval ocean that rolled its
shoreless 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,
Goddess 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 analogy 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.