many epochs in his history. By its aid many
arts become possible, and it is a civilizer in more ways than one. In
the figurative language of the red race, it is constantly used as "an
emblem of peace, happiness, and abundance."[140-1] To extingish[TN-5] an
enemy's fire is to slay him; to light a visitor's fire is to bid him
welcome. Fire worship was closely related to that of the sun, and so
much has been said of sun worship among the aborigines of America that
it is well at once to assign it its true position.

A generation ago it was a fashion very much approved to explain all
symbols and myths by the action of this orb on nature. This short and
easy method with mythology has, in Carlylian phrase, had its bottom
pulled from under it in these later times. Nowhere has it manifested its
inefficiency more palpably than in America. One writer, while thus
explaining the religions of the tribes of colder regions and higher
latitudes, denies sun worship among the natives of hot climates; another
asserts that only among the latter did it exist at all; while a third
lays down the maxim that the religion of the red race everywhere "was
but a modification of Sun or Fire worship."[141-1] All such sweeping
generalizations are untrue, and must be so. No one key can open all the
arcana of symbolism. Man devised means as varied as nature herself to
express the idea of God within him. The sun was but one of these, and
not the first nor the most important. Fear, said the wise Epicurean,
first made the gods. The sun with its regular course, its kindly warmth,
its beneficent action, no wise inspires that sentiment. It conjures no
phantasms to appal the superstitious fancy, and its place in primitive
mythology is conformably inferior. The myths of the Eskimos and
northern Athapascas omit its action altogether. The Algonkins by no
means imagined it the highest god, and at most but one of his
emblems.[142-1] That it often appears in their prayers is true, but this
arose from the fact that in many of their dialects, as well as in the
language of the Mayas and others, the word for heaven or sky was
identical with that for sun, and the former, as I have shown, was the
supposed abode of deity, "the wigwam of the Great Spirit."[142-2] The
alleged sun worship of the Cherokees rests on testimony modern,
doubtful, and unsupported.[142-3] In North America the Natchez alone
were avowed worshippers of this luminary. Yet they adored it under the
name Gr