eat Fire (_wah sil_), clearly pointing to a prior adoration of
that element. The heliolatry organized principally for political ends by
the Incas of Peru, stands alone in the religions of the red race. Those
shrewd legislators at an early date officially announced that Inti, the
sun, their own elder brother, was ruler of the cohorts of heaven by like
divine right that they were of the four corners of the earth. This
scheme ignominiously failed, as every attempt to fetter the liberty of
conscience must and should. The later Incas finally indulged publicly in
heterodox remarks, and compromised the matter by acknowledging a
divinity superior even to their brother, the sun, as we have seen in a
previous chapter.

The myths of creation never represent the sun as anterior to the world,
but as manufactured by the "old people" (Navajos), as kindled and set
going by the first of men (Algonkins), or as freed from some cave by a
kindly deity (Haitians). It is always spoken of as a fire; only in Peru
and Mexico had the precession of the equinoxes been observed, and
without danger of error we can merge the consideration of its worship
almost altogether in that of this element.[143-1]

The institutions of a perpetual fire, of obtaining new fire, and of
burning the dead, prevailed extensively in the New World. In the present
discussion the origin of such practices, rather than the ceremonies with
which they were attended, have an interest. The savage knew that fire
was necessary to his life. Were it lost, he justly foreboded dire
calamities and the ruin of his race. Therefore at stated times with due
solemnity he produced it anew by friction or the flint, or else was
careful to keep one fire constantly alive. These not unwise precautions
soon fell to mere superstitions. If the Aztec priest at the stated time
failed to obtain a spark from his pieces of wood, if the sacred fire by
chance became extinguished, the end of the world or the destruction of
mankind was apprehended. "You know it was a saying among our
ancestors," said an Iroquois chief in 1753, "that when the fire at
Onondaga goes out, we shall no longer be a people."[144-1] So deeply
rooted was this notion, that the Catholic missionaries in New Mexico
were fain to wink at it, and perform the sacrifice of the mass in the
same building where the flames were perpetually burning, that were not
to be allowed to die until Montezuma and the fabled glories of ancient
Anahuac with its