e of the Great Spirit of the four winds speaking from the
clouds and admonishing them that the time of corn planting was at
hand.[151-2] The flames kindled by the lightning were of a sacred
nature, proper to be employed in lighting the fires of the religious
rites, but on no account to be profaned by the base uses of daily life.
When the flash entered the ground it scattered in all directions those
stones, such as the flint, which betray their supernal origin by a gleam
of fire when struck. These were the thunderbolts, and from such an one,
significantly painted red, the Dakotas averred their race had
proceeded.[151-3] For are we not all in a sense indebted for our lives
to fire? "There is no end to the fancies entertained by the Sioux
concerning thunder," observes Mrs. Eastman. They typified the
paradoxical nature of the storm under the character of the giant Haokah.
To him cold was heat, and heat cold; when sad he laughed, when merry
groaned; the sides of his face and his eyes were of different colors and
expressions; he wore horns or a forked headdress to represent the
lightning, and with his hands he hurled the meteors. His manifestations
were fourfold, and one of the four winds was the drum-stick he used to
produce the thunder.[152-1]

Omitting many others, enough that the sameness of this conception is
illustrated by the myth of Tupa, highest god and first man of the Tupis
of Brazil. During his incarnation, he taught them agriculture, gave them
fire, the cane, and the pisang, and now in the form of a huge bird
sweeps over the heavens, watching his children and watering their crops,
admonishing them of his presence by the mighty sound of his voice, the
rustling of his wings, and the flash of his eye. These are the thunder,
the lightning, and the roar of the tempest. He is depicted with horns;
he was one of four brothers, and only after a desperate struggle did he
drive his fraternal rivals from the field. In his worship, the priests
place pebbles in a dry gourd, deck it with feathers and arrows, and
rattling it vigorously, reproduce in miniature the tremendous drama of
the storm.[152-2]

As nations rose in civilization these fancies put on a more complex form
and a more poetic fulness. Throughout the realm of the Incas the
Peruvians venerated as creator of all things, maker of heaven and earth,
and ruler of the firmament, the god Ataguju. The legend was that from
him proceeded the first of mortals, the man Guamans