trands of Godheim. Relics of
this belief are found in the Koran which describes the bridge _el
Sirat_, thin as a hair and sharp as a scimetar,[TN-13] stretched in a
single span from heaven to earth; in the Persian legend, where the
rainbow arch Chinevad is flung across the gloomy depths between this
world and the home of the happy; and even in the current Christian
allegory which represents the waters of the mythical Jordan rolling
between us and the Celestial City.

How strange at first sight does it seem that the Hurons and Iroquois
should have told the earliest missionaries that after death the soul
must cross a deep and swift river on a bridge formed by a single slender
tree most lightly supported, where it had to defend itself against the
attacks of a dog?[248-1] If only they had expressed this belief, it
might have passed for a coincidence merely. But the Athapascas
(Chepewyans) also told of a great water, which the soul must cross in a
stone canoe; the Algonkins and Dakotas, of a stream bridged by an
enormous snake, or a narrow and precipitous rock, and the Araucanians of
Chili of a sea in the west, in crossing which the soul was required to
pay toll to a malicious old woman. Were it unluckily impecunious, she
deprived it of an eye.[248-2] With the Aztecs this water was called
Chicunoapa, the Nine Rivers. It was guarded by a dog and a green dragon,
to conciliate which the dead were furnished with slips of paper by way
of toll. The Greenland Eskimos thought that the waters roared through
an unfathomable abyss over which there was no other bridge than a wheel
slippery with ice, forever revolving with fearful rapidity, or a path
narrow as a cord with nothing to hold on by. On the other side sits a
horrid old woman gnashing her teeth and tearing her hair with rage. As
each soul approaches she burns a feather under its nose; if it faints
she seizes it for her prisoner, but if the soul's guardian spirit can
overcome her, it passes through in safety.[249-1]

The similarity to the passage of the soul across the Styx, and the toll
of the obolus to Charon is in the Aztec legend still more striking, when
we remember that the Styx was the ninth head of Oceanus (omitting the
Cocytus, often a branch of the Styx). The Nine Rivers probably refer to
the nine Lords of the Night, ancient Aztec deities guarding the
nocturnal hours, and introduced into their calendar. The Tupis and
Caribs, the Mayas and Creeks, entertained very simi