Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/228

210 If we seek the origin of these extraordinary coincidences in opinions and habits, we must go far back of the time of the lost tribes. We must seek it in the relationship of the Jews to the family of Noah, and in the identity of the Noachic race destroyed in the Deluge with the people of the drowned Atlantis.

Nor need it surprise us to find traditions perpetuated for thousands upon thousands of years, especially among a people having a religious priesthood.

The essence of religion is conservatism; little is invented; nothing perishes; change comes from without; and even when one religion is supplanted by another its gods live on as the demons of the new faith, or they pass into the folk-lore and fairy stories of the people. We see Votan, a hero in America, become the god Odin or Woden in Scandinavia; and when his worship as a god dies out Odin survives (as Dr. Dasent has proved) in the Wild Huntsman of the Hartz, and in the Robin Hood (Oodin) of popular legend. The Hellequin of France becomes the Harlequin of our pantomimes. William Tell never existed; he is a myth; a survival of the sun-god Apollo, Indra, who was worshipped on the altars of Atlantis.

The rite of circumcision dates back to the first days of Phœnicia, Egypt, and the Cushites. It, too, was probably an Atlantean custom, invented in the Stone Age. Tens of thousands of years have passed since the Stone Age; the ages of copper, bronze, and iron have intervened; and yet to this day the Hebrew rabbi performs the ceremony of circumcision with a stone knife.

Frothingham says, speaking of St. Peter's Cathedral, in Rome:

"Into what depths of antiquity the ceremonies carried me back! To the mysteries of Eleusis; to the sacrificial rites of Phœnicia. The boys swung the censors as censors had been