Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/640

624 practice in insular and continental Australasia, Northern Asia, and Central America.

Curious are the forms under which many people have figured the sun and moon. The simplest are the disk-forms, with or without rays, which are of frequent occurrence. On a temple of Palenque, while the sun has this form, the moon is represented as a shell-shaped vase or a spiral shell filled with water, out of which a hare is creeping. Squier found similar representations painted on the rocks in Nicaragua. In pictures ascribed to the Toltecs, the four great Mexican gods are bearing the eye-dotted sky on their shoulders and arms, while the sun-god and the moon-god are indicated under the symbols of the tiger and the hare—a form of representation that has extensively spread in North America. In the ancient Kami religion of the Japanese, the moon was worshiped as a fox. The Caffres and the Esquimaux ascribed an independent life to these planets, the latter people holding that they were human beings who had ascended to heaven, and conceiving the Moon to be the younger brother of the female Sun. In Peru the Moon-mother was both sister and wife of the Sun, like Osiris and Isis in Egypt. In the Lithuanian folk-songs the Moon takes the Sun to wife, and the Morning-Star is their daughter. The red Mintiras of the Malay Peninsula regard both Sun and Moon as women. In Southern Australia, among the Mbokobis in South America, and in the old Slavic sagas, the Moon is a man, and to the Khasias of Northwestern India he is the son-in-law of the Sun. By the Hurons the Moon is called the creator of the earth and grandmother of the Sun; in the myths of the Ottawas it is an old woman with a pleasant white face—the sister of the Day-Star. The Chiquitos call the Moon their mother, and the Navajos make it a rider on a mule. Where the planets are worshiped, preference in honors is generally accorded to the brighter and more conspicuous star of day. But the Botocudos of Brazil give the higher place to the Moon, and derive most of the phenomena of nature from it; and in Central America and Hayti are also people who hold the Moon in no less honor. Curiously, these people find their counterparts among tribes of Western, Southern, and Central Africa, who rejoice with dancing and feasts at each appearance of the new moon, and expect an improvement of their condition from its beneficent influence; and they are not so far removed from the superstitious women of civilized Europe and America who wait for the increase of the moon to change their dwelling, to cut their hair, to be married, and to baptize their children. A belief existed among the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, the Natchez of the Mississippi, and the Appalachians of Florida, that the sun was the radiant abode of dead chiefs and braves. To the Esquimaux of Labrador belongs the honor of having discovered that the moon was the paradise for the good, while the wicked were consigned to a hole in the earth; although some of the South American Indians and the