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We are told (Gen. ii., 21) that "the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam," and while he slept God made Eve out of one of his ribs.

According to the Quiche tradition, there were four men from whom the races of the world descended (probably a recollection of the red, black, yellow, and white races); and these men were without wives, and the Creator made wives for them "while they slept."

Some wicked misanthrope referred to these traditions when he said, "And man's first sleep became his last repose."

In Genesis (chap. iii., 22), "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever:"

therefore God drove him out of the garden. In the Quiche legends we are told, "The gods feared that they had made men too perfect, and they breathed a cloud of mist over their vision."

When the ancestors of the Quiches migrated to America the Divinity parted the sea for their passage, as the Red Sea was parted for the Israelites.

The story of Samson is paralleled in the history of a hero named Zipanca, told of in the "Popol Vuh," who, being captured by his enemies and placed in a pit, pulled down the building in which his captors had assembled, and killed four hundred of them.

"There were giants in those days," says the Bible. A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient race of giants called Quinames.

This parallelism runs through a hundred particulars:

Both the Jews and Mexicans worshipped toward the east.

Both called the south "the right hand of the world."

Both burnt incense toward the four corners of the earth.

Confession of sin and sacrifice of atonement were common to both peoples.

Both were punctilious about washings and ablutions.

Both believed in devils, and both were afflicted with leprosy.

Both considered women who died in childbirth as worthy of honor as soldiers who fell in battle.

Both punished adultery with stoning to death.

As David leaped and danced before the ark of the Lord, so did the Mexican monarchs before their idols.

Both had an ark, the abiding-place of an invisible god.

Both had a species of serpent-worship.

GREAT SERPENT MOUND, OHIO.

Compare our representation of the great serpent-mound in Adams County, Ohio, with the following description of a great serpent-mound in Scotland:

"Serpent-worship in the West.--Some additional light appears to have been thrown upon ancient serpent-worship in the West by the recent archaeological explorations of Mr. John S. Phene, F.G.S., F.R.G.S., in Scotland. Mr. Phene has just investigated a curious earthen mound in Glen Feechan, Argyleshire, referred to by him, at the late meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh, as being in the form of a serpent or saurian. The mound, says the Scotsman, is a most perfect one. The head is a large cairn, and the body of the earthen reptile 300 feet long; and in the centre of the head there were evidences, when Mr. Phene first visited it, of an altar having been placed there. The position with regard to Ben Cruachan is most remarkable. The three peaks are seen over the length of the reptile when a person is standing on the head, or cairn. The shape can only be seen so as to be understood when looked down upon from an elevation, as the outline cannot be understood unless the whole of it can be seen. This is most perfect when the spectator is on the head of the animal form, or on the lofty rock to the west of it.

This mound corresponds almost entirely with one 700 feet long in America, an account of which was lately published, after careful survey, by Mr. Squier. The altar toward the head in each case agrees. In the American mound three rivers (also objects of worship with the ancients) were evidently identified. The number three was a sacred number in all ancient mythologies. The sinuous winding and articulations of the vertebral spinal arrangement are anatomically perfect in the Argyleshire mound. The gentlemen present with Mr. Phene during his investigation state that beneath the cairn forming the head of the animal was found a megalithic chamber, in which was a quantity of charcoal and burnt earth and charred nutshells, a flint instrument, beautifully and minutely serrated at the edge, and burnt bones. The back or spine of the serpent, which, as already stated, is 300 feet long, was found, beneath the peat moss, to be formed by a careful adjustment of stones, the formation of which probably prevented the structure from being obliterated by time and weather." (Pall Mall Gazette.)

STONE IMPLEMENTS OF EUROPE AND AMERICA

We find a striking likeness between the works of the Stone Age in America and Europe, as shown in the figures here given.

The same singular custom which is found among the Jews and the Hindoos, for "a man to raise up seed for his deceased brother by marrying his widow," was found among the Central American nations. (Las Casas, MS.

"Hist. Apoloq.," cap. ccxiii., ccxv. Torquemada, "Monarq. Ind.," tom.

ii., 377-8.)

No one but the Jewish high-priest might enter the Holy of Holies. A similar custom obtained in Peru. Both ate the flesh of the sacrifices of atonement; both poured the blood of the sacrifice on the earth; they sprinkled it, they marked persons with it, they smeared it upon walls and stones. The Mexican temple, like the Jewish, faced the east. "As among the Jews the ark was a sort of portable temple, in which the Deity was supposed to be continually present, so among the Mexicans, the Cherokees, and the Indians of Michoacan and Honduras, an ark was held in the highest veneration, and was considered an object too sacred to be touched by any but the priests." (Kingsborough, "Mex. Antiq., "vol.

viii., p.258.)

The Peruvians believed that the rainbow was a sign that the earth would not be again destroyed by a deluge. (Ibid., p. 25.)

The Jewish custom of laying the sins of the people upon the head of an animal, and turning him out into the wilderness, had its counterpart among the Mexicans, who, to cure a fever, formed a dog of maize paste and left it by the roadside, saying the first passer-by would carry away the illness. (Dorman, "Prim. Super.," p. 59.) Jacob's ladder had its duplicate in the vine or tree of the Ojibbeways, which led from the earth to heaven, up and down which the spirits passed. (Ibid., p. 67.)

Both Jews and Mexicans offered water to a stranger that he might wash his feet; both ate dust in token of humility; both anointed with oil; both sacrificed prisoners; both periodically separated the women, and both agreed in the strong and universal idea of uncleanness connected with that period.

Both believed in the occult power of water, and both practised baptism.

"Then the Mexican midwife gave the child to taste of the water, putting her moistened fingers in its mouth, and said, 'Take this; by this thou hast to live on the earth, to grow and to flourish; through this we get all things that support existence on the earth; receive it.' Then with moistened fingers she touched the breast of the child, and said, 'Behold the pure water that washes and cleanses thy heart, that removes all filthiness; receive it: may the goddess see good to purify And cleanse thine heart.' Then the midwife poured water upon the head of the child, saying, 'O my grandson--my son--take this water of the Lord of the world, which is thy life, invigorating and refreshing, washing and cleansing. I pray that this celestial water, blue and light blue, may enter into thy body, and there live; I pray that it may destroy in thee and put away from thee all the things evil and adverse that were given thee before the beginning of the world. . . . Wheresoever thou art in this child, O thou hurtful thing, begone! leave it, put thyself apart; for now does it live anew, and anew is it born; now again is it purified and cleansed; now again is it shaped and engendered by our mother, the goddess of water." (Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii., p. 372.)

Here we find many resemblances to the Christian ordinance of baptism: the pouring of the water on the head, the putting of the fingers in the mouth, the touching of the breast, the new birth, and the washing away of the original sin. The Christian rite, we know, was not a Christian invention, but was borrowed from ancient times, from the great storehouse of Asiatic traditions and beliefs.

The Mexicans hung up the heads of their sacrificed enemies; this was also a Jewish custom:

"And the Lord said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel. And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baal-peor."

(Numb., xxv., 4, 5.)

The Scythians, Herodotus tells us, scalped their enemies, and carried the scalp at the pommel of their saddles; the Jews probably scalped their enemies:

"But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his trespasses." (Psa., lxviii., 21.)

The ancient Scandinavians practised scalping. When Harold Harefoot seized his rival, Alfred, with six hundred followers, he "had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled." (Taine's "Hist.

Eng. Lit.," p. 35.)

Herodotus describes the Scythian mode of taking the scalp: "He makes a cut round the head near the ears, and shakes the skull out." This is precisely the Indian custom. "The more scalps a man has," says Herodotus, "the more highly he is esteemed among them."

The Indian scalp-lock is found on the Egyptian monuments as one of the characteristics of the Japhetic Libyans, who shaved all the head except one lock in the middle.

The Mantchoos of Tartary wear a scalp-lock, as do the modern Chinese.

Byron describes the heads of the dead Tartars under the walls of Corinth, devoured by the wild dogs:

"Crimson and green were the shawls of their wear, And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair, All the rest was shaven and bare."

These resemblances are so striking and so numerous that repeated attempts have been made to prove that the inhabitants of America are the descendants of the Jews; some have claimed that they represented "the lost tribes" of that people. But the Jews were never a maritime or emigrating people; they formed no colonies; and it is impossible to believe (as has been asserted) that they left their flocks and herds, marched across the whole face of Asia, took ships and sailed across the greatest of the oceans to a continent of the existence of which they had no knowledge.

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.

"Nothing here but it doth change into something rich and strange."

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