CHAPTER V.
THE MYTHS OF WATER, FIRE, AND THE THUNDER-STORM.
Water the oldest element.—Its use in purification.—Holy water.—The Rite of Baptism.—The Water of Life.—Its symbols.—The Vase.—The Moon.—The latter the goddess of love and agriculture, but also of sickness, night, and pain.—Often represented by a dog.—Fire worship under the form of Sun worship.—The perpetual fire.—The new fire—Burning the dead.—A worship of the passions, but no sexual dualism in myths, nor any phallic worship in America.—Synthesis of the worship of Fire, Water, and the Winds in the Thunder-storm, personified as Haokah, Tupa, Catequil, Contici, Heno, Tlaloc, Mixcoatl, and other deities, many of them triune.
The primitive man was a brute in everything but the susceptibility to culture; the chief market of his time was to sleep, fight, and feed; his bodily comfort alone had any importance in his eyes; and his gods were nothing, unless they touched him here. Cold, hunger, thirst, these were the hounds that were ever on his track; these were the fell powers he saw constantly snatching away his fellows, constantly aiming their invisible shafts at himself. Fire, food, and water were the gods that fought on his side; they were the chief figures in his pantheon, his kindliest, perhaps his earliest, divinities.
With a nearly unanimous voice mythologies assign the priority to water. It was the first of all things, the parent of all things. Even the gods themselves were born of water, said the Greeks and the Aztecs. Cosmogonies reach no further than the primeval ocean that rolled its shoreless waves through a timeless night.
“Omnia pontus erant, deerant quoque litora ponto.”
Earth, sun, stars, lay concealed in its fathomless abysses. “All of us,” ran the Mexican baptismal formula, “are children of Chalchihuitlycue, Goddess of Water,” and the like was said by the Peruvians of Mama Cocha, by the Botocudos of Taru, by the natives of Darien of Dobayba, by the Iroquois of Ataensic—all of them mothers of mankind, all personifications of water.
How account for such unanimity? Not by supposing some ancient intercourse between remote tribes, but by the uses of water as the originator and supporter, the essential prerequisite of life. Leaving aside the analogy presented by the motherly waters which nourish the unborn child, nor emphasizing how indispensable it is as a beverage, the many offices this element performs in nature lead easily to the supposition that it must have preceded all else. By quenching thirst, it quickens life; as the dew and the rain it feeds the plant, and when withheld the seed perishes in the ground and forests and flowers alike wither away; as the fountain, the river, and the lake, it enriches the valley, offers safe retreats, and provides store of fishes; as the ocean, it presents the most fitting type of the infinite. It cleanses, it purifies; it produces, it preserves. “Bodies, unless dissolved, cannot act,” is a maxim of the earliest chemistry. Very plausibly, therefore, was it assumed as the source of all things.
The adoration of streams, springs, and lakes, or rather of the spirits their rulers, prevailed everywhere; sometimes avowedly because they provided food, as was the case with the Moxos, who called themselves children of the lake or river on which their village was, and were afraid to migrate lest their parent should be vexed;[124-1] sometimes because they were the means of irrigation, as in Peru, or on more general mythical grounds. A grove by a fountain is in all nature worship the ready-made shrine of the sylphs who live in its limpid waves and chatter mysteriously in its shallows. On such a spot in our Gulf States one rarely fails to find the sacrificial mound of the ancient inhabitants, and on such the natives of Central America were wont to erect their altars (Ximenes). Lakes are the natural centres of civilization. Like the lacustrine villages which the Swiss erected in ante-historic times, like ancient Venice, the city of Mexico was first built on piles in a lake, and for the same reason—protection from attack. Security once obtained, growth and power followed. Thus we can trace the earliest rays of Aztec civilization rising from lake Tezcuco, of the Peruvian from Lake Titicaca, of the Muyscas from Lake Guatavita. These are the centres of legendary cycles. Their waters were hallowed by venerable reminiscences. From the depths of Titicaca rose Viracocha, mythical civilizer of Peru. Guatavita was the bourne of many a foot-sore pilgrim in the ancient empire of the Zac. Once a year the high priest poured the collective offerings of the multitude into its waves, and anointed with oils and glittering with gold dust, dived deep in its midst, professing to hold communion with the goddess who there had her home.[125-1]
Not only does the life of man but his well-being depends on water. As an ablution it invigorates him bodily and mentally. No institution was in higher honor among the North American Indians than the sweat-bath followed by the cold douche. It was popular not only as a remedy in every and any disease, but as a preliminary to a council or an important transaction. Its real value in cold climates is proven by the sustained fondness for the Russian bath in the north of Europe. The Indians, however, with their usual superstition attributed its good effects to some mysterious healing power in water itself. Therefore, when the patient was not able to undergo the usual process, or when his medical attendant was above the vulgar and routine practice of his profession, it was administered on the infinitesimal system. The quack muttered a formula over a gourd filled from a neighboring spring and sprinkled it on his patient, or washed the diseased part, or sucked out the evil spirit and blew it into a bowl of water, and then scattered the liquid on the fire or earth.[125-2]