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 to 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."
The rite of circumcision dates back to the first days of Phoenicia, 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 Phoenicia. The boys swung the censors as censors had been swung in the adoration of Bacchus. The girdle and cassock of the priests came from Persia; the veil and tonsure were from Egypt; the alb and chasuble were prescribed by Numa Pompilius; the stole was borrowed from the official who used to throw it on the back of the victim that was to be sacrificed; the white surplice was the same as described by Juvenal and Ovid."