moonlit land; there they saw the Moon approaching as from behind a hill, they knew her at the first sight, she was an aged woman with white face and pleasing air; speaking kindly to them, she led them to her brother the Sun, and he carried them with him in his course and sent them home with promises of happy life.[1] As the Egyptian Osiris and Isis were at once brother and sister, and husband and wife, so it was with the Peruvian Sun and Moon, Ynti and Quilla, father and mother of the Incas, whose sister-marriage thus had in their religion at once a meaning and a justification.[2] The myths of other countries, where such relations of sex may not appear, carry on the same lifelike personification in telling the ever-reiterated, never tedious tale of day and night. Thus to the Mexicans it was an ancient hero who, when the old sun was burnt out, and had left the world in darkness, sprang into a huge fire, descended into the shades below, and arose deified and glorious in the east as Tonatiuh the Sun. After him there leapt in another hero, but now the fire had grown dim, and he arose only in milder radiance as Metztli the Moon.[3]
If it be objected that all this may be mere expressive form of speech, like a modern poet's fanciful metaphor, there is evidence which no such objection can stand against. When the Aleutians thought that if anyone gave offence to the moon, he would fling down stones on the offender and kill him,[4] or when the moon came down to an Indian squaw, appearing in the form of a beautiful woman with a child in her arms, and demanding an offering of tobacco and fur robes,[5] what conceptions of personal life could be
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Algic Researches,' vol. ii. p. 54; compare 'Tanner's Narrative,' p. 317; see also 'Prose Edda,' i. 11; 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' p. 327.
- ↑ Prescott, 'Peru,' vol. i. p. 86; Garcilaso de la Vega, 'Comm. Real.' i. c. 15, iii. c. 21.
- ↑ Torquemada, 'Monarquia Indiana,' vi. 42; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 9; Sahagun in Kingsborough, 'Antiquities of Mexico.'
- ↑ Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 59.
- ↑ Le Jeune, in 'Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,' 1639, p. 88.
