littoral and
make their way to America by the Aleutian route there was a further
infiltration of new ideas. But when more venturesome sailors began to
navigate the open seas and exploit Polynesia, for centuries[150] there
was a more or less constant influx of customs and beliefs, which were
drawn from Egypt and Babylonia, from the Mediterranean and East Africa,
from India and Indonesia, China and Japan, Cambodia and Oceania. One and
the same fundamental idea, such as the attributes of the serpent as a
water-god, reached America in an infinite variety of guises, Egyptian,
Babylonian, Indian, Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese, and from this
amazing jumble of confusion the local priesthood of Central America
built up a system of beliefs which is distinctively American, though
most of the ingredients and the principles of synthetic composition were
borrowed from the Old World.

Every possible phase of the early history of the dragon-story and all
the ingredients which in the Old World went to the making of it have
been preserved in American pictures and legends in a bewildering variety
of forms and with an amazing luxuriance of complicated symbolism and
picturesque ingenuity. In America, as in India and Eastern Asia, the
power controlling water was identified both with a serpent (which in the
New World, as in the Old, was often equipped with such inappropriate and
arbitrary appendages, as wings, horns and crests) and a god, who was
either associated or confused with an elephant. Now many of the
attributes of these gods, as personifications of the life-giving powers
of water, are identical with those of the Babylonian god Ea and the
Egyptian Osiris, and their reputations as warriors with the respective
sons and representatives, Marduk and Horus. The composite animal of
Ea-Marduk, the "sea-goat" (the Capricornus of the Zodiac), was also the
vehicle of Varuna in India whose relationship to Indra was in some
respects analogous to that of Ea to Marduk in Babylonia.[151] The Indian
"sea-goat" or _Makara_ was in fact intimately associated both with
Varuna and with Indra. This monster assumed a great variety of forms,
such as the crocodile, the dolphin, the sea-serpent or dragon, or
combinations of the heads of different animals with a fish's body (Fig.
14). Amongst these we find an elephant-headed form of the _makara_,
which was adopted as far east as Indonesia and as far west as Scotland.

[Illustration: Fig. 14.

A. The so-ca