e first puff should be to the
sky, and then one to each of the corners of the earth, or the cardinal
points.[70-1] These were the spirits who made and governed the earth,
and under whatever difference of guise the uncultivated fancy portrayed
them, they were the leading figures in the tales and ceremonies of
nearly every tribe of the red race. These were the divine powers
summoned by the Chipeway magicians when initiating neophytes into the
mysteries of the meda craft. They were asked to a lodge of four poles,
to four stones that lay before its fire, there to remain four days, and
attend four feasts. At every step of the proceeding this number or its
multiples were repeated.[71-1] With their neighbors the Dakotas the
number was also distinctly sacred; it was intimately inwoven in all
their tales concerning the wakan power and the spirits of the air, and
their religious rites. The artist Catlin has given a vivid description
of the great annual festival of the Mandans, a Dakota tribe, and brings
forward with emphasis the ceaseless reiteration of this number from
first to last.[71-2] He did not detect its origin in the veneration of
the cardinal points, but the information that has since been furnished
of the myths of this stock leaves no doubt that such was the case.[71-3]

Proximity of place had no part in this similarity of rite. In the grand
commemorative festival of the Creeks called the Busk, which wiped out
the memory of all crimes but murder, which reconciled the proscribed
criminal to his nation and atoned for his guilt, when the new fire was
kindled and the green corn served up, every dance, every invocation,
every ceremony, was shaped and ruled by the application of the number
four and its multiples in every imaginable relation. So it was at that
solemn probation which the youth must undergo to prove himself worthy of
the dignities of manhood and to ascertain his guardian spirit; here
again his fasts, his seclusions, his trials, were all laid down in
fourfold arrangement.[72-1]

Not alone among these barbarous tribes were the cardinal points thus the
foundation of the most solemn mysteries of religion. An excellent
authority relates that the Aztecs of Micla, in Guatemala, celebrated
their chief festival four times a year, and that four priests solemnized
its rites. They commenced by invoking and offering incense to the sky
and the four cardinal points; they conducted the human victim four times
around the templ