n wakes from his slumbers, faces the rising sun,
and prays. The east is before him; by it he learns all other directions;
it is to him what the north is to the needle; with reference to it he
assigns in his mind the position of the three other cardinal
points.[91-1] There is the starting place of the celestial fires, the
home of the sun, the womb of the morning. It represents in space the
beginning of things in time, and as the bright and glorious creatures of
the sky come forth thence, man conceits that his ancestors also in
remote ages wandered from the orient; there in the opinion of many in
both the old and new world was the cradle of the race; there in Aztec
legend was the fabled land of Tlapallan, and the wind from the east was
called the wind of Paradise, Tlalocavitl.

From this direction came, according to the almost unanimous opinion of
the Indian tribes, those hero gods who taught them arts and religion,
thither they returned, and from thence they would again appear to resume
their ancient sway. As the dawn brings light, and with light is
associated in every human mind the ideas of knowledge, safety,
protection, majesty, divinity, as it dispels the spectres of night, as
it defines the cardinal points, and brings forth the sun and the day,
it occupied the primitive mind to an extent that can hardly be magnified
beyond the truth. It is in fact the central figure in most natural
religions.

The west, as the grave of the heavenly luminaries, or rather as their
goal and place of repose, brings with it thoughts of sleep, of death, of
tranquillity, of rest from labor. When the evening of his days was come,
when his course was run, and man had sunk from sight, he was supposed to
follow the sun and find some spot of repose for his tired soul in the
distant west. There, with general consent, the tribes north of the Gulf
of Mexico supposed the happy hunting grounds; there, taught by the same
analogy, the ancient Aryans placed the Nerriti, the exodus, the land of
the dead. "The old notion among us," said on one occasion a
distinguished chief of the Creek nation, "is that when we die, the
spirit goes the way the sun goes, to the west, and there joins its
family and friends who went before it."[92-1]

In the northern hemisphere the shadows fall to the north, thence blow
cold and furious winds, thence come the snow and early thunder. Perhaps
all its primitive inhabitants, of whatever race, thought it the seat of
the might