the sky.[184-2] Or from the more fragmentary mythology of ruder
nations, proof might be brought of the well nigh universal reception of
these fundamental views. As, for instance, when the Mandans of the Upper
Missouri speak of their first ancestor as a son of the West, who
preserved them at the flood, and whose garb was always of four
milk-white wolf skins;[185-1] and when the Pimos, a people of the valley
of the Rio Gila, relate that their birthplace was where the sun rises,
that there for generations they led a joyous life, until their
beneficent first parent disappeared in the heavens. From that time, say
they, God lost sight of them, and they wandered west, and further west
till they reached their present seats.[185-2] Or I might instance the
Tupis of Brazil, who were named after the first of men, Tupa, he who
alone survived the flood, who was one of four brothers, who is described
as an old man of fair complexion, _un vieillard blanc_,[185-3] and who
is now their highest divinity, ruler of the lightning and the storm,
whose voice is the thunder, and who is the guardian of their nation. But
is it not evident that these and all such legends are but variations of
those already analyzed?

In thus removing one by one the wrappings of symbolism, and displaying
at the centre and summit of these various creeds, He who is throned in
the sky, who comes with the dawn, who manifests himself in the light and
the storm, and whose ministers are the four winds, I set up no new god.
The ancient Israelites prayed to him who was seated above the firmament,
who commanded the morning and caused the day-spring to know its place,
who answered out of the whirlwind, and whose envoys were the four winds,
the four cherubim described with such wealth of imagery in the
introduction to the book of Ezekiel. The Mahometan adores "the clement
and merciful Lord of the Daybreak," whose star is in the east, who rides
on the storm, and whose breath is the wind. The primitive man in the New
World also associated these physical phenomena as products of an
invisible power, conceived under human form, called by name, worshipped
as one, and of whom all related the same myth differing but in
unimportant passages. This was the primeval religion. It was not
monotheism, for there were many other gods; it was not pantheism, for
there was no blending of the cause with the effects; still less was it
fetichism, an adoration of sensuous objects, for these were recog