worshipped the 'panes' bird, which seems to have been an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood, and the body burned. Yet the natives maintained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacrificed each year, and more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages.[1] Among the comparatively cultured Peruvians, Acosta describes another theory of celestial archetypes. Speaking of star-deities, he says that shepherds venerated a certain star called Sheep, another star called Tiger protected men from tigers, &c.: 'And generally, of all the animals and birds there are on the earth, they believed that a like one lived in heaven, in whose charge were their procreation and increase, and thus they accounted of divers stars, such as that they call Chacana, and Topatorca, and Mamana, and Mizco, and Miquiquiray, and other such, so that in a manner it appears that they were drawing towards the dogma of the Platonic ideas.'[2] The North American Indians also have speculated as to the common ancestors or deities of species. One missionary notes down their idea as he found it in 1634. 'They say, moreover, that all the animals of each species have an elder brother, who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals, and this elder brother is marvellously great and powerful. The elder brother of the beavers, they told me, is perhaps as large as our cabin.' Another early account is that each species of animals has its archetype in the land of souls; there exists, for example, a manitu or archetype of all oxen, which animates all oxen.[3] Here, again, occurs a noteworthy correspondence with the ideas of a distant race. In Buyán, the island paradise of Russian myth, there
- ↑ Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 105.
- ↑ Acosta, 'Historia de las Indias,' book v. c. iv.; Rivero & Tschudi, pp. 161, 179; J. G. Müller, p. 365.
- ↑ Le Jeune in 'Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,' 1634, p. 13. Lafitau, 'Mœurs des Sauvages,' vol. i. p. 370. See also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194; Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 327.
