Mexican teocalli, and the Aonic mounds of North America, compose a form
of architecture equally ancient; which can be traced back over the
plains of Asia, to the period of the original dispersion of mankind.
The temple of Belus, was but a vast pyramid, raised for the worship of
Bel. Originating in the Hamitic tribes, in the alluvial vallies and
flat-lands of Asia Minor, a perfect infatuation, on the subject,
appears to have possessed the early oriental nations, and they carried
the idea into the valley of the Nile, and, indeed, wherever they went.
It appeared to be the substitute of idolatrous nations, on alluvial
lands, for an isolated hill, or promontory. It was at such points that
Baal and Bel were worshipped, and hence the severe injunctions of the
sacred volume, on the worship established in the oriental world "on
high places." Such was the position of the pyramids in the vallies of
the Euphrates and the Nile, and the idea appears to have reached
America without any deviation whatever in its relative position, or its
general design. It was every were, throughout America, as we find it,
in the vallies of Mexico and the Mississippi, erected in rich and level
vallies, or plains, and dedicated to idolatrous worship.
The mound builders of North America, north of the tropical latitudes,
appear like bad copyists of a sublime original. They retained the idea
of the oriental pyramid, but being no mechanics constructed piles of
earth to answer the ancient purpose, both of worship and interment. Our
largest structures of this kind, are the mound of Grave Creek in
Western Virginia, containing about three millions of cubic feet, and
the great group of the Monks of _La Trappe_ in Illinois, estimated at
seven millions of cubic feet.[12] Those of Saint Louis, mount Joliet,
and the Blue mounds respectively are now known to be of _geological_
origin.
[12] The central mound of this group has been cut through since
the date of my paper before the Ethnological Society, and proved
to be _artificial_.
But the Mexican and South American tribes built more boldly, and have
left several specimens of the pyramids, which deserve to be mentioned,
as well from the evidences they afford of mechanical skill, as from
their magnificent proportions, and their Nilotic power of endurance.
The pyramid of Cholula, in the valley of Mexico, exists in three vast
steps, retreating as they ascend, the highest of which was crowned with
a temple, whose base was one hundred and seventy-seven feet above the
plain. This is nine feet higher than that of Myrcerinus, the third of
the great group of Ghiza on the Nile; but its base of one thousand four
hundred and twenty-three feet, exceeds that of any edifice of the kind
found by travellers in the old world, and is double that of Cheops. To
realize a clear idea of its magnitude, we may imagine a solid structure
of earth, bricks and stone, which would fill the Washington parade
ground, squared by its east and west lines, and rising seventy-five
feet above the turrets of the New York University.
The pyramids of the empire of the Incas are not less remarkable. There
are at Saint Juan Teotihuacan, near lake Tezcuco, in the Mexican
valley, two very large antique pyramids, which were consecrated by the
ancient inhabitants to the Sun and Moon. The largest, called Tonatiuh
Ytzalqual, or the House of the Sun, has a base of two hundred and eight
metres, or six hundred and eighty-two English feet in length, and
fifty-five metres or one hundred and eighty feet perpendicular
elevation; being three feet higher than the great pyramid of Cholula.
The other, called Meztu Ytzaqual, or House of the Moon, is thirty-six
feet lower, and has a lesser base. These monuments, according to the
first accounts, were erected by the most ancient tribes, and were the
models of the Aztec Teocalli. The faces of these pyramids are within
fifty-two seconds, exactly north and south and east and west. Their
interior consists of massive clay and stone. This solid nucleus is
covered by a kind of porous amygdaloid, called tetzontli. They are
ascended by steps of hewn stone to their pinnacles, where tradition
affirms, there were anciently statues covered with thin lamina of gold.
And it was on these sublime heights, with the clear tropical skies of
Mexico above them, that the Toltec magi lit the sacred fire upon their
altars, offered up incense, and chanted hymns.
One fact in connexion with these ancient structures is remarkable, on
account of its illustrative character of the use of our small mounds.
Around the base of these pyramids, there were found numerous smaller
pyramids, or cones of scarcely nine or ten metres--twenty-nine to
thirty feet elevation, which were dedicated to the STARS. These minor
elevations, were generally arranged at right angles. They furnished
also places of sepulture for their distinguished chiefs, and hence the
avenue leading through them, was called Micoatl, or Road of the Dead.
We have in this arrangement a hint of the object of the numerous small
mounds, which generally surround the large mounds in the Mississippi
valley--as may be witnessed in the remarkable group of La Trappe, in
Illinois. A similar arrangement, indeed, prevails in the smaller series
of the leading mound groups west of the Alleghanies. They may be called
Star-mounds. If this theory be correct, we have not only a satisfactory
explanation of the object of the smaller groups, which has heretofore
puzzled inquirers; but the presence of such groups may be taken as an
evidence of the wide spread worship of the Sun, at an early period in
these latitudes.
Sun-worship existed extensively in North America as well as South.
There is reason to believe that the ancestors of all the principal
existing tribes in America, worshipped an ETERNAL FIRE. Both from their
records and traditions, as well as their existing monuments, this
deduction is irresistible. Not only the Olmecs and Toltecs, who built
the temples of the sun and moon, near the lake of Tezcuco--not only the
Auricaneans, who obeyed the voice of the First Inca, in erecting the
temple of the Sun at the foot of the Andes; but the Aztecs, even at the
later and more corrupted period of their rites, adhered strongly to
this fundamental rite. It is to be traced from the tropical latitudes
into the Mississippi valley, where the earth-mound it is apprehended,
rudely supplied the place of its more gorgeous, southern prototype.
When they had raised the pile of earth as high as their means and skill
dictated, facts denote that they erected temples and altars at its
apex. On these altars, tradition tells us, they burned the tobacco
plant, which maintains its sacred character unimpaired to the present
day. From the traditions which are yet extant in some of the tribes,
they regarded the sun as the symbol of _Divine Intelligence_. They paid
him no human sacrifices, but offered simply incense, and dances and
songs. They had an order of priesthood, resembling the ancient magi,
who possessed the highest influence and governed the destinies of the
tribes. It is past all doubt that Manco Capac, was himself one of these
magi: and it is equally apparent, that the order exists at this day,
although shorn of much of its ancient, external splendor, in the solemn
_metais_, and sacrificial _jossakeeds_, who sway the simple multitudes
in the North American forests. Among these tribes, the graphic
_Ke-ke-win_, which depicts the Sun, stands on their pictorial rolls, as
the symbol of the Great Spirit; and no important rite or ceremony is
undertaken without an offering of tobacco. This weed is lit with the
sacred element, generated anew on each occasion, from percussion. To
light and to put out this fire, is the symbolic language for the
opening and closing of every important civil or religious public
transaction, and it is the most sacred rite known to them. It is never
done without an appeal, which has the characteristics of prayer, to the
Great Spirit. To find in America, a system of worship which existed in
Mesopotamia, in the era of the patriarch Job, one thousand five hundred
and fifty years before the advent of Christ, is certainly remarkable,
and is suggestive both of the antiquity and origin of the tribes.
Geology is not without its testimony in this connexion. The antiquity
of human occupancy in the Mississippi valley is so extreme, that it
appears to mingle its evidences with some of its more recent geological
phenomena. The gradual disintegration and replacement of strata in that
quarter of the country, involve facts which are quite in accordance
with evidences of ancient eras drawn from other sources. It is some
seven and twenty years since the earliest evidences of this kind
arrested my attention. I was then descending the valley of the UNICAU
or White river, in the present area of Arkansas. This is one of that
series of large streams which descends the great slope or
_Wassershied_, extending from the foot of the Rocky Mountains into the
lower Mississippi. These streams have carried down for ages the
loosened materials of the elevated and mountainous parts of that great
range into the delta of the Mississippi, filling up immense ancient
inlets and seas, and pushing its estuary into the Mexican gulf. They
are still to be regarded as the vast geological laboratory in which so
large a part of the plains, islands and shores of that great off-drain
of the continent have been prepared. The evidences referred to in the
descent of the Unicau, consisted of antique, coarse pottery, scoria and
ashes, together with a metallic alloy of a whitish hue, but capable of
being cut partially with a knife. There were also deposites of bones,
but so decayed and fragmentary as to make it impossible to determine
their specific character. All these were, geologically, beneath the
various strata of sand, loam and vegetable mould, supporting the heavy
primitive forest of that valley. At Little Rock, in the valley of the
Arkansas, vestiges of art have recently been found in similar beds of
denudation, at considerable depths below the surface of the wooded
plains. They consisted of a subterraneous furnace, together with broken
clay kettles. In other portions of this wide slope of territory, a
species of antique bricks have been disinterred.[13] It is in this
general area, and in strata of a similar age, that gigantic bones,
tusks and teeth of the mastodon, and other extinct quadrupeds, have
been so profusely found within a few years, particularly in the Osage
valley.
[13] Arkansas paper.
But the greatest scene of superficial disturbance of post-human
occupancy, appears in the great alluvial angle of territory which lies
between the Mississippi and Ohio, extending to their junction. This
area constitutes the grand prairie section of lower Illinois. The Big
Bone Lick of the Ohio, the original seat of the discovery of the bones
of the megalonyx and mastodon, announced by Mr. Jefferson to the
philosophers of Europe, connects itself with this element of
continental disturbance. Its western limits are cut through by the
Mississippi, which washes precipitous cliffs of rock, between a
promontory or natural pyramid of limestone, standing in its bed called
Grand Tower, and the city of St. Louis, extending even to a point
opposite the junction of the Missouri. Directly opposite these
secondary cliffs, on the Illinois shore, extends transversely for one
hundred miles, the noted alluvial tract called the American bottom.
This tract discloses, at great depths, buried trunks of trees,
fresh-water shells, animal bones and various wrecks of pre-existing
orders of the animal and vegetable creation. On the banks of the Sabine
river, which flows into the Ohio, there was found, some few years ago,
in the progress of excavations made for salt water, coarse clay kettles
of from eight to ten gallons capacity, and fragments of earthenware,
imbedded at the depth of eighty feet. The limestone rocks of the
Missouri coast, above noticed, which form the western verge of this
antique lacustrine sea, have produced some curious organic foot-tracks
of animals and other remains; and the faces of these cliffs exhibit
deep and well marked water lines, as if they had been acted on by a
vast body of water, standing for long and fixed periods, at a high
level, and subject to be acted on by winds and tempests. Indeed, it
requires but little examination of the various phenomena, offered at
this central point of the Mississippi valley, to suppose that the
southern boundary of this ancient oceanic-lake, ran in the direction of
the Grand Tower and Cave in rock groups, and that an arm of the sea or
gulf of Mexico, must have extended to the indicated foot of this
ancient lacustrine barrier. At this point, there appear evidences also
of the existence of mighty ancient cataracts. The topic is one which
has impressed me as being well entitled to investigation, and is
hastily introduced here among the branches of inquiry bearing on my
subject. But it cannot be dwelt upon, although it is connected with an
interesting class of kindred phenomena, in other parts of the west.
I have already occupied the time, which I had prescribed to myself in
these remarks. It has been impossible to consider many topics, upon
which a true understanding of the antique period of our history
depends. But I cannot close them, without a brief allusion to the
leading traits and history of the Red Race, whose former advance in the
arts, and whose semi-civilization in the equinoctial latitudes of the
continent, we have been contemplating.
That these tribes are a people of great antiquity, far greater than has
been assigned to them, is denoted by the considerations already
mentioned. Their languages, their astronomy, their architecture and
their very ancient religion and mythology, prove this. But a people who
live without letters, must expect their history to perish with them.
Tradition soon degenerates into fable, and fable has filled the oldest
histories of the world, with childish incongruities and recitals of
gross immoralities. In this respect, the Indian race have evinced less
imagination than the Greeks and Romans, who have filled the world with
their lewd philosophy of genealogy, but their myths are quite as
rational and often better founded than those of the latter. To restore
their history from the rubbish of their traditions, is a hopeless task.
We must rely on other data, the nature of which has been mentioned. To
seek among ruins, to decypher hieroglyphics, to unravel myths, to study
ancient systems of worship and astronomy, and to investigate
vocabularies and theories of language, are the chief methods before us;
and these call for the perseverance of Sysiphus and the clear inductive
powers of Bacon. Who shall touch the scattered bones of aboriginal
history with the spear of truth, and cause the skeleton of their
ancient society to arise and live? We may never see this; but we may
hold out incentives to the future scholar, to labor in this department.
Of their origin, it is yet premature, on the basis of ethnology, to
decide. There is no evidence--not a particle, that the tribes came to
the continent after the opening of the Christian era. Their religion
bears far more the characteristics of Zoroaster, than of Christ. It has
also much more that assimilates it to the land of Chaldea, than to the
early days of the land of Palestine. The Cyclopean arch, and the form
of the pyramid, point back to very ancient periods. Their language is
constructed on a very antique plan of thought. Their symbolic system of
picture writing is positively the oldest and first form of recording
ideas the world ever knew. The worship of the sun is the earliest form
of human idolatry. Their calendar and system of astronomy reveal traits
common to that of China, Persia, or Hindostan. Mr. Gallatin, from the
consideration of the languages alone, is inclined to think that they
might have reached the continent within five hundred years after the
original dispersion. That they are of the Shemitic stock, cannot be
questioned. The only point to be settled, indeed, appears to be, from
what branch of that very widely dispersed, and intermingled race of
idolaters and warriors they broke loose, and how, and in what manner,
and during what era, or eras, they found their way to these shores?
But, however these questions may be decided, this is certain, that
civilization, government and arts began to develope themselves first in
the tropical regions of Mexico and Central America. Mexico itself, in
the process of time, became to the ancient Indian tribes, the Rome of
America. Like its proud prototype in Europe, it was invaded by one
barbaric tribe after another, to riot and plunder, but who, in the end,
adopted the type of civilization, which they came to destroy. Such was
the origin of the Toltecs and the Aztecs, whom Cortez conquered.
When we turn our view from this ancient centre of Indian power, to the
latitudes of the American Republic, we find the territory covered, at
the opening of the sixteenth century, with numerous tribes, of divers
languages, existing in the mere hunter state, or at most, with some
habits of horticulture superadded. They had neither cattle nor arts.
They were bowmen and spearmen--roving and predatory, with very little,
if any thing, in their traditions, to link them to these prior central
families of men, but with nearly every thing in their physical and
intellectual type, to favor such a generic affiliation. They erected
groups of mounds, to sacrifice to the sun, moon and stars. They were,
originally, fire-worshippers. They spoke ONE general class of
transpositive languages. They had implements of copper, as well as of
silex, and porphyries. They made cooking vessels of tempered clay. They
carved very beautiful and perfect models of birds and quadrupeds, out
of stone, as we see in some recently opened mounds. They cultivated the
most important of all the ancient Mexican grains, the zea mays. They
raised the tobacco plant, to be offered, to their Gods, as
frankincense. They used the Aztec drum in their religious ceremonies
and war dances. They employed the very ancient Asiatic art of recording
ideas, by means of representative devices. They believed in the
oriental doctrines of transformation, and the power of necromancy.
Their oral fictions on this head, are so replete with fancy, that they
might give scope to the lyre of some future western Ovid. They held,
with Pythagoras, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. They
believed, indeed, in duplicate souls. They believed with Zoroaster, in
the two great creative and antagonistical principles of Ormusd and
Ahriman, and they had THEN, and have STILL, an influential and powerful
order of priests, who uphold the principles of a sacred fire.
To these principles, they appeal _now_, as they did in the days of the
discovery. They believe in the sacred character of Fire, and regard it
as the mysterious element of the Universe, which typifies the Divinity.
They believe, and practice strictly, with the descendants of Abraham,
the law of separation, but not the practice of circumcision. With the
ancient Phoenicians, they attribute extraordinary powers, to the wisdom
and subtlety of the Serpent, and this reptile holds a high place in
their mythology. They regard the Tortoise, as the original increment,
and medium of the creation of the Earth, and view the Bear and the Wolf
as enchanted heroes of supernatural energies. And they have adopted the
devices of these three animals as the general Totemic types and bond of
their separation into clans. They are as observant as any of the
orientalists were, of the flight of birds. They draw, with the ancient
Chaldeans, prognostications from the clouds. They preserve the simple
music of the Arcadian pipe, which is dedicated to love. They people
their woods and mountains, and romantic water-falls, with various
classes of wood and water nymphs, fairies and genii. They had
anticipated the author of the "Rape of the Lock" in the creation of a
class of personal gnomes, who nimbly dance over the lineaments of the
human frame. They have a class of seers and prophets, who mutter from
the ground, the decisions of fate and Providence. They believe in the
idea of ghosts, witchcraft, and vampires. They place the utmost
reliance on dreams and night visions. A dream and a revelation, are
synonymous. Councils are called, and battles are fought on the
prognostications of a dream. They are astrologers and star-gazers, and
draw no small part of their mythology from the skies. They fast to
obtain the favor of the Deity, and they feast, at the return of the
first fruits. They have concentrated the wisdom and fancy of their
forefathers and sages, in allegories and fables. With the Arabs, they
are gifted in the relation of fictitious domestic tales, in which
necromancy and genii, constitute the machinery of thought. With the
ancient Mesopotamians, Persians and Copts, they practice the old art of
ideographic, or picture writing. They are excellent local geographers,
and practical naturalists. There is not an animal, fish, insect or
reptile in America, whose character and habitudes they do not
accurately and practically know. They believe the earth to be a plain,
with four corners, and the sky a hemisphere of material substance-like
brass, or metal, through which the planets shine, and around which the
sun and moon revolve. Over all, they install the power of an original
Deity, who is called the Great Spirit, who is worshipped by fire, who
is invoked by prayer, and who is regarded, from the cliffs of the
Monadnock,[14] to the waters of the Nebraska,[15] as omnipotent,
immaterial, and omnipresent.
[14] A mountain in New Hampshire, seen from the sea.
[15] The Indian name of the river La Plate.
That this race has dwelt on the continent long centuries before the
Christian era, all facts testify. If they are not older as a people,
than most of the present nations on the Asiatic shores of the Indian
ocean, as has been suggested, they are certainly anterior in age, to
the various groups of the Polynesian islands. They have, it is
apprehended, taken the impress of their character and mental ideocracy
from the early tribes of Western Asia, which was originally peopled, to
a great extent, by the descendants of Shem. These fierce tribes crowded
each other, as one political wave trenches on another, till they have
apparently traversed its utmost bounds. How they have effected the
traject here, and by what process, or contingency, are merely curious
questions, and can never be satisfactorily answered. The theory of a
migration by Behring's straits, is untenable. If we could find adequate
motives for men to cross thence, we cannot deduce the tropical animals.
We cannot erect a history from materials so slender. It may yield one
element of population; but we require the origin of many. But while we
seek for times and nations, we have the indubitable evidences of the
general event or events in the people before us, and we are justified
by philology alone, in assigning to it an epoch or epochs, which are
sufficiently remote and conformable to the laws of climate, to account
for all the phenomena. No such epoch seems adequate this side of the
final overthrow of Babylon, or general dispersion of mankind, or the
period of the conquest of Palestine. One singular and extraordinary
result, in the fulfilment of a very ancient prophecy of the human
family, may be noticed. It is this. Assuming the Indian tribes to be of
Shemitic origin, which is generally conceded, they were met on this
continent, in 1492, by the Japhetic race, after the two stocks had
passed round the globe by directly different routes. Within a few years
subsequent to this event, as is well attested, the humane influence of
an eminent Spanish ecclesiastic, led to the calling over from the
coasts of Africa, of the Hamitic branch. As a mere historical question,
and without mingling it in the slightest degree with any other, the
result of three centuries of occupancy, has been a series of movements
in all the colonial stocks, south and north, by which Japhet has been
immeasurably enlarged on the continent, while the called and not
voluntary sons of Ham, have endured a servitude, in the wide stretching
vallies of the tents of Shem.[16]
[16] Genesis, 9. 27.