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First, we have the ancient worship of the Sun, implicit, if not explicit, in a great part of the oldest Greek rituals, and then idealized by Plato in the Republic, where the Sun is the author of all light and life in the material world, as the Idea of Good is in the ideal world. This worship came gradually into contact with the traditional and definite Sun-worship of Persia.
Hopi myths represent clans as descended from ancestors originally animal, and transformed into human shape by deities. But the elaborate sun-worship and the complicated solstice ceremonies are tribal. The Zuñi economic ceremonies appear to have passed from under clan control.
Agumkakrimi invokes Shamash as 'warrior of heaven and earth'; and it is likely that the precedent furnished by these two kings, who considered it consistent with devotion to Marduk to single out the places sacred to Shamash for special consideration, had much to do in maintaining the popularity of sun-worship in Babylonia and Assyria.
'There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god, including 'lizards, toads, and frogs. In the midst of these superstitions the Incas appeared. Though sun-worship became the established religion, worship of the animal pacarissas was still tolerated.
This circumstance, and the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries of sun-worship and then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of the vaishnava cult of Jaganath and his car, which attracted and often slew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey to prepare at once for the press the Ooriya Bible.
In later ages, the gender of the sun and the moon seems to be exceedingly variable. The Achts of Vancouver's Island worship sun and moon the sun as female, the moon as male. In some of the countries of Africa the moon is adored as female and sun-worship is unknown. Among various peoples the sun and the moon are regarded as husband and wife, and among others as brother and sister.
We have seen that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribal pacarissas in Peru, and that the huacas, or images, of the sacred animals were admitted under the roof of the temple of the Sun.
But in this case, the visible object, is idealized; not worshipped as the brute thing really is, but as the type and symbol of God." PARKER, Disc. of Relig. b. i. ch. v. p. 50. A recent writer thus eloquently refers to the universality, in ancient times, of sun-worship: "Sabaism, the worship of light, prevailed amongst all the leading nations of the early world.
In Christian countries, during the past eighteen hundred years, the greatest care has been exercised to conceal the fact that sun-worship underlies all forms of religion, and under Protestant Christianity no pains has been spared in eliminating the female element from the god-idea; hence the ignorance which prevails at the present time in relation to the fact that the Creator once comprehended the forces of Nature, which by an older race were worshipped as female.
Like a good many of the other southern tribes, they fought when it was necessary, but they were peaceable compared with the Five Nations. They had a form of sun-worship resembling that of Mexico, and in other ways their ideas were like those of the people farther south. For instance, when a chief died, his wives were killed.
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