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Updated: June 11, 2025
There are two ancient and widely-spread creeds to which we must chiefly look for the origin of Christianity, namely, Sun-worship and Nature-worship.
But such beliefs appear not to have affected the Pawnee social organization. These are possibly survivals of totemic names, but there is no account of the existence of totemic groups among them. On the other hand, they had a highly developed sun-worship, with human sacrifices. +496+. Customs in the Siouan stock vary. In the Dakota tribe there is no known evidence of totemism.
On leaving the place, their guide blew a white powder toward the altar three times, and muttered a prayer. This, he explained, was “asking a blessing of Montezuma and the sun.” This altar seems to represent recollections of the ancient sun-worship.
Judging from analogous instances, he represented some phase of the sun worshipped in a particular locality, whose cult, with the disappearance of the place from the surface of political affairs, yielded to the tendency to concentrate sun-worship in two or three deities, Shamash and Ninib more especially. In the astronomy of the Babylonians the name survived as a designation of Marduk-Jupiter.
Perfectly to understand this symbol, I must refer, as a preliminary matter, to the worship of the Phallus, a peculiar modification of sun-worship, which prevailed to a great extent among the nations of antiquity.
In no part of the world is superstition stronger than among the ignorant populace of the settlements of New Mexico. In fact, it may be regarded as forming part of their religion. The missionary padres, in grafting the religion of Rome upon the sun-worship of Quetzalcoatl, admitted for their own purposes a goodly string of superstitions.
Sun-worship, that which waited upon some hill-top to catch the first beams of the morning that created a new day, is the oldest and the most natural of all kinds of worship.
These, it seems, were first erected and dedicated to the sun, as we may infer from the fact that globes representing the sun surmount them. Since the introduction of the Christian religion, a figure of St. Peter with the cross is placed upon some of them. Hence, the development of religious ideas stands chronologically thus: First, Sun-worship and afterwards the elevation of St.
As long as Larsa and Sippar retained a prominence overshadowing that of Babylon, the sun cult at the latter place could attract but little attention. Only as Babylon began to rival, and finally to supersede, other centers of sun-worship, could Marduk be brought into the front rank of prevailing cults.
It was the "centre or body from which the pervading spirit, the original producer of order, fertility, and organization, continued to emanate to preserve the mighty structure which it had formed." It is evident that at an early age, both in Egypt and in India, spiritualized conceptions of sun-worship had already been formed.
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