Chapter 3

The _architecture_ of the ancient inhabitants of Mexico and Peru, has been illustrated, within a few years, by several elaborate works; and the subject may be deemed to have been brought, by these works, within the scope of study and comparison. There are two features in this unique order of architecture, which appear to denote great antiquity in the principles developed, namely, the arch and the pyramid. These nations appear to have had the use of squares and parallelograms, in their geometry, without circles, or parabolic lines. The only form of the arch observed, is that called the cyclopean arch, which is made by one course of stones overlapping another, till the two walls meet, and a flat stone covers the space. This is the earliest type of the arch known among mankind, and is believed to be more ancient than the foundation of any city in Europe.

The pyramid, as developed in the temple of the sun at Tezcuco, the 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.