The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in America

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G. P. Putnam, 1851 - History - 254 pages
 

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Page 24 - They have the same swarthy and copper colour, flat and smooth hair, small beard, squat body, long eye, with the corner directed upwards towards the temples, prominent cheek bones, thick lips, and an expression of gentleness in the mouth, strongly contrasted with a gloomy and severe look.
Page 148 - Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like, sat'st brooding on the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant...
Page 176 - Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet. He stood, and measured the earth : he beheld, and drove asunder the nations ; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow : his ways are everlasting.
Page 246 - He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made : for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it : and he called it Nehushtan.
Page 37 - We must not be surprised," he says, " at finding, on a close examination, that the characters of all the Pagan deities, male and female, melt into each other and at last into one or two; for it seems a well-founded opinion, that the whole crowd of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome, and modern Varanes [Benares] mean only the powers of nature, and principally those of the Sun, expressed in a variety of ways and by a multitude of fanciful names.
Page 24 - These facts, however, are mere exceptions to a general rule, and do not alter the peculiar physiognomy of the Indian, which is as undeviatingly characteristic as that of the Negro ; for whether we see him in the athletic Charib or the stunted Chayma, in the dark Californian or the fair Borroa, he is an Indian still, and cannot be mistaken for a being of any other race.
Page 133 - ... a great spacious house, wherein only some few (that are, as we may term them, priests) come. Thither, at certain known times, resort all their people, and offer almost all the riches they have to their gods, as kettles, skins, hatchets, beads, knives, etc., all which are cast by the priests into a great fire that they make in the midst of the house, and there consumed to ashes.
Page 158 - For the purpose of regeneration, it is directed to make an image of pure gold of the female power of nature ; in the shape either of a woman or of a cow. In this statue the person to be regenerated is enclosed and dragged through the usual channel.
Page 156 - Egyptians ; for this animal was esteemed by him to be the most inspired of all the reptiles, and of a fiery nature, inasmuch as it exhibits an incredible celerity, moving by its spirit without either hands or feet, or any of those external...
Page 28 - It is on account of this general analogy of structure — it is because American languages, which have no word in common, (the Mexican, for instance, and the Quichua,) resemble each other by their organization, and form complete contrasts with the languages of Latin Europe, that the Indians of the missions familiarize themselves more easily with an American idiom, than with that of the metropolis.

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