But the clouds still are mighty; rains and storms and fogs battle
with the warmth and light. The "Popul Vuh" continues:
"And the sun and the moon and the stars were now all established";
that is, they now become visible, moving in their orbits. "Yet was
not the sun then in the beginning the same as now; his _heat wanted
force_, and he was _but as a reflection in a mirror_; verily, say the
historians, not at all the same sun as that of to-day. Nevertheless,
he _dried up and warmed the surface of the earth, and answered many
good ends_."
Could all this have been invented? This people could not themselves
have explained the meaning of their myth, and yet it dove-tails into
every fact revealed by our latest science as to the Drift Age.
[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 46.]
{p. 246}
And then, the "Popul Vuh" tells us, the sun petrified their gods: in
other words, the worship of lions, tigers, and snakes, represented by
stone idols, gave way before the worship of the great luminary whose
steadily increasing beams were filling the world with joy and light.
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