Ancient faiths and modern : a dissertation upon worships, legends and divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, before the Christian era : showing their relations to religious customs as they now exist / by Thomas Inman.
- Thomas Inman
- Date:
- 1876
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Ancient faiths and modern : a dissertation upon worships, legends and divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, before the Christian era : showing their relations to religious customs as they now exist / by Thomas Inman. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![symbol ^. Again, Domenecli figures some male and female human effigies, of whom American savans write that they represent idols of sexual design, similar to those exposed in the Mysteries of Eleusis, one of them being a badly finished image of Priapus. Domenech still farther states, on the authority of Cortez, that a form of worsliip, recalling the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris, Avas established in America. Eespecting the nature of the rehgion of the mound builders the Abb^ writes— The government of these nations appears to have been theocratic or sacerdotal, like that of the Jews, and the religious administrative and military power was, probably, vested in one and the same person. This is clearly evinced by the taboo, or sacred monuments, being combined with those of a purely military character, p. 366. Without straining doubtful points too far, we may content ourselves with affirming that the researches of Davis and Squire, of Stephens, and of Domenech, show that the mound builders of America raised high places for sacrificial fires; that they built huge ]3iles of earth over dead warriors; and, that during the funeral rites which were observed at the obsequies, they immolated certain human victims. Let us now pause for a moment and consider how much is involved in the practice of making a sacrifice by fire, or other- wise, at the burial of any deceased chieftain or honoured man. With what idea could the living wife join her husband on the funeral pyre in India, or the ancient Tartars have slain the horse, slaves, wives, and chief officers of a defunct king, burying them all in a vast grave, unless they entertained the belief that there was a life beyond the grave ? The faith may have been of the crudest form, yet the practice evidenced the belief that those who died, and Avere buried togetlier, would arise and live at the same time and place, and in the same relative positions wliich tliey had during life. If this](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21060381_0056.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
