The place of his birth is nearly always located in the East; from that quarter he first came when he appeared as a man among men; toward that point he returned when he disappeared; and there he still lives, awaiting the appointed time for his reappearance.

Whenever the personal appearance of this hero-god is described, it is, strangely enough, represented to be that of one of the white race, a man of fair complexion, with long, flowing beard, with abundant hair, and clothed in ample and loose robes.  This extraordinary fact naturally suggests the gravest suspicion that these stories were made up after the whites had reached the American shores, and nearly all historians have summarily rejected their authenticity, on this account.  But a most careful scrutiny of their sources positively refutes this opinion.  There is irrefragable evidence that these myths and this ideal of the hero-god, were intimately known and widely current in America long before any one of its millions of inhabitants had ever seen a white man.  Nor is there any difficulty in explaining this, when we divest these figures of the fanciful garbs in which they have been clothed by the religious imagination, and recognize what are the phenomena on which they are based, and the physical processes whose histories they embody.  To show this I will offer, in the most concise terms, my interpretation of their main details.

The most important of all things to life is Light.  This the primitive savage felt, and, personifying it, he made Light his chief god.  The beginning of the day served, by analogy, for the beginning of the world.  Light comes before the sun, brings it forth, creates it, as it were.  Hence the Light-God is not the Sun-God, but his Antecedent and Creator.

The light appears in the East, and thus defines that cardinal point, and by it the others are located.  These points, as indispensable guides to the wandering hordes, became, from earliest times, personified as important deities, and were identified with the winds that blew from them, as wind and rain gods.  This explains the four brothers, who were nothing else than the four cardinal points, and their mother, who dies in producing them, is the eastern light, which is soon lost in the growing day.  The East, as their leader, was also the supposed ruler of the winds, and thus god of the air and rain.  As more immediately connected with the advent and departure of light, the East and West are twins, the one of which sends forth the glorious day-orb, which the other lies in wait to conquer.  Yet the light-god is not slain.  The sun shall rise again in undiminished glory, and he lives, though absent.

By sight and light we see and learn.  Nothing, therefore, is more natural than to attribute to the light-god the early progress in the arts of domestic and social life.  Thus light came to be personified as the embodiment of culture and knowledge, of wisdom, and of the peace and prosperity which are necessary for the growth of learning.