The Phoenicians believed in an evil spirit called Zebub; the Peruvians had a devil called Cupay.  The Peruvians burnt incense in their temples.  The Peruvians, when they sacrificed animals, examined their entrails, and from these prognosticated the future.

I need not add that all these nations preserved traditions of the Deluge; and all of them possessed systems of writing.

The Egyptian priest of Sais told Solon that the myth of Phaethon, the son of Helios, having attempted to drive the chariot of the sun, and thereby burning up the earth, referred to “a declination of the bodies moving round the earth and in the heavens” (comets), which caused a “great conflagration upon the earth,” from which those only escaped who lived near rivers and seas.  The “Codex Chimalpopoca”—­a Nahua, Central American record—­tells us that the third era of the world, or “third sun,” is called, Quia Tonatiuh, or sun of rain, “because in this age there fell a rain of fire, all which existed burned, and there fell a rain of gravel;” the rocks “boiled with tumult, and there also arose the rocks of vermilion color.”  In other words, the traditions of these people go back to a great cataclysm of fire, when the earth possibly encountered, as in the Egyptian story, one of “the bodies moving round the earth and in the heavens;” they had also memories of “the Drift Period,” and of the outburst of Plutonic rocks.  If man has existed on the earth as long as science asserts, he must have passed through many of the great catastrophes which are written upon the face of the planet; and it is very natural that in myths and legends he should preserve some recollection of events so appalling and destructive.

Among the early Greeks Pan was the ancient god; his wife was Maia.  The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg calls attention to the fact that Pan was adored in all parts of Mexico and Central America; and at Panuco, or Panca, literally Panopolis, the Spaniards found, upon their entrance into Mexico, superb temples and images of Pan. (Brasseur’s Introduction in Landa’s “Relacion.”) The names of both Pan and Maya enter extensively into the Maya vocabulary, Maia being the same as Maya, the principal name of the peninsula; and pan, added to Maya, makes the name of the ancient capital Mayapan.  In the Nahua language pan, or pani, signifies “equality to that which is above,” and Pentecatl was the progenitor of all beings. ("North Americans of Antiquity,” p. 467.)

The ancient Mexicans believed that the sun-god would destroy the world in the last night of the fifty-second year, and that he would never come back.  They offered sacrifices to him at that time to propitiate him; they extinguished all the fires in the kingdom; they broke all their household furniture; they bung black masks before their faces; they prayed and fasted; and on the evening of the last night they formed a great procession to a neighboring mountain.  A human being was sacrificed exactly at midnight; a