Here we have the light and darkness, the sun and the night, battling with each other; the sun fights with a younger brother, another luminary, the comet; the comet is broken up; it flies for life, the red blood (the red clay) streaming from it, and flint-stones appearing on the earth wherever the blood (the clay) falls.  The victorious sun re-establishes himself in the east.  And then the myth of the sun merges into the legends concerning a great people, who were the fathers of mankind who dwelt “in the east,” on the borders of the great eastern ocean, the Atlantic.  “The earth was at first arid and sterile,” covered with débris and stones; but the returning sun, the White One, destroys the gigantic frog, emblem of cold and water, the great snows and ice-deposits; this

[1.  Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 184.]

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frog had “swallowed all the waters,” that is to say, the falling rains had been congealed in these great snow-banks and glaciers; the sun melts them, and kills the frog; the waters pour forth in deluging floods; Manibozho “guides the torrents into smooth streams and lakes”; the woods return, and become once more full of animal life.  Then the myth again mixes up the sun and the sun-land in the east.  From this sun-land, represented as “a tortoise,” always the emblem of an island, the Iroquois derive the knowledge of “how to make fire.”

This coming of the monster, his attack upon and conquest of the sun, his apparent swallowing of that orb, are all found represented on both sides of the Atlantic, on the walls of temples and in great earth-mounds, in the image of a gigantic serpent holding a globe in its mouth.

This long-trailing object in the skies was probably the origin of that primeval serpent-worship found all over the world.  And hence the association of the serpent in so many religions with the evil-one.  In itself, the serpent should no more represent moral wrong than the lizard, the crocodile, or the frog; but the hereditary abhorrence with which he is regarded by mankind extends to no other created thing.  He is the image of the great destroyer, the wronger, the enemy.

Let us turn to another legend.

An ancient authority[1] gives the following legend of the Tupi Indians of Brazil: 

“Monau, without beginning or end, author of all that is, seeing the ingratitude of men, and their contempt for him who had made them thus joyous, withdrew from them, and sent upon them tata, the divine fire, which burned all that was on the surface of the earth.  He

[1.  “Une Fête Brésilienne célébré à Rouen en 1550,” par M. Ferdinand Denis, p. 82.]

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swept about the fire in such a way that in places he raised mountains, and in others dug valleys.  Of all men one alone, Irin Magé, was saved, whom Monau carried into the heaven.  He, seeing all things destroyed, spoke thus to Monau:  ’Wilt thou also destroy the heavens and their garniture?  Alas! henceforth where will be our home?  Why should I live, since there is none other of my kind?  Then Monau was so filled with pity that he poured a deluging rain on the earth, which quenched the fire, and flowed on all sides, forming the ocean, which we call the parana, the great waters."[1]