The use of confession and penance was known in the religious ceremonies
of some of the American nations. Baptism was a religious ceremony with
them, and the bodies of the dead were sprinkled with water.
Vestal virgins were found in organized communities on both sides of the
Atlantic; they were in each case pledged to celibacy, and devoted to
death if they violated their vows. In both hemispheres the recreant were
destroyed by being buried alive. The Peruvians, Mexicans, Central
Americans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews each had a powerful
hereditary priesthood.
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.
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