worshipped the sun at Emesa, under the name of Elagabalus, "typified in
the form of a black conical stone, which it was believed had fallen from
heaven." The conical stone was the emblem of Bel. Did it have relation
to the mounds and pyramids?

Sun-worship was the primitive religion of the red men of America. It was
found among all the tribes. (Dorman, "Origin of Primitive Superstitions,
p. 338.) The Chichimecs called the sun their father. The Comanches have
a similar belief.

But, compared with such ancient nations as the Egyptians and
Babylonians, the Greeks were children. A priest of Sais said to Solon,

"You Greeks are novices in knowledge of antiquity. You are ignorant of
what passed either here or among yourselves in days of old. The history
of eight thousand years is deposited in our sacred books; but I can
ascend to a much higher antiquity, and tell you what our fathers have
done for nine thousand years; I mean their institutions, their laws, and
their most brilliant achievements."

The Greeks, too young to have shared in the religion of Atlantis, but
preserving some memory of that great country and its history, proceeded
to convert its kings into gods, and to depict Atlantis itself as the
heaven of the human race. Thus we find a great solar or nature worship
in the elder nations, while Greece has nothing but an incongruous jumble
of gods and goddesses, who are born and eat and drink and make love and
ravish and steal and die; and who are worshipped as immortal in presence
of the very monuments that testify to their death.

"These deities, to whom the affairs of the world were in trusted, were,