the most valuable of documents. Leaving out of account for the moment
the more familiar mythology of the Greeks, based on something older
yet, we may refer for illustration to that of the mysterious Maya race
of America. At Izamal, in Yucatan, says Mr Stansbury Hagar, is a group
of ruins perched, after the Mexican and Central-American plan, on the
summits of pyramidal mounds which mark the site of an ancient
theogonic center of the Mayas. Here the temples all evidently refer to
a cult based upon the constellations as symbols. The figures and the
names, of course, were not the same as those that we have derived from
our Aryan ancestors, but the star groups were the same or nearly so.
For instance, the loftiest of the temples at Izamal was connected with
the sign of the constellation known to us as Cancer, marking the place
of the sun at the summer solstice, at which period the sun was
supposed to descend at noon like a great bird of fire and consume the
offerings left upon the altar. Our Scorpio was known to the Mayas as a
sign of the ``Death God.'' Our Libra, the ``Balance,'' with which the
idea of a divine weighing out of justice has always been connected,
seems to be identical with the Mayan constellation Teoyaotlatohua,
with which was associated a temple where dwelt the priests whose
special business it was to administer justice and to foretell the
future by means of information obtained from the spirits of the dead.
Orion, the ``Hunter'' of our celestial mythology, was among the Mayas
a ``Warrior,'' while Sagittarius and others of our constellations were
known to them (under different names, of course), and all were endowed
with a religious symbolism. And the same star figures, having the same
significance, were familiar to the Peruvians, as shown by the temples
at Cuzco. Thus the imagination of ancient America sought in the
constellations symbols of the unchanging gods.

But, in fact, there is no nation and no people that has not recognized