SUN-GOD.
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Sun's brother, high priest and despot over his people. By his side stood his sister or nearest female relative, the female chief who of all women was alone permitted to enter the Sun-temple. Her son, after the custom of female succession common among the lower races, would succeed to the primacy and chiefship; and the solar family took to themselves wives and husbands from the plebeian order, who were their inferiors in life, and were slain to follow them as attendants in death.[1] Another nation of sun-worshippers were the Apalaches of Florida, whose daily service was to salute the Sun at their doors as he rose and set. The Sun, they said, had built his own conical mountain of Olaimi, with its spiral path leading to the cave-temple, in the east side. Here, at the four solar festivals, the worshippers saluted the rising sun with chants and incense as his rays entered the sanctuary, and again when at midday the sunlight poured down upon the altar through the hole or shaft pierced for this purpose in the rocky vault of the cave; through this passage the sun-birds, the tonatzuli, were let fly up sunward as messengers, and the ceremony was over.[2] Day by day, in the temples of Mexico, the rising sun was welcomed with blast of horns, and incense, and offering of a little of the officiators' own blood drawn from their ears, and a sacrifice of quails. Saying, the Sun has risen, we know not how he will fulfil his course nor whether misfortune will happen, they prayed to him — 'Our Lord, do your office prosperously.' In distinct and absolute personality, the divine Sun in Aztec theology was Tonatiuh, whose huge pyramid-mound stands on the plain of Teotihuacan, a witness of his worship for future ages. Beyond this, the religion of Mexico, in its complex system or congeries of great gods, such as results from the mixture and alliance of the deities of several nations, shows the solar element rooted deeply and widely in other personages of its divine mythology, and attributes