In the United States, as in Europe and in the East, there are found in steep places, by difficult paths, always near the banks of streams, narrow, much-worn passages in rocks, through which one person[J] can barely squeeze, and which were evidently not intended for ordinary travel.  The passing through these places was enjoined on religious votaries, as indicating respect for the great principle of regeneration.  The peasants of Europe, here and there, at the present day, continue to pass through these rock or cave doors, ‘for luck.’  It was usual, after the transition, whether into a cave, where mysteries, feasts, and orgies were held, significant of ‘the revival,’ or merely through a narrow way,—­to bathe in the invariably neighboring river; the serpent-river or water which drowns organic life, yet without which it dies.

In England, at a comparatively recent period, and even yet occasionally in Scandinavia, the peasantry plighted their troth by passing their hands through the hole in the ‘Odin-stones,’ and clasping them.  Beads and wedding rings and ‘fairy-stones,’ or those found with holes in them, were all linked to the same faith which rendered sacred every resemblance to the ‘passing through.’  The graves of both North and South America contain abundant evidence of the sacredness in which the same objects were held.  I have a singularly-shaped soapstone ornament, taken from an Indian grave, whose perforation indicates the ‘fairy-stone.’  The religious legends of Mexico and of Peru are too identical with many of the Old World to be passed over as coincidences; the gold images of Chiriqui, with their Baal bell-ringing figures, and serpent-girt, pot-bellied phallic idols, are too strikingly like those of Old Ireland and of the East not to suggest some far-away common origin.  I have good authority for saying that almost every symbol, whether of cup or dove, serpent or horn, flower or new moon, boat or egg, common to Old World mythology, may be found set forth or preserved with the emphasis of religious emblems in the graves or ruined temples of ancient North America.

The mass of evidence which has been accumulated by scholars illustrative of a common origin of mythologies and a centralization of them around the serpent; or, as G.S.  Faber will have it, the Ark; or, as some think, the heavenly bodies; or, as others claim, simply a worship of paternity and maternity,—­is immense.  Why they should claim separate precedence for symbols, all of which set forth the one great mystery how GOD ‘weaves and works in action’s storm,’ is only explicable on the ground that ’every scholar likes to have his own private little pet hypothesis.’  Enough, however, may be found to show that this stupendous nature-worship was held the world over,—­possibly in the days of a single language,—­in America as in ancient Italy, or around the sacred mountain-crags of India; in Lebanon as in Ireland, in the garden-lands of Assyria, and in the isles of the South.