The artist Catlin has given a vivid description
of the great annual festival of the Mandans, a Dakota tribe, and brings
forward with emphasis the ceaseless reiteration of this number from
first to last.[71-2] He did not detect its origin in the veneration of
the cardinal points, but the information that has since been furnished
of the myths of this stock leaves no doubt that such was the case.[71-3]
Proximity of place had no part in this similarity of rite. In the grand
commemorative festival of the Creeks called the Busk, which wiped out
the memory of all crimes but murder, which reconciled the proscribed
criminal to his nation and atoned for his guilt, when the new fire was
kindled and the green corn served up, every dance, every invocation,
every ceremony, was shaped and ruled by the application of the number
four and its multiples in every imaginable relation. So it was at that
solemn probation which the youth must undergo to prove himself worthy of
the dignities of manhood and to ascertain his guardian spirit; here
again his fasts, his seclusions, his trials, were all laid down in
fourfold arrangement.
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