Cold, hunger, thirst, these were
the hounds that were ever on his track; these were the fell powers he
saw constantly snatching away his fellows, constantly aiming their
invisible shafts at himself. Fire, food, and water were the gods that
fought on his side; they were the chief figures in his pantheon, his
kindliest, perhaps his earliest, divinities.
With a nearly unanimous voice mythologies assign the priority to water.
It was the first of all things, the parent of all things. Even the gods
themselves were born of water, said the Greeks and the Aztecs.
Cosmogonies reach no further than the primeval ocean that rolled its
shoreless waves through a timeless night.
"Omnia pontus erant, deerant quoque litora ponto."
Earth, sun, stars, lay concealed in its fathomless abysses. "All of us,"
ran the Mexican baptismal formula, "are children of Chalchihuitlycue,
Goddess of Water," and the like was said by the Peruvians of Mama Cocha,
by the Botocudos of Taru, by the natives of Darien of Dobayba, by the
Iroquois of Ataensic--all of them mothers of mankind, all
personifications of water.
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