Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel
374 CONCLUSIONS.
—always the image of an island—how to make fire, and taught the Indians the art. And in their legends the battle between the White One and the Dark One took place in the east near the great ocean.
Dr. Brinton says, speaking of the Great Hare, Manibozho : :
“Tn the oldest accounts of the missionaries he was alleged to reside toward the east, and in the holy formula of the meda craft, when the winds are inyoked to the medicine-lodge, the east is summoned in his name, the door opens in that direction, and there at the edge of the earth, where the sun rises, on the shore of the infinite ocean that surrounds the land, he has his house, and sends the luminaries forth on their daily journey.” *
That is to say, in the east, in the surrounding ocean of the east, to wit, in the Atlantic, this god, (or godlike race,) has his house, his habitation, upon a land surrounded by the ocean, to wit, an island ; and there his power and his civilization are so great that he controls the movements of the sun, moon, and stars; that is to say, he fixes the measure of time by the movements of the sun and moon, and he has mapped out the heavenly bodies into constellations. In the Miztec legend, (see page 214, ante,) we find the people praying to God to gather the waters together and enlarge the land, for they have only “a little garden” to inhabit in the waste of waters. This meant an island.
In the Arabian legends we have the scene of the catastrophe described as an island west of Arabia, and it requires two years and a half of travel to reach it. It is the land of bronze.
In the Hindoo legend of the battle between Rama, the
* Brinton’s “ Myths of the New World,” p. 177.