Those who have complained of the hopeless confusion of American religions have but proven the insufficiency of their own means of analyzing them. The uniformity which they display in so many points is nowhere more fully illustrated than in the unanimity with which they all point to the _sun_ as the land of the happy souls, the realm of the blessed, the scene of the joyous hunting-grounds of the hereafter. Its perennial glory, its comfortable warmth, its daily analogy to the life of man, marked its abode as the pleasantest spot in the universe. It matters not whether the eastern Algonkins pointed to the south, others of their nation, with the Iroquois and Creeks, to the west, or many tribes to the east, as the direction taken by the spirit; all these myths but mean that its bourn is the home of the sun, which is perhaps in the Orient whence he comes forth, in the Occident where he makes his bed, or in the South whither he retires in the chilling winter. Where the sun lives, they informed the earliest foreign visitors, were the villages of the deceased, and the milky way which nightly spans the arch of heaven, was, in their opinion, the road that led thither, and was called the path of the souls (_le chemin des ames_).[244-1] To _hueyu ku_, the mansion of the sun, said the Caribs, the soul passes when death overtakes the body.[244-2] Our knowledge is scanty of the doctrines taught by the Incas concerning the soul, but this much we do know, that they looked to the sun, their recognized lord and protector, as he who would care for them at death, and admit them to his palaces. There--not, indeed, exquisite joys--but a life of unruffled placidity, void of labor, vacant of strong emotions, a sort of material Nirvana, awaited them.[244-3] For these reasons, they, with most other American nations, interred the corpse lying east and west, and not as the traveller Meyen has suggested,[244-4] from the reminiscences of some ancient migration. Beyond the Cordilleras, quite to the coast of Brazil, the innumerable hordes who wandered through the sombre tropical forests of that immense territory, also pointed to the west, to the region beyond the mountains, as the land where the souls of their ancestors lived in undisturbed serenity; or, in the more brilliant imaginations of the later generations, in a state of perennial inebriety, surrounded by infinite casks of rum, and with no white man to dole it out to them.[245-1] The natives of the extreme south, of the Pampas and Patagonia, suppose the stars are the souls of the departed. At night they wander about the sky, but the moment the sun rises they hasten to the cheerful light, and are seen no more until it disappears in the west. So the Eskimo of the distant north, in the long winter nights when the aurora bridges the sky with its changing hues and arrowy shafts of light, believes he sees the spirits of his ancestors clothed in celestial raiment, disporting themselves in the absence of the sun, and calls the phenomenon _the dance of the dead_.