Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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This Worship Of Stones, When Once
Established, Is Preserved Amidst More Modern Forms Of Worship; And
What Was At First The Object Of Religious Homage, Becomes A Source Of
Superstitious Confidence.
Divine stones are transformed into amulets,
which are believed to preserve the wearer from every ill, mental and
corporeal.
Although a distance of five hundred leagues separates the
banks of the Amazon and the Orinoco from the Mexican table-land;
although history records no fact that connects the savage nations of
Guiana with the civilized nations of Anahuac, the monk Bernard de
Sahagun, at the beginning of the conquest, found preserved as relics
at Cholula, certain green stones which had belonged to Quetzalcohuatl.
This mysterious personage is the Mexican Buddha; he appeared in the
time of the Toltecs, founded the first religious associations, and
established a government similar to that of Meroe and of Japan.
The history of the jade, or the green stones of Guiana, is intimately
connected with that of the warlike women whom the travellers of the
sixteenth century named the Amazons of the New World. La Condamine has
produced many testimonies in favour of this tradition. Since my return
from the Orinoco and the river Amazon, I have often been asked, at
Paris, whether I embraced the opinion of that learned man, or
believed, like several of his contemporaries, that he undertook the
defence of the Cougnantainsecouima (the independent women who received
men into their society only in the month of April), merely to fix, in
a public sitting of the Academy, the attention of an audience somewhat
eager for novelties.
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