Advocates of Scandinavian analogies in religion are not wanting. Although Viollet-le-Duc finds parallels existing between the Brahmanistic ideas of divinity and passages of the Popol Vuh, still he is of the opinion that the strongest resemblances have been found to exist between the religious customs of the Scandinavians and those recorded in the Popol Vuh.[694] Humboldt remarks, “we have fixed the special attention of our readers upon this Votan or Wodan, an American who appears of the same family with the Wods or Odins of the Goths and of the peoples of Celtic origin. Since, according to the learned researches of Sir William Jones, Odin and Buddha are probably the same person, it is curious to see the names of Bondvar, Wodansdag and Votan designating in India, Scandinavia, and in Mexico, the day of a brief period.”[695]

Lafitau, in his Mœurs des Sauvages, is as enthusiastic in his advocacy of the theory that the ancient Americans derived their religion from the Greeks, as Kingsborough is certain that it was of Jewish origin. He devotes his fourth chapter, and furnishes numerous illustrations, in support of his view.[696] Our limited space precludes the possibility of presenting in full the analogies discovered by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg between the Mexican deities and those of Greece and Egypt. If we hesitate sometimes in accepting his conclusions, we cannot but wonder at his erudition and his zeal in research. He calls attention to the fact that the cult of Pan and Hermes were identical in Greece, and refers to Maia, a personification of the earth, and the mother of the Hermes having been the consort of Zeus or Pan himself. So in Mexico he finds Pan in the person of Cipactoual, who, under the name of Cuextecatl, has for his consort Maia or Maiaoel. This god was adored in all parts of Mexico and Central America, and at Panuco or Panco, literally Panopolis, the Spaniards found upon their entrance into Mexico, superb temples and images of Pan.[697] The names of both Pan and Maia enter extensively into the Maya vocabulary, Maia being the same as Maya, the principal name of the peninsula, and pan, making Mayapan, the ancient capital. In the Nahua language pan or pani signifies “equality to that which is above,” and Pantecatl was the progenitor of all beings. The Abbé has little difficulty in proving the identity of Zamna, Hunab-ku and other Maya deities, with the gods of Greece.[698] In the name of the Egyptian god Horus, he finds the significance of hurricane, or in the dialects of the Antilles, huracan or urogan, the god Hurakan of the Quichés. Also in the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol which Salvolini found equivalent to the phonetic K, namely, the singular reptile Uraeus, which resembles a serpent in an erect position with an enlarged body, and employed extensively as a decoration in hair of the Egyptian deities and the Pharaohs; he sees the emblem of Quetzalcoatl (Ketzalcohuatl) the feathered-serpent, called Gukumatz in Quiché, and Kukulcan in Maya. The same symbol is represented on the Egyptian monuments with a feather rising from the serpent’s crest.[699] It would be easy to pursue these ingenious comparisons through a number of pages, but we question their value in throwing any light on the subject in hand. The reader will find them scattered in profusion through the voluminous writings of the learned Abbé. It is sufficient to say that most of the seeming analogies between the new and old world religions cannot be other than accidental, since it is probable that the aborigines entered our continent at a very remote antiquity, long before the religions with which theirs have been so persistently compared, took on their distinctive features. If after they were separated from the rest of the world by seas and mountains, the Americans developed religious systems presenting analogies to those of other lands, it furnishes us but another proof of the common parentage and brotherhood of the race, of the universal outgoing of the human mind after the deity, and the sameness of mental operations and processes under the same given conditions.[700]