1. 26.jpeg

Amazons

world. It begins with certain fishes which nest and guard their eggs—in some cases (stickleback, etc.) the male parent does this—and becomes a condition of survival in the birds and mammals, many of which will fight to the death for their eggs or young. The development of social life among the mammals extends altruistic practices beyond the parental relation. At the human level altruism expands with social life—to the clan, the tribe, etc.—and is the chief basis of moral law, being now an “enlightened egoism” or consciousness of communal interests. Social-moral progress is based upon the expansion of the deep-rooted family sentiment to larger and larger groups, ultimately to the entire race. Wester-marck traces altruism in the animal and savage worlds in Ch. XXXIV of his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1926). For the superficial claim that Christianity first taught altruism see special articles (Children ; Hospitals ; Philanthropy ; Slavery, etc.).

Amazons

Amazons, The. The old Greek legend of the Amazons of Asia Minor is now generally regarded as garbled story told by early sailors who had seen bodies of women of masculine appearance and dress. These were probably the celibate priestesses of Ma, the mother-earth goddess of the Hittites [see]. These priestesses, of whom we have discovered carved representations, wore short tunics, armour, axes, and daggers. The Greek geographer Strabo tells us that in certain “holy cities” they formed the majority of the popula-tion. In one city there were 6,000 of them, besides eunuch priests like those of Attis. They carry back the story of religious celibacy to the dawn of civiliza-tion. See the Rev. Prof. Sayce, The Hittites (4th ed., 1925) and, especially, W. Leonhard, Hittiter und Amazonen (1911).

Amazons

Amenhotep IV. [See Ikhnaten.] Americanism. The name first given by the Vatican to the Modernist Move-ment in the Roman Church. In the later years of the last century many American Catholics, lay and clerical, loudly professed, as part of their attempt to win America, that they were going to modernize their branch of the

Amerindians

Church. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII drastically denounced this “American-ism,” as he called it, in a public letter to Cardinal Gibbons, and the American bishops and cardinals meekly submitted.

Amerindians

Amerindians, The Religion of the. The religion, or religions, of the Amerin-dians at the time of the Spanish conquest afford the purest example of the develop-ment of religion from a very crude level to that of an elaborate mythology and organization. American archæologists periodically announce discoveries of pre-Columbian cultures, but, though one or two claims are still under dis-cussion, none have yet been substan-tiated. It is the general conviction that the first immigrants who crossed from extreme north-eastern Asia to Alaska at some date between 5,000 and 10,000 B.C.—the Ice Age precludes an earlier date—entered a virgin continent over which they spread as far as Tierra del Fuego, at one time, it is estimated, numbering about 100,000,000. The low-est religious level, among the Indians of the far North—there has been much degeneration in South America, espe-cially in the case of the Yahgans—and the peoples of north-eastern Asia, suggests the starting-point, a crude nature-religion with shamans, and the cults of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Peruvians exhibit a natural evolution from this stage to that of ethical and sacerdotal religions. The late Sir G. Elliot Smith contended that Egyptian culture had reached America through Southern Asia; but no American archæologist admits this, and the present writer, who visited the sites from Central Mexico to Southern Yucatan, found the theory unintelligible. We have here, therefore, not only a fine illustration of the natural evolution of civilization by the contact of peoples with different cultures—the civilization began in the bottle-neck of Central America—but of the natural growth of a moral ideal which conquers and inspires beliefs and practices in many respects like those of Roman Catholicism. The Spanish missionary who accompanied the Spaniards to Mexico, Fr. B. de Sahagun,tells us (Historia General, Span. trans., 1829) that he and his colleagues were amazed