As the path to a higher life hereafter, the burning of the dead was first instituted. It was a privilege usually confined to a select few. Among the Algonkin-Ottawas, only, those of the distinguished totem of the Great Hare, among the Nicaraguans none but the caciques, among the Caribs exclusively the priestly caste, were entitled to this peculiar honor.[145-1] The first gave as the reason for such an exceptional custom, that the members of such an illustrious clan as that of Michabo, the Great Hare, should not rot in the ground as common folks, but rise to the heavens on the flames and smoke. Those of Nicaragua seemed to think it the sole path to immortality, holding that only such as offered themselves on the pyre of their chieftain would escape annihilation at death;[145-2] and the tribes of upper California were persuaded that such as were not burned at death were liable to be transformed into the lower orders of brutes.[145-3] Strangely, enough, we thus find a sort of baptism by fire deemed essential to a higher life beyond the grave.
Another analogy strengthened the symbolic force of fire as life. This is that which exists between the sensation of warmth and those passions whose physiological end is the perpetuation of the species. We see how native it is to the mind from such coarse expressions as "hot lust," "to burn," "to be in heat," "stews," and the like, figures not of the poetic, but the vulgar tongue. They occur in all languages, and hint how readily the worship of fire glided into that of the reproductive principle, into extravagances of chastity and lewdness, into the shocking orgies of the so-called phallic worship.
Some have supposed that a sexual dualism pervades all natural religions and this too has been assumed as the solution of all their myths. It has been said that the action of heat upon moisture, of the sun on the waters, the mysteries of reproduction, and the satisfaction of the sexual instincts, are the unvarying themes of primitive mythology. So far as the red race is concerned, this is a most gratuitous assumption. The facts that have been eagerly collated by Dulaure and others to bolster such a detestable theory lend themselves fairly to no such interpretation.