Praised be my Lord with all his creatures and specially Our brother, the Sun, who brings us the day. He signifies to us Thee! and—for our sister the Moon ... for our brother the Wind, and for Air and Cloud. And for our sister Water who is very serviceable unto us, and precious and clear.... And for our brother Fire. And for our Mother, the Earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours, and grass. Mrs. Nuttall, after long years of study, concludes that the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor were a guiding principle of the Aztec calendar and furnished the archetype of the varied forms of the swastika and of the cross symbol.[217] She gives 4000 B.C. as an approximate date for the first use of this symbol. Certainly the swastika forms a favorite design for amulets, and for the decoration of baskets and pottery, among the Pueblo artists, and since it is agreed that nearly every ornament has its symbolic purpose, have we not here perhaps one more point of contact? At all events, the cross unquestionably existed in America for a very long time before the coming of the “men with faces white like snow who came in wooden houses with wings.” Did not Castañeda write, upon finding some cross-shaped prayer-sticks, “in some way the Indians must have received light from our Redeemer Christ”? In fact the padres found the cross below our Rock of Ácoma as well as elsewhere, and questioned whether it could be due to “the pious labors of St. Thomas or to the sacrilegious subtlety of Satan.” However they settled so obscure a problem, the Indian familiarity with the cross symbol—something both races held in reverence—undoubtedly helped the Franciscans to spread their gospel of the cross of Christ. It is interesting to recall that the rosary and the double cross date in the Indian country from Espéjo’s time (1582) when he forced the natives to wear it as a token of allegiance to Spain and to the Roman church. John G. Bourke says in 1884 that at Santo Domingo the Indians were chanting the rosary in a manner so strange and so thoroughly Indian that he was convinced he was listening to original music antedating the introduction of Christianity, which the Spanish padres had quietly allowed to be fused with their own ritual, simply changing the application. Another example of such “application” is the rule that everyone must be signed with a cross of ashes on Ash Wednesday, according to the practice of the Roman church. So interwoven with real religion are fear and superstition in the mind of aboriginal man that we find everywhere in primitive society a belief in witchcraft. It is then a safe clue toward an understanding of many unusual things which the observant visitor sees in New Mexico.