So much for the Myth of Civilisation. It is certainly wrong to try to find matter of history in these stories of civilisation, and, with Markham, Rivero, and Tschudi, to see in Bochica and the other bearded heroes of civilisation belonging to American mythology ‘missionaries of the worship of Brahma, of Buddha, and probably of other sects.’[554] My readers will surely perceive the perverseness of such a proceeding. J.G. Müller himself recognised the Sun in Bochica, the civiliser of the Muyscas; but he did not find out all the mythological relations which determine his solar character. The most important of these is the circumstance that Bochica is ‘a bearded old man, who came from the East.’ Here then, as in other American myths, the Sun’s rays are regarded as the long white beard of the old man of the sun, in the same sense in which they appear elsewhere under the form of _locks_ of hair (see supra, p. 137). And as in Egyptian the rising sun has a different name from the setting, and the same distinction of name is stamped upon the Hebrew myth also (Leah and Delilah on the one side, and Dinah, Zilpah, Asher, etc. on the other), so in the myth of the Muyscas the three names of the Sun refer to his various positions at rising, noon, and setting, which probably played a part in the ancient myth of the Muyscas. The corresponding three faces of the Sun express the same idea that produced the myth of the two of Janus (see p. 137); with the difference that the American myth notices three phases of the Sun, and the Roman only two. The Sun is opposed by the Moon, the sky of day is engaged in an everlasting war with the sky of night. The circumstance that the moon causes the flood exactly agrees with the American conception, which connects water with the moon.[555] The moon also is provided with three names in our American myth, and these three names have the same signification as the three of the Sun, i.e. the conception that each of the varying phases of the moon is itself an independent object. Dr. Anton Henne, a Swiss mythologist, first considered the meaning of the three visible forms of the moon (as contrasted with the four astronomical phases) in mythology, especially German, and cited some parallels from classical mythology.[556] Now although this feature of the triple form of the moon is undoubtedly expressed in many myths, among others in the American one under review, yet Henne-Am-Rhyn seems to go rather too far, in referring the many variations of the German story of the three spinning girls and so forth to this mythical idea. Many of these variants bear the undeniable impress of a mythical description of the setting Sun’s or the Night’s battle with the bright Sun of day; especially that in which one of the Sisters is quite white, the second half-white and half-black, and the third _blind_. Unquestionably the Sun of day is the quite white sister; the Sun shortly before setting the half-white and half-black; and the Night the blind