All the civilized Americans had a priesthood, and circumcision was practised by the Mayas of Yucatan, the Calchaquis of Caho.[14] and Mexicans,[15] who worshipped the sun and stars, believing that departed souls became stars. Water was held to be sacred for religious ablution—and the mounds are generally found near it, or have the means of being well supplied. Adair assures us that the Choctaws called the old mounds “Nanne-Yah,” “The Hills or Mounts of God;” a name almost identical with the Mexican pyramids. In Mexico, the Teocalli, or “Houses of God,” or Houses of the Sun, (for the word “Teolt,” the appellation of the Supreme Being, was also used to denote that luminary,) were regular terraced pyramids, supporting chapels, which contained the images of their idolatry. The temples of the sun and moon, in Mexico, resemble similar temples among the ancient Romans. The sun was worshipped at Emesa, says Gibbon, under the name of Elagabalus, under the form of a black conical stone, which, it was universally believed, had fallen from heaven on that sacred spot. The Siamese and Javanese divide their weeks similar to the Mexicans, the first, like theirs, being market-day; and their cycles, like the Maya age, consisted of twenty years. This was a custom with them previous to any connexion with the Hindoos.[16] The belief of the Mayas and Mexicans, that the world would be destroyed at the end of one of their ages, coincides singularly with the same impression among the Egyptians, according to Herodotus, when they saw the sun descend from the Crab toward Capricorn. In the festival of Isis, when the orb began to re-appear, and the days grew longer, they robed themselves in white garments, and crowned themselves with flowers. The movements of the Pleiades were observed by most of the primitive nations, says Pritchard, and not less so by the southern and central Indians. It is an Egyptian legend that the body of Osiris (the moon) was cut to pieces by Typhon (the sun.) So, likewise, in the Mexican mythology, the woman serpent (the moon) is said to be devoured by the sun; a fabulous allusion to the changes of the moon. In Mexico the woman serpent, or moon, was styled the “mother of our flesh;” so, in Egypt, that luminary was called the “mother of the world.” The Mexicans, Peruvians, Araucanians, the Canadian and Huron Indians; as, also, the Chinese, Malays, and Hindoos, in cases of eclipses of the sun or moon, shot off arrows at them, made hideous noises, caused dogs to bark and howl, and in every possible way struggled to separate the two antagonists.