Natchez

“The chief of the Natchez [was] known as the Great Sun,… He was carried about on a litter moved at a past pace by relays of eight men who, without breaking step, passed it from one team to another…

“The cult of the sun represented the official religion of the chiefdom… Its theology was quite complex, but it was based on a supreme deity who lived in the sky and was closely connected with the sun (he may indeed have been identical with it, but the early French reports are confused on this point).

“The Natchez believed that in the distant past the son of this deity had descended to earth and brought civilization to them as his own chosen people giving them those laws, customs, ceremonies, and arts that made them powerful over their neighbors. Then this deity had retired into a stone that was ever afterward preserved in the principal temple;…”

Peter Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State (New York: Dutton, 1968), 155, 157–158.