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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lectures on the Origin and Growth of
+Religion as Illustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru, by Albert Réville
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru
+
+Author: Albert Réville
+
+Release Date: December 31, 2010 [EBook #34804]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from scans of public domain material produced by
+Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.)
+
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+
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+
+
+
+
+    _THE HIBBERT LECTURES, 1884._
+
+    LECTURES
+    ON THE
+    ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF RELIGION
+    AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE
+    NATIVE RELIGIONS OF MEXICO
+    AND PERU.
+
+    DELIVERED AT OXFORD AND LONDON,
+    IN APRIL AND MAY, 1884.
+
+    BY
+    ALBERT RÉVILLE, D.D.
+    PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS AT THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE.
+
+    TRANSLATED BY PHILIP H. WICKSTEED, M.A.
+
+
+    WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
+    14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON;
+    AND 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.
+
+    1884.
+
+    [_All Rights reserved._]
+
+
+
+
+    LONDON:
+    PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SON,
+    178, STRAND.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+    LECTURE I.
+
+    INTRODUCTION.--CENTRAL AMERICA AND MEXICO. THEIR COMMON BASES
+    OF CIVILIZATION AND RELIGION.
+
+                                                                     PAGE
+
+    Importance of the history of Religion                               1
+
+    The religions of Mexico and Peru, and the special importance
+    of studying them                                                    7
+
+    Journey to another planet                                           8
+
+    Parallelism of religious history in the New World and in
+    the Old                                                             9
+
+    Central America and Mexico, and the authorities as to their
+    history and religion                                               14
+
+    Area and general character of this civilization                    18
+
+    The Mayas                                                          20
+
+    Toltecs, Chichimecs and Aztecs                                     24
+
+    The Aztec empire                                                   29
+
+    Character of the religious conceptions common to Central
+    America and Mexico                                                 35
+
+    The serpent-god and the American cross                             38
+
+    Estimate of the character and significance of the parallelisms
+    observed                                                           39
+
+
+    LECTURE II.
+
+    THE DEITIES AND MYTHS OF MEXICO.
+
+                                                                     PAGE
+
+    The Sun and Moon                                                   45
+
+    The pyramidal Mexican temples                                      47
+
+    The great temple of the city of Mexico                             48
+
+    The narrative of Bernal Diaz; and the two great Aztec deities,
+    Uitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca                                    51
+
+    Mythical significance of Uitzilopochtli                            54
+
+    Significance of Tezcatlipoca                                       60
+
+    The serpent-god Quetzalcoatl, god of the east wind                 62
+
+    Netzalhuatcoyotl, the philosopher-king of Tezcuco                  69
+
+    Number of Mexican deities                                          70
+
+    Tlaloc, god of rain                                                71
+
+    Centeotl, goddess of maize                                         72
+
+    Xiuhtecutli, god of fire                                           74
+
+    The Mexican Venus                                                  75
+
+    Other deities                                                      76
+
+    The Tepitoton                                                      77
+
+    Mictlan, god of the dead                                           78
+
+    Summary and reflections                                            79
+
+
+    LECTURE III.
+
+    THE SACRIFICES, SACERDOTAL AND MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS, ESCHATOLOGY
+    AND COSMOGONY OF MEXICO.
+
+                                                                     PAGE
+
+    Recapitulation                                                     85
+
+    Original meaning of sacrifice                                      86
+
+    Human sacrifices and cannibalism                                   87
+
+    Importance attached to the suffering of the victims                90
+
+    Tragic and cruel character of the Mexican sacrifices               91
+
+    The victims of Tezcatlipoca and Centeotl                           93
+
+    The children of Tlaloc                                             96
+
+    The roasted victims of the god of fire                             97
+
+    Mexican asceticism                                                 99
+
+    Mexican "communion"                                               101
+
+    Religious ethics                                                  102
+
+    The priesthood                                                    106
+
+    Convents, monks and nuns of ancient Mexico                        109
+
+    Mexican cosmogonies                                               112
+
+    The great jubilee                                                 116
+
+    The future life                                                   118
+
+    Conversion of the Mexicans                                        121
+
+    The Inquisition                                                   122
+
+    Conclusion                                                        123
+
+
+    LECTURE IV.
+
+    PERU.--ITS CIVILIZATION AND CONSTITUTION.--THE LEGEND OF THE
+    INCAS: THEIR POLICY AND HISTORY
+
+                                                                     PAGE
+
+    The Peru of the Incas                                             127
+
+    Cortes and Pizarro                                                131
+
+    The Inca hierocracy                                               132
+
+    The Quipos                                                        134
+
+    Authorities for the history and religion of Peru                  136
+
+    Garcilasso el Inca de la Vega                                     137
+
+    Peruvian civilization                                             139
+
+    Huayna Capac's taxation                                           142
+
+    Social, political and military organization of Peru               143
+
+    Education                                                         152
+
+    Material well-being                                               153
+
+    The legend of the Incas: Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo               156
+
+    Were the Incas really the sole civilizers of Peru?                159
+
+    Succession of the Incas and character of their rule               160
+
+    Free-thinking Incas                                               161
+
+    Huayna Capac's departure from traditional maxims                  166
+
+
+    LECTURE V.
+
+    THE FALL OF THE INCAS.--PERUVIAN MYTHOLOGY PRIESTHOOD.
+
+                                                                     PAGE
+
+
+    Recapitulation                                                    171
+
+    Atahualpa and Pizarro                                             172
+
+    Father Valverde's discourse                                       174
+
+    Atahualpa's imprisonment and death                                176
+
+    Inca pretenders                                                   179
+
+    Worship of the Sun and Moon                                       182
+
+    Viracocha, god of fertilizing showers                             184
+
+    His consort, Mama Cocha                                           186
+
+    Old Peruvian hymn                                                 187
+
+    Pachacamac, god of internal fire                                  188
+
+    The myth of Pacari Tambo                                          191
+
+    Cuycha, the rainbow                                               194
+
+    Chasca, the planet Venus                                          194
+
+    Worship of fire                                                   195
+
+    Worship of the thunder                                            196
+
+    Worship of esculent plants                                        197
+
+    Worship of animals                                                198
+
+    The Huacas                                                        199
+
+    Peruvian priesthood                                               202
+
+    The Virgins of the Sun                                            204
+
+    Punishment of faithless nuns                                      206
+
+    Independent parallelisms, illustrated by the "couvade"            208
+
+
+    LECTURE VI.
+
+    PERUVIAN CULTUS AND FESTIVALS.--MORALS AND THE FUTURE
+    LIFE.--CONCLUSIONS.
+
+                                                                     PAGE
+
+    Peruvian temples                                                  215
+
+    Sacrifices                                                        218
+
+    Columns of the Sun                                                222
+
+    Hymns                                                             223
+
+    Religious dances                                                  224
+
+    The four great festivals                                          225
+
+    Chasing the evil spirit                                           227
+
+    Occasional and minor festivals                                    229
+
+    Eclipses                                                          230
+
+    Sorcerers and priests                                             230
+
+    Moral significance of the Peruvian religion                       232
+
+    Communion, baptism and sacerdotal confession                      233
+
+    Various ideas as to the future life                               235
+
+    Supay, the god of the departed                                    237
+
+    Conversion of the Peruvians                                       239
+
+    Are the origins of the American civilizations to be sought in
+    the Old World?                                                    241
+
+    Real significance and importance of analogies observed            243
+
+    Sacrifice                                                         245
+
+    Three stages of religious faith: animistic nature-worship,
+    anthropomorphic polytheism and spiritual monotheism               246
+
+    The genesis of the temple                                         249
+
+    Primitive independence and subsequent mutual interpenetration
+    of religion and morals                                            250
+
+    Human nature invincibly religious                                 252
+
+    The guiding principle                                             254
+
+    Farewell                                                          255
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDA ET CORRIGENDA.
+
+
+    P. 16, _note_, under _Acosta_, add, "E[dward] G[rimstone]'s
+    translation was edited, with notes, for the Hakluyt Society, by
+    Clements R. Markham, in 1880."
+
+    P. 17, _note_, lines 4 and 5, to "English translation" add "in
+    epitome."
+
+       "   lines 8 and 9, for "Ixtilxochitl" read "Ixtlilxochitl."
+
+       "   line 7 from below, for "note" read "notes."
+
+    P. 32, line 10 from below, for "bases" read "basis."
+
+    P. 34, line 1, for "lama" read "llama."
+
+    P. 35, last line, insert "and" after "America."
+
+    P. 77, _note_, last line, for "caps." read "capp."
+
+    P. 92, line 9 from below, omit "to" before "which."
+
+    P. 113, _note_, last line, for "Chichemeca" read "Chichimeca."
+
+    P. 129, line 3, for "East to West" read "West to East."
+
+    P. 224, _note_, for "_Rivero y Tschudi_, l.c." read "_Rivero y
+    Tschudi_: Antigüedades Peruanas: Viena, 1851." N. B. An English
+    translation of this work by F. L. Hawks appeared at New York
+    in 1853.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+
+INTRODUCTION.--CENTRAL AMERICA AND MEXICO. COMMON BASES OF CIVILIZATION
+AND RELIGION.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+My first duty is to acknowledge the signal honour which the Hibbert
+Trustees have done me in inviting me to follow such a series of eminent
+men as the previous occupiers of this Chair, and to address you, in the
+free and earnest spirit of truth-loving and impartial research, on those
+great questions of religious history which so justly pre-occupy the
+chosen spirits of European society. Our age is not, as is sometimes
+said, an age of positive science and of industrial discoveries alone,
+but also, and in a very high degree, an age of criticism and of history.
+It is to history, indeed, more than to anything else, that it looks for
+the lights which are to guide it in resolving the grave difficulties
+presented by the problems of the hour, in politics, in organization, and
+in social and religious life. Penetrated more deeply than the century
+that preceded it by the truth that the development of humanity is not
+arbitrary, that the law of continuity is no less rigorously applicable
+to the successive evolutions of the human mind than to the animal and
+vegetable transformations of the physical world, it perceives that the
+present can be no other than the expansion of germs contained in the
+past; it attempts to pierce to the very essence of spiritual realities
+by investigating the methods and the laws of their historical
+development; it strives, here as elsewhere, to separate the permanent
+from the transient, the substance from the accident, and is urged on in
+these laborious researches by no mere dilettante curiosity, but rather
+by the hope of arriving at a more accurate knowledge of all that is
+true, all that is truly precious, all that can claim, as the pure truth,
+our deliberate adhesion and our love. And in the domain of Religion,
+more especially, we can never lose our confidence that, if historical
+research may sometimes compel us to sacrifice illusions, or even beliefs
+that have been dear to us, it gives us in return the right to walk in
+the paths of the Eternal with a firmer step, and reveals with growing
+clearness the marvellous aspiration of humanity towards a supreme
+reality, mysterious, nay incomprehensible, and yet in essential affinity
+with itself, with its ideal, with its all that is purest and sublimest.
+The history of religion is not only one of the branches of human
+knowledge, but a prophecy as well. After having shown us whence we come
+and the path we have trodden, it shadows forth the way we have yet to
+go, or at the very least it effects the orientation by which we may know
+in which direction it lies.
+
+Gentlemen, in these Lectures I shall be loyal to the principles of
+impartial scholarship to which I understand this Chair to be
+consecrated. Expect neither theological controversy nor dogmatic
+discussion of any kind from me. It is as a historian that I am here, and
+as a historian I shall speak. Only let me say at once, that, while
+retaining my own very marked preferences, I place religion itself, as a
+faculty, an attribute, a tendency natural to the human mind, above all
+the forms, even the most exalted, which it has assumed in time and
+space. I can conceive a _Templum Serenum_ where shall meet in that love
+of truth, which at bottom is but one of the forms of love of God, all
+men of upright heart and pure will. To me, religion is a natural
+property and tendency, and consequently an innate need of the human
+spirit. That spirit, accidentally and in individual cases, may indeed be
+deprived of it; but if so, it is incomplete, mutilated, crippled. But
+observe that the recognition of religion itself (in distinction from the
+varied forms it may assume), as a natural tendency and essential need of
+the human mind, implies the reality of its object, even if that sacred
+object should withdraw itself from our understanding behind an
+impenetrable veil, even could we say nothing concerning it save this one
+word: IT IS! For it would be irrational to the last degree to lay down
+the existence of such a need and such a tendency, and yet believe that
+the need corresponds to nothing, that the tendency has no goal.
+Religious history, by bringing clearly into light the universality, the
+persistency and the prodigious intensity of religion in human life, is
+therefore, to my mind, one unbroken attestation to God.
+
+And now it remains for me to express my lively regret that I am unable
+to address you in your own tongue. I often read your authors: I profit
+much by them. But I have emphatically not received the gift of tongues.
+By such an audience as I am now addressing, I am sure to be understood
+if I speak my mother-tongue; but were I to venture on mutilating yours,
+I should instantly become completely unintelligible! Let me throw
+myself, then, upon your kind indulgence.
+
+
+I.
+
+I am about to speak to you on a subject little known in general, though
+it has already been studied very closely by specialists of great
+merit--I mean the religions professed in Mexico and Peru when, in the
+sixteenth century, a handful of Spanish adventurers achieved that
+conquest, almost like a fairy tale, which still remains one of the most
+extraordinary chapters of history. But I shall perhaps do well at the
+outset briefly to explain the very special importance of these now
+vanished religions.
+
+The intrinsic interest of all the strange, original, dramatic and even
+grotesque features that they present to the historian, is in itself
+sufficiently great; for they possessed beliefs, institutions, and a
+developed mythology, which would bear comparison with anything known to
+antiquity in the Old World. But we have another very special and weighty
+reason for interesting ourselves in these religions of a
+demi-civilization, brusquely arrested in its development by the European
+invasion.
+
+To render this motive as clear as possible, allow me a supposition.
+Suppose, then, that by a miracle of human genius we had found means of
+transporting ourselves to one of the neighbouring planets, Mars or Venus
+for example, and had found it to be inhabited, like our earth, by
+intelligent beings. As soon as we had satisfied the first curiosity
+excited by those physical and visible novelties which the planetary
+differences themselves could not fail to produce, we should turn with
+re-awakened interest to ask a host of such questions as the following:
+Do these intelligent inhabitants of Mars or Venus reason and feel as we
+do? Have they history? Have they religion? Have they politics, arts,
+morals? And if it should happen that after due examination we found
+ourselves able to answer all these questions affirmatively, can you not
+imagine what interest there would be in comparing the history, politics,
+arts, morals and religion of these beings with our own? And if we found
+that the same fundamental principles, the same laws of evolution and
+transformation, the same internal logic, had asserted itself in Mars, in
+Venus and on the Earth, is it not clear that the fact would constitute a
+grand confirmation of our theories as to the fundamental identity of
+spiritual being, the conditions of its individual and collective
+genesis--in a word, the universal character of the laws of mind?
+
+And now consider this. For the Europeans of the early sixteenth century,
+America, especially continental America, was absolutely equivalent to
+another planet upon which, thanks to the presaging genius of Christopher
+Columbus, the men of the Old World had at last set foot. At first they
+only found certain islands inhabited by men of another type and another
+colour than their own, still close upon the savage state. But before
+long they had reason to suspect that immense regions stretched to the
+west of the archipelago of the Antilles; they ventured ashore, and
+returned with a vague notion that there existed in the interior of the
+unknown continent mighty empires, whose wealth and military organization
+severed them widely indeed from the poor tribes of St. Domingo or Cuba,
+whom they had already discovered and had so cruelly oppressed. It was
+then that a bold captain conceived the apparently insane project of
+setting out with a few hundred men to conquer what passed for the
+richest and most powerful of these empires. His success demanded not
+only all his courage, but all his cold cruelty and absolute
+unscrupulousness, together with those favours which fortune sometimes
+reserves for audacity. At any rate he succeeded, and the rumours that
+had inflamed his imagination turned out to be true. On his way he came
+upon great cities, upon admirably cultivated lands, upon a complete
+social and military organization. He saw an unknown religion display
+itself before his eyes. There were temples, sacrifices, magnificent
+ceremonies. There were priests, there were convents, there were monks
+and nuns. To his profound amazement, he noticed the cross carved upon a
+great number of religious edifices, and saw a goddess who bore her
+infant in her arms. The natives had rites which closely recalled the
+Christian baptism and the Christian communion. As for our captain,
+neither he nor his contemporaries could see anything in all this parade
+of a religion, now so closely approaching, now so utterly remote, from
+their own, but a gigantic ruse of the devil, who had led these unhappy
+natives astray in order to secure their worship. But for us, who know
+that the devil cannot help us to the genesis of ancient mythologies and
+ancient religions--who know likewise that the social and religious
+development of Central America was in the strictest sense native and
+original, and that all attempts to bring it into connection with a
+supposed earlier intercourse with Asia or Europe have failed--the
+question presents itself under a very different aspect. In our Old
+World, the natural religious development of man has produced myths and
+mythologies, sacrificial rites and priesthoods, temples, ascetics, gods
+and goddesses; and on the basis of the Old World's experience we might
+already feel entitled to say, "Such are the steps and stages of
+religious evolution; such were the processes of the human spirit before
+the appearance of the higher religions which are in some sort grafted
+upon their elder sisters, and have in their turn absorbed or
+spiritualized them." But there would still be room to ask whether all
+this development had been natural and spontaneous, whether successive
+imitations linking one contiguous people to another had not transformed
+some local and isolated phenomenon into an apparently general and
+international fact--much as took place with the use of tea or
+cotton--without our being compelled to recognize any necessary law of
+human development in it. But what answer is possible to the argument
+furnished by the discovery of the new planet--I mean to say of America?
+How can we resist this evidence that the whole organism of mythologies,
+gods, goddesses, sacrifices, temples and priesthoods, while varying
+enormously from race to race and from nation to nation, yet, wherever
+human beings are found, develops itself under the same laws, the same
+principles and the same methods of deduction; that, in a word, given
+human nature anywhere, its religious development is reared on the same
+identical bases and passes through the same phases?
+
+Mr. Max Müller, one of my most honoured masters, and one of those who
+have best deserved the gratitude of the learned world, has declared,
+with equal justice and penetration, in his Preface to Mr. Wyatt Gill's
+"Myths and Songs," that the possibility of studying the Polynesian
+mythology is to the historian what an opportunity of spending a time in
+the midst of the plesiosauri and the megatherions would be to the
+zoologist, or of walking in the shade of the vast arborescent ferns that
+lie buried under our present soil to the botanist. Polynesian mythology
+has in fact preserved, down to our own day, the pre-historic ages. And,
+similarly, the religions of Mexico and Peru (for the empire of the Incas
+held the same surprises and the same lessons in store for its explorers
+as that of Montezuma had done) has enabled history to carry to the
+point of demonstration its fundamental thesis of the natural
+development, in subjection to fixed laws, of the religious tendency in
+man. All those curious resemblances, amidst the differences which we
+shall also bring out, between the religious history of the New World and
+that of the Old, are not at bottom any more extraordinary than the fact
+that, in spite of the differences of physical type which separated the
+natives from their conquerors, they none the less saw with eyes, walked
+on feet, ate with a mouth and digested with a stomach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall begin our study with Mexico. But a few preliminary
+ethnographical remarks are indispensable. I spare you the catalogue of
+the numerous sources and documents from which a detailed knowledge of
+the Mexican religion may be drawn.[1] Such a list is in place in a book
+rather than in a lecture. I will only direct your attention to the noble
+collection made in 1830 by one of your own compatriots, Lord
+Kingsborough, under the title of "Antiquities of Mexico," a work of
+extreme importance, which reproduces, in facsimile or engravings, the
+monuments and ruins of ancient Mexico;[2] and the very remarkable work
+of Mr. H. H. Bancroft, "Native Races of the Pacific States of North
+America."[3]
+
+
+II.
+
+The region with which we are now to occupy ourselves comprises the space
+bounded on the South by the Isthmus of Panama, washed East and West by
+the oceans, and determined, roughly speaking, towards the North by a
+line starting from the head of the Gulf of California, and sweeping
+round to the mouths of the Mississippi with a curve that takes in
+Arizona and Southern Texas. In our day, this southern portion of North
+America is broken into two great divisions, the first and most southern
+of which is known collectively as Central America, and embraces the
+republics of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador
+and Panama. The great peninsula of Yucatan, which is now Mexican,
+formerly belonged to this group of Central American peoples. The second
+portion of the territory we are to study corresponds to the present
+republic of Mexico. I shall presently explain the sense in which it
+might be called the Mexican empire in the time of Fernando Cortes. For
+the present, let me ask you to remember that we are now about to speak,
+in a general and preliminary manner, of the region which pretty closely
+corresponds to the present Central America and Mexico.
+
+To begin with, we treat these two districts as a single whole, because
+the Europeans found them inhabited by a race which was divided, it is
+true, into several varieties, but was distinguished clearly from the
+Red-skins on the North, and still more from the Eskimos, and alone of
+the native races of North America had proved itself capable of rising by
+its own strength to a veritable civilization. The general physical type
+of the race is marked by a very brown skin, a medium stature, low brow,
+black coarse hair, prominent jaw, heavy lips, thick eyebrows, and a
+nose generally large and often hooked. The noble families as a rule had
+a clearer complexion. The women are thick-set and squab, but not without
+grace in their movements. In their youth they are sometimes very pretty,
+but they fade early. We must leave it to ethnological specialists to
+decide whether this type is not the result of previous crossings.
+
+So much is certain, that at an epoch the date of which it is impossible
+to fix, but which must have been remote, this race, cut off from all the
+world by the sea and the profoundest savagery, developed a civilization
+_sui generis_, to which the traditional reminiscences of the natives
+and a series of most remarkable ruins, discovered especially in Central
+America, bear witness. For it is in this southern district that we find
+the monumental ruins of Palenque, of Chiapa, of Uxmal, of Utatlan, and
+of other places, the list of which has again begun to receive additions
+in recent years. When the Spaniards conquered the New World, the centre
+of this civilization had shifted further north, to Mexico proper, to the
+city of Mexico, to Tezcuco and to Cholula. But the consciousness that
+the Mexican civilization was affiliated to that of the isthmic region
+had by no means been lost. It was a nation or race called Maya, the name
+of which seems to indicate that it considered itself indigenous, and the
+proper centre of which lay in Yucatan, that produced this American
+civilization--capable of organizing states and priesthoods, of rearing
+immense palaces, of carving stone in great perfection and with a true
+artistic sense, and of realizing a high degree of physical well-being.
+There is reason to believe, however, that this civilization, resembling
+in some respects that of ancient Canaan, had more refinement in its
+pursuit of material comfort than vigour in its morality. A certain
+effeminacy, and even the endemic practice of odious vices, appears to
+have early enervated it. When the Spaniards arrived in America, wars and
+devastating invasions had shattered the old and powerful monarchies of
+the central region and reduced the great monuments of antiquity to
+ruins, and that too so long ago that the natives themselves, while
+retaining a certain civilization, had lost all memory of the ancient
+cities and the ancient palaces that the Europeans rescued from oblivion.
+We may still see figured amongst the monuments of Mexico those beautiful
+ruins of Palenque, where stretches a superb gallery, vaulted with the
+broad ogives that recal the Moorish architecture of the Alhambra; while
+at Tehuantepec an immense temple has been discovered, hollowed out of a
+huge rock, like certain temples in India. The cultivation of maize was
+to this region what that of wheat was to Egypt and Mesopotamia, or of
+rice to India and China, the material condition, namely, of a precocious
+civilization. For, as has been remarked, the primitive civilizations
+could not be developed except where an abundant cereal raised man above
+immediate anxiety for his subsistence, and rescued him from the
+all-engrossing fatigues and the dangerous uncertainties of the hunter's
+life.
+
+This Maya race, having adopted the agricultural and sedentary life,
+multiplied so greatly as to send out many swarms of colonists towards
+the North, where the _Nahuas_, that is to say, "the skilled ones" or
+"experts" (for so the emigrants from the Maya land were called), found
+men of the same race as themselves, to whom they imparted their superior
+knowledge. They kept on pushing northwards, established themselves on
+the great plateau of Anahuac, or "lake country," where the city of
+Mexico is situated, and advanced up to the somewhat indefinite limit
+opposed to their progress by the Red-skins. This migratory movement
+towards the North was evidently not the affair of a day. It must have
+continued for centuries; and during its process the Maya civilization
+may have experienced great developments and undergone numerous
+modifications; so that, without venturing to pronounce categorically
+upon a problem yet unsolved, I should myself be inclined to ascribe to
+a population, which either consisted of bands of emigrant Mayas or was
+affected by this Nahua movement, those "Mounds" which still throw their
+galling defiance at the modern methods of research, powerless to explain
+their origin in regions which have since been under the reign of the
+most absolute savagery.
+
+However this may be, the movement by which in a remote antiquity the
+peoples of Central America ascended towards the North, carrying with
+them their relative civilization to Mexico and even beyond, was reversed
+at the epoch of our Middle Ages by a migration in the opposite
+direction. In this case it was the peoples of the northern regions that
+tended to beat back upon the South. They invaded, conquered and brought
+into subjection the peoples who had established themselves along the
+path followed by the previous migrations; and it is probably to
+invasions of this description that we must ascribe the fall of the
+ancient Maya society of the isthmic region. But the civilization of
+which it had sown the germs was not dead. Nay, the peoples who descended
+upon the South had in great measure themselves adopted it; and in the
+invaded districts there remained groups and nuclei of Nahua populations
+who maintained its principles, its arts and its spirit, to which their
+conquerors readily conformed. The last conquerors had been established
+as masters in the Mexican district for more than a century when the
+Spaniards arrived there. They were the _Aztecs_. They had conquered or
+shattered what was called the _Chichimec_ empire, which in its turn had
+destroyed, some centuries earlier, the _Toltec_ empire. But it would be
+a mistake to think of three successive empires, Toltec, Chichimec and
+Aztec, one supplanting the other in the same way as the Frankish empire,
+for example, took the place of that of Rome, which in its turn had
+replaced divers others more ancient yet. What really took place was what
+follows.
+
+The prolonged migrations of the Nahuas towards the North had not spread
+civilization uniformly amongst all the tribes encountered on the route.
+Thus, down to the sixteenth century, there still existed in the heart of
+Mexico tribes very little removed from the savage state, such as the
+Otomis or "wanderers;" whereas, in other districts, the Nahuas had
+established themselves on a footing of acknowledged supremacy and
+developed a brilliant civilization. Thus they founded at the extreme
+north of the present Mexico the ancient city of Tulan or Tullan, the
+name of which passed into that of its inhabitants, the _Toltecs_, and
+this latter, in its turn, became the designation of everything graceful,
+elegant, artistically refined and beautiful. Ethnographically, it simply
+indicates the most brilliant foci of the civilization imported from
+Central America. In fact, there never was a Toltec empire at all, but
+simply a confederation of the three cities of Tullan, Colhuacan and
+Otompan, all of which may be regarded as Toltec in the social sense
+which I have just described. Many other small states existed outside
+this confederation. It was destroyed by the revolt or invasion of more
+northern tribes, hitherto held in vassalage and looked down upon as
+belonging to a lower level of culture and manners. These tribes received
+or assumed the name of _Chichimecs_ or "dogs," which may have been a
+term of contempt converted into a title of honour, like that of the
+_Gueux_ of the Low Countries. Thus arose a Chichimec confederation, of
+which Colhuacan (the name given for a time to Tezcuco), Azcapulzalco,
+the capital of the Tepanecs, and Tlacopan, were the principal cities. At
+Tezcuco the Toltec element was still powerful. Cholula, a sacred city,
+remained essentially Toltec, and in general the Chichimecs readily
+adopted the superior civilization of the Toltecs. This was so much the
+case that Tezcuco became the seat of an intellectual and artistic
+development, in virtue of which the Europeans called it the Athens of
+Mexico. It was from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, according
+to the historians, that what may be called the Chichimec era lasted.
+
+At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Aztecs--that is to say
+_the white flamingos_ or _herons_ (from _aztatl_), the last comers from
+the North, who had long been a poor and wretched tribe, and on reaching
+Anahuac had been obliged to accept the suzerainty of Tezcuco--began to
+assume great importance. They had founded, under the name of
+Tenochtitlan, upon an island that is now united to the mainland, the
+city which was afterwards called Mexico. But originally the name of
+Mexico belonged to the quarter of the city which was dedicated to the
+god of war, Mextli. At once warlike and commercial, the Aztecs grew in
+numbers, wealth and military power; they saved Tezcuco from the dominion
+of the Tepanecs, who tried to bring the whole Chichimec confederation
+into subjection; presently they threw off all vassalage, and in the
+fifteenth century they stood at the head of the new confederation which
+took the place of that of the Chichimecs, and of which Mexico, Tezcuco
+and Tlacopan (or Tacuba), were the three capitals.
+
+There was no Mexican empire, then, at the moment when Fernando Cortes
+disembarked near Vera Cruz, but there was a federation. On certain days
+of religious festivity a solemn public dance was celebrated in Mexico,
+in which the sovereign families of the three states, together with their
+subjects of the highest rank, took part. It began at noon before the
+palace of the Mexican king. They stood three and three. The king of
+Mexico led the dance, holding with his right hand the king of Tezcuco,
+and with his left the king of Tlacopan, and the three confederate
+sovereigns or emperors thus symbolized for several hours the union of
+their three states by the harmonious cadence of their movements.[4]
+
+
+III.
+
+The widely-spread error that makes Montezuma, the Mexican sovereign that
+received Fernando Cortes, the absolute master of the whole district of
+the present Mexico, is explained by the fact, that of the three
+confederate states that of the Aztecs was by far the strongest, most
+warlike and most dreaded. It was constantly extending its dominion by
+means of a numerous, disciplined and admirably organized army, and
+little by little the other two states were constantly approaching the
+condition of vassalage. The Aztecs were no more recalcitrant to
+civilization than the Chichimecs, but they were ruder, more
+matter-of-fact and more cruel. They did no sacrifices to the Toltec
+graces, but developed their civilization exclusively on its utilitarian
+and practical side. They were no artists, but essentially warriors and
+merchants. And even their merchants were often at the same time spies
+whom the kings of Mexico sent into the countries they coveted, to study
+their resources, their strength and their weakness. Their yoke was hard.
+They raised heavy tributes. Their policy was one of extreme
+centralization, and, without destroying the religion of the peoples
+conquered by their arms, they imposed upon them the worship and the
+supremacy of their own national deities. Their warlike expeditions bore
+a pronounced religious character. The priests marched at the head of the
+soldiers, and bore Aztec idols on their backs. On the eve of a battle
+they kindled fresh fire by the friction of wood; and it was they who
+gave the signal of attack. These wars had pillage and conquest as their
+object, but also and very specially the capture of victims to sacrifice
+to the Aztec gods. For the Aztecs pushed the superstitious practice of
+human sacrifice to absolute frenzy. It was to these horrible sacrifices
+that they attributed their successes in war and the prosperity of their
+empire. If they experienced a check or had suffered any disaster, they
+redoubled their blood-stained offerings. But note this trait, so
+essentially pagan and in such perfect accord with the polytheistic ideas
+of the ancient world--they sacrificed to the gods of the conquered
+country too, to show them that it was not against them they were
+contending, and that the new régime would not rob them of the homage to
+which they were accustomed. The Aztec deities were not _jealous_. They
+confined themselves to vindicating their own pre-eminence. After each
+fresh conquest, the Aztecs raised a temple at Mexico bearing the name of
+the conquered country, and thither they transported natives of the place
+to carry on the worship after their own customs. It seems that they did
+not consider even this precaution enough; for they constructed a special
+edifice near the great temple of Mexico, where the supreme deities of
+the Aztec people were enthroned, and there they shut up the idols of the
+conquered countries. This was to prevent their escape, should the desire
+come over them to return to their own peoples and help them to
+revolt.[5]
+
+All this will explain how it was that Fernando Cortes found numerous
+allies against Montezuma's despotism amongst the native peoples. For it
+is an error, generally received indeed, but contradicted by history,
+that the Spanish captain decided the fate of so redoubtable an empire,
+and of a city so vigorously defended as Mexico, with the sole aid of his
+thousand Europeans.
+
+For the rest, we are forced to acknowledge that the Aztecs had developed
+their civilization, in its political and material aspects, in a way that
+does the greatest credit to their sagacity. Property was organized on
+the individual and hereditary basis for the noble families, and on the
+collective basis for the people, divided into communities. The taxes
+were raised in kind, according to fixed rules. Numbers of slaves were
+charged with the most laborious kinds of work. The merchants, assembled
+in the cities, formed a veritable _tiers-état_ which exercised a growing
+political influence. There were markets, the abundance and wealth of
+which stupefied the Spaniards. The luxury of the court and of the great
+families was dazzling. No one dared to address the sovereign save with
+lowered voice, and--strange custom in our eyes!--no one appeared before
+him save with naked feet and clad in sordid garments, in sign of
+humility. Mexico had been joined to the mainland by causeways, along
+which an aqueduct conveyed the pure waters of distant springs to the
+city. The irrigation works in the country were numerous and in good
+repair. The streets were cleansed by day and lighted at night,
+advantages in which none of the European capitals rejoiced in the
+sixteenth century. And finally, for we cannot dwell indefinitely upon
+this subject, let us note the excellent roads that stretched from Mexico
+to the limits of the Aztec empire and the confederated states. Along
+these roads the sovereigns of Mexico had established, at intervals of
+two leagues, courier posts for the transmission of important news to
+them. Montezuma heard of the disembarkment of Fernando Cortes three days
+after it took place.
+
+And now imagine that this people was always averse to navigation--was
+ignorant of use of iron, knowing only of gold, silver and copper--had no
+beast of traction or burden, neither horse, nor ass, nor camel, nor
+elephant, nor even the llama of Peru--was without writing (for though we
+find a kind of hieroglyph on the monuments of Mexico and Central
+America, yet the system was not of the smallest avail for ordinary
+life)--and, finally, had no money except an inconsiderable number of
+silver crosses and cacao berries, the mass of exchanges being effected
+by barter! On the other hand, they worked in stone with admirable skill.
+In their knives and lance and arrow heads, made of obsidian, they
+achieved remarkable perfection, and they excelled in the art of
+supplying the place of writing by pictures, painted on a kind of aloe
+paper or on cotton stuffs, representing the persons or things as to
+which they desired to convey information.
+
+Such, then, is the singular people that Spain was destined to conquer in
+the sixteenth century, and whose civilization, though modified by the
+special Aztec spirit, rested after all upon the same bases that had
+sustained the more ancient civilization of Central America. And this is
+equally true of the religion, which, with all the varieties impressed
+upon it by the special genius or inclinations of the diverse peoples,
+reveals itself as resting upon one common basis, from the Isthmus of
+Panama to the Gulf of California and the mouths of the Rio del Norte.
+
+
+IV.
+
+One of the fundamental traits of this regional religion, then, is the
+pre-eminence of the Sun, regarded as a personal and animated being, over
+all other divinities. At Guatemala, amongst the Lacandones, he was
+adored directly, without any images. Amongst their neighbours the Itzas,
+not far from Vera Paz, he was represented as a round human head
+encircled by diverging rays and with a great open mouth. This symbol,
+indeed, was very widely spread in all that region. Often the Sun is
+represented putting out his tongue, which means that he lives and
+speaks. For in the American hieroglyphics, a protruded tongue, or a
+tongue placed by the side of any object, is the emblem of life. A
+mountain with a tongue represents a volcano. The Sun was generally
+associated with the Moon as spouse, and they were called _Grandfather_
+and _Grandmother_. In Central America, and in the territory of Mexico,
+may be observed a number of stone columns which are likewise statues;
+but the head is generally in the middle, and is so overlaid with
+ornaments or attributes, that it is not very easy to discover it. These
+are _Sun-columns_. As he traced the shadow of these monoliths upon the
+soil day after day, the Sun appeared to be caressing them, loving them,
+taking them as his fellow-workers in measuring the time. These same
+columns were also symbols of fructifying power. Often the Sun has a
+child, who is no other than a doublet of himself, but conceived in human
+form as the civilizer, legislator and conqueror, bearing diverse names
+according to the peoples whose hero-god and first king he is represented
+as being. And for that matter, if we had but the time, we might long
+dwell on the myths of Yucatan, of Guatemala (amongst the Quichés), of
+Honduras, and of Nicaragua. By the side of the Sun and Moon, grandfather
+and grandmother, there were a number of great and small deities (some of
+them extremely vicious), and amongst others a god of rain, who was
+called Tohil by the Quichés and Tlaloc at Mexico, where he took his
+place amongst the most revered deities. His name signifies "noise,"
+"rumbling." Amongst the Quichés he had a great temple at Utatlan,
+pyramidal in form, like all others in this region of the world, where he
+was the object of a "perpetual adoration" offered him by groups of from
+thirteen to eighteen worshippers, who relieved each other in relays day
+and night.
+
+Human sacrifice was practised by all these peoples, though not to such
+an extent as amongst the Aztecs, for they only resorted to it on rare
+occasions. It was especially girls that they immolated, with the idea of
+giving brides to the gods. They were to exercise their conjugal
+influence in favourably disposing their divine consorts towards the
+sacrificers. In this connection we find a tragi-comic story of a young
+victim whose forced marriage was not in the least to her taste, and who
+threatened to pronounce the most terrible maledictions from heaven upon
+her slaughterers. Her threats had so much effect that they let her go,
+and procured another and less recalcitrant bride for the deity.[6]
+
+Finally, we will mention a most characteristic deity (whom we shall
+presently recognize at Mexico under yet another name), variously known
+as Cuculkan (bird-serpent), Gucumatz (feathered-serpent),
+Hurakan--whence our "hurricane"--Votan (serpent), &c. He is always a
+serpent, and generally feathered or flying. He is a personification of
+the wind, especially of the east wind, which brings the fertilizing
+rains in that district. Almost everywhere he is credited with gentle and
+beneficent dispositions, and therefore with a certain hostility to human
+sacrifice. It was this deity, in one of his forms, who was worshipped in
+the sacred island of Cozumel, situated close to Yucatan, to which
+pilgrimages were made from great distances. It was there that the
+Spaniards, to their great surprise, first observed a cross surmounting
+the temple of this god of the wind. This was the starting-point of the
+legend according to which the Apostle Thomas had of old evangelized
+America. It is a pure illusion. The pagan cross of Central America and
+Mexico is nothing whatever but the symbol of the four cardinal points of
+the compass from which blow the four chief winds.
+
+Such is the common religious basis, which we have simply sketched in its
+most general outlines, and upon which the more elaborate and sombre
+religion of the Aztecs, which we shall examine at our next meeting, was
+reared. Pray observe that we find in this group of connected beliefs and
+worships something quite analogous to the polytheism of the ancient
+world. The only notable difference is, that the god of Heaven, Dyaus,
+Varuna, Zeus, Ahura Mazda, or (in China) Tien, does not occupy the same
+pre-eminent place in the American mythology that he takes in its
+European and Asiatic counterparts. For the rest, the processes of the
+human spirit are absolutely identical in the two continents. In both
+alike it is the phenomena of nature, regarded as animated and conscious,
+that wake and stimulate the religious sentiment and become the objects
+of the adoration of man. At the same time, and in virtue of the same
+process of internal logic, these personified beings come to be regarded
+more and more as possessed of a nature superior in power indeed, but in
+all other respects closely conforming, to that of man. If
+nature-worship, with the animism that it engenders, shapes the first
+law to which nascent religion submits in the human race,
+anthropomorphism furnishes the second, disengaging itself ever more and
+more completely from the zoomorphism which generally serves as an
+intermediary. This is so _everywhere_. And thus we may safely leave to
+ethnologists the task of deciding whether the whole human race descends
+from one original couple or from many; for, spiritually speaking,
+humanity in any case is one. It is one same spirit that animates it and
+is developed in it; and this, the incontestable unity of our race, is
+likewise the only unity we need care to insist on. Let us recognize it,
+then, since indeed it imposes itself upon us, and let us confess that
+the gospel did but anticipate the last word of science in proclaiming
+universal fraternity.
+
+And here, Gentlemen, we reach one of those grand generalizations which
+must finally win over even those who are still inclined to distrust the
+philosophical history of religions as a study that destroys the most
+precious possessions of humanity. In setting forth the intellectual and
+moral unity of mankind, everywhere directed by the same successive
+evolutions and the same spiritual laws, it brings into light the great
+principle of _human brotherhood_. In demonstrating that these
+evolutions, in spite of all the influences of ignorance, of selfishness
+and of grossness, converge towards a sublime, ideal goal, and are no
+other than the mysterious but mighty and unbroken attraction to that
+unfathomable Power of which the universe is the visible expression, it
+founds on a basis of reason the august sentiment of the _divine
+fatherhood_. Brother-men and one Father-God!--what more does the thinker
+need to raise the dignity of our nature, the promises of the future, the
+sublimity of our destiny, into a region where the inconstant waves of a
+superficial criticism can never reach them? Such is the vestibule of the
+eternal Temple; and in approaching the sanctuary--albeit I may not know
+the very title by which best to call the Deity who reigns in it--I bow
+my head with that union of humility and of filial trust which
+constitutes the pure essence of religion.
+
+But from these general considerations we must return to our more
+immediate subject. At our next meeting, Gentlemen, we are to study the
+special beliefs and mythology of ancient Mexico.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+
+THE DEITIES AND MYTHS OF MEXICO.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+It will be my task to-day to give an account of the Mexican mythology
+and religion, resting as it does on the foundation common to the peoples
+of Central America, but inspired by the sombre, utilitarian,
+matter-of-fact, yet vigorous and earnest, genius of the Aztecs. You will
+remember that this name belongs to the warlike and commercial people
+that enjoyed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a military and
+political supremacy in the region that is now called Mexico, after the
+Aztec capital of that name.
+
+
+I.
+
+To begin with, we must note that the ancient Central-American cultus of
+the Sun and Moon, considered as the two supreme deities, was by no
+means renounced by the Aztecs. Ometecutli (i.e. _twice Lord_) and
+Omecihuatl (_twice Lady_), or in other words supreme Lord and Lady, are
+the designations under which they are always indicated in the first rank
+in the religious formulæ. All the Mexicans called themselves "children
+of the Sun," and greeted him every morning with hymns and with trumpet
+peals, accompanied with offerings. Four times by day and four times by
+night, priests who were attached to the various temples addressed their
+devotions to him. And yet he had no temple specially consecrated to him.
+The fact was that all temples were really his, much as in our own
+Christian civilization all the churches are raised in honour of God,
+though particular designations are severally given to them. The Sun was
+the _teotl_ (i.e. the god) _par excellence_. I am informed that to this
+very day the inhabitants of secluded parts of Mexico, as they go to
+mass, throw a kiss to the sun before entering the church.
+
+Notwithstanding all this, we have to observe that, by an inconsistency
+which again has its analogies in other religions, the cultus of the
+supreme deity and his consort was pretty much effaced in the popular
+devotions and practices by that of divinities who were perhaps less
+august, and in some cases were even derived from the substance of the
+supreme deity himself, but in any case seemed to stand nearer to
+humanity than he did. More especially, the national deities of the
+Aztecs, the guardians of their empire, whose worship they instituted
+wherever their arms had triumphed, practically took the first place. It
+is with these national deities that we are now to make acquaintance, and
+we cannot do better than begin with the two great deities of the city of
+Mexico, whose colossal statues were enthroned on its principal temple.
+
+But first we must form some notion of what a Mexican temple was.
+
+The word "temple," if held to imply an enclosed and covered building, is
+very improperly applied to the kind of edifice in question. Indeed, a
+Mexican temple (and the same may be said of most of the sanctuaries of
+Central America) was essentially a gigantic altar, of pyramidal form,
+built in several stages, contracting as they approached the summit. The
+number of these retreating stories or terraces might vary. There were
+never less than three, but there might be as many as five or six, and in
+Tezcuco some of these quasi-pyramids even numbered nine. The one that
+towered over all the rest in the city of Mexico was built in five
+stages. It measured, at its base, about three hundred and seventy-five
+feet in length and three hundred in width, and was over eighty feet
+high. At a certain point in each terrace was the stair that sloped
+across the side of the pyramid to the terrace above; but the successive
+ascents were so arranged that it was necessary to make the complete
+circuit of the edifice in order to mount from one stage to another, and
+consequently the grand processions to which the Mexicans were so much
+devoted must have encircled the whole edifice from top to bottom, like a
+huge living serpent, before the van could reach the broad platform at
+the top, and this must have added not a little to the picturesque effect
+of these religious ceremonies. Such an erection was called a _teocalli_
+or "abode of the gods." The great teocalli of Mexico commanded the four
+chief roads that parted from its base to unite the capital to all the
+countries beneath the sceptre of its rulers. It was the palladium of the
+empire, and, as at Jerusalem, it was the last refuge of the defenders of
+the national independence.
+
+The teocalli which Fernando Cortes and his companions saw at Mexico, and
+which the conqueror razed to the ground, to replace it by a Catholic
+church, was not of any great antiquity. It had been constructed
+thirty-four years before, in the place of another much smaller one that
+dated from the time when the Aztecs were but an insignificant tribe; and
+it seems that frightful human hecatombs had ensanguined the foundations
+of this more recent teocalli. Some authorities speak of seventy-two or
+eighty thousand victims, while more moderate calculations reduce the
+number to twenty thousand, which is surely terrible enough. In front of
+the temple there stretched a spacious court some twelve hundred feet
+square. All around were smaller buildings, which served as habitations
+for the priests, and store-houses for the apparatus of worship, as well
+as arsenals, oratories for the sovereign and the grandees of the
+empire, chapels for the inferior deities and so on. Amongst these
+buildings was the temple in which, as I have said, the gods of the
+conquered peoples were literally imprisoned. In another the Spaniards
+could count a hundred and thirty-six thousand symmetrically-piled
+skulls. They were the skulls of all the victims that had been sacrificed
+since the foundation of the sanctuary. And, by a contrast no less than
+monstrous, side by side with this monument of the most atrocious
+barbarism there were halls devoted to the care of the poor and sick, who
+were tended gratuitously by priests.[7] What a tissue of contradictions
+is man!
+
+But the Aztec religion does not allow us to dwell upon the note of
+tenderness. In the centre of the broad platform at the summit stood the
+_stone of sacrifices_, a monolith about three feet high, slightly ridged
+on the surface. Upon this stone the victim was stretched supine, and
+while sundry subordinate priests held his head, arms and feet, the
+sacrificing pontiff raised a heavy knife, laid open his bosom with one
+terrific blow, and tore out his heart to offer it all bleeding and
+palpitating to the deity in whose honour the sacrifice was performed.
+And here you will recognize that idea, so widely spread in the two
+Americas, and indeed almost everywhere amongst uncivilized peoples, that
+the heart is the epitome, so to speak, of the individual--his soul in
+some sense--so that to appropriate his heart is to appropriate his whole
+being.
+
+Finally, there rose on the same platform a kind of chapel in which were
+enthroned the two chief deities of the Aztecs, Uitzilopochtli and
+Tezcatlipoca.[8] And here I will ask you to accompany Captain Bernal
+Diaz in the retinue of his chief, Fernando Cortes, to whom the king
+Montezuma himself had seen fit to do the honours of his "cathedral."
+For, as you are aware, Montezuma, divided between a rash confidence and
+certain apprehensions which I shall presently explain, received Cortes
+for a considerable time with the utmost distinction, lodged him in one
+of his palaces, and did everything in the world to please him. This,
+then, is the narrative of Bernal Diaz:[9]
+
+    "Montezuma invited us to enter a little tower, where in a kind
+    of chamber, or hall, stood what appeared like two altars covered
+    with rich embroidery." (What Bernal Diaz compared to altars were
+    the two _Teoicpalli_ (or _seats of the gods_), which were wooden
+    pedestals, painted azure blue and bearing a serpent's head at
+    each corner).... "The first [idol], placed on the right, we were
+    told represented Huichilobos, their god of war" (this was as
+    near as Bernal Diaz could get to Uitzilopochtli), "with his face
+    and countenance very broad, his eyes monstrous and terrible; all
+    his body was covered with jewels, gold and pearls of various
+    sizes.... His body was girt with things like great serpents,
+    made with gold and precious stones, and in one hand he held a
+    bow, and arrows in the other. And another little idol who stood
+    by him, and, as they said, was his page, carried a short lance
+    for him, and a very rich shield of gold and jewels. And
+    Huichilobos had his neck hung round with faces of Indians, and
+    what seemed to be the hearts of these same Indians, made of
+    gold, or some of them of silver, covered with blue gems; and
+    there stood some brasiers there, containing incense made with
+    copal and the hearts of three Indians who had been slain that
+    same day; and they were burning, and with the smoke and incense
+    they had made that sacrifice to him; and all the walls of this
+    oratory were so bathed and blackened with cakes of blood, as was
+    the very ground itself, that the whole exhaled a very foul
+    odour.
+
+    "Carrying our eyes to the left we perceived another great mass,
+    as high as Huichilobos. Its face was like a bear's, and its
+    shining eyes were made of mirrors called Tezcat. Its body was
+    covered with rich gems like that of Huichilobos, for they said
+    that they were brothers. And this Tescatepuca" (the mutilated
+    form under which Bernal Diaz presents Tezcatlipoca) "was the god
+    of hell" (this is another mistake, for Tezcatlipoca was a
+    celestial deity).... "His body was surrounded with figures like
+    little imps, with tails like serpents; and the walls were so
+    caked and the ground so saturated with blood, that the
+    slaughterhouses of Castile do not exhale such a stench; and
+    indeed we saw the hearts of five victims who had been
+    slaughtered that same day.... And since everything smelt of the
+    shambles, we were impatient to escape from the foul odour and
+    yet fouler sight."
+
+
+II.
+
+Such was the impression made upon a Spanish soldier and a good Catholic
+by the sight of the two chief deities of the Mexican people. To him
+they were simply two abominable inventions of Satan. Let us try to go a
+little further below the surface.
+
+Uitzilopochtli signifies _Humming-bird to the left_, from _Uizilin_
+(Humming-bird), and _opochtli_ (to the left). The latter part of the
+name is probably due to the position we have just seen noticed to the
+left of the other great deity, Tezcatlipoca. But why Humming-bird? What
+can there be in common between this graceful little creature and the
+monstrous idol of the Aztecs? The answer is given by the American
+mythology, in which the Humming-bird is a divine being, the messenger of
+the Sun. In the Aztec language it is often called the "sunbeam" or the
+"sun's hair." This charming little bird, with the purple, gold and topaz
+sheen of its lovely plumage, as it flits amongst the flowers like a
+butterfly, darts out its long tongue before it to extract their juices,
+with a burring of its wings like the humming of bees, whence it derives
+its English name. Moreover, it is extremely courageous, and will engage
+with far larger birds than itself in defence of its nest. In the
+northern regions of Mexico, the humming-bird is the messenger of
+spring, as the swallow is with us. At the beginning of May, after a cold
+and dry season that has parched the soil and blighted all verdure, the
+atmosphere becomes pregnant with rain, the sun regains his power, and a
+marvellous transformation sets in. The land arrays itself, before the
+very eyes, with verdure and flowers, the air is filled with perfumes,
+the maize comes to a head, and hosts of humming-birds appear, as if to
+announce that the fair season has returned. We may lay it down as
+certain that the humming-bird was the object of a religious cultus
+amongst the earliest Aztecs, as the divine messenger of the Spring, like
+the wren amongst our own peasantry, the plover amongst the Latins, and
+the crow amongst many tribes of the Red-skins. It was the emissary of
+the Sun.
+
+It was in this capacity, and under the law of anthropomorphism to which
+all the Mexican deities were subject, that the divine humming-bird, as a
+revealing god, the protector of the Aztec nation, took the human form
+more and more completely in the religious consciousness of his
+worshippers. And indeed the Mexican mythology gives form to this idea
+that the divine humming-bird (of which those on earth were but the
+relatives or little brothers) was a celestial man like an Aztec of the
+first rank, in the following legend of his incarnation.
+
+Near to Coatepec, that is to say the Mountain of Serpents,[10] lived the
+pious widow _Coatlicue_ or _Coatlantona_ (the ultimate meaning of which
+is "female serpent"). One day, as she was going to the temple to worship
+the Sun, she saw a little tuft of brilliantly coloured feathers fall at
+her feet. She picked it up and placed it in her bosom to present as an
+offering to the Sun. But when she was about to draw it forth, she knew
+not what had come upon her. Soon afterwards she perceived that she was
+about to become a mother. Her children were so enraged that they
+determined to kill her, but a voice from her womb cried out to her,
+"Mother, have no fear, for I will save thee, to thy great honour and my
+own great glory." And in fact Coatlicue's children failed in their
+murderous attempt. In due time Uitzilopochtli was born, grasping his
+shield and lance, with a plume of feathers shaped like a bird's beak on
+his head, with humming-birds' feathers on his left leg, and his face,
+arms and legs barred with blue. Endowed from his birth with
+extraordinary strength, while still an infant he put to death those who
+had attempted to slay his mother, together with all who had taken their
+part. He gave her everything he could take from them; and after
+accomplishing mighty feats on behalf of the Aztecs, whom he had taken
+under his protection, he re-ascended to heaven, bearing his mother with
+him, and making her henceforth the goddess of flowers.[11]
+
+You will be struck by the analogy between this myth and more than one
+Greek counterpart. There is the same method of reducing to the
+conditions of human life, and concentrating at a single point of time
+and space, a permanent or regularly recurrent and periodic natural
+phenomenon. Uitzilopochtli, the humming-bird, has come from the Sun with
+the purpose of making himself man, and he has therefore taken flesh in
+an Aztec woman, Coatlicue, the serpent, who is no other than the spring
+florescence, and therefore the Mexican Flora. It is not only amongst the
+Mexicans that the creeping progress of the spring vegetation, stretching
+along the ground towards the North, has suggested the idea of a divine
+serpent crawling over the earth. The Athenian myth of Erichthonius is a
+conception of the same order. The celestial humming-bird, then,
+offspring of the Sun, valiant and warlike from the day of his birth,
+champion of his mother, plundering and ever victorious, is the symbol
+instinctively seized on by the Aztec people; for it, too, had sprung
+from humble beginnings, had been despised and menaced by its neighbours,
+and had grown so marvellously in power and in wealth as to have become
+the invincible lord of Anahuac. Uitzilopochtli had grown with the Aztec
+people. He bears, amongst other surnames, that of Mextli, the warrior,
+whence the name of Mexico. He protects his people and ever extends the
+boundaries of its empire. And thus, in spite of his bearing the name of
+a little bird, his statue as an incarnate deity had become colossal. Yet
+the Aztecs did not lose the memory of his original minuteness of
+stature. Did you observe, in the account given by Bernal Diaz, that
+there stood at the feet of the huge idol another quite small one, that
+served, according to the Spanish Captain, as his page? This was the
+_Uitziton_, or "little humming-bird," called also the _Paynalton_, or
+the "little quick one," whose image was borne by a priest at the head of
+the soldiers as they charged the enemy. On the day of his festival, too,
+he was borne at full speed along the streets of the city. He was,
+therefore, the diminutive Uitzilopochtli, or, more correctly speaking,
+the Uitzilopochtli of the early days, the portable idol of the still
+wandering tribe; and in fidelity to those memories, as well as to
+preserve the warlike rite to the efficacy of which they attached so much
+value, the Aztecs had kept the small statue by the side of the great
+one.
+
+To sum up: Uitzilopochtli was a derivative form or determination of the
+Sun, and specifically of the Sun of the fair season. He had three great
+annual festivals. The first fell in May, at the moment of the return of
+the flowering vegetation. The second was celebrated in August, when the
+favourable season unfolded all its beauty. The third coincided with our
+month of December. It was the beginning of the cold and dry season. On
+the day of this third festival they made a statue in Uitzilopochtli's
+likeness, out of dough concocted with the blood of sacrificed infants,
+and, after all kinds of ceremonies, a priest pierced the statue with an
+arrow. Uitzilopochtli would die with the verdure, the flowers and all
+the beauteous adornments of spring and summer. But, like Adonis, like
+Osiris, like Atys, and so many other solar deities, he only died to live
+and to return again.[12]
+
+It was now his brother Tezcatlipoca who took the direction of the world.
+His name signifies "Shining Mirror." As the Sun of the cold and sterile
+season, he turned his impassive glance upon all the world, or gazed into
+the mirror of polished crystal that he held in his hand, in which all
+the actions of men were reflected. He was a stern god of judgment, with
+whose being ideas of moral retribution were associated. He was therefore
+much dreaded. Up to a certain point he reminds us of the Vedic Varuna.
+His statue was made of dark obsidian rock, and his face recalled that of
+the bear or tapir. Suspended to his hair, which was plaited into a tail
+and enclosed in a golden net, there hung an ear, which was likewise made
+of gold, towards which there mounted flocks of smoke in the form of
+tongues. These were the prayers and supplications of mortals. Maladies,
+famines and death, were the manifestations of Tezcatlipoca's justice.
+Dry as the season over which he presided, he was not easily moved. And
+yet he was not absolutely inexorable. The ardent prayers, the sacrifices
+and the supplications of his priests might avert the strokes of his
+wrath. But in spite of all, he was pre-eminently the god of austere law.
+And this is why he was regarded as the civilizing and organizing deity
+of the Aztecs. It was he who had established the laws that governed the
+people and who watched over their observance. In this capacity he made
+frequent journeys of inspection, like an invisible prefect of police,
+through the city of Mexico, to see what was going on there. Stone seats
+had been erected in the streets for him to rest upon on these
+occasions, and no mortal would have dared to occupy them. At the same
+time a terrible and cruel subtlety in the means he employed to
+accomplish his ends was attributed to him; and the legend about him,
+which is far less brilliant than that of his brother Uitzilopochtli, led
+several Europeans to believe that he was simply an ancient magician who
+had spread terror around him by his sorceries. All this we see
+exemplified in his conflicts with a third great deity whom we shall next
+describe. In any case we may define Tezcatlipoca as another
+determination of the Sun, and specifically of the winter Sun of the
+cold, dry, sterile season.[13]
+
+The third great deity is Quetzalcoatl, that is to say "the feathered
+serpent," or "the serpent-bird;" and it is specially noteworthy, in
+connection with the elevated rank which he occupied in the Mexican
+pantheon, that he was not an Aztec deity, but one of the ancient gods of
+the invaded country. He was in fact a Toltec deity, and we recognize in
+his name, as well as in the special notes in the legend concerning him,
+that god of the wind whom we know already in Central America under the
+varying names of Cuculcan, Hurakan, Gucumatz, Votan and so forth. He is
+almost always a serpent, and a serpent with feathers. His temple at
+Mexico departed altogether from the pyramidal type that we have
+described. It was dome-shaped and covered. The entrance was formed by a
+great serpent-mouth, wide open and showing its fangs, so that the
+Spaniards thought it represented a gate of hell. Quetzalcoatl's priests
+were clothed in white, whereas the ordinary garb of the Mexican priests
+was black. There was something mysterious and occult about the
+priesthood of this deity, as though it were possessed of divine secrets
+or promises, the importance of which it would be dangerous to
+undervalue. A special aversion to human sacrifice, and especially to the
+frightful abuse of the practice amongst the Aztecs, was attributed to
+this god and his priests, in passive protest, as it were, against the
+sanguinary rites to which the Aztecs attributed the prosperity of their
+empire.
+
+The legend of Quetzalcoatl, as the Aztecs transmitted it to the
+Spaniards, is a motley concatenation of euhemerized myths. Its
+historical basis is the continuous retreat of the Toltecs before the
+northern invaders, with their god Tezcatlipoca. This latter deity
+becomes a magician, cunning and malicious enough to get the better of
+the gentle Quetzalcoatl on every occasion. I regret that time will not
+allow me to tell in detail of the combat between Tezcatlipoca and
+Quetzalcoatl. The latter was a sovereign who lived long ago at Tulla,
+the northern focus of Toltec civilization. Under his sceptre men lived
+in great happiness and enjoyed abundance of everything. He had taught
+them agriculture, the use of the metals, the art of cutting stone, the
+means of fixing the calendar; and being opposed to the sacrifice of
+human victims--note this--he had advised their replacement by the
+drawing of blood from the tongue, the lips, the chest, the legs, &c.
+Tezcatlipoca succeeded by his enchantments in destroying this rule of
+peace and prosperity, and forced Quetzalcoatl to quit Tulla, which
+thereupon fell in ruins. He then pursued him into Cholula, the ancient
+sacred city of the Toltecs, in which he had sought refuge, and in which
+he had again made happiness and abundance reign. Finally, he forced him
+to quit the continent altogether, and embark in a mysterious vessel not
+far from Vera Cruz, near to the very spot where Cortes disembarked.
+Since then Quetzalcoatl had disappeared; "But wait!" said his priests,
+"for he will return." This expectation of Quetzalcoatl's return
+furnishes a kind of parallel to the Messianic hope, or more closely yet
+to the early Christian expectation of the _parousia_ or "second coming"
+of the Christ. For when he returned, it would be to punish his enemies,
+to chastise the wicked, the oppressors and the tyrants. And that is why
+the Aztecs dreaded his return, and why they had not dared to proscribe
+his cultus, but, on the contrary, recognized it and carried it on. And
+if you would know the real secret of the success of Fernando Cortes in
+his wild enterprize--for, after all, the Mexican sovereign could easily
+have crushed him and his handful of men, by making a hecatomb of them
+before they had had time to entrench themselves and make allies--you
+will find it in the fact that Montezuma, whose conscience was oppressed
+with more crimes than one, had a very lively dread of Quetzalcoatl's
+return; and when he was informed that at the very point where the
+dreaded god had embarked, to disappear in the unknown East, strange and
+terrible beings had been seen to disembark, bearing with them fragments
+of thunderbolts, in tubes that they could discharge whenever they
+would--some of them having two heads and six legs, swifter of foot than
+the fleetest men--Montezuma could not doubt that--it was Quetzalcoatl
+returning, and instead of sending his troops against Cortes, he
+preferred to negotiate with him, to allow him to approach, and to
+receive him in his own palace. And although doubts soon asserted
+themselves in his mind, yet he long retained, perhaps even to the last,
+a superstitious dread of Cortes, that enabled the latter to secure a
+complete ascendancy over him. This, I repeat, was the secret of the bold
+Spaniard's success; nor can we ever understand the matter rightly unless
+we take into consideration the significance of this worship of
+Quetzalcoatl that the Aztecs had continued to respect, though all the
+while flattering themselves that their own god, Tezcatlipoca, would be
+able once more to protect them against his ancient adversary. Years
+after the conquest, Father Sahagun had still to answer the question of
+the natives, who asked him what he knew of the country of
+Quetzalcoatl.[14]
+
+What, then, was the fundamental significance of this feathered Serpent
+that so pre-occupied the religious consciousness of the Aztecs?
+
+He was not the Sun. The Sun does not disappear in the East. He was a god
+of the wind, as Father Sahagun perfectly well understood, but of that
+wind in particular that brings over the parched land of Mexico the tepid
+and fertilizing exhalations of the Atlantic. And this is why
+Tezcatlipoca, the god of the cold and dry season, rather than
+Uitzilopochtli, is his personal enemy. It is towards the end of the dry
+season that the fertilizing showers begin to fall on the eastern shores,
+and little by little to reach the higher lands of the interior. The
+flying Serpent, then, the wind that comes like a huge bird upon the air,
+bringing life and abundance with it, is a benevolent deity who spreads
+prosperity wherever he goes. But he does not always breathe over the
+land, and does not carry his blessed moisture everywhere. Tezcatlipoca
+appears. The lofty plateaux of Tulla, of Mexico and of Cholula, are the
+first victims of his desolating force. Quetzalcoatl withdraws ever
+further and further to the East, and at last disappears in the great
+ocean.
+
+Such is the natural basis of the myth of Quetzalcoatl, and the
+justification of my remark that we find in him the pendant of those
+deities, serpents and birds in one, who were adored in Central America,
+and who answered, like Quetzalcoatl, to the idea of the Atlantic wind.
+He was, in truth, the ancient deity that the Nahuas or Mayas of the
+civilized immigrations brought with them when they settled in Anahuac
+and still further North. Like all the other gods of these regions,
+Quetzalcoatl had assumed the human shape more and more completely. We
+still possess, especially in the Trocadero Museum at Paris, great blocks
+of stone on which he is represented as a serpent covered with feathers,
+coiled up and sleeping till the time comes for him to wake. But there
+are also statues of him in human form, save that his body is surmounted
+by a bird's head, with the tongue projected. Now in the Mexican
+hieroglyphie this bird's head, with the tongue put out, is no other than
+the symbol of the wind. Hence, too, his names of _Tohil_ "the hummer" or
+"the whisperer," _Ehecatl_ "the breeze," _Nauihehecatl_ "the lord of the
+four winds," &c. The naturalistic meaning of Quetzalcoatl, then, cannot
+admit of the smallest doubt.
+
+It is probably to the more gentle and humane religious tendency which
+was kept alive by the priesthood of this deity, that we must attribute
+the attempted reform of the king of Tezcuco, Netzalhuatcoyotl (the
+fasting coyote), who has been called the Mexican Solomon. He was a poet
+and philosopher as well as king, and had no love either of idolatry or
+of sanguinary sacrifices. He had a great pyramidal teocalli of nine
+stages erected in his capital for the worship of the god of heaven, to
+whom he brought no offerings except flowers and perfumes. He died in
+1472, and, as far as we can see, his reformation made no progress. The
+ever-increasing preponderance of the Aztecs was as unfavourable as
+possible to this humane and spiritual tendency in religion.[15] Yet one
+loves to dwell upon the fact, that even in the midst of a religion
+steeped in blood, a protest was inspired by the sentiment of humanity,
+linked, as it should always be, with the progress of religious thought.
+
+
+III.
+
+We must now proceed with our review of the Mexican deities, but I must
+be content with indicating the most important amongst them; for without
+admitting, with Gomara--who registered many names and epithets belonging
+to one and the same divinity as indicating so many distinct
+beings--that their number rose to two thousand, we find that the most
+moderate estimate of the historians raises them to two hundred and
+sixty. We shall confine ourselves, then, to the most significant.
+
+The importance of rain in the regions of Mexico, so marked in the myths
+we have already considered, prepares us to find amongst the great gods
+the figure of Tlaloc, whose name signifies "the nourisher," and who was
+the god of rain. He was believed to reside in the mountains, whence he
+sent the clouds. He was also the god of fecundity. Lightning and thunder
+were amongst his attributes, and his character was no more amiable than
+that of the Mexican deities in general. His cultus was extremely cruel.
+Numbers of children were sacrificed to him. His statues were cut in a
+greenish white stone, of the colour of water. In one hand he held a
+sceptre, the symbol of lightning; in the other, a thunderbolt. He was a
+cyclops; that is to say, he had but one eye, which shows that he must be
+ultimately identified as an ancient personification of the rainy sky,
+whose one eye is the sun. His huge mouth, garnished with crimson teeth,
+was always open, to signify his greed and his sanguinary tastes. His
+wife was _Chalchihuitlicue_, "the lady Chalchihuit," whose name is
+identical with that of a soft green jade stone that was much valued in
+Mexico. Her numerous offspring, the Tlalocs, probably represent the
+clouds. Side by side with the hideous sacrifices of which Tlaloc's
+festival was the occasion, we may note the grotesque ceremony in which
+his priests flung themselves pell-mell into a pond, imitating the action
+and the note of frogs. This is but one of a thousand proofs that in the
+rites intended to conciliate the nature-gods, it was thought well to
+reproduce in mimicry the actions of those creatures who were supposed to
+be their favourites or chosen servants. The frogs were manifestly loved
+by the god of the waters, and to secure his good graces his priests, as
+was but natural, transformed themselves into frogs likewise. It was with
+this cultus especially that the symbol of the Mexican cross was
+connected, as indicating the four points of the horizon from which the
+wind might blow.
+
+_Centeotl_ was another great deity, a kind of Mexican Ceres or Demeter.
+She was the goddess of Agriculture, and very specially of maize. Indeed,
+her name signifies "maize-goddess," being derived from _centli_ (maize)
+and _teotl_ (divine being). Sometimes, however, inasmuch as this goddess
+had a son who bore the same name as herself, Centeotl stands for a male
+deity. The female deity is often represented with a child in her arms,
+like a Madonna. This child, who is no other than the maize itself, grows
+up, becomes an adult god, and is the masculine Centeotl. The feminine
+Centeotl, moreover, bears many other names, such as _Tonantzin_ (our
+revered mother), _Cihuatcoatl_ (lady serpent), and very often _Toci_ or
+_Tocitzin_ (our grandmother). She was sometimes represented in the form
+of a frog, the symbol of the moistened earth, with a host of mouths or
+breasts on her body. She had also a daughter, _Xilonen_, the young
+maize-ear, corresponding to the Persephone or Kore of the Greeks. Her
+face was painted yellow, the colour of the maize. Her character, at
+least amongst the Aztecs, had nothing idyllic about it, and we shall
+have to return presently to the frightful sacrifices which were
+celebrated in her honour.
+
+Next comes the god of Fire, _Xiuhtecutli_ (the Lord Fire), a very
+ancient deity, as we see by one of his many surnames, _Huehueteotl_ (the
+old god). He is represented naked, with his chin blackened, with a
+head-dress of green feathers, carrying on his back a kind of serpent
+with yellow feathers, thus combining the different fire colours. And
+inasmuch as he looked across a disk of gold, called "the looking-plate,"
+we may ask whether his primitive significance was not very closely
+allied to that of Tezcatlipoca, the shining mirror of the cold season.
+Sacrifice was offered to him daily. In every house the first libation
+and the first morsel of bread were consecrated to him. And finally, as
+an instance of the astounding resemblance that is forced upon our
+attention between the religious development of the Old World and that of
+the New, only conceive that in Mexico, as in ancient Iran and other
+countries of Asia and Europe, the fire in every house must be
+extinguished on a certain day in every year, and the priest of
+Xiuhtecutli kindled fire anew by friction before the statue of his god.
+You are aware that this rite, with which so many customs and
+superstitions are connected, rests on the idea that Fire is a divine
+being, of celestial and pure origin, which is shut up in the wood, and
+which is contaminated in the long run by contact with men and with human
+affairs. Hence it follows that in order for it to retain its virtues, to
+continue to act as a purifier and to spread its blessings amongst men,
+it must be brought down anew, from time to time, from its divine
+source.[16]
+
+The Aztecs also had a Venus, a goddess of Love, who bore the name of
+_Tlazolteotl_ (the goddess of Sensuality).[17] At Tlascala she was known
+by the more elegant name of _Xochiquetzal_ (the flowery plume). She
+lived in heaven, in a beautiful garden, spinning and embroidering,
+surrounded by dwarfs and buffoons, whom she kept for her amusement. We
+hear of a battle of the gods of which she was the object. Though the
+wife of Tlaloc, she was loved and carried off by Tezcatlipoca. This
+probably gives us the clue to her mythic origin. She must have been the
+aquatic vegetation of the marsh lands, possessed by the god of waters,
+till the sun dries her up and she disappears. The legend about her is
+not very edifying. It was she--to mention only a single feat--who
+prevailed over the pious hermit Yappan, when he had victoriously
+resisted all other temptations. After his fall he was changed into a
+scorpion; and that is why the scorpion, full of wrath at the memory of
+his fall and fleeing the daylight, is so poisonous and lives hidden
+under stones.[18]
+
+We have still to mention _Mixcoatl_, the cloud-serpent, whose name
+survives to our day as the designation of water-spouts in Mexico, and
+who was specially worshipped by the still almost savage populations of
+the secluded mountain districts,--_Omacatl_, "the double reed," a kind
+of Momus, the god of good cheer, who may very well be a secondary form
+of Tlaloc, and who avenged himself, when defrauded of due homage, by
+interspersing hairs and other disagreeable objects amongst the
+viands,--_Ixtlilton_, "the brown," a sort of Esculapius, the healing
+god, whose priest concocted a blackish liquid that passed as an
+efficacious remedy for every kind of disease,--_Yacatecutli_, "the lord
+guide," the god of travellers and of commerce, whose ordinary symbol was
+the stick with a carved handle carried by the Mexicans when on a
+journey, who was sedulously worshipped by the commercial and middle
+classes of Mexico, and in connection with whom we may note that every
+Mexican, when travelling, would be careful to fix his stick in the
+ground every evening and pay his respectful devotions to it,[19]--and,
+finally, _Xipe_, "the bald," or "the flayed," the god of goldsmiths,
+probably another form of Uitzilopochtli (whose festival coincided with
+his), deriving his name apparently from the polishing process to which
+gold (no doubt regarded as belonging to the substance of the sun) had to
+undergo to give it the required brilliance, and to whose hideous cultus
+we shall have to return in our next Lecture.
+
+I must now be brief, and will only speak further of the _Tepitoton_,
+that is to say, the "little tiny ones," minute domestic idols, the
+number of which was incalculable. They insensibly lower to the level of
+animism and fetishism that religion which, as we have seen, bears
+comparison in its grander aspects with the most renowned mythologies of
+the ancient world. I must, however, allow myself a few words on the god
+_Mictlan_, the Mexican Hades or Pluto. His name properly signifies
+"region of the North;" but inasmuch as the North was regarded as the
+country of mist, of barrenness and of death, his name easily passed into
+the designation of the subterranean country of the dead. The Germanic
+_Helle_ has a similar history, for it was first localized in the wintry
+North and then carried underground. Mictlan, like Hades, was used as a
+name alike for the sojourn and for the god of the dead. This deity had a
+consort who bore divers names, and he also had at his command a number
+of genii or servants, called _Tzitzimitles_, a sort of malicious demons
+held in great dread by the living. Of course both Mictlan and his wives
+are always represented under a hideous aspect, with huge open mouths, or
+rather jaws, often in the act of devouring an infant.[20]
+
+At last we have done! In the next Lecture we shall penetrate to the very
+heart of this singular religion, as we discuss its terrible sacrifices,
+its institutions, and its doctrines concerning this world and the life
+to come. And here, again, we shall find cause for amazement in the
+striking analogies it presents to the rites and institutions of other
+religions much nearer home. Meanwhile, observe that in examining the
+purely mythological portion of the subject which we have passed in
+review to-day, we have seen that there is not a single law manifested by
+the mythologies of the ancient world, which had not its parallel
+manifestations in Mexico before it was discovered by the Europeans. The
+great gods, derived from a dramatized nature--animism, with the
+fetishism that springs from it, occupying the basement, if I may so
+express myself, beneath these mythological conceptions--in the midst of
+all a tendency manifested from time to time towards a purer and more
+spiritual conception of the adorable Being--all re-appears and all is
+combined in Mexico, even down to something like an incarnation, and the
+hope of the coming of the god of justice and of goodness who will
+restore all things. Indeed, I know not where else one could look for so
+complete a résumé of what has constituted in all places, now the
+smallness and wretchedness, now the grandeur and nobleness, of that
+incomprehensible and irresistible factor of human nature which we call
+_religion_. The "eternally religious" element in man had stamped its
+mark upon the unknown Mexico as upon all other lands; and when at last
+it was discovered, evidence might have been found, had men been able to
+appreciate it, that there too, however frightfully misinterpreted, the
+Divine breath had been felt.
+
+It is the spiritually-minded who must learn the art of discerning the
+spirit wherever it reveals itself; and when the horrors rise up before
+us of which religion has more than once in the course of history been
+the cause or the pretext, and we are almost tempted to ask whether this
+attribute of human nature has really worked more good than ill in the
+destinies of our race, we may remember that the same question might be
+asked of all the proudest attributes of our humanity. Take polity or the
+art of governing human societies. To what monstrous aberrations has it
+not given birth! Take science. Through what lamentable and woful errors
+has it not pursued its way! Take art. How gross were its beginnings, and
+how often has it served, not to elevate man, but to stimulate his vilest
+and most degrading passions! Yet, who would wish to live without
+government, science or art?
+
+Let us apply the same test to religion. The horrors it has caused cannot
+weigh against the final and overmastering good which it produces; and
+its annals, too often written in blood, should teach us how to guide it,
+how to purify it from all that corrupts and debases it. We shall see at
+the close of our Lectures what that directing, normalizing, purifying
+principle is that must hold the helm of religion and guide it in its
+evolution. Meanwhile, let no imperfection, no repulsiveness--nay, no
+atrocity even--blind us to the ideal value of what we have been
+considering, any more than we should allow the disasters that spring
+from the use of fire to make us cease to rank it amongst the great
+blessings of our earthly life.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+
+THE SACRIFICES, SACERDOTAL AND MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS, ESCHATOLOGY AND
+COSMOGONY OF MEXICO.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+In our last Lecture we passed in review the chief gods and goddesses of
+ancient Mexico, and you might see how, in spite of very characteristic
+differences, the Mexican mythology obeys the same law of formation that
+manifests itself among the peoples of the Old World, thereby proving
+once more that the religious development of humanity is not arbitrary,
+that it proceeds in every case under the direction of the inherent and
+inalienable principles of the human mind.
+
+To-day we are to complete the internal study of the Mexican religion, by
+dealing with its sacrifices, its institutions, and its eschatological
+and cosmogonical doctrines. We begin with those sacrifices of which I
+have already spoken as so numerous and so horrible.
+
+
+I.
+
+We have some little difficulty in our times, familiar as we are with
+spiritual conceptions of God and the divine purposes, in comprehending
+the extreme importance which sacrifices, offerings, gifts to the divine
+being, assumed in the eyes of peoples who were still enveloped in the
+darkness of polytheism and idolatry. And perhaps we may find it more
+difficult yet to realize the primitive object and intention of these
+sacrifices. There can be no doubt that they were originally suggested by
+the idea that the divine being, whatever it may have been--whether a
+natural object, an animal, or a creature analogous to man--liked what we
+like, was pleased with what pleases us, and had the same tastes and the
+same proclivities as ours. This is the fundamental idea that urged the
+polytheistic peoples along the path of religious anthropomorphism.
+
+This principle once established, and the object being to secure the
+goodwill and the protection of the divine beings, what could be more
+natural than to offer them the things in which men themselves took
+pleasure, such as viands, drinks, perfumes, handsome ornaments, slaves
+and wives? We must not carry back to the origins of sacrifice the
+meta-physical and moral ideas which did not really appear until much
+later. And since the necessity of eating, and the pleasure of eating
+choice food, take a foremost rank in the estimation of infant peoples,
+it is not surprising that the food-offering was the most frequent and
+the most important amongst them, so as in some sort to absorb all the
+rest.
+
+And here we are compelled to bow before a fact which cannot possibly be
+disputed, namely, that traces of the primitive sacrifice of human
+victims meet us everywhere. And this shows that cannibalism, which is
+now restricted to a few of the savage tribes who have remained closest
+to the animal life, was once universal to our race. For no one would
+ever have conceived the idea of offering to the gods a kind of food
+which excited nothing but disgust and horror amongst men.
+
+This being granted, two rival tendencies must be reckoned with. In the
+first place, moral development, with its influence on religious ideas,
+worked towards the suppression of the horrible custom of human
+sacrifice, whilst at the same time extirpating the taste and desire for
+human flesh. For we must not forget that where cannibalism still reigns,
+human flesh is regarded as the most delicious of foods; and the Greek
+mythology has preserved legends and myths that are connected with the
+very epoch at which human sacrifices first became an object of horror to
+gods and men. But, in the second place, in virtue of the strange
+persistency of rites and usages connected with religion, human
+sacrifices prevailed in many places when cannibalism had completely
+disappeared from the habits and tastes of the population. Thus the
+Semites of Western Asia and the Çivaïte Hindus, the Celts, and some of
+the populations of Greece and Italy, long after they had renounced
+cannibalism, still continued to sacrifice human beings to their deities.
+
+And this gives us the clue to a third phase, which was actually
+realized in Mexico before the conquest. Cannibalism, in ordinary life,
+was no longer practised. The city of Mexico underwent all the horrors of
+famine during the siege conducted by Fernando Cortes. When the Spaniards
+finally entered the city, they found the streets strewn with corpses,
+which is a sufficient proof that human flesh was not eaten even in dire
+extremities. And, nevertheless, the Aztecs not only pushed human
+sacrifices to a frantic extreme, but they were _ritual cannibals_, that
+is to say, there were certain occasions on which they ate the flesh of
+the human victims whom they had immolated.
+
+This practice was connected with another religious conception, grafted
+upon the former one. Almost everywhere, but especially amongst the
+Aztecs, we find the notion that the victim devoted to a deity, and
+therefore destined to pass into his substance and to become by
+assimilation an integral part of him, is already co-substantial with
+him, has already become part of him; so that the worshipper in his turn,
+by himself assimilating a part of the victim's flesh, unites himself in
+substance with the divine being. And now observe that in all religions
+the longing, whether grossly or spiritually apprehended, to enter into
+the closest possible union with the adored being is fundamental. This
+longing is inseparable from the religious sentiment itself, and becomes
+imperious wherever that sentiment is warm; and this consideration is
+enough to convince us that it is in harmony with the most exalted
+tendencies of our nature, but may likewise, in times of ignorance, give
+rise to the most deplorable aberrations.
+
+Note this, again, that immolation or sacrifice cannot be accomplished
+without suffering to the victim. Yet more: the immense importance of
+sacrifice in the inferior religions raises the mere rite itself to a
+position of unrivalled efficacy as gauged by the childlike notions that
+have given it birth, so that at last it acquires an intrinsic and
+magical virtue in the eyes of the sacrificers. They have lost all
+distinct idea as to how their sacrifice gives pleasure to the gods, but
+they retain the firm belief that as a matter of fact, it is the
+appointed means of acting upon their dispositions and modifying their
+will. The civilized Greeks and Romans no longer believed that their gods
+ate the flesh of the sacrifices, but this did not prevent their
+continuing them as the indispensable means of appeasing the wrath or
+conciliating the favour of the deities. To such a length was this
+carried in India and Iran, that sacrifice finally came to be regarded as
+a cosmic force, a creative act. The gods themselves sacrificed as a
+means of creation, or of modifying the existing order of the world. This
+idea of the intrinsic and magical virtue of sacrifice naturally re-acted
+on the importance attached to the sufferings of the victim so
+inseparably connected with it, until the latter came to be regarded as
+amongst the prime conditions of an efficacious sacrifice. For the rest,
+I need not do more than mention the notions of substitution, of
+compensation, and of renunciation on the part of the sacrificer, which
+so readily attach themselves to the idea of sacrifice, and represent its
+moral aspects.
+
+Now all these considerations will help us to understand both the fearful
+intensity and the special significance of the practice of human
+sacrifice established among the Aztecs. And here I must ask you to
+harden your hearts for a few moments while I conduct you through this
+veritable chamber of horrors.
+
+The Mexican sacrifices were, in truth, of the most frightful
+description. It was an axiom amongst the Aztecs that none but human
+sacrifices were truly efficacious. They were continually making war in
+order to get a supply of victims. They regarded the victim, when once
+selected, as a kind of incarnation of the deity who was ultimately to
+consume his flesh, or at any rate his heart. They retained the practice
+of cannibalism as a religious rite, and, as though they had had some of
+the Red-skins' blood in their veins, they refined upon the tortures
+which they forced those victims, whom they had almost adored the moment
+before, to undergo at last.
+
+These victims were regularly selected a considerable time in advance.
+They were vigilantly watched, but in other respects were well cared for
+and fed with the choicest viands--in a word, fattened. There was not a
+single festival upon which at least one of these victims was not
+immolated, and in many cases great numbers of them were flung upon the
+"stone of sacrifices," where the priests laid their bosoms open, tore
+out their hearts, and placed them, as the epitome of the men themselves,
+in a vessel full of burning rezin or "copal," before the statue of the
+deity. Some few of these sacrifices it is my duty to describe to you.
+
+For example: To celebrate the close of the annual rule of Tezcatlipoca,
+which fell at the beginning of May, they set apart a year beforehand the
+handsomest of the prisoners of war captured during the preceding year.
+They clothed him in a costume resembling that of the image of the god.
+He might come and go in freedom, but he was always followed by eight
+pages, who served at once as an escort and a guard. As he passed, I will
+not say that the people either knelt or did not kneel before him, for in
+Mexico the attitude expressive of religious adoration was that of
+squatting down upon the haunches. As he passed, then, the people
+squatted all along the streets as soon as they heard the sound of the
+bells that he carried on his hands and feet. Twenty days before the
+festival, they redoubled their care and attention. They bathed him,
+anointed him with perfume, and gave him four beautiful damsels as
+companions, each one bearing the name of a goddess, and all of them
+instructed to leave nothing undone to make their divine spouse as happy
+as possible. He then took part in splendid banquets, surrounded by the
+great Mexican nobles. But the day before the great festival, they placed
+him and his four wives on board a royal canoe and carried them to the
+other side of the lake. In the evening the four goddesses quitted their
+unhappy god, and his eight guardians conducted him to a lonely
+_teocalli_, a league distant, where he was flung upon the stone of
+sacrifices and his heart torn from his bosom. He must disappear and die
+with the god whom he represented, who must now make way for
+Uitzilopochtli. This latter deity likewise had his human counterpart,
+who had to lead a war-dance in his name before being sacrificed. He had
+the grotesque privilege of choosing the hour of his own immolation, but
+under the condition that the longer he delayed it the less would his
+soul be favoured in the abode of Uitzilopochtli. For we must note that
+in the Mexican order of ideas, though the flesh of the victims was
+destined to feed the gods to whom they were sacrificed, their souls
+became the blessed and favoured slaves or servants of these same gods.
+
+Centeotl, or Toci, the goddess of the harvest, had her human sacrifices
+also, but in this case a woman figured as protagonist. She, too, was
+dressed like the goddess, and entrusted to the care of four midwives,
+priestesses of Centeotl, who were commissioned to pet and amuse her. A
+fortnight before the festival, they celebrated "the arm dance" before
+her, in which the dancers, without moving their feet, perpetually raised
+and lowered their arms, as a symbol of the vegetation fixed at its
+roots, but moving freely above. Then she had to take part in a mock
+combat, after which she received the title of "image of the mother of
+the gods." The day before her execution, she went to pay what was called
+her "farewell to the market," in which she was conducted to the market
+of Mexico, sowing maize all along the street as she went, and reverenced
+by the people as Toci, "our grandmother." But the following midnight she
+was carried to the top of a teocalli, perched upon the shoulders of a
+priest, and swiftly decapitated. Then they flayed her without loss of
+time. The skin of the trunk was chopped off, and a priest, wrapping
+himself in the bleeding spoil, traversed the streets in procession, and
+made pretence of fighting with soldiers who were interspersed in the
+cortége. The skin of the legs was carried to the temple of Centeotl, the
+son, where another priest made himself a kind of mask with it, to
+represent his god, and sacrificed four captives in the ordinary way.
+After this, the priest, accompanied by some soldiers, bore the hideous
+shreds to a point on the frontier, where they were buried as a talisman
+to protect the empire.
+
+The festivals of Tlaloc, god of rain, were perhaps yet more horrible. At
+one of them they sacrificed a number of prisoners of war, one upon
+another, clothed like the god himself. They tore out their hearts in the
+usual way, and then carried them in procession, enclosed in a vase, to
+throw them into a whirlpool of the lake of Mexico, which they imagined
+to be one of the favoured residences of the aquatic deity. But it was
+worse still at the festival of this same Tlaloc which fell in February.
+On this occasion a number of young children were got together, and
+decked with feathers and precious stones. They put wings upon them, to
+enable them to fly up, and then placed them on litters, and bore them
+through the city in grand procession and with the sound of trumpets. The
+people, says Sahagun,[21] could not choose but weep to see these poor
+little ones led off to the sacrifice. But if the children themselves
+cried freely, it was all the better, for it was a sign that the rain
+would be abundant.[22]
+
+I will not try your nerves by dwelling much longer on this dismal
+subject, though there is no lack of material. At the feast of Xipe, "the
+flayed," for example, whole companies of men were wrapped in the skins
+of sacrificed captives, and engaged in mock battles in that costume. But
+the only further instance I am compelled to mention is connected with
+the festival of the god of fire, Xiuhtecutli, which was celebrated with
+elaborate ceremonies. At set of sun, all who had prisoners of war or
+slaves to offer to the deity brought forward their victims, painted
+with the colours of the god, danced along by their side, and shut them
+up in a building attached to the teocalli of Fire. Then they mounted
+guard all round, singing hymns. At midnight, each owner entered and
+severed a lock of the hair of his slave or slaves, to be carefully
+preserved as a talisman. At daybreak they brought out the victims and
+led them to the foot of the temple stair. There the priests took them
+upon their shoulders and carried them up to the higher platform, where
+they had prepared a great brazier of burning embers. Here each priest
+flung his human burden upon the fire, and I leave you to imagine the
+indescribable scene that ensued. Nor is this all. The same priests,
+armed with long hooks, fished out the poor wretches before they were
+quite roasted to death, and despatched them in the usual fashion on the
+stone of sacrifices.[23]
+
+It was after these offerings of private devotion that family and
+friendly gatherings were held, at which a part of the victim's flesh was
+eaten, under the idea that by thus sharing the food of the deity his
+worshippers entered into a closer union with him. We ought, however, to
+note that a master never ate the flesh of his own slave, inasmuch as he
+had been his guest, and as it were a member of his family. He waited
+till his friends returned his attention.
+
+
+II.
+
+Human sacrifice, Gentlemen, appears to have been a universal practice;
+but wherever the human sympathies developed themselves rapidly, it was
+early superseded by various substituted rites which it was supposed
+might with advantage replace it. Such were flagellation, mutilation of
+some unessential part of the body, or the emission of a certain quantity
+of blood. This last practice, in particular, might be regarded as an act
+of individual devotion, a gift made to the gods by the worshipper
+himself out of his own very substance. The priesthood of Quetzalcoatl,
+who had little taste for human sacrifices, seem to have introduced this
+method of propitiating the gods by giving them one's own blood; and the
+practice of drawing it from the tongue, the lips, the nose, the ears or
+the bosom, came to be the chief form of expression of individual piety
+and penitence in Central America and in Mexico. The priests in
+particular owed it to their special character to draw their blood for
+the benefit of the gods, and nothing could be stranger than the refined
+methods they adopted to accomplish this end. For instance, they would
+pass strings or splinters through their lips or ears and so draw a
+little blood. But then a fresh string or a fresh splinter must be added
+every day, and so it might go on indefinitely, for the more there were,
+the more meritorious was the act; nor can we doubt that the idea of the
+suffering endured enhancing the merit of the deed itself, was already
+widely spread in Mexico. There was a system of Mexican _asceticism_,
+too, specially characterized by the long fasts which the faithful, and
+more particularly the priests, endured. Indeed, fasting is one of the
+most general and ancient forms of adoration. It rests, in the first
+place, on an instinctive feeling that a man is more worthy to present
+himself before the divine beings when fasting than when stuffed with
+food; and, in the second place, on the fact that fasting is shown by
+experience to promote dreams, hallucinations, extasies and so forth,
+which have always been considered as so many forms of communication with
+the deity.[24] It was only later that fasting became the sign and index
+of mourning, and therefore of sincere repentance and profound sorrow.
+Mexico had its solitaries or hermits, too, who sought to enter into
+closer communion with the gods by living in the desert under conditions
+of the severest asceticism. Are we not once more tempted to exclaim that
+there is nothing new under the sun?
+
+But the devotees of the ancient Mexican religion had other methods of
+uniting themselves substantially and corporeally with their gods; and in
+accordance with the notions which we have seen were accredited by their
+religion, they had developed a kind (or kinds) of _communion_ from
+which, with a little theology, a regular doctrine of transubstantiation
+might have been drawn.
+
+Thus, at the third great festival in honour of Uitzilopochtli
+(celebrated at the time of his death), they made an image of the deity
+in dough, steeped it in the blood of sacrificed children, and partook of
+the pieces.[25] In the same way the priests of Tlaloc kneaded statuettes
+of their god in dough, cut them up, and gave them to eat to patients
+suffering from the diseases caused by the cold and wet.[26] The
+statuettes were first consecrated by a small sacrifice. And so, too, at
+the yearly festival of the god of fire, Xiuhtecutli, an image of the
+deity, made of dough, was fixed in the top of a great tree which had
+been brought into the city from the forest. At a certain moment the tree
+was thrown down, on which of course the idol broke to pieces, and the
+worshippers all scrambled for a bit of him to eat.
+
+It has been asked how far any moral idea had penetrated this religion,
+the repulsive aspects of which we have been describing. The question is
+a legitimate one. I believe, Gentlemen, that in studying the religious
+origins of the different peoples of the earth, we shall come to the
+conclusion that the fusion of the religious and moral life--which has
+long been an accomplished fact for us, especially since the Gospel, so
+that we cannot admit the possibility of uniting immorality and piety for
+a single instant--is not primitive, but is due to the development of the
+human spirit, and to healthier, more complete and more religious ideas
+concerning the moral law. At the beginning of things, and in our own day
+amongst savages, nay, even amongst the most ignorant strata of the
+population in civilized countries, it is obvious that religion and
+morals have extremely little to do with each other. Some authors,
+accordingly, in the face of all the monstrous cruelty, selfishness and
+inhumanity of the Mexican religion, have concluded that no element of
+morality entered into it at all, but that all was self-seeking and
+fanaticism.
+
+This is an exaggeration. We have seen that amongst the nature-gods of
+Mexico there was one, Tezcatlipoca, who was looked upon as the austere
+guardian of law and morals. If we are to believe Father Sahagun,--and
+even if we allow for strong suspicions as to the accuracy of his
+translations of the prayers and exhortations uttered under certain
+circumstances by parents and priests,--it is evident that the Mexicans
+were taught to consider a decent and virtuous life as required by the
+gods. Indeed, they had a system of confession, in which the priest
+received the statement of the penitent, laid a penance on him, and
+assured him of the pardon of the gods. Generally the penitents delayed
+their confession till they were advanced in age, for relapses were
+regarded as beyond the reach of pardon.[27] It would be nearer the truth
+to say that the religious ethics of the Mexicans had entered upon that
+path of dualism[28] by which alone, in almost every case, the normal
+synthesis or rational reconciliation of the demands of physical nature
+and the moral life has been ultimately reached. For inasmuch as fidelity
+to duty often involves a certain amount of suffering, the suffering
+comes to be regarded as the moral act itself, and artificial sufferings
+are voluntarily incurred under the idea that they are the appointed
+price of access to a higher and more perfect life, in closer conformity
+with the divine will. The cruel rites which entered into the very tissue
+of the Mexican religion could hardly fail to strengthen the same ascetic
+tendency, by encouraging the idea that pain itself was pleasant to the
+eyes of the gods. But the truth is that in this matter we can discern no
+more than tendencies. There are symptoms of men's minds being busy with
+the relation of the moral to the religious life, but no fixed or
+systematic conclusions had been reached. It might, perhaps, have been
+otherwise in the sequel, and these tendencies might ultimately have
+taken shape in corresponding theories and doctrines, had not the Spanish
+conquest intervened to put an end for ever to the evolution of the
+Mexican religion.
+
+I have frequently spoken of the Mexican priests, and the time has now
+come for dwelling more explicitly on this priesthood.
+
+It was very numerous, and had a strong organization reared on an
+aristocratic basis, into which political calculations manifestly
+entered. The noblest families (including that of the monarch) had the
+exclusive privilege of occupying the highest sacerdotal offices. The
+priests of Uitzilopochtli held the primacy. Their chief was sovereign
+pontiff, with the title of _Mexicatl-Teohuatzin_, "Mexican lord of
+sacred things," and _Teotecuhtli_, "divine master." Next to him came the
+chief priest of Quetzalcoatl, who had no authority, however, except over
+his own order of clergy. He lived as a recluse in his sanctuary, and the
+sovereign only sent to consult him on certain great occasions; whereas
+the primate sat on the privy council and exercised disciplinary powers
+over all the other priests in the empire. Every temple and every
+quarter had its regular priests. No one could enter the priesthood until
+he had passed satisfactorily through certain tests or examinations
+before the directors of the _Calmecac_, or houses of religious
+education, of which we shall speak presently. The power of the clergy
+was very great. They instructed youth, fixed the calendar, preserved the
+knowledge of the annals and traditions indicated by the hieroglyphics,
+sang and taught the religious and national hymns, intervened with
+special ceremonies at birth, marriage and burial, and were richly
+endowed by taxes raised in kind upon the products of the soil and upon
+industries. Every successful aspirant to the priesthood, having passed
+the requisite examinations, received a kind of unction, which
+communicated the sacred character to him. All this indicates a
+civilization that had already reached a high point of development; but
+the indelible stain of the Mexican religion re-appears every moment even
+where it seems to rise highest above the primitive religions: amongst
+the ingredients of the fluid with which the new priest was anointed was
+the blood of an infant!
+
+The priests' costume in general was black. Their mantles covered their
+heads and fell down their sides like a veil. They never cut their hair,
+and the Spaniards saw some of them whose locks descended to their knees.
+Probably this was a part of the solar symbolism. The rays of the Sun are
+compared to locks of hair, and we very often find the solar heroes or
+the servants of the Sun letting their hair grow freely in order that
+they may resemble their god. Their mode of life was austere and sombre.
+They were subject to the rules of a severe asceticism, slept little,
+rose at night to chant their canticles, often fasted, often drew their
+own blood, bathed every night (in imitation of the Sun again), and in
+many of the sacerdotal fraternities the most rigid celibacy was
+enforced. You will see, then, that I did not exaggerate when I spoke of
+the belief that the gods were animated by cruel wills and took pleasure
+in human pain as having launched the Mexican religion on a path of a
+systematic dualism and very stern asceticism.[29]
+
+But the surprise we experience in noting all these points of resemblance
+to the religious institutions of the Old World, perhaps reaches its
+culminating point when we learn that the Mexican religion actually had
+its convents. These convents were often, but not always, places of
+education for both sexes, to which all the free families sent their
+children from the age of six or nine years upwards. There the boys were
+taught by monks, and the girls by nuns, the meaning of the
+hieroglyphics, the way to reckon time, the traditions, the religious
+chants and the ritual. Bodily exercises likewise had a place in this
+course of education, which was supposed to be complete when the children
+had reached the age of fifteen. The majority of them were now sent back
+to their families, while the rest stayed behind to become priests or
+simple monks. For there were religious orders, under the patronage of
+the different gods, and convents for either sex. The monastic rule was
+often very severe. In many cases it involved abstinence from animal
+food, and the people called the monks of these severer orders
+_Quaquacuiltin_, or "herb-eaters." There were likewise associations
+resembling our half-secular, half-ecclesiastical fraternities. Thus we
+hear of the society of the "_Telpochtiliztli_," an association of young
+people who lived with their families, but met every evening at sunset to
+dance and sing in honour of Tezcatlipoca. And, finally, we know that
+ancient Mexico had its hermits and its religious mendicants.[30] The
+latter, however, only took the vow of mendicancy for a fixed term. These
+are the details which led von Humboldt and some other writers to believe
+that Buddhism must have penetrated at some former period into Mexico.
+Not at all! What we have seen simply proves that asceticism, the war
+against nature, everywhere clothes itself in similar forms, suggested by
+the very constitution of man; and there is certainly nothing in common
+between the gentle insipidity of Buddha's religion and the sanguinary
+faith of the Aztecs.
+
+The girls were under a rule similar to that of the boys. They led a hard
+enough life in the convents set apart for them, fasting often, sleeping
+without taking off their clothes, and (when it was their turn to be on
+duty) getting up several times in the night to renew the incense that
+burned perpetually before the gods. They learned to sew, to weave, and
+to embroider the garments of the idols and the priests. It was they who
+made the sacred cakes and the dough idols, whose place in the public
+festivals I have described to you. At the age of fifteen, the same
+selection took place among the girls as among the boys. Those who stayed
+in the convent became either priestesses, charged with the lower
+sacerdotal offices, or directresses of the convents set aside for
+instruction, or simple nuns, who were known as _Cihuatlamacasque_, "lady
+deaconesses," or _Cihuaquaquilli_, "lady herb-eaters," inasmuch as they
+abstained from meat. The most absolute continence was rigorously
+enforced, and breach of it was punished by death.[31]
+
+One cannot but ask whether a priesthood so firmly organized, in which
+was centred the whole intellectual life and all that can he called the
+science of Mexico, had not elaborated any higher doctrines or cosmogonic
+theories such as we owe to the priesthoods of the Old World, especially
+when we know that they regulated the calendar, which presupposes some
+astronomical conceptions.
+
+But here we enter upon a region that has not yet been methodically
+reclaimed by the historians. We have often enough been presented with
+Mexican cosmogonies, but the fundamental error of all these expositions
+is, that they present as a fixed and established body of doctrine what
+was in reality a very loose and unformed mass of traditions and
+speculations. The sponsors of these cosmogonies agree neither as to
+their number nor their order of succession, and it is obvious that a
+mistaken zeal to bring them as near as possible to the Biblical
+tradition has been at work. An attempt has even been made to find a
+Mexican Noah, coming out of the ark, in a fish-god emerging from a kind
+of box floating on the waters.[32]
+
+One thing, however, is certain, namely, that these cosmogonies are not
+Aztec. The Aztec deities proper play no part in them. We may therefore
+suppose that they are of Central American origin, or are due to that
+priesthood of Quetzalcoatl which continued its silent work in the depths
+of its mysterious retreats. The contradictions of our authorities as to
+the number and order of these cosmogonies suggest the idea that their
+arrangement one after another is no more than a harmonizing attempt to
+bring various originally distinct cosmogonies into connection with each
+other. The fact is that others yet are known, in addition to those which
+have taken their place in what we may call the classical list
+established by Humboldt and Müller.[33] In this classical list there
+are five ages of the world, separated from each other by universal
+cataclysms, something after the fashion of the successive creations of
+the school of Cuvier. Each of these ages is called a Sun, and, according
+to the elements that preponderate during their respective courses, they
+are called, 1st, the Sun of the Earth; 2nd, the Sun of Fire; 3rd, the
+Sun of the Air; and 4th, the Sun of Water. The fifth Sun, which is the
+present one, has no special name. We cannot enter upon the details
+concerning each of these Suns, and they are not very interesting in any
+case. They contain confused reminiscences of primitive life, of the
+ancient populations of Anahuac, of old and bygone worships, but nothing
+particularly characteristic or original. The only specially striking
+feature in this mass of cosmogonic traditions is the sense of the
+instability of the established order alike of nature and society which
+pervades them. What was it that inspired the Mexicans with this feeling?
+Perhaps the mighty destructive forces for which tropical countries,
+equatorial seas and volcanic regions, so often furnish a theatre, had
+shaken confidence in the permanence of the physical constitution of the
+world. Perhaps the numerous political and social revolutions, the
+frequent successions of peoples, rulers and subjects in turn, had
+accustomed the mind to conceive and anticipate perpetual changes, of
+which the successive ages of the world were but the supreme expression;
+and finally, perhaps that quasi-messianic expectation of the return of
+Quetzalcoatl, to be accompanied by a complete renewal of things, may
+have given an additional point of attachment to this belief in the
+caducity of the whole existing order. What is certain is that this
+sentiment itself was very widely spread. It served as a consolation to
+the peoples who were crushed beneath the cruel yoke of the Aztecs. They
+might well cherish the thought that all this would not last for ever;
+and even the Aztecs themselves had no unbounded confidence in the
+stability of their empire. The Spaniards profited greatly by this vague
+and all but universal distrust. After their victory they made much of
+pretended prodigies that had shadowed it forth, and even of prophecies
+that had announced it.[34] But the state of mind of the populations
+concerned being given, at whatever moment the Spaniards had arrived they
+would have been able to appeal to auguries of a like kind, by dint of
+just giving them that degree of precision and clearness which usually
+distinguishes predictions that are recorded after their fulfilment!
+
+A further proof that the Mexican religion helped to spread this sense of
+the instability of things is furnished by the grand jubilee festival
+which was celebrated every fifty-two years in the city of Mexico and
+throughout the empire. The Mexican cycle, marking the coincidence of
+four times thirteen lunar and four times thirteen solar years,[35]
+counted two-and-fifty years, and was called a "sheaf of years." Now
+whenever the dawn of the fifty-third year drew near, the question was
+anxiously put, whether the world would last any longer, and preparations
+were made for the great ceremony of the _Toxilmolpilia_, or "binding up
+of years." The day before, every fire was extinguished. All the priests
+of the city of Mexico marched in procession to a mountain situated at
+two leagues' distance. The entire population followed them. They watched
+the Pleiades intently. If the world was to come to an end, if the sun
+was never to rise again, the Pleiades would not pass the zenith; but the
+moment they passed it, it was known that a new era of fifty-two years
+had been guaranteed to men. Fire was kindled anew by the friction of
+wood. But the wood rested on the bosom of the handsomest of the
+prisoners, and the moment it was lighted the victim's body was opened,
+his heart torn out, and both heart and body burned upon a pile that was
+lit by the new fire. No sooner did the people, who had remained on the
+plain below, perceive the flame ascend, than they broke into delirious
+joy. Another fifty-two years was before the world. More victims were
+sacrificed in gratitude to the gods. Brands were lighted at the sacred
+flame on the mountain, from which the domestic fires were in their turn
+kindled, and swift couriers were despatched with torches, replaced
+continually on the route, to the very extremities of the empire. It was
+in the year 1507, twelve years before Cortes disembarked, that the
+Toxilmolpilia was celebrated for the last time. In 1559, although the
+mass of the natives had meanwhile been converted to Roman Catholicism,
+the Spanish government had to take severe measures to prevent its
+repetition.[36]
+
+We have far firmer footing, then, than is furnished by the shifting
+ground of the cosmogonies, when we insist upon the general prevalence of
+the feeling that the world might veritably come to an end as it had done
+before. Beyond this there was nothing fixed or generally accepted. Much
+the same might be said of the future life. The Mexicans believed in
+man's survival after death. This we see from the practice of putting a
+number of useful articles into the tomb by the side of the corpse, after
+first breaking them, so that they too might die and their spirits might
+accompany that of the departed to his new abodes. They even gave him
+some Tepitoton, or little household gods, to take with him, and as a
+rule they killed a dog to serve as his guide in the mysterious and
+painful journey which he was about to undertake. Sometimes a very rich
+man would go so far as to have his chaplain slaughtered, that he might
+not be deprived of his support in the other world. But in all this there
+is nothing to distinguish the Mexican religion from the beliefs that
+stretched over the whole of America, and there is no indication that any
+moral conception had as yet vivified and hallowed the prospect beyond
+the grave. The mass of ordinary mortals remained in the sombre, dreary,
+monotonous realm of Mictlan; for in Mexico, as in Polynesia, a really
+happy immortality was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy. There
+were several paradises, including that of Tlaloc, and above all the
+"mansion of the Sun," destined to receive the kings, the nobles and the
+warriors. There they hunt, they dance, they accompany the sun in his
+course, they can change themselves into clouds or humming-birds. An
+exception is made, however, irrespective of social rank, in favour of
+warriors who fall in battle and women who die in child-bed, as well as
+for the victims sacrificed in honour of the celestial deities and
+destined to become their servants. So, too, the paradise of Tlaloc, a
+most beauteous garden, is opened to all who have been drowned (for the
+god of the waters has taken them to himself), to all who have died of
+the diseases caused by moisture, and to the children who have been
+sacrificed to him. We recognize in these exceptions an unquestionable
+tendency to introduce the idea of justice as qualifying the desolating
+doctrine of aristocratic privilege; and probably this principle of
+justice would have become preponderant, here as elsewhere, had not the
+destinies of the Mexican religion been suddenly broken off. Nor is it
+easy to explain the asceticism and austerities of which we have spoken,
+except on the supposition that those who practised them all their lives
+believed they were thereby acquiring higher rights in the future life.
+It must be admitted, however, that it is not in its doctrine of a future
+life that the Mexican religion reached its higher developments.
+
+We must postpone till we have examined the Peruvian religion, which
+presents so many analogies to that of Mexico, while at the same time
+differing from it so considerably, the final considerations suggested by
+the strange compound of beliefs, now so barbarous and now so refined,
+which we have passed in review. Spanish monks, as we all know, succeeded
+within a few years in bringing the populations who had submitted to the
+hardy conquerors within the pale of their Church. It was no very
+difficult task. The whole past had vanished. The royal families, the
+nobility, the clergy, all had perished. Faith in the national gods had
+been broken by events. The new occupants laid a grievous yoke upon the
+subject peoples, whom they crushed and oppressed with hateful tyranny;
+but we must do the Franciscan monks, who were first on the field in the
+work of conversion, the justice of testifying that they did whatever in
+them lay to soften the fate of their converts and to plead their cause
+before the Court of Spain. Nor were their efforts always unsuccessful.
+They were rewarded by the unstinted confidence and affection of the
+unhappy natives, who found little pity or comfort save at the hands of
+the good Fathers. Let us add that many of the peoples, especially those
+from whom the human tithes of which we have spoken had been exacted by
+the Aztecs, were sensible of the humane and charitable aspects of a
+religion that repudiated these hideous sacrifices in horror, and raised
+up the hearts of the oppressed by its promises of a future bliss
+conditioned by neither birth nor social rank.[37]
+
+But the worthy monks could not give what they had not got. And the
+religious education which they gave their converts reflected only too
+faithfully their own narrow and punctilious monastic spirit, itself
+almost as superstitious, though in another way, as what it supplanted.
+Nay, more: in spite of the best dispositions on either side, it was
+inevitable that the ancient habits and beliefs should long maintain
+themselves, though more or less shrouded beneath the new orthodoxy. In
+1571, the terrible Inquisition of Spain came and established itself in
+Mexico to put an end to this state of things; and alas! it found as
+many heretics as it could wish to show that it had not come for nothing.
+And when the natives saw the fearful tribunal at work, when the fires of
+the _autos-da-fé_ were kindled on the plain of Mexico and consumed by
+tens or hundreds the victims condemned by the Holy Office, do you
+suppose that the new converts felt well assured in their own hearts that
+the God of the Gospel was, after all, much better than Uitzilopochtli
+and Tezcatlipoca?[38]
+
+But we are stepping beyond the domain of history we have marked out for
+ourselves. The religion of Mexico is dead, and we cannot desire a
+resurrection for it. But the memory it has left behind is at once
+mournful and instructive. It has enriched history with its confirmatory
+evidence as to the genesis, the power and the tragic force of religion
+in human nature; and he who inspects its annals, now so poetical and now
+so terror-laden, pauses in pensive thought before the grotesque but
+imposing monument which thrills him with admiration even while he
+recoils with horror.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV.
+
+PERU.--ITS CIVILIZATION AND CONSTITUTION, THE LEGEND OF THE INCAS: THEIR
+POLICY AND HISTORY.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+We pass to-day from North to South America; and as in the former we
+confined ourselves to the district which presented the Europeans of the
+sixteenth century with the unlooked-for spectacle of a native
+civilization and religion in an advanced stage of development, so in the
+latter we shall specially study that other indigenous civilization,
+likewise supported and patronized by a very curious and original
+religion, which established itself along the Cordilleras on the
+immensely long but comparatively narrow strip of land between those
+mountains and the ocean. Peru, like Mexico, was the country of an
+organized solar religion; but the former, even more than the latter,
+displays this religion worked into the very tissues of a most remarkable
+social structure, with which it is so completely identified as not to be
+so much as conceivable without it. The empire of the Incas is one of the
+most complete and absolute theocracies--perhaps the very most complete
+and absolute--that the world has seen. But in order to get a clear idea
+of what the Peruvian religion was, we must first say a word as to the
+country itself, its physical constitution and its history.
+
+The Peru of the Incas, as discovered and conquered by the Spaniards,
+transcended the boundaries of the country now so called, inasmuch as it
+included the more ancient kingdom of Quito (corresponding pretty closely
+to the modern republic of Ecuador), and extended over parts of the
+present Chili and Bolivia. We learn from our ordinary maps that this
+whole territory was narrowly confined between the mountains and the sea.
+Observe, however, that it was nearly two thousand five hundred miles in
+length, four times as long as France, and that its breadth varied from
+about two hundred and fifty to about five hundred miles. From West to
+East it presents three very different regions. 1. A strip along the
+coast where rain hardly ever falls, but where the night dews are very
+heavy and the produce of the soil tropical. 2. The _Sierra_ formed by
+the first spurs of the Cordilleras, and already high enough above the
+level of the sea to produce the vegetation of the temperate regions.
+Here maize was cultivated on a large scale, and great herds of vicunias,
+alpacas and llamas were pastured. And here we may note a great point of
+advantage enjoyed by Peru over Mexico; for the llama, though not very
+strong, serves as a beast of burden and traction, its flesh is well
+flavoured and its wool most useful. 3. The _Montaña_, consisting of a
+region even yet imperfectly known, over which extend unmeasured forests,
+the home of the jaguar and the chinchilla, of bright-plumed birds and of
+dreaded serpents. Above these forests stretch the dizzy peaks and the
+volcanos. The most remarkable natural phenomenon of the country is the
+lake Titicaca, about seven times as great as the lake of Geneva, not
+far distant from the ancient capital Cuzco, and serving, like Anahuac,
+the lake district of Mexico, as the chief focus of Peruvian civilization
+and religion. The mysterious disappearance beneath the ground of the
+river by which it empties itself, stimulated yet further the
+myth-forming imagination of the dwellers on its shores.
+
+There is a remarkable difference between the ways in which the two
+civilizations of which we are speaking formed and consolidated
+themselves in Mexico and Peru respectively. We have seen that in Mexico
+the state of things to which the Spanish conquest put an end was the
+result of a long series of revolutions and wars, in which successive
+peoples had ruled and served in turn; and the Aztecs had finally seized
+the hegemony, while adopting a civilization the origins of which must be
+sought in Central America. In Peru things had followed a more regular
+and stable course. The dynasty of the Incas had maintained itself for
+about six centuries as the patron of social progress and of a remarkably
+advanced culture. Starting from its native soil on the shores of Lake
+Titicaca, and long confined in its authority to Cuzco and its immediate
+territory, this family had finally succeeded in indefinitely extending
+its dominion between the mountains and the sea, sometimes by successful
+wars and sometimes by pacific means; for whole populations had more than
+once been moved to range themselves of their own free will under the
+sceptre of the Incas, so as to enjoy the advantages assured to their
+subjects by their equitable rule. When Pizarro and his companions
+disembarked in Peru, the great Inca, Huayna Capac, had but recently
+completed the empire by the conquest of the kingdom of Quito.
+
+It has been asked, which was the more marvellous feat, the conquest of
+Mexico by Fernando Cortes, or that of Peru by Pizarro. One consideration
+weighs heavily in favour of Cortes. It is that he was the first. When
+Francisco Pizarro threw himself with his handful of adventurers upon
+Peru in 1531, he had before him the example of his brilliant precursor,
+to teach him how a few Europeans might impose by sheer audacity on the
+amazed and superstitious peoples; and in many respects he simply copied
+his model. Like him, he took advantage of the divisions and rivalries
+of the natives; like him, he found means of securing the person of the
+sovereign, and was thereby enabled to quell the subjects. On the other
+hand, he had even fewer followers than Cortes. His company scarcely
+numbered over two hundred men at first, and the Peruvian empire was more
+compact and more wisely organized than that of Mexico. We shall
+presently see the principal cause to which his incredible success must
+be ascribed; but the net result seems to be, that one hesitates to
+pronounce the feats of either adventurer more astounding than those of
+the other, especially when we remember that Pizarro was without the
+political genius of Fernando Cortes, and was so profoundly ignorant that
+he could not so much as read!
+
+The family of the Incas, whose scourge Pizarro proved to be, must have
+numbered many fine politicians in its ranks. Never has what is called a
+"dynastic policy" been pursued more methodically and ably. The proofs
+assail us at every moment. The Incas were a family of priest-kings, who
+reigned, as children of the Sun, over the Peruvian land, and the Sun
+himself was the great deity of the country. To obey the Incas was to
+obey the supreme god. Their person was the object of a veritable cultus,
+and they had succeeded so completely in identifying the interests of
+their own family with those of religion, of politics and of
+civilization, that it was no longer possible to distinguish them one
+from another. And yet it was this very method, so essentially
+theocratic, of insisting on the minute regulation of all the actions of
+human life in the name of religion, which finally ruined the Incas.
+Peru, in the sixteenth century, had become one enormous convent, in
+which everything was mechanically regulated, in which no one could take
+the smallest initiative, in which everything depended absolutely upon
+the will of the reigning Inca; so that the moment Pizarro succeeded in
+laying hold of this Inca, this "father Abbé," everything collapsed in a
+moment, and nothing was left of the edifice constructed with such
+sagacity but a heap of sand. And indeed this is the fatal result of
+every theocracy, for it can never really be anything but a _hierocracy_
+or rule of priests. On the one hand it must be absolute, for the
+sovereign priest rules in the name of God; and on the other hand it is
+fatally impelled to concern itself with every minutest affair, to
+interfere vexatiously in all private concerns (since they too affect
+religious ethics and discipline), and to multiply regulations against
+every possible breach of the ruling religion. It is a general lesson of
+religious history that is illustrated so forcibly by the fate of the
+Inca priest-kings.
+
+I will not weary you in this case, any more than in that of Mexico, with
+the enumeration of the authors to whom we must go for information on the
+political and religious history of the strange country with which we are
+dealing. I must, however, say a few words concerning a certain writer
+who long enjoyed the highest of reputations, and was regarded throughout
+the last century as the most trustworthy and complete authority in
+Peruvian matters. The Peruvians, far as their civilization had advanced
+in many respects, were behind even the Mexicans in the art of preserving
+the memory of the past; for they had not so much as the imperfect
+hieroglyphics known to the latter. They made use of _Quipus_ or
+_Quipos_, indeed, which were fringes, the threads of which were
+variously knotted according to what they were intended to represent; but
+unfortunately the Peruvians anticipated on a large scale what so often
+happens on the small scale amongst ourselves to those persons of
+uncertain memory who tie knots on their handkerchiefs to remind them of
+something important. They find the knot, indeed, but have forgotten what
+it means! And so with the Peruvians. They were not always at one as to
+the meaning of their ancient Quipos, and there were several ways of
+interpreting them. Moreover, after the conquest, the few Peruvians who
+might still have made some pretension to a knowledge of them did not
+trouble themselves to initiate the Europeans into their filiform
+writing. All that is left of it is the practice of the Peruvian women
+who preserve this method of registering the sins they intend to record
+against themselves in the confessional.[39] Let us hope that they at
+least never experience any analogous infirmity to that which besets the
+knot-tiers amongst ourselves.[40]
+
+To return to the Peruvian author of whom I intended to speak. He is the
+celebrated Garcilasso de la Vega, who published his _Commentarios
+reales_ in 1609 and 1617.[41] Garcilasso's father was a European, but
+his mother was a Peruvian, and, what is more, a _Palla_, that is to say,
+a princess of the family of the Incas. Born in 1540, this Garcilasso had
+received from his mother and a maternal uncle a great amount of
+information as to the family, the history and the persons of the ancient
+sovereigns. He was extremely proud of his origin; so much so, indeed,
+that he issued his works under the name of "Garcilasso _el Inca_ de la
+Vega," though he had no real title to the name of Inca, which could not
+be transmitted by women. A genuine fervour breathes through his accounts
+of the history of his Peruvian country and his glorious ancestors, and
+it is to him that we owe the knowledge of many facts that would
+otherwise have been lost. The interest of his narrative explains the
+reputation so long enjoyed by his work, but the more critical spirit of
+recent times has discovered that his filial zeal has betrayed him into
+lavish embellishments of the situation created by the clever and
+cautious policy of his forebears, the Incas. He has passed in silence
+over many of their faults, and has attributed more than one merit to
+them to which they have no just claim. But in spite of all this, when we
+have made allowance for his family weakness, we may consult him with
+great advantage as to the institutions and sovereigns of ancient Peru.
+
+We must allow, with Garcilasso, that from the year 1000 A.D. onwards
+(for he places the origin of their power at about this date) the Incas
+had accomplished a work that may well seem marvellous in many respects.
+Had there been any relations between Peru and Central America? Can we
+explain the Peruvian civilization as the result of an emigration from
+the isthmic region, or an imitation of what had already been realized
+there? There is not the smallest trace of any such thing. No doubt it
+would be difficult to justify a categorical assertion on a subject so
+obscure; but it is certain that when they were discovered, Peru and the
+kingdom of Quito were separated from North America by immense regions
+plunged in the deepest savagery. Beginning at the Isthmus of Panama,
+this savage district stretched over the whole northern portion of South
+America, broken only by the demi-civilization of the Muyscas or Chibchas
+(New Granada); and the Peruvians knew nothing of the Mexicans. Neither
+the one nor the other were navigators, and nothing in the Peruvian
+traditions betrays the least connection with Central America. The most
+probable supposition is, that an indigenous civilization was
+spontaneously developed in Peru by causes analogous to those which had
+produced a similar phenomenon in the Maya country. In Peru, as in
+Central America, the richness of the soil, the variety of its products,
+the abundance of vegetable food, especially maize, secured the first
+conditions of civilization. The Peruvian advance was further favoured by
+the fact that it was protected towards the East by almost impassable
+mountains, and towards the West by the sea, while to the North and South
+it might concentrate its defensive forces upon comparatively narrow
+spaces.
+
+The whole territory of the empire was divided into three parts. The
+first was the property of the Sun, that is to say of the priests who
+officiated in his numerous temples; the second belonged to the reigning
+Inca; and the third to the people. The people's land was divided out
+every year in lots apportioned to the needs of each family, but the
+portions assigned to the _Curacas_, or nobles, were of a magnitude
+suited to their superior dignity. Taxes were paid in days of labour
+devoted to the lands of the Inca and those of the Sun, or in
+manufactured articles of various kinds, for the cities contained a
+number of artizans. Indeed, it was one of the maxims of the Incas that
+no part of the empire, however poor, should be exempt from paying
+tribute of one kind or another. To such a length was this carried, that
+so grave a historian as Herrera tells us how the Inca Huayna Capac,
+wishing to determine what kind of tribute the inhabitants of Pasto were
+to pay, and being assured that they were so entirely without resources
+or capacity of any kind that they could give him nothing at all, laid on
+them the annual tribute of a certain measure of vermine, preferring, as
+he said, that they should pay this singular tax rather than nothing.[42]
+We cannot congratulate the officials commissioned to collect the
+tribute, but we cite this sample in proof of the rigour with which the
+Incas carried out the principles which they considered essential to the
+government of the country. The special principle we have just
+illustrated was founded on the idea that the Sun journeys and shines for
+every one, and that accordingly every one should contribute towards the
+payment of his services. For the rest, the great herds of llamas, which
+constituted a regular branch of the national wealth, could only be owned
+by the temples of the Sun and by the Inca. Every province, every town
+or village, had the exact nature and the exact quantity of the products
+it must furnish assigned, and the Incas possessed great depôts in which
+were stored provisions, arms and clothes for the army. All this was
+regulated, accounted for and checked by means of official Quipos.
+
+The numerous body of officials charged with the general superintendence
+and direction of affairs was organized in a very remarkable manner, well
+calculated to consolidate the Inca's power. All the officials held their
+authority from him, and represented him to the people, just as he
+himself represented the Sun-god. At the bottom of the scale was an
+official overseer for every ten families, next above an overseer of a
+hundred families, then another placed over a thousand, and another over
+ten thousand. Each province had a governor who generally belonged to the
+family of the Incas. All this constituted a marvellous system of
+surveillance and espionage, descending from the sovereign himself to the
+meanest of his subjects, and founded on the principle that the rays of
+the Sun pierce everywhere. The lowest members of this official
+hierarchy, the superintendents of ten families, were responsible to
+their immediate superiors for all that went on amongst those under their
+charge, and those superiors again were responsible to the next above
+them, and so on up to the Inca himself, who thus held the threads of the
+whole vast net-work in the depths of his palace. It was another maxim of
+the Peruvian state that every one must work, even old men and children.
+Infants under five alone were excepted. It was the duty of the
+superintendents of ten families to see that this was carried out
+everywhere, and they were armed with disciplinary powers to chastise
+severely any one who remained idle, or who ordered his house ill, or
+gave rise to any scandal. Individual liberty then was closely
+restrained. No one could leave his place of residence without leave. The
+time for marriage was fixed for both sexes--for women at eighteen to
+twenty, for men at twenty-four or upwards. The unions of the noble
+families were arranged by the Inca himself, and those of the inferior
+classes by his officers, who officially assigned the young people one
+to another. Each province had its own costume, which might not be
+changed for any other, and every one's birthplace was marked by a ribbon
+of a certain colour surrounding his head.[43] In a word, the Jesuits
+appear to have copied the constitution of the Peruvian society when they
+organized their famous Paraguay missions, and perhaps this fact may help
+us to trace the profound motives which in either case suggested so
+minutely precise a system of inserting individuals into assigned places
+which left no room for self-direction. The Incas and the Jesuits alike
+had to contend against the disconnected, incoherent turbulence of savage
+life, and both alike were thereby thrown upon an exaggerated system of
+regulations, in which each individual was swaddled and meshed in
+supervisions and ordinances from which it was impossible to escape.
+
+Having said so much, we must acknowledge that, generally speaking, the
+Incas made a very humane and paternal use of their absolute power. They
+strove to moderate the desolating effects of war, and generally treated
+the conquered peoples with kindness. But we note that in the century
+preceding that of the European conquest, they had devised a means of
+guarding against revolts exactly similar to the measures enforced
+against rebellious peoples by the despotic sovereigns of Nineveh and
+Babylon; that is to say, they transported a great part of the conquered
+populations into other parts of their empire, and it appears that Cuzco,
+like Babylon, presented an image in miniature of the whole empire.
+There, as at Babylon, a host of different languages might be heard, and
+it was amongst the children of the deported captives that Pizarro, like
+Cyrus at Babylon, found allies who rejoiced in the fall of the empire
+that had crushed their fathers. For the rest, the Incas endeavoured to
+spread the language of Cuzco, the _Quechua_, throughout their
+empire.[44] Nothing need surprise us in the way of political sagacity
+and insight on the part of this priestly dynasty. Its monarchs seem to
+have hit upon every device which has been imagined elsewhere for
+attaching the conquered peoples to themselves or rendering their
+hostility harmless. Thus you will remember that at Mexico there was a
+chapel that served as a prison for the idols of the conquered. In the
+same way there stood in the neighbourhood of Cuzco a great temple with
+seventy-eight chapels in it, where the images of all the gods worshipped
+in Peru were assembled. Each country had its altar there, on which
+sacrifice was made according to the local customs.[45]
+
+The Spaniards, amongst whom respect for the royal person was
+sufficiently profound, were amazed by the marks of extreme deference of
+which the Inca was the object. They could not understand at first that
+actual religious worship was paid to him. He alone had the inherent
+right to be carried on a litter, and he never went out in any other
+way, imitating the Sun, his ancestor, who traverses the world without
+ever putting his foot to the ground. Some few men and women of the
+highest rank might rejoice in the same distinction, but only if they had
+obtained the Inca's sanction. In the same way, it was only the members
+of the Inca family and the nobles of most exalted rank who were allowed
+to wear their hair long, for this was a distinctive sign of the
+favourites of the Sun. None could enter the presence of the reigning
+Inca save bare-footed, clad in the most simple garments and bearing a
+burden on his shoulders, all in token of humility; nor must he raise his
+eyes throughout the audience, for no man looks upon the face of the Sun.
+It seems that the Incas possessed "the art of royal majesty" in a high
+degree. They could retain the impassive air of indifference, whatever
+might be going on before their eyes, like the Sun, who passes without
+emotion over everything that takes place below. It was thus that
+Atahualpa appeared to the Spaniards, who remarked the all but stony
+fixity of the Peruvian monarch's features in the presence of all the new
+sights--horses, riding, fire-arms--which filled his subjects with
+surprise and terror.[46] And such was the superhuman character of the
+Inca, that even the base office of a spittoon--excuse such a detail--was
+supplied by the hand of one of his ladies.[47] The salute was given to
+the Inca by kissing one's hand and then raising it towards the Sun. At
+his death the whole country went into mourning for a year. The young
+Incas were educated together, under conditions of great austerity, and
+were never allowed to mingle with young people of the inferior
+classes.[48]
+
+The army of the Incas was the army of the Sun. The obligation to
+military service was universal, since the Sun shines for all men. Every
+sound man from twenty-five to fifty might be called on to serve in his
+company. Thus numerous and highly-disciplined armies were raised, for
+the spirit of obedience had penetrated all classes of the people. The
+Incas had abolished the use of poisoned arrows, which is so common
+amongst the natives of the New World.[49]
+
+Justice was organized after fixed laws, and, as is usually the case in
+theocracies, these laws were severe. For in theocracies, to the social
+evil of the offence is added the impiety committed against the Deity and
+his representative on earth. The culprit has been guilty not only of
+crime, but of sacrilege. The penalty of death was freely inflicted even
+in the case of offences that implied no evil disposition.[50] The
+palanquin-bearer, for instance, who should stumble under his august
+burden when carrying the Inca, or any one who should speak with the
+smallest disrespect of him, must die. But we must also note certain
+principles of sound justice which the Incas had likewise succeeded in
+introducing. The judges were controlled, and, in case of unjust
+judgments, punished. The law was more lenient to a first offence than to
+a second, to crimes committed in the heat of the moment than to those of
+malise prepense; more lenient to children than to adults, and (mark
+this) more lenient to the common people than to the great.[51] The
+members of the Inca family alone were exempted from the penalty of
+death, which in their case was replaced by imprisonment for life. They
+alone might, and indeed must, marry their sisters, for a reason that we
+shall see further on. Thus everything was calculated to set this divine
+family apart. Polygamy, too, was only allowed to the Incas and to the
+families of next highest rank after them, who, however, might not marry
+at all without the personal assent of the sovereign.[52] But the Incas
+strove to make themselves loved. Herrera tells us of establishments in
+which orphans and foundlings were brought up at the Inca's charges, and
+of the alms he bestowed on widows who had no means of subsistence.[53]
+
+The same deliberate system shows itself in the attempts to spread
+education. The Incas founded schools, but they were opened only to the
+children of the Incas and of the nobility. This is a genuine theocratic
+trait. Garcilasso tells us naively that his ancestor the Inca Roca
+(1200--1249) in founding public schools had no idea of allowing _the
+people_ "to get information, grow proud, and disturb the state."[54] The
+instruction, which was given by the _amautas_ (sages), turned on the
+history or traditions of the country, on the laws, and on religion. We
+have said that writing was unknown. There were only the mnemonic Quipos,
+pictures on linen representing great events, and some rudimentary
+attempts at hieroglyphics which the Incas do not seem to have
+encouraged. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the hieroglyphics
+found graven on the rocks of Yonan are anterior to the Inca
+supremacy;[55] and it is said that a certain _amauta_ who had attempted
+to introduce a hieroglyphic alphabet, was burned to death for impiety at
+the order of the Inca.[56]
+
+The most remarkable results of the rule of the Incas are seen in the
+material well-being which they secured to their people. All the
+historians speak of the really extraordinary perfection to which
+Peruvian agriculture had been carried, though the use of iron was quite
+unknown. The solar religion fits perfectly with the habits of an
+agricultural people, and the Incas thought it became them, as children
+of the Sun, to encourage the cultivation of the soil. They ordered the
+execution of great public works, such as supporting walls to prevent the
+sloping ground from being washed away; irrigation canals, some of which
+measured five hundred miles, and which were preserved with scrupulous
+care; magazines of guano, the fertilizing virtues of which were known in
+Peru long before they were learned in Europe.[57] The Spaniards are far
+from having maintained Peruvian agriculture at the level it had reached
+under the Incas. Splendid roads stretched from Cuzco towards the four
+quarters of heaven; and Humboldt still traced some of them, paved with
+black porphyry, or in other cases cemented or rather macadamized, and
+often launched over ravines and pierced through hills with remarkable
+boldness.[58] The Incas had established reservoirs of drinking water for
+the public use from place to place along these roads, and likewise
+pavilions for their own accommodation when they were traversing their
+realms, on which occasions they never travelled more than three or four
+leagues a day. Bridges were thrown across the rivers, sometimes built of
+stone, but more often constructed on the method, so frequently
+described, that consists in uniting the opposing banks by two parallel
+ropes, along which a great basket is slung.[59] A system of royal
+courier posts measured the great roads as in Mexico. There were many
+important cities in Peru, and, according to a contemporary estimate
+cited by Prescott, the capital, Cuzco, even without including its
+suburbs, must have embraced at least two hundred thousand
+inhabitants.[60] Architecture was in a developed stage. We shall have to
+speak of the temples presently. The Inca's palaces--and there was at
+least one in every city of any importance--were of imposing dimensions,
+and a high degree of comfort and luxury was displayed within them. Gold
+glittered on the walls and beneath the roofs which were generally
+thatched with straw. They were provided with inner courts, spacious
+halls, sculptures in abundance, but inferior, it would seem, to those of
+Central America, and baths in which hot or cold water could be turned on
+at will.[61] In a word, when we remember from how many resources the
+Peruvians were still cut off by their ignorance and isolation, we cannot
+but admit that a genuine civilization is opening before our eyes, the
+defects of which must not blind us to its splendour. And since this
+civilization was in great part due (we shall see the force of the
+qualification presently) to the continuous efforts of the Incas, our
+next task must be to ascend to the mythic origin of that family, which
+we borrow from the narrative of their descendant, Garcilasso de la
+Vega.[62]
+
+Properly speaking, this narrative is the local myth of the Lake
+Titicaca and of Cuzco, transformed into an imperial myth.
+
+Before the Incas, we are told, men lived in the most absolute savagery.
+They were addicted to cannibalism and offered human victims to gods who
+were gross like themselves. At last the Sun took pity on them, and sent
+them two of his children, Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo (or Oullo, Ocollo,
+Oolle, &c.), to establish the worship of the Sun and alleviate their
+lot. The two emissaries, son and daughter of the Sun and Moon, rose one
+day from the depths of the Lake Titicaca. They had been told that a
+golden splinter which they bore with them would pierce the earth at the
+spot in which they were to establish themselves, and the augury was
+fulfilled on the site of Cuzco, the name of which signifies _navel._[63]
+Observe that, in classical antiquity, Babylon, Athens, Delphi, Paphos,
+Jerusalem, and so forth, each passed for the navel of the earth. Manco
+Capac and Mama Ogllo, then, established the worship of the Sun. They
+taught the savage inhabitants of the place agriculture and the principal
+trades, the art of building cities, roads and aqueducts. Mama Ogllo
+taught the women to spin and weave. They appointed a number of overseers
+to take care that every one did his duty; and when they had thus
+regulated everything in Cuzco, they re-ascended to heaven. But they left
+a son and daughter to continue their work. Like their parents, the
+brother and sister became husband and wife, and from them descends the
+sovereign family of the Incas, that is to say, the Lord-rulers, or
+Master-rulers.
+
+Such is the legend, from which the first deduction must be that the Inca
+family has nothing in common with the other denizens of earth. It is
+super-imposed, as it were, on humanity. It is because of this difference
+of origin that the laws which restrain the rest of mankind are not
+always applicable to the Incas. For example, they marry their sisters,
+as Manco Capac did, and as the Sun does, for the Moon is at once his
+wife and his sister. It is thus that they are enabled to preserve the
+divine character of their unique family.
+
+For ourselves, we can entertain no doubt that this is a cosmic myth.
+Mama Ogllo, or "the mother egg," and Manco Capac, or "the mighty man,"
+are two creators. The myth indicates that there existed an ancient solar
+priesthood on one of the islands or on the shores of the Lake of
+Titicaca (at an early date the focus of a certain civilization), and
+that this priestly family became at a given period the ruling power at
+Cuzco. It was thence that it radiated over the small states which
+surrounded Cuzco, embracing them one after another under its prestige
+and its power, until it had become the redoubtable dynasty that we know
+it. Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo, the creator and the cosmic egg, have
+become the Sun and Moon, represented by their Inca high-priest and his
+wife. There is no practice towards which a more wide-spread tendency
+exists in America than that of conferring the name of a deity on his
+chief priest. And if Garcilasso fixes the appearance of Manco Capac at
+about 1000 A.D., it is simply because the historical recollections of
+his family mounted no higher, and that about that time it began to rise
+out of its obscurity. It had the advantage of numbering in its royal
+line both successful warriors and, what is more, consummate
+politicians, instances of whose ability we have already seen and shall
+see again.
+
+The point at which the legend preserved by Garcilasso is clearly at
+fault, is in its claim for the Incas as the first and only civilizers of
+Peru. We shall presently meet with other Peruvian myths of civilization
+which do not stand in the least connection with Manco Capac and the
+Incas. The kingdom of Quito, which the Inca Huayna Capac had recently
+conquered when the Spaniards arrived, though not on the same level as
+Peru proper, was far removed from the savage state, while as yet a
+stranger to the influence of the Incas. The country of the Muyscas, the
+present New Granada or land of Bogota, though standing in no connection
+with Peru, was the theatre of another sacerdotal and solar religion _sui
+generis_, which, though very little known, is highly interesting. The
+valley of the Rimac, or Lima, and the coast lands in general, were
+likewise centres of a pre-Inca civilization. The Chimus especially,
+themselves dwellers on the coast, were possessed of an original
+civilization differing from that of the Incas. They were the last to be
+conquered. To sum up, everything leads us to suppose that various
+centres of social development had long existed, up and down the whole
+region, but that, under the presiding genius of the priesthood of Manco
+Capac, the civilization of Cuzco had gradually acquired the
+preponderance, till it consecutively eclipsed and absorbed all the
+others.
+
+Garcilasso labours hard to impress us with the belief that the
+sovereigns of his family maintained an unbroken age of gold, by dint of
+their wisdom and virtues. But we know, both from himself and from other
+sources, that as a matter of fact the Incas' sky was not always
+cloudless. They had numbered both bad and incapable rulers in their
+line. More than once they had had to suppress terrible insurrections,
+and their palaces had witnessed more than one tragedy."[64] But after
+making all allowances, we must admit that they succeeded in governing
+well, and more especially in maintaining intact their own religious and
+political prestige.
+
+Now this very cleverness, this conscious and often extremely deliberate
+and astutely calculated policy, compels us to ask how far the Incas
+themselves were sincere in their pretension to be descended from the
+Sun, and their faith in the very special favour in which the great
+luminary held them. There is so much rationalism in their habitual
+tactics, that one cannot help suspecting a touch of it in their beliefs.
+And the truth is that their descendant, Garcilasso, has recorded certain
+traditions to that effect, which he has perhaps dressed up a little too
+much in European style, with a view to convincing us that his ancestors
+were monotheistic philosophers, but which nevertheless bear the marks of
+a certain authenticity. For the reasoning which Garcilasso puts into the
+mouth of the Incas closely resembles what would naturally commend itself
+to the mind of a pagan who should once ask himself whether the visible
+phenomenon, the Sun, which he adored, was really as living, as
+conscious, as personal, as they said. Thus the Inca Tupac Yupanqui
+(fifteenth century) is said to have reasoned thus:[65]
+
+    "They say that the Sun lives, and that he does everything. But
+    when one does anything, he is near to the thing he does; whereas
+    many things take place while the Sun is absent. It therefore
+    cannot be he who does everything. And again, if he were a living
+    being, would he not be wearied by his perpetual journeyings? If
+    he were alive, he would experience fatigue, as we do; and if he
+    were free, he would visit other parts of the heavens which he
+    never traverses. In truth, he seems like a thing held to its
+    task that always measures the same course, or like an arrow that
+    flies where it is shot and not where it wills itself."
+
+Note this line of reasoning, Gentlemen, which must have repeated itself
+in many minds when once they had acquired enough independence and power
+of thought calmly to examine those natural phenomena which primitive
+naïveté had animated, personified and adored as the lords of destiny.
+Their fixity and their mechanical and unvarying movements, when once
+observed, could not fail to strike a mortal blow at the faith of which
+they were the object. That faith was transformed without being radically
+changed when it was no longer the phenomenon itself, but the personal
+and directing spirit, the genius, the deity that was behind the
+phenomenon, but distinct from it and capable of detaching itself from
+it, which drew to itself the worship of the faithful. But in his turn
+this god, shaped in the image of man, must either be refined into pure
+spirit, or must fall below the rational and moral ideal ultimately
+conceived by man himself. When all is said and done, Gentlemen, Buddhism
+is still a religion of Nature. It is the last word of that order of
+religions, and exists to show us that, at any rate in its authentic and
+primitive form, that last word is _nothingness_. And that is why
+Buddhism has never existed in its pure form as a popular religion. For
+in religion, and at every stage of religion, mind seeks mind. Without
+that, religion is nothing. Note, too, the observant Inca's remark, that
+if the Sun were alive he must be dreadfully tired. You may find the same
+idea in more than one European mythology, in which the Sun appears as an
+unhappy culprit condemned to a toilsome service for some previous fault;
+or, again, an iron constitution is given him, to explain why he is not
+worn out by his ceaseless journeying.
+
+Now Tupac Yupanqui would not be the only Inca who cherished a certain
+scepticism concerning his ancestor the Sun. Herrera tells us that the
+Inca Viracocha denied that the Sun was God;[66] and according to a story
+preserved by Garcilasso,[67] the Inca Huayna Capac, the conqueror of
+Quito, who died shortly after Pizarro's first disembarkment, must have
+been quite as much of a rationalist. One day, during the celebration of
+a festival in honour of the Sun, he is said to have gazed at the great
+luminary so long and fixedly that the chief priest ventured on some
+respectful remarks to the effect that so irreverent a proceeding must
+surprise the people. "I will ask you two questions," replied the
+monarch. "I am your king and universal lord. Would any one of you have
+the hardihood to order me to rise from my seat and take a long journey
+for his pleasure?... And would the richest and most powerful of my
+vassals dare to disobey if I should command him on the spot to set out
+in all speed for Chili?" And when the priest answered in the negative,
+the Inca continued: "Then I tell you there must be a greater and a more
+mighty lord above our father the Sun, who orders him to take the course
+he follows day by day. For if he were himself the sovereign lord, he
+would now and again omit his journey and rest, for his pleasure, even if
+he experienced no necessity for doing so."
+
+Once more: I will not vouch for the exact form of these audacious
+speculations of the free-thinking Inca. But such reminiscences,
+collected independently by various authors, correspond to the
+conjectures forced upon us by the extreme political sagacity of the
+Incas. None but theocrats, in whose own hearts faith in their central
+principle was waning, could develop such astuteness and diplomacy. A
+sincere and untried faith has not recourse to so many expedients
+dictated by policy and the fear lest the joint in the armour should be
+found. It is to be presumed, however, that these heterodox speculations
+of the Incas themselves never passed beyond the narrow circle of the
+family and its immediate surroundings. Nothing of the kind would ever be
+caught by the ear of the people. But the evidence as to Huayna Capac's
+scepticism derives a certain confirmation from the fact that he was the
+first Inca who departed (to the woe of his empire, as it turned out)
+from some of the hereditary maxims that had always been scrupulously
+observed by his ancestors.
+
+Huayna Capac had considerably extended the Peruvian empire by the
+conquest of the kingdom of Quito. In the hope, presumably, of
+consolidating his conquest, he resided for a long time in the
+newly-acquired territory, and married the conquered king's daughter, to
+whom he became passionately attached. This was absolutely contrary to
+one of the statutes of the Inca family, no member of which was allowed
+to marry a stranger. By his foreign wife he had a son called Atahualpa,
+and whether it was that he thought it good policy to allow a certain
+autonomy to the kingdom of Quito, or whether it was due to his
+tenderness towards Atahualpa's mother and the son she had borne him,
+certain it is that when he died at Quito in 1525, he decided that
+Atahualpa should reign over this newly-acquired kingdom, whilst his
+other son Huascar, the unimpeachably legitimate Inca, was to succeed him
+as sovereign of Peru proper. This, again, was a violation of the maxim
+that the kingdom of the Incas, which was the kingdom of the Sun, was
+never to be parted. It was in the midst of the struggles provoked by the
+hostility of the two brothers that Pizarro fell like a meteor amongst
+the Peruvians, who did not so much as know of the existence of any other
+land than the one they inhabited.
+
+But the hour warns me that I must pause. When next we meet, I shall
+have to recount the fall of the great religious dynasty of the Incas,
+and we shall then examine more closely that Peruvian religion of which
+we have to-day but sketched the outline.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V.
+
+FALL OF THE INCAS.--PERUVIAN MYTHOLOGY, PRIESTHOOD.
+
+
+I.
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+You will remember that when last we met we traced out the legendary
+origin of the royal house of the Incas. Starting from the shores of the
+Lake Titicaca and the city of Cuzco, and progressively extending its
+combined religious and political dominion over the numerous countries
+situated west of the Cordilleras, it had welded them into one vast
+empire, centralized and organized in a way that, in spite of its
+defects, extorts our admiration. You had occasion to notice the
+extraordinary degree to which the consummate practical sagacity which
+distinguished the sacerdotal and imperial family of the Sun for
+successive centuries, was combined with purely mythological principles
+of faith; and we were compelled to ask whether so much diplomacy was
+really consistent with unreserved belief. Finally we saw that, according
+to the historians, more than one of the Incas had in fact expressed and
+justified a doubt as to the living and conscious personality of that
+Sun-god whose descendants they were supposed to be. The position of
+affairs when the Spaniards disembarked on the shores of Peru is already
+known to you. The Inca Huayna Capac, conqueror of Quito, had broken with
+the constitutional maxims of his dynasty, in the first place by marrying
+a stranger, the daughter of a deposed king; and in the second place by
+leaving the kingdom of Quito to the son, Atahualpa, whom she bore him;
+while he allowed Huascar, the heir-apparent to the empire, to succeed
+him in Peru proper, thus severing into two parts the kingdom of the Sun,
+in defiance of the principle hitherto recognized, which forbad the
+division of that kingdom under any circumstances.
+
+The war which speedily arose between Atahualpa and his half-brother
+Huascar was the great cause that made it possible for Pizarro and his
+miniature army to get a footing in the Peruvian territory. The military
+forces of both sections of the empire were engaged with each other far
+away from the place of landing, and the inhabitants, wholly unaccustomed
+to take any initiative, made no resistance to the strange invaders,
+whose appearance, arms and horses, struck terror into their hearts, and
+in whom (like the Mexicans in the case of Cortes and his followers) they
+thought they saw supernatural beings. Pizarro, who knew how things
+stood, had but one idea, viz., to imitate Cortes in laying hold of the
+sovereign's person. Atahualpa returned victorious. He had defeated
+Huascar, slaughtered many members of the Inca family, and thrown his
+conquered brother into prison, so as to govern Peru in his name, for he
+was not sure that he himself would be recognized and obeyed as a
+legitimate descendant of the Sun. Pizarro found means of making his
+arrival known to him, and at the same time offered him his alliance
+against his enemies.[68] Atahualpa was delighted with these overtures,
+and invited his pretended allies to a conference near Caxamarca, where
+the Spaniards had installed themselves. The Inca advanced, parading all
+the pomp and splendour of his solar divinity. Four hundred richly-clad
+attendants preceded his palanquin, which sparkled at a thousand points
+with gold and precious stones, and was borne on the shoulders of
+officers drawn from amongst the highest nobles, while troops of male and
+female dancers followed the child of the Sun and plied their art. Then
+ensued one of those unique scenes of history upon which, as indignation
+contends with amazement for the mastery in our minds, we must pause for
+a moment to gaze.
+
+Pizarro's almoner, Father Valverde, drew near to the Inca, a crucifix in
+one hand and a missal in the other, and by means of an interpreter
+delivered a regular discourse to him, in which he announced that Pope
+Alexander VI. had given all the lands of America to the King of Spain,
+which he had a right to do as the successor of St. Peter, who was
+himself the Vicar of the Son of God. Then he expounded the chief
+articles of Christian orthodoxy, and summoned the Inca there and then
+to abjure the religion of his ancestors, receive baptism, and submit to
+the sovereignty of the King of Spain. On these conditions he might
+continue to reign. Otherwise he must look for every kind of disaster.
+
+Atahualpa was literally stupefied. Much of the discourse, no doubt, he
+failed to follow, but what he did understand filled him with
+indignation. He answered that he reigned over his peoples by hereditary
+right, and could not see how a foreign priest could dispose of lands
+that were not his. He should remain faithful to the religion of his
+fathers, "especially," he added, as he pointed to the crucifix grasped
+by the monk, "since my god, the Sun, is at any rate alive; whereas the
+one you propose for my acceptance, as far as I gather, is dead."
+Finally, he desired to know whence his interlocutor had derived all the
+strange things that he had told him. "Hence!" cried Valverde, holding
+out his missal. The Inca, who had never seen a book in all his life,
+took this object, so new to him, in his hands, opened it, put it to his
+ear, and finding that it said nothing, flung it contemptuously on the
+ground.
+
+Pizarro saw the moment for striking the blow he contemplated. Crying out
+at the sacrilege, he gave his soldiers the signal of attack. Their
+horses and fire-arms caused an instant panic. In vain did some of his
+officers attempt to defend the Inca. Pizarro broke through to him,
+seized him by the arm and dragged him to his quarters. All his escort
+fled in terror.
+
+Atahualpa, then, was in the immediate power of Pizarro, who (still
+imitating Cortes) surrounded his prisoner with every comfort and
+attention, though confining him strictly to one chamber, and warning him
+that any attempt at escape or resistance would be the signal for his
+death. Atahualpa soon perceived that thirst for gold was the great
+motive that had impelled the Spaniards to their audacious enterprize. He
+hoped to disarm them by offering as ransom gold enough to fill the
+chamber in which he was confined up to the height of a man. He gave the
+necessary orders for collecting the precious metal in the requisite
+amount, and to secure the good reception of the emissaries whom Pizarro
+despatched everywhere to receive it. One of these detachments even
+entered into relations with the captive Inca, Huascar, and the latter
+hastened to offer the Spaniards yet more gold than Atahualpa was giving
+them if they would take his part. Atahualpa heard of this, was alarmed,
+regarded his conquered brother's attempts in the light of high-treason,
+gave orders for his death--and was obeyed.[69]
+
+He was not aware how precarious was his own tenure of life. Pizarro saw
+more and more clearly that, in order to become the real master of Peru,
+he must get rid of the reigning Inca, and put some child in his place,
+who would be a passive instrument in his hands. He was fairly alarmed by
+the religious obedience, timid but absolute, that the "child of the
+Sun," even in his captivity, received from all classes of his subjects.
+He fancied that from the recesses of his prison, and even while paying
+off his enormous ransom,[70] Atahualpa had sent secret orders to the
+most distant populations to arm themselves and come to his rescue. The
+interpreter through whom he communicated with his captive was out of
+temper with his master, for his head had been so turned by ambition,
+that he had demanded the hand of a _coya_, that is to say, one of the
+Inca's women, and had been haughtily refused. In revenge, he made
+malicious reports to Pizarro. But it was an accidental circumstance that
+brought the latter's ill-will towards his captive to a point. The Inca
+greatly admired the art of writing when he discovered all the uses the
+Spaniards made of it. One day it occurred to him to get one of the
+soldiers on guard over him to write the word _Dio_ upon his nail, and he
+was delighted and astonished to find that every one to whom he showed it
+read it in the same way. So they told him that every one a little above
+the common herd could read and write in Europe. His evil star would
+have it that he showed his thumb one day to Pizarro, who could make
+nothing of it. Pizarro, then, could not read! Atahualpa concluded that
+he was merely one of the common herd, and found an opportunity of
+telling him so. Pizarro, stung to the quick, hesitated no longer. A mock
+judgment condemned Atahualpa to the extreme penalty for the crimes of
+idolatry, polygamy, usurpation, fratricide and rebellion. In vain he
+appealed to the King of Spain. He was led to the stake, and Father
+Valverde made him purchase by a baptism _in extremis_ the privilege of
+being strangled instead of burned alive.
+
+From this moment the fate of Peru was decided. The head once struck from
+the great body, long convulsions ensued, but no serious resistance was
+possible. Pizarro set up as Inca a young brother of Huascar's, who was
+at first a mere instrument in the hands of his country's bleeders, but
+afterwards escaped and raised insurrections which ended in his total
+defeat. The Spaniards had been reinforced, and had found allies amongst
+the peoples who had been torn from their native soils by the victorious
+Incas.[71] Other attempts, still attaching themselves to the name of
+some Inca, failed in like manner. And yet the mass of the Peruvians, in
+spite of their conversion to Roman Catholicism, remained obstinately
+attached to the memory of their Incas. One of their real or pretended
+descendants, in the eighteenth century, did not shrink from serving as a
+domestic at Madrid and Rome, as the only means of learning the secret of
+that European power which had so cruelly crushed his ancestors.[72] But
+on his return to Peru (1744 A.D.) his efforts only ended in his
+destruction. But this did not prevent a certain Tupac Amarou, who was
+descended from the Incas through a female line, from fomenting a
+rebellion in 1780, which it cost the Spaniards an effort to
+suppress.[73] Later on, after the revolution that broke the bond of
+subjection to Spain, this stubborn hostility of the Peruvians changed
+its character; but in 1867, Bustamente still tried to make capital out
+of the historical attachment of the natives to the Incas by declaring
+himself their descendant. The opposition, however, had long lost all
+vestige of a religious character. The legend of Manco Capac, which is
+still current amongst the people, has been euhemerized. It is now no
+more than the story of a just and enlightened prince, the benefactor of
+the country. The natives, it seems, are fond of playing a kind of drama,
+in which the trial and death of Atahualpa are represented. Superstitious
+to the last degree, they accept the practices of Catholicism with a
+submission that has in it more of a melancholy and hopeless resignation
+than an ardent or trusting faith. The glorious age of the Incas is gone,
+and will never return, but it is still regretted.[74]
+
+
+II.
+
+And now it is high time that we examined that religion which was so
+closely associated with the whole national life of Peru.
+
+From all that I have said already, you will easily understand that the
+Sun has never been worshipped more directly or with more devotion than
+in Peru. It was he whom the Peruvians regarded as sovereign lord of the
+world, king of the heaven and the earth. His Peruvian name was _Inti_,
+"Light." The villages were usually built so as to look eastward, in
+order that the inhabitants might salute the supreme god as soon as he
+appeared in the morning. The most usual representation of him was a
+golden disk representing a human face surrounded by rays and flames. In
+Peru, as everywhere else, a feeling existed that there was a certain
+relation between the substance of gold and that of the great luminary.
+In the nuggets torn from the mountain sides they thought they saw the
+Sun's tears.[75] The great periodic fêtes of the year, the imperial and
+national festivals in which every one took part, were those held in
+honour of the Sun.
+
+Immediately after him came his sister and consort the Moon, Mama Quilla.
+Her image was a disk of silver bearing human features, and silver played
+the same part in her worship that gold did in that of the Sun. It
+appears, however, that they performed fewer sacrifices to her than to
+her august consort, which is quite in harmony with the inferior position
+assigned to woman in the Peruvian civilization.[76] Like Selene amongst
+the Greeks, Mama Quilla, and her incarnation in human form, Mama Ogllo,
+were weavers. And that is why the latter was said to have taught the
+Peruvian women the art of spinning and weaving. This is a mythological
+conception suggested by likening the moonbeams to twisted threads, out
+of which on fair clear nights the brilliant verdure in which the earth
+is clad is spun.
+
+But before going on to the gods who form the usual retinue of these two
+official and imperial deities, I must speak of two great Peruvian gods
+whose worship was likewise widely spread, but who nevertheless are not
+attached to the solar family, or at least are only so attached by an
+after-thought and by dint of harmonizing efforts which the Incas had
+their motives of policy for favouring: I mean the two great deities,
+_Viracocha_ and _Pachacamac_.
+
+The myth of Viracocha is the first instance we shall cite of traces of a
+certain civilization prior to the Incas, or at any rate of a belief
+widely spread in some parts of Peru that civilization had not really
+been, as the legend of the Incas would have it, the sole work of that
+sacerdotal family. The name of Viracocha must be very ancient, for it
+became a generic name to signify divine beings. It was given to Manco
+Capac himself as a title of honour, and the Spaniards on their arrival
+passed as _Viracochas_ in the eyes of the people. This name, according
+to Spanish authorities, followed by Prescott,[77] signifies _Foam of the
+sea_ or of the _lake_. This would make the deity a male Aphrodite. He
+was represented with a long beard, and human victims were sacrificed to
+him. At the same time, they said that he had neither flesh nor bone,
+that he ran swiftly, and that he lowered mountains and lifted up
+valleys. The following legend was told of him.[78]
+
+There were men on the earth before the Sun appeared, and the temples of
+Viracocha, for instance, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, are older than
+the Sun. One day Viracocha rose out of the lake. He made the sun, the
+moon, the stars, and prescribed their course for them. Then he made
+stone statues, put life into them, and commanded them to go out of the
+caverns in which he had made them and follow him to Cuzco. There he
+summoned the inhabitants, and set a man over them called Allca Vica, who
+was the common ancestor of the Incas. Then he departed and disappeared
+in the water.
+
+Evidently this myth belongs to a different body of tradition from that
+of the Incas. When it says that the earth was peopled before the Sun
+appeared, it is only a mythical way of asserting that there were men and
+even cities in Peru before the establishment of Sun-worship by the
+Incas. Now the latter claimed direct descent from the Sun, the supreme
+god, and they would not have readily allowed that this supreme deity had
+been made by another. One is rather tempted to find in this myth the
+echo of the claims put forward with equal resignation and persistency by
+a priesthood of Viracocha, that bowed its head before the supremacy
+acquired by the solar priesthood, but insisted all the same upon the
+fact that it was itself its elder brother.
+
+But to what element can we affiliate the god Viracocha himself?
+
+His aquatic name, _Foam of the sea_ or _lake_, in itself leads us to
+suppose that he was closely related to the water. The supposition is
+confirmed by the saying that he had neither flesh nor bone, and yet ran
+swiftly. We can understand, too, why he lowers mountains and raises
+valleys. He rises from the water and disappears in it. He is bearded,
+like all aquatic gods, with their fringes of reeds. Finally, his consort
+and sister Cocha is the lake itself, and also the goddess of rain. An
+old Peruvian hymn that was chanted under the Incas, and has fortunately
+been preserved, raises the character we have assigned to Viracocha
+above all doubt.[79] The goddess Cocha is represented as carrying an urn
+full of water and snow on her head. Her brother Viracocha breaks the
+urn, that its contents may spread over the earth. Here is the hymn,
+which is composed in nineteen short verses or lines:
+
+     1. Fair Princess,
+     3. Thy urn
+     2. Thy brother
+     4. Shatters.
+     5. At the blow
+     6. It thunders, lightens
+     7. Flashes;
+     8. But thou, Princess,
+    10. Rainest down
+     9. Thy waters.
+    11. At the same time
+    12. Hailest,
+    13. Snowest.
+    14. World-former,
+    15. World-animator,
+    16. Viracocha,
+    17. To this office
+    18. Thee has destined,
+    19. Consecrated.
+
+It admits of no doubt, therefore, that Viracocha held a place in the
+Peruvian Pantheon closely analogous to that of Tlaloc, the rain-god, in
+its Mexican counterpart. The blow with which he breaks his sister's urn
+is the thunder-stroke. Inasmuch as rain is a fertilizing agent,
+Viracocha represents its generative force. His resemblance to Tlaloc
+extends to his demand for human victims, in which he is less ferociously
+insatiable, but quite as pronounced, as his Mexican analogue. Since his
+legend makes him rise out of the Lake of Titicaca, we must think of him
+as the chief god of the religion in honour before that of the Incas rose
+to supremacy. When it is said that after accomplishing his task he
+disappeared, we are reminded that the river Desaguadero, which carries
+off the waters of Lake Titicaca, sinks into the earth and is lost to
+sight.
+
+But there was yet another great deity whose pretensions the Incas had
+allowed by making room for him in the official religion, although he
+really belonged to a totally different group of mythical formations: I
+refer to Pachacamac, whose name signifies "animator of the earth," from
+_caman_, "to animate," and _pacha_, "earth."[80] The primitive centre of
+his worship was in the valley of Lurin, south of Lima, as well as in
+that valley of Rimac which has given its name to the city of Lima
+itself, for the latter is but a transformation of _Rimac_. It was there
+that Pachacamac's colossal temple rose. It was left standing by the
+Incas, but is now in ruins.[81] The branch of the Yuncas who resided
+there were already possessed of a certain civilization when the Inca
+Pachacutec annexed their country, at the close of the fourteenth
+century, partly by persuasion and partly by terror. Pachacamac was the
+divine civilizer who had taught this people the arts and crafts.[82] It
+would even seem that he had supplanted a still more ancient worship of
+Viracocha in these same valleys, for it is said that the latter was
+worsted in war by him and put to flight, upon which the new god renewed
+the world by changing the people he found on the earth into jaguars and
+monkeys, and creating a new and higher race. This opposition to
+Viracocha, god of the waters, puts us on the traces of Pachacamac's
+original significance. He must have been a god of fire, and especially
+of the internal fire of the earth, which displays itself in the volcanos
+and warms the spirit of man. He was a kind of Peruvian Dionysus. There
+was something gloomy and violent about his worship. He demanded human
+victims. The valley of Rimac really means the valley of the _Speaker_,
+of him who answers when questioned. There was a kind of oracle inspired
+by the god of internal fire there. A certain feeling of mystery, as
+though in Pachacamac they had to do with a god less visible, less
+palpable, more spiritual than the rest, seems to have impressed itself
+upon his Peruvian worshippers. Garcilasso, who perhaps exaggerates a
+little, here as elsewhere, goes near to making him a god who could only
+be adored in the heart, without temple and without sacrifices.[83]
+
+Thus, if the myth of Viracocha, god of the waters, makes the stars and
+the earth rise out of the moist element which he has fertilized and
+organized, the myth of Pachacamac makes him a kind of demiurge working
+within to form the world and enlighten mankind. I need not stay to point
+out what close analogies these two conceptions find in several of the
+cosmogonies of the Old World.
+
+This confusion and rivalry of the Peruvian gods has left its traces in
+the crude and obscure legend of the Collas, or mountaineers of Pacari
+Tambo, to the south-west of Cuzco. "From the caves of Pacari Tambo (i.e.
+'the house of the dawn') issued one day four brothers and four sisters.
+The eldest ascended a mountain, and flung stones towards the four
+cardinal points, which was his way of taking possession of all the land.
+This aroused the displeasure of the other three. The youngest of all was
+the cunningest, and he resolved to get rid of his three brothers and
+reign alone. He persuaded his eldest brother to enter a cave, and as
+soon as he had done so closed the mouth with an enormous stone, and
+imprisoned him there for ever." This seems to refer to the
+quasi-subterranean cultus of Pachacamac, the internal fire, the first
+revelation of whom must have been a volcano hurling stones in every
+direction.--"The youngest brother then persuaded the second to ascend a
+high mountain with him, to seek their lost brother, and when they stood
+on the summit he hurled him down the precipice and changed him into a
+stone by a spell." I cannot say to what special deity this part of the
+legend alludes, unless it simply refers to an ancient worship of stones
+or rocks, many vestiges of which remained under the Incas, though it
+ceased to have any official importance in presence of the radiant
+worship of the Sun promulgated and favoured by the ruling family.--"Then
+the third brother fled in terror." This fleeing god must be Viracocha,
+the god of showers, who flees before the Sun.--"Then the youngest
+brother built Cuzco, caused himself to be adored as child of the Sun
+under the name of Pirrhua Manco, and likewise built other cities on the
+same model."[84]
+
+This last trait puts it out of doubt that the legend is really an
+attempt to explain how the religion of Manco Capac established at Cuzco
+had succeeded in eclipsing all others, owing to the superior skill of
+its priesthood. It is a formal confirmation of all that I have told you
+of the consummate art with which the Incas gradually extended the circle
+of their political and religious dominion. _Pirrhua_ is the contraction
+of Viracocha, taken in the generic sense of "divine being." Pirrhua
+Manco was an alternative name of Manco Capac.
+
+Of course this legend was not officially received under the Incas. The
+latter, being unable or unwilling to abolish the worship of Viracocha
+and of Pachacamac, took up a far more conciliatory attitude than that of
+the legends I have given. The supreme god, the Sun, was admitted to have
+had three sons, Kon or Viracocha, Pachacamac and Manco Capac; but the
+latter was declared to have been quite specially designed by the common
+father to instruct and govern men. By this arrangement every one was
+satisfied,--and especially the Incas.
+
+
+III.
+
+We may now return to the other deities who were officially incorporated
+in the family or retinue of the Sun.
+
+The rainbow, _Cuycha_, was the object of great veneration as the servant
+of the Sun and Moon. He had his chapel contiguous with the temple of the
+Sun, and his image was made of plates of gold of various shades, which
+covered a whole wall of the edifice. When a rainbow appeared in the
+clouds, the Peruvian closed his mouth for fear of having all his teeth
+spoilt.[85]
+
+The planet Venus, _Chasca_ or the "long-haired star," so called from its
+extraordinary radiance, was looked upon as a male being and as the page
+of the Sun, sometimes preceding and sometimes following his master. The
+Pleiades were next most venerated. Comets foreboded the wrath of the
+gods. The other stars were the Moon's maids of honour.[86]
+
+The worship of the elements, too, held a prominent place in this
+complicated system of nature-worship. For example, Fire, considered as
+derived from the Sun, was the object of profound veneration, and the
+worship rendered it must have served admirably as a link between the
+religion of the Incas and that of Pachacamac. Strange as it may seem at
+first sight, the symbols of fire were stones. But our surprise will
+cease when we remember that stones were thought, in a high antiquity, to
+be animated by the fire that was supposed to be shut up within them,
+since it could be made to issue forth by a sharp blow. The Peruvian
+religion likewise adds its testimony to that of all the religions of the
+Old World, as to the importance which long attached to the preservation
+amongst the tribes of men of that living fire which it was so difficult
+to recover if once it had been allowed to escape. A perpetual fire
+burned in the temple of the Sun and in the abode of the Virgins of the
+Sun, of whom we shall have to speak presently. The wide-spread idea that
+fire becomes polluted at last and loses its divine virtue by too long
+contact with men, meets us once more. The fire must be renewed from
+time to time, and this act was performed yearly by the chief-priest of
+Peru, who kindled wood by means of a concave golden mirror. This miracle
+is very easy for us to explain, but we cannot doubt that the priests and
+people of Peru saw something supernatural in the phenomenon.[87]
+
+The thunder, likewise, was personified and adored in certain provinces
+under the name of _Catequil_, but it is a peculiarity of the Peruvian
+religion that it assigns a subordinate rank in the hierarchy to the god
+of thunder, who elsewhere generally takes the supreme place. In Peru, he
+was but one of the Sun's servants, though the most redoubtable of them
+all. The Peruvians are remarkable for their childish dread of thunder. A
+great projecting rock, often one that had been struck by the thunder,
+passed for the deity's favoured residence. Catequil appears in three
+forms: _Chuquilla_ (thunder), _Catuilla_ (lightning), and _Intiallapa_
+(thunderbolt). His remaining name, _Illapa_, also means thunder. He had
+special temples, in which he was represented as armed with a sling and a
+club.[88] They sacrificed children, but more especially llamas, to him.
+Twins were regarded as children of the lightning, and if they died young
+their skeletons were preserved as precious relics. And, finally, we find
+in Peru the same idea that prevails in a great part of southern Africa,
+viz. that a house or field that has been struck by lightning cannot be
+used again. Catequil has taken possession of it, and it would be
+dangerous to dispute it with him.[89]
+
+We have seen how the element of water was adored under the names of
+Viracocha and his sister Mama Cocha. The earth was worshipped in grottos
+or caves, often considered as the places whence men and gods had taken
+their origin, and as giving oracles.[90] There were also trees and
+plants that were clothed with a divine character, especially the
+esculent plants, such as the maize, personified as _Zarap Conopa_, and
+the potato, as _Papap Conopa_. A female statue was often made of maize
+or coca leaves, and adored as the mother of plants.[91]
+
+Thus we descend quite gently from the official heights of the religion
+of the Incas towards those substrata of religious thought which always
+maintain themselves beneath the higher religion that more or less
+expressly patronizes them, but to which they are not really bound by any
+necessary tie. They are the survivals of old superstitions, to which the
+common people are often far more attached than they are to the exalted
+doctrines which they are taught officially. And it is thus, for example,
+that we note in Peru the very popular worship of numerous animals,
+mounting, without doubt, to a much higher antiquity than was reached by
+the religion of the Incas. Indeed, I should be inclined to ascribe to
+the religious diplomacy of the children of the Sun the Peruvian belief
+which established a connection of origin between each kind of animal and
+a particular star. The serpent, especially, seems to have been, in Peru
+as in Africa, the object of great veneration. We find it reproduced in
+wood and stone on an enormous number of the greater and smaller relics
+of Peruvian art. The god of subterranean treasures, _Urcaguay_, was a
+great serpent, with little chains of gold at his tail, and a head
+adorned with stag-like horns. The dwellers by the shore worshipped the
+whale and the shark. There were fish-gods, too, in the temple of
+Pachacamac, no doubt because of the enormous power of reproduction
+possessed by fishes. The condor was a messenger of the Sun, and his
+image was graven on the sceptre of the Incas.[92] It is remarkable that
+the llama does not appear amongst these divine animals, probably because
+it was so completely domesticated and wholly subject to man.
+
+And finally, when we come to the _Guacas_, or _Huacas_, we reach the
+point where the Peruvian religion sinks into absolute fetichism.
+
+The meaning of the word _Guaca_, or _Huaca_, was not very precise in the
+mouths of the Peruvians themselves. On the one hand, it was applied to
+everything that bore a religious character, whether an object of
+worship, the person of the priests, a temple, a tomb, or what not. The
+Sun himself was _Huaca_. The chief priest of Cuzco bore amongst other
+names that of _Huacapvillac_, "he who converses with huaca beings."[93]
+On the other hand, in ordinary language, this same term was used to
+signify those wood, stone and metal objects which were so abundant in
+Peru, of which we still possess numerous specimens, and of which we must
+now say a few words. Some of these huacas, especially the stone ones,
+were of considerable size, and no doubt dated from the pre-historic
+religion before the Incas. But as a rule they were small and portable,
+were private and hereditary property, and were regarded as veritable
+fetiches, that is to say, as the dwelling-places of spirits. Animism, in
+fact, never ceased to haunt the imaginations of the Peruvians,
+especially amongst the lower orders, whether the spirits were dreaded as
+malevolent sprites, or courted as protectors and revealers. These huacas
+represented (as true fetiches should) forms which were sometimes
+animal, sometimes human, sometimes simply grotesque, but always ugly and
+exaggerated. Every valley, every tribe, every temple, every chief, had a
+guardian spirit. Those which were analogous to _pænates publici_ were
+recognized by the Incas, who endowed them with flocks and various
+presents. Often a stone in the middle of the village passed as the abode
+of the patron spirit of the place. It was the _huacacoal_, the stone of
+the huaca, whereas the huacas of the family or house were distinguished
+as _conopas_. Meteorites or thunderbolts were in great demand as huacas,
+and especially amongst lovers, since they were supposed to inspire a
+reciprocity of affection. The Christian missionaries had more difficulty
+in rooting out the worship of the Huacas than in abolishing that of the
+Sun and Moon, and we may still detect numerous traces of this ancient
+superstition amongst the natives of Peru.[94]
+
+
+IV.
+
+Let us now turn to the priesthood which presided over the worship of
+these numerous deities.
+
+There was no sacerdotal caste in Peru, or, to speak more correctly, the
+Inca family constituted the only sacerdotal caste in the strict sense of
+the word. This family retained for itself all the highest positions in
+the priesthood, as well as in the army and administration. These priests
+of the higher rank bore special garments and insignia, while the lower
+clergy wore the ordinary costume. At the head of all the priests of the
+empire, first after the reigning Inca, stood the _Villac Oumau_, "the
+chief sacrificer," also, as we have seen, called the _Huacapvillac_. He
+was nominated by the reigning Inca, and in his turn nominated all his
+subordinates. His name indicates that he was the living oracle, the
+interpreter of the will of the Sun. You can understand, therefore, how
+important it was for the policy of the Incas that he should himself be
+subject to the authority and discretion of the sovereign. After him came
+the rest of the chief priests, also members of the Inca family, whom he
+put in charge of the provincial temples of the Sun. At Cuzco itself all
+the priests had to be Incas. They were divided into squadrons, which
+attended in succession, according to the quarters of the moon, to the
+elaborate ritual of the service. And here we must admire the consummate
+art with which the Incas had planned everything in their empire to
+secure their supremacy against all attaint, in religion as in all else,
+while still leaving the successively annexed populations a certain
+measure of religious freedom. In the provinces, the Inca family,
+numerous as it was, could not have provided priests for all the
+sanctuaries; and, moreover, there would be local rites, traditions,
+perhaps even priesthoods, which could not well be fitted into the
+framework of the official religion. The Incas therefore had decided that
+the priests of the local deities should be affiliated to the imperial
+priesthood, but in such a way that the chief priests of the local
+deities should at the same time be subordinate priests of the deities of
+the empire. What a wonderful stroke of political genius! What happier
+method could have been found of teaching the subject populations, while
+still maintaining their traditional forms of worship, to regard the
+imperial cultus patronized by the reigning Inca as superior to all
+others? And what an invaluable guarantee of obedience was obtained by
+this association of the non-Inca priests with the official priesthood,
+the honours and advantages of which they were thus made to share,
+without any room for an aspiration after independence! I regard this
+organization of the priesthood in ancient Peru as one of the most
+striking proofs of the political genius of the Incas, and as one of the
+facts which best explain how a theocracy, which was after all based on
+the absolute and exclusive pretensions of one special mythology, was
+able to consolidate itself and endure for centuries, while exercising a
+large toleration towards other traditions and forms of worship.[95]
+
+By the side of the priests there were also priestesses; and they were
+clothed with a very special function. I refer to those _Virgins of the
+Sun_ (_acllia_ = chosen ones), those Peruvian nuns, who so much
+impressed the early historians of Peru. There were convents of these
+Virgins at Cuzco and in the chief cities of the empire. At Cuzco there
+were five hundred of them, drawn for the most part from the families of
+the Incas and the _Curacas_ or nobles, although (for a reason which will
+be apparent presently) great beauty gave even a daughter of the people a
+sufficient title to enter the sacred abode. They had a lady president--I
+had almost said a "mother abbess"--who selected them while yet quite
+young; and under her superior direction, matrons, or _Mamaconas_,
+superintended the young flock. They lived encloistered, in absolute
+retreat, without any relationship with the outside world. Only the
+reigning Inca, his chief wife, the _Coya_, and the chief priest, were
+allowed to penetrate this sanctuary of the virgins. Now these visits of
+the Inca's were not exactly disinterested. The fact is, that it was here
+he generally looked for recruits for his harem. You will ask how that
+could be reconciled with the vow of chastity which the maidens had
+taken; but their promise had been never to take any consort except the
+Sun, or _him to whom the Sun should give them_. Now the Inca, the child
+of the Sun, his representative and incarnation upon earth, began by
+assigning the most beautiful to himself, after which he might give some
+of those who had not found special favour in his eyes to his Curacas.
+And thus the vow was kept intact. In other respects, the most absolute
+chastity was sternly enforced. If any nun violated her vow, or was
+unhappy enough to allow the sacred fire that burned day and night in the
+austere abode to be extinguished, the penalty was death. And the strange
+thing is, that the mode of death was identical with that which awaited
+the Roman vestal guilty of the same offences. The culprit was buried
+alive. This illustrates the value of the theories started by those
+authors who can never discover any resemblance of rites or beliefs
+between two peoples without forthwith setting about to inquire which of
+the two borrowed from the other! It will hardly be maintained that the
+Peruvians borrowed this cruel custom from the ancient Romans, and
+assuredly the Romans did not get it from Peru. Whence, then, can the
+resemblance spring? From the same train of ideas leading to the same
+conclusion. By the sacrilege of the culprit, the gods of heaven and of
+light, the protecting and benevolent deities, were offended and
+incensed, and the whole country would feel the tokens of their wrath. To
+disarm their anger, its unhappy cause must expiate her guilt, and at the
+same time must be removed from their sight and given over to the powers
+of darkness, for she was no longer worthy to see the light. And that is
+why the dark tomb must swallow her. She had betrayed her spouse the
+Sun--let her henceforth be the spouse and the slave of darkness; and let
+her be sent alive to those dark powers, that they might do with her as
+they would. We must add that the guilty nun's accomplice was strangled,
+and that her whole family from first to last was put to death.
+
+The ordinary occupations of the Virgins of the Sun consisted in making
+garments for the members of the imperial family and tapestries destined
+to adorn the temples and palaces, in kneading and baking the sacred
+loaves, preparing the sacred drinks, and, finally, in watching and
+feeding the sacred fire. You perceive that it was not exactly the
+ascetic principle which had given rise to these convents--as in the
+case of the Buddhist and Christian institutions, for example--but rather
+the desire to do honour to the Sun, the supreme god, by consecrating
+seraglios to him, in which his numerous consorts, protected by a severe
+rule, could be kept from all except himself and those to whom he might
+give them; accomplishing, meanwhile, those menial tasks which,
+especially under the rule of polygamy, woman is required to perform in
+the abode of her lord and master.[96]
+
+All this shows us once more, Gentlemen, how the same fundamental logic
+of the human mind asserts itself across a thousand diversities, and
+re-appears under every conceivable form in every climate and every race.
+Only let us look close enough and with the requisite information, and we
+shall find in every case that all is explained, that all holds together,
+that all is justified, by some underlying principle, and that "that
+idiot of a word," _chance_, is never anything but a veil for our
+ignorance. And thus, when we notice anything paradoxical, grotesque, and
+unexplained by the resources we command at present, we must be very
+careful not to pronounce it inexplicable. We should rather suspend our
+judgment, wait till wider reflection and renewed investigation have
+shown us the middle terms, and meanwhile keep silence rather than
+attribute to chance or to influences which escape all human reason the
+phenomena that seem abnormal.
+
+For instance, you have heard sometimes of the strange custom in
+accordance with which the father of a new-born child goes to bed and is
+nursed as an invalid. You are perhaps aware that this custom, that
+appears so strange to us and is now restricted to a few savage tribes,
+was noted in ancient times in Europe itself, and has been preserved
+almost to our own time in certain cantons of the Pyrenees. It must
+therefore have been extremely wide-spread. Yet for a long time it seemed
+inexplicable. But now, thanks to investigations and comparisons, the
+explanation has been found. There is no doubt that the custom in
+question rested on the idea that there was a close solidarity between
+the health of the father and that of the new-born babe, so that if the
+father should fall sick, his far weaker child would die. The father,
+therefore, must be guarded from all over-exertion, must abstain from all
+excess--in short, was best in bed!
+
+So, too, in the present case. How are we to explain the resemblance
+between the treatment of the Vestals at Rome and the Virgins of the Sun
+at Cuzco? It was once impossible, but now that we are better acquainted
+with the genesis, the spirit, the inner logic of the primitive
+religions, and the modes of life, the wants and the apprehensions proper
+to the pre-historic ages, we have no difficulty in attaching two
+parallel customs to a single religious principle which had found
+acceptance alike in Italy and Peru. And this is one of the chief tasks,
+and one of the greatest charms, of the branch of study which I have the
+honour of professing. It shows us that even in human error, human reason
+has never abdicated its throne.
+
+We have still to speak of the temples, the ritual and the chief
+festivals of ancient Peru. To these subjects we shall devote the first
+part of our sixth and last Lecture, reserving the closing portion for
+the conclusions and the general lessons suggested by our two-fold study
+of Mexico and Peru.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI.
+
+PERUVIAN CULTUS AND FESTIVALS.--MORALS AND THE FUTURE
+LIFE.--CONCLUSIONS.
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+To complete my account of the native religion of Peru, I have still to
+speak of the cultus, the festivals, the religious ethics, and the ideas
+of a future life.
+
+
+I.
+
+The Peruvian cultus had given birth to the _temple;_ and, indeed, it is
+highly interesting to witness what one may call the "genesis of the
+temple" on this soil, so different from those of the Old World. There
+were temples, indeed, before the Incas, but they differed both in style
+and in signification from those reared under their patronage. In Peru,
+as in Mexico, the temples were originally neither more nor less than
+extremely lofty altars; that is to say, artificial elevations, on the
+summit of which the sacrifices were presented, while a little chapel
+served to contain the image of the god or gods adored. Round this great
+altar were grouped other chapels, galleries and columns, as though to
+accompany the great central altar formed by the eminence itself. Under
+the Incas, the crowning chapel increased so enormously that it encircled
+the altar and became the essential part of the sacred structure. The
+Inca temples were veritable palaces, destined as abodes for the gods.
+None of them remain; but their ruins attest the fact that the architects
+aimed rather at colossal than at beautiful effects. They contained
+gigantic stone statues, gates cut out of monoliths, and the well-known
+pyramidal structures of which we have spoken already. The most imposing
+of the temples was the one at Cuzco, which consisted in a vast central
+edifice, flanked with a number of adjacent buildings. Gold was so
+prodigally lavished on its interior that it bore the name of
+_Coricancha,_ that is to say, "the place of gold." The roof was formed
+by timber-work of precious woods plated with gold, but was covered, as
+in the case of all the houses of the land, with a simple thatch of maize
+straw. The doors opened to the East, and at the far end, above the
+altar, was the golden disk of the Sun, placed so as to reflect the first
+rays of the morning on its brilliant surface, and, as it were, reproduce
+the great luminary. And note that the mummies of the departed Incas,
+children of the Sun, were ranged in a semicircle round the sacred disk
+on golden thrones, so that the morning rays came day by day to shine on
+their august remains. The adjacent buildings were abodes of the deities
+who formed the retinue of the Sun. The principal one was sacred to the
+Moon, his consort, who had her disk of silver, and ranged around her the
+ancient queens, the departed _Coyas_. Others served as the abodes of
+Chaska, our planet Venus, the Pleiades, the Thunder, the Rainbow, and
+finally the officiating priests of the temple. In the provinces, the
+Incas reared a number of temples of the Sun on the model of that at
+Cuzco, but on a smaller scale.[97]
+
+The Incas, however, had been anticipated in this striking development of
+the temple by the religions anterior or adjacent to their own. Witness
+the great temple of Pachacamac, which they left standing in the valley
+of Lurin, and the remarkable ruins of another great temple situated at
+some miles distance from Lake Titicaca, which has quite recently been
+made the subject of a careful reconstructive study by your compatriot
+Mr. Inwards.[98]
+
+The offerings presented to the gods were very varied in kind. Flowers,
+fragrant incense, especially from preparations of coca, vegetables,
+fruits, maize, prepared drinks offered in cups of gold. At some of the
+feasts the officiating priest moistened the tips of his fingers in the
+cup and flung the drops towards the Sun. We also find in Peru a very
+special form of that remnant of self-immolation which enters, in more or
+less reduced and restricted shape, into the devotions of so many peoples
+and assumes such varied forms. The Red-skin offers his sweat; the Black
+offers his saliva or his teeth; the more poetical Greek, a lock of his
+hair, or even all of it. The Peruvian pulled out a hair from his eyebrow
+and blew it towards the idol![99]
+
+But there were also sacrifices of blood. A llama was sacrificed every
+day at Cuzco. Before setting out on war, the Peruvians sacrificed a
+black llama that they had previously kept fasting, that the heart of
+their enemies might fail as did his. This was the Peruvian application
+of the principle that lies at the base of all those superstitious
+ceremonies intended to provoke or stimulate a desired effect by
+reproducing its analogue in advance. Small birds, rabbits, and, for the
+health of the Inca, black dogs, were also sacrificed frequently. All
+these offerings were as a rule burned, that they might so be transmitted
+to the gods.[100] It should be noted that they only sacrificed edible
+animals,[101] which is a clear proof that the intention was to feed the
+gods. The sacrificing priest turned the animal's eyes towards the Sun,
+and opened its body to take out its heart, lungs and viscera, and offer
+them to the idols. It is a characteristic fact that when the victim was
+not burned, its flesh was divided amongst the sacrificers and _eaten
+raw_. The Peruvians had long learned to cook their meat, but this rite
+carries us back to a high antiquity, when cooking food was still an
+innovation which the power of tradition excluded from the ritual. It is
+to analogous causes that we must attribute the continued use of stone
+instruments in the religious ceremonies of peoples who are acquainted
+with iron and use it in ordinary life. In conclusion, they smeared the
+idols and the doors of the temples with the blood of the victims in
+order to appease the gods.[102]
+
+All this is sufficiently crude and material, and rests upon the same
+premisses as those which drove the Mexicans to the frightful excesses
+which I have previously described. But humanity was far less outraged
+in the Peruvian than in the Mexican religion. Garcilasso deceives
+himself, or is attempting to deceive his readers, when he gives his
+ancestors, the Incas, the honour of having put an end to human
+sacrifices.[103] It is certain that in the religion of Pachacamac more
+especially this kind of sacrifice was frequent, and for that matter we
+know that it was universal in the primitive epochs. All that we can
+allow to the descendant of the Incas is, that they did not encourage,
+and were rather disposed to restrain, human sacrifice. But for all that,
+when the reigning Inca was ill, they sacrificed one of his sons to the
+Sun, and prayed him to accept the substitution of the son for the
+father. At certain feasts a young infant was immolated. Others were
+sacrificed to the subterranean spirits when a new Inca was enthroned. To
+the same category we must attach the custom which enjoined upon wives,
+especially those of the Incas, the duty of burying themselves alive on
+the death of their husbands. It is asserted that when Huayna Capac
+died, a thousand members of his household incurred a voluntary death
+that they might go with him to serve him. The widows, however, were not
+compelled to take this step, and we know that the Incas had organized
+the support of widows without resources. But public opinion was not
+favourable to those who refused to follow their husbands to the tomb. It
+was regarded as a species of infidelity.[104] We see, however, from
+other well-established facts, that the Peruvian religion had been
+gradually softened. In Peru, as in China, instead of the living beings
+that they used formerly to bury with the dead, they now placed
+statuettes of men and women with him in his tomb to represent his wives
+and his servants.[105]
+
+We must also mention those "columns of the Sun" which appear never to
+have been absent in countries dominated by a solar worship. We have
+already seen them in Central America and in Mexico, and we also find
+them in Egypt, in Syria, in Asia Minor, in Palestine, at Carthage and
+elsewhere. In these columns the idea of fertilization is associated with
+that of the pleasure the Sun must feel in tracing out their shadows as
+he caresses their faces and summits with his rays. The earliest
+quadrants were traced at the foot of these columns. In Peru, they were
+levelled at the top, and were regarded as "seats of the Sun," who loved
+to rest upon them. At the equinoxes and solstices they placed golden
+thrones upon them for him to sit upon. Those nearest to the equator were
+held in greatest veneration, because the shadows were shorter there than
+elsewhere, and the Sun appeared to rest vertically upon them.[106]
+
+Prayer, in the proper sense of the word, asserted its place but feebly
+in the Peruvian religion. But hymns to the Sun were chanted at the great
+festivals and by the people as they went to cultivate the lands of the
+Sun. Every strophe ended with the cry, _Hailly_, or "triumph." It was
+the Peruvian _Io Pæan_. These chants, as far as they are still known to
+us, have something soft and sad about them. The rule of the Incas,
+paternal indeed, but monotonous in the extreme, must have tended to
+produce melancholy. In 1555, a Spanish composer wrote a mass upon the
+themes of these indigenous airs. It was sung in chorus, and it is
+chiefly to it that we owe the preservation of these chants.[107]
+
+But the grand form of religious demonstration among the Peruvians was
+the dance. They were very assiduous in this form of devotion, and indeed
+we know what a large place the earliest of the arts occupied in the
+primitive religions generally. The dance was the first and chief means
+adopted by pre-historic humanity of entering into active union with the
+deity adored. The first idea was to imitate the measured movements of
+the god, or at any rate what were supposed to be such. Afterwards, this
+fundamental motive was more or less forgotten; but the rite remained in
+force, like so many other religious forms which tradition and habit
+sustained even when the spirit was gone. In Peru, this tradition was
+still full of life. The name of the principal Peruvian festivals,
+_Raymi_, signifies "dance." The performances were so animated, that the
+dancers seemed to the Europeans to be out of their senses. It is
+noteworthy that the Incas themselves took no part in these violent
+dances, but had an "Incas' dance" of their own, which was grave and
+measured.[108]
+
+There were four great official festivals in the year, coinciding with
+the equinoxes and the solstices. The first was the festival of the
+Winter solstice, which fell in June. It was the _Raymi_, or festival
+_par excellence_, the _Citoc Raymi_, the feast of the diminished and
+(henceforth) growing Sun. It lasted nine days, the first three of which
+were given up to fasting. On the morning of the great day, a grand
+procession, led by the reigning Inca and his family, followed by the
+nobles and the people, proceeded, with insignia, banners and symbolic
+masks, towards the place of the dawn and the rising Sun. When the
+luminary appeared, the crowd fell to the earth and threw him kisses. The
+Inca presented the sacred beverage to the Sun, drank some of it himself,
+and passed it on to his suite. This was a sort of solar communion. Then
+they went to the temple of the Sun to sacrifice a black llama there.
+After this, they kindled the new fire by means of the concave mirror,
+and slaughtered a number of llamas, representing the Sun's present to
+the people. The pieces were distributed to the families, where they were
+eaten with the sacred cakes prepared by the Virgins of the Sun. This was
+the second act of communion with the luminary to whom the day was
+sacred. The remaining days of the festival were passed in rejoicings,
+when the people seem to have made themselves ample amends for the fast
+with which they had begun.[109]
+
+The second great festival, that of Spring, which fell in September, was
+the _Citua Raymi_, the feast of Purification. But do not attach any
+essentially moral significance to the idea of purification. The object
+in view was to purify the territory from all influences hostile to the
+health, security and prosperity of the inhabitants. Ball-shaped cakes
+were eaten on this occasion, in which was mixed the blood of victims or
+of young children, who were not slaughtered however, but bled above the
+nose, which is evidence of a previous custom of far greater ferocity,
+and of the gradual softening of the Peruvian ritual. With this bread the
+people rubbed their bodies all over, and the doors of their houses
+likewise. Then, a little before sunset, a very strange ceremony was
+performed. An Inca, clad in precious armour and lance in hand, descended
+from the fortress of Cuzco, followed by four relatives whom the Sun had
+specially charged with the task of chasing away by open force all the
+maladies from the city and its environs. They traversed the chief
+streets of Cuzco at full speed, amid the acclamations of the
+inhabitants, and then surrendered their lances to others, who were
+relieved in their turn, till the limits of the ancient state of Cuzco
+were reached. There the lances were fixed in the ground, as so many
+talismans against evil influences. At night there was a great
+torch-light procession, at the close of which the torches were hurled
+into the river, and thus the evil spirits of the night were expelled, as
+those of the day had been by the lancers of the Sun.[110] Observe that
+in Africa, amongst the Blacks, a kind of "chase of the evil spirits" is
+practised (though accompanied with far fewer ceremonies than in Peru),
+in which the inhabitants of a village, armed with sticks and uttering
+formulæ of exorcism, expel the evil spirits from their houses and from
+their streets, and pursue them into the desert or the interior of a
+forest. But notice here, again, with what art the Incas had contrived to
+turn an old superstition to account in the interests of their own
+prestige. If maladies did not decimate the people of Cuzco, it was to
+their Incas that they owed their safety.
+
+The third great festival, the Aymorai, which fell in May, celebrated the
+Harvest. A statue was constructed out of grains of corn glued together,
+and was adored under the name of _Pirrhua_, which in this case may well
+be a contraction of Viracocha, the god of fertilizing moisture. On this
+occasion a number of sacrifices were made at home by the
+householders.[111]
+
+The fourth great feast fell in December. It was the _Capac Raymi_, the
+festival of Power, in which the god of thunder was the object of a
+special worship by the side of the Sun. On this occasion the young
+Incas, after fasts, tournaments and other tests, received the
+investiture of manhood by having their ears pierced, and receiving a
+scarf, an axe and a crown of flowers. The young Curacas of the same age
+were also admitted to the privileges and duties of their rank, and
+shared with the Inca the sacred bread in token of indissoluble communion
+with him.[112]
+
+There were also a number of other and less important feasts. Each month
+had one of its own. Then there were occasional feasts, to celebrate the
+triumphal return of a victorious Inca for example, or when the
+tournaments of the young nobles, to which a religious value was
+attached, took place, or when silent processions lasting a day and
+night, and followed by dances, were instituted to avert threatening
+calamities, and so forth.[113] In Peru, as in so many other regions,
+eclipses were the subject of great terror. The eclipses of the Sun were
+attributed to his own anger, those of the Moon to an illness caused by
+the attack of an evil spirit, to frighten which away and put it to
+flight a hideous yelling was raised.[114]
+
+There were sorcerers in Peru as everywhere else; but in Peru too, as
+everywhere else where a priesthood has acquired a regular organization
+and made its authority respected, sorcery was hardly resorted to save by
+the lower classes.[115] In fact, the sorcerer is the priest of backward
+tribes, and the priest is the developed sorcerer. By his superior
+knowledge, by the more stable guarantees which he can give as the member
+of an imposing organization, by the nature of the religion of which he
+is the organ, and which raises him above the incoherent puerilities of
+animism, the priest eclipses the sorcerer and relegates him to the lower
+strata of society, which is just where his own titles to superiority are
+least appreciated. The sorcerer sinks in proportion as the priest
+rises.[116] For the rest, the official priesthood had its own diviners,
+who could foretel the future, the _Huacarimachi_, or "they who make the
+gods speak." The oracles of the valley of Rimac or Lima were much
+frequented; and, moreover, the Peruvians, like so many peoples of the
+Old World, thought that they could read the future in the entrails of
+the victims offered in sacrifice.[117] This wide-spread belief rests on
+the idea that immolation unites the victim so closely to the deity that
+it enters into communion with his thoughts and intentions, so that its
+heart, liver, and all other organs supposed to be affected by mental and
+moral dispositions, receive the impress of the divine prevision. Is it
+not passing strange, Gentlemen, that this mode of divination, which
+appears so absurd to us, which has no rational basis whatever, which
+rests on a singularly subtle conception of the relations between the
+creature sacrificed and the being to whom it is offered, has secured the
+prolonged confidence of the peoples of the Old World, and appears again
+in Peru, where it cannot have been imitated from any one?
+
+
+II.
+
+It has been asked whether the native religion of Peru rested any system
+of elevated morals on its fundamental principles. Gentlemen, I am
+persuaded that religion and morals unite together and interpenetrate
+each other in the higher regions of thought and life. Perhaps the most
+distinct result of our Christian education is the full comprehension of
+the fact that what is moral is religious, and that immorality cannot on
+any pretext be allowed as legitimately religious. But we must certainly
+yield to the overwhelming evidence that in the lower stages of religion
+this union of the two sisters is present only in germ. Religion, still
+quite selfish in its character, pursues its own way and seeks its own
+satisfactions independently of all moral considerations, and almost
+always lives in a state of separation from morality. We ought therefore
+to expect that in systems such as that of Peru--which have already risen
+much above the low level of the primitive religions, but are still far
+below that of the higher ones--we should find a certain religious ethic,
+a certain moral tendency in religion, but likewise all kinds of
+inconsistencies, and constant relapses towards the ancient separation of
+the two sisters. As a general rule, we may say that even where the
+Peruvian religion seems to undertake the elevation and protection of
+morals, it does so rather with a utilitarian and selfish view, than with
+any real purpose of sanctifying the heart and will.
+
+Thus we have noted ceremonies which forcibly recal the Communion. But
+the great object in view was to secure to the communicants the safety
+and well-being that would result from their union with the Sun or his
+representatives. The moral idea occupies but a small place in this
+communion, though it is but right to add that the great social laws
+were placed under the patronage and sanction of the Sun, whose
+legislation the Incas were held responsible for enforcing. In the same
+way we find in Peru something that closely resembles baptism. From
+fifteen to twenty days after birth the child received its first name,
+after being plunged into water. But this purification had nothing to do
+with the ideas of sin and regeneration. It was but a form of exorcism,
+destined to secure the child from the evil spirits and their malign
+influences. Between the ages of ten and twelve, the child's definitive
+name was conferred. On this occasion his hair and nails were cut off,
+and offered to the Sun and the guardian spirits.[118] This represented
+the consecration of his person, but its main object was to secure him
+the protection of the divine power.
+
+There was likewise a sacerdotal confession, but it was an institution of
+state and of police rather than a sacrament with a moral purpose. The
+great object was to discover all actions, whether voluntary or not,
+which might bring misfortune upon the state if not expiated by the
+appropriate penances and rites. The father confessors of Peru were
+inquisitors charged with the searching out of secret faults and the
+exaction of their avowal. A refusal to confess might provoke severe
+measures. A proof of the small influence of the moral element in the
+whole system of inquisition may be found in the fact that the priest
+relied on purely fortuitous tests in deciding whether or not to give
+absolution. For instance, he would take a pinch of maize grains, and if
+the number turned out to be even, he would declare the confession good,
+and give absolution, otherwise he would say the penitent must have
+concealed something, and would make him confess again.[119]
+
+Our conviction that the Peruvian religion had but a very elementary
+moral significance, receives a final confirmation from the beliefs
+concerning the future life.
+
+It is clear that no very definite ideas on this point had become
+generally established. In fact, we find amongst the Peruvians at the
+time of the conquest the underlying conceptions of the most widely
+severed peoples, all mingled together. Thus the common people of Peru,
+like all savages, thought of the future life as a continuation, pure and
+simple, of the present life. This explains the custom of burying all
+kinds of useful and desirable objects with the dead--giving him an
+emigrant's outfit, in short. The worship of ancestors is easily grafted
+upon this conception of the life beyond the grave. These ancestors may
+still succour, protect and inspire their descendants. I am assured at
+first hand that to this very day, and in spite of the efforts of the
+Catholic clergy, the worship of ancestors is still widely practised by
+the native population. There was not the least idea of a resurrection of
+the body. If the corpse was preserved, especially in the case of
+departed Incas, it was because the Peruvians believed that the soul
+which had left it still retained a marked predilection for its ancient
+abode and liked to return to it from time to time; and also because they
+attributed magic virtues to the remains thus preserved. No idea of
+recompense is as yet associated with this purely animistic and primitive
+conception of the life beyond the tomb.[120]
+
+Amongst the higher classes, the ideas entertained on this same subject
+had become a little less naive. The Incas were supposed to be
+transported to the mansion of the Sun, their father, where they still
+lived together as his family. The Curacas or nobles would either follow
+them there, or would still live under the earth beneath the sceptre of
+the god of the dead, Supay, the Hades or Pluto of the Peruvian
+mythology. Do not identify this deity with a Satan or Ahriman of any
+kind. He was not a wicked, but rather a sinister god, the conception of
+whom could wake no joyous or even serene emotions. He was a voracious
+deity, of insatiable appetite. At Quito, at any rate before the conquest
+of the country by the Incas, a hundred children were sacrificed to him
+every year. There is no idea of positive suffering inflicted on the
+wicked under his direction. But the subterranean abode is gloomy and
+dismal, like the place of shades in the Odyssey. Exceptional
+considerations of birth, rank or valour in war, determine the passage of
+chosen souls to heaven, where their lot will of course be far more
+brilliant and happy than that of the souls that remain in the
+subterranean regions. Thus the aristocratic point of view, barely
+modified by the high importance attributed to the warlike virtues, still
+dominates the ideas of a future life in ancient Peru, as in Mexico, in
+Polynesia and in Africa. This is a final proof that the moral element
+was but feebly present in the ancient Peruvian religion. For wherever a
+clear and definite belief in a conscious life beyond the grave is united
+to a sense of the religious character of morality, it is likewise held,
+by an obvious connection of ideas, that the lot of departed souls will
+depend completely upon their moral condition, without distinction of
+birth or rank.[121]
+
+This Peruvian religion, then, in spite of its elevation and refinement
+in some respects, forcibly reminds us of the walls of its own temples,
+all plated with gold, but covered in with straw, and poor and unvaried
+in architecture. A monotonous, unformed, gloomy spirit seems to pervade
+the whole institution, in spite of its brilliant exterior. The air of
+the convent broods over it. Those thousands of functionaries who spent
+their lives in superintending the furniture, the dress, the work, the
+very cookery, of the families under their charge, and inflicting
+corporal chastisement on those whom they surprised in a fault, might
+succeed in forming a correct and regular society, drilled like the bees
+in a hive, might form a nation of submissive slaves, but could never
+make a nation of _men_; and this is the deep cause that explains the
+irremediable collapse of this Peruvian society under the vigorous blows
+of a handful of unscrupulous Spaniards. It was a skilfully constructed
+machine, which worked like a chronometer; but when once the mainspring
+was broken, all was over.
+
+It is no part of our task to tell the story of the conversion of the
+natives to Roman Catholic Christianity. It was comparatively easily
+effected. The fall of the Incas was a mortal blow to the religious, no
+less than to the political, edifice in which they were the key-stone of
+the arch. It was evident that the Sun had been unable or unwilling to
+protect his children. The conqueror imposed his religion on Peru, as on
+Mexico, by open force; and the Spanish Inquisition, though not giving
+rise to such numerous and terrible spectacles in the former as in the
+latter country, yet carried out its work of terror and oppression there
+too. The result was that peculiar character of the Catholicism of the
+natives of Peru which strikes every traveller, and consists in a kind of
+timid and superstitious submission, without confidence and without zeal,
+associated with the obstinate preservation of customs which mount back
+to the former religious régime, and with memories of the golden age of
+the Inca rule under which their ancestors were privileged to live, but
+which has gone to return no more.
+
+
+III.
+
+And now it only remains for us to draw the inferences and conclusions
+suggested by our examination of the ancient religions of Mexico and
+Peru, so closely associated with the remarkable though imperfect
+civilizations to which the two nations had attained.
+
+We have not stayed to discuss the hypotheses that have so often been put
+forward, to attach these religions and civilizations to some immigration
+from the Old World. The fact is that all these attempts rest on the
+arbitrary selection of some few traits of resemblance, on which
+exclusive stress is laid, to the neglect of still more characteristic
+differences. The best proof that the work of affiliation has been
+abortive, in spite of the high authority of some of the names that have
+been lent to it, may be found in the fact that every possible nation of
+the Old World has in its turn been selected as the true parent of the
+Peruvians and Mexicans. The Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Chinese, the
+Hindus, the Buddhists of India and China, the Romans, even the Celts and
+the Chaldeans, have been put forward one after the other. Nay, the
+English themselves have been tried! There is a gratifying legend which
+brings the story of Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo into connection with the
+results of the shipwreck of an _Englishman_, whose national name was
+transformed into _Inga Man_, which again, in conjunction with _Cocapac_,
+the name of the father of the native wife whom the Englishman had taken
+to himself, made _Inca Manco Capac_! The sequel is obvious. The two
+fair-skinned children that sprang from this union were of course the
+founders of the Inca family and the state of Cuzco.[122] I need not tell
+you that all this will not bear a moment's examination. Everything shows
+that the civilizations and religions of Mexico and Peru are
+autochthonous, springing from the soil itself.
+
+There is surely something very strange in this passion for localizing
+all origins at some single point of the globe. Why not admit that what
+took place there may have taken place elsewhere also, that the same
+concourse of events which called forth such and such a result in a
+certain given place may have been reproduced somewhere else, and
+consequently given rise to identical or closely analogous results there
+too? Does not our own experience teach us that the contact of a
+civilized with an uncivilized people is not enough in itself to ensure
+the adoption by the latter of the civilization that is brought to it? It
+is the exception, not the rule, for the Red-skin, the Kafir, the
+Australian or the Papuan, to become civilized. Civilization can only be
+handed on if the invaded race possesses a special disposition and
+aptitude for civilized life; and this aptitude may have existed to such
+a degree as to be capable of independent development in the New-World as
+we know it did in the Old; and if there were centres of such nascent
+civilization in Central America, in Mexico and in Peru, it is absolutely
+superfluous to search elsewhere than in America itself for the origins
+of American civilization.
+
+But the mistake into which so many historians and travellers have fallen
+is explained, to a certain extent, by the fact that, in examining the
+beliefs, the monuments and the customs of Peru and Mexico, we come upon
+phenomena at every moment which are identical with or analogous to
+something we have observed in the Old World. The temples, with their
+successive terraces, remind us of ancient Chaldea, and the hieroglyphics
+of ancient Egypt. The convents recal the Indian and Chinese Buddhism.
+The cruel and bloody sacrifices and the preponderance of the Sun-worship
+have a Semitic tinge. There are myths and curious resemblances of words
+which wake thoughts of Hellenic civilization; and sacerdotal castes and
+sacrificial rites which bring us round to the Celts! Nay, are there not
+even beliefs as to the arrival or return of a deity who will restore
+order and avenge outraged justice, round which there breathes a kind of
+Messianic air? So much so, indeed, that I must add to the list of
+supposed ancestors of American civilization the ten lost tribes of
+Israel, who must have fled from the yoke of their Ninevite oppressors
+right across Asia into America! The partizans of this ingenious
+hypothesis have, it is true, forgotten to inquire how far these
+Israelites of the North, whose enthusiasm for the house of Judah was, to
+say the least of it, decidedly subdued, had ever heard of the Messianic
+hopes at all!
+
+The real result of all these wild speculations, however, is to bring out
+the fact very clearly, that in the native religions of Mexico, of
+Central America and of Peru, we find a number of traits united which are
+scattered amongst the most celebrated religions of our own ancient
+world; so that this new and well-defined region gives us a precious
+opportunity of testing the value of the explanations of religious ideas
+and practices deduced from the comparative study of religions.
+
+Let us take the question of sacrifice, for instance. In both religions
+sacrifice is frequent, often cruel,--in Mexico even frightful. But it is
+easy to trace the original idea that inspired it. It is by no means the
+sense of guilt, or the idea that the culprit, terrified by the account
+that he must render to the divine justice, can transfer to a victim the
+penalty he has himself incurred. It is simply the idea that by offering
+the gods the things they like--that is to say, whatever will satisfy and
+gratify their senses--it is possible to secure their goodwill, their
+protection and their favour, while at the same time disarming their
+wrath, if need be, and appeasing their dangerous appetites. It is only
+at a later stage that the extreme importance attributed to this rite,
+the very essence of the worship rendered to the gods, leads to the
+association of mystic and ultimately of moral ideas with the
+circumstance of the pain inseparably connected with sacrifice. And when
+this stage is reached, men will either refine upon the suffering with
+frantic intensity, as they did in Mexico, or, if the sentiment of
+humanity has made itself felt in religion, as was the case in Peru and
+in the special worship of Quetzalcoatl, they will try to restrain the
+number and mitigate the horror of the human sacrifices, while still
+inflexibly maintaining the principle they involve.
+
+Again: there is not the smallest trace of an earlier monotheism
+preceding the polytheism of either the one or the other nation. On the
+other hand, we may trace in both alike three stages of religious faith
+superimposed, so to speak, one upon the other. At the bottom of all
+still lies the religion that we find to-day amongst peoples that are
+strangers to all civilization. It is an incoherent and confused jumble
+of nature-worship and of animism or the worship of spirits, but
+especially the latter; for the primitive nature-worship has been
+developed, enlarged and more or less organized, on a higher level,
+whereas animism has remained what it was. The spirits of nature, which
+may often be anonymous--spirits of forests, of plants, of rocks, of
+waters, of animals, generally with the addition of the spirits of
+ancestors--make up a confused and inorganic mass that may assume almost
+any form. Fetichism is not the base, as it has been called, but the
+consequence and application of this animistic view. It is enough to
+secure adoration for any worthless object, natural or artificial, if it
+strikes the ignorant imagination forcibly enough to induce the belief
+that it is the residence of a spirit. Magic, founded on the pretension
+of certain individuals to stand in special relations with the spirits,
+equips the priesthood of this lowest stage. But above this, through the
+action of the higher minds amongst the people, nature-worship develops
+itself into the adoration of the most important, most general and most
+imposing phenomena of nature. In the tropical countries, at once warm
+and fertile, it is the Sun that reigns supreme, though not without
+leaving a very exalted place to other phenomena, such as wind, rain,
+vegetation and so on, personified as so many special deities. But in all
+this there is no indication of an antecedent and primitive monotheism.
+It is quite true that each one of these deities receives in his turn
+epithets which seem to attribute omnipotence to him and to make him the
+sole creator. But this is the case in all polytheistic systems, whether
+in Greece, Persia, and India, or in Mexico and Peru. It only proves that
+when man worships, he never limits the homage he renders to the object
+of his adoration; but if he is a polytheist, he has no scruple in
+attributing the same omnipotence to each of his gods in turn. It is much
+the same with the worthy curés in our rural districts, whose sermons
+systematically exalt the saint of the day, whoever he may be, to the
+chief place in Paradise! And here in Mexico and in Peru, as in Greece
+and in India, we observe the ever growing tendency towards
+_anthropomorphism_, transforming into men, of enormous strength, stature
+and power, those natural phenomena which at the earlier stage were
+rather assimilated to animals. Uitzilopochtli still bears the traces of
+his ancient nature as a humming-bird, and Tezcatlipoca of the time when
+he was no more than a celestial tapir. Their cultus, like their
+functions in the order of nature, must be regular and subject to fixed
+rules. And thus the priesthood, organized and regulated in its turn,
+emerges from the earlier stage of sorcery, and becomes a great
+institution to protect and foster the nascent civilization. The third
+stage was not actually reached in ancient Mexico and Peru. One can but
+divine its beginnings in the mysterious priesthood of Quetzalcoatl, or
+trace it in the traditions of the philosopher king of Tezcuco, and the
+sceptical Incas of whom Garcilasso and others tell us. In such traits as
+these we may discover a certain dissatisfaction with the established
+polytheism, striving to raise itself higher in the direction of a
+spiritual monotheism. But this tendency is obviously the last term of
+the evolution, and in no sense its first.
+
+The history of the temple in Mexico and Peru suggests similar
+reflections. Its point of departure is the altar, and not the tomb,--the
+altar on which, as on a sacred table, the flesh destined for their food
+was placed before the gods. Little by little, as the developed and
+organized nature-worship substitutes gods of imposing might and
+greatness for the contemptible deities of the period when nature-worship
+and animism were confounded together, these altars assumed huge and at
+last gigantic proportions; and in Mexico, except in the case of
+Quetzalcoatl, there the development stopped, save that a little chapel,
+destined to serve as the abode of the national gods, was reared on the
+summit. Peru passes through the same phases, but goes further. There the
+surmounting chapel grows, assumes vast dimensions, and ends by embracing
+the altar itself, of which at first it was but an adjunct.
+
+The two religions alike exhibit an initial penetration of religion by
+the moral idea. They are at bottom two theocracies, the laws and
+institutions of which rest upon the gods themselves, though the
+theocratic form is far more prominent in Peru than in Mexico. They share
+the advantages of a theocracy for a nascent civilization, and its
+disadvantages for one that has already reached a certain development.
+It was the theocratic and sacerdotal conception that maintained and
+enforced the religious butchery of which you have heard in Mexico, and
+which transformed Peru into one enormous convent, where no one had any
+will or any initiative of his own. For the same reason, asceticism, the
+principle that confuses, through an illusion we can easily understand,
+the moral act itself with the suffering that accompanies it, shows
+itself in both religions, but especially in that of Mexico; and convents
+that startle us by their resemblance to those of Buddhism and
+Christianity rise in either realm. But this mutual interpenetration of
+the religious and moral ideas is still quite rudimentary. The prevailing
+tone of the religion is given by the self-seeking and purely calculating
+principle, aiming no doubt at a certain mystic satisfaction (for at
+every stage of religion this moving principle has been most powerful and
+fruitful), but likewise seeking material advantages without any scruple
+as to the means; and those monstrous forms of transubstantiation which
+the Mexican thought he was bringing about when he ate of the same human
+flesh which he offered to his gods, are typical of the period in which
+religion pursued its purpose of union with the deity, regardless of the
+protests of the moral sense and of humanity.
+
+It was reserved for the higher religions, and especially for that of
+which our Bible is the monument, to realize the intimate alliance of the
+religious and moral sentiments,--that priceless alliance, without which
+morals remain for the most part almost barren, and religion falls into
+monstrous aberrations. That the roots of religion pierce to the very
+cradles of humanity, may now be taken as demonstrated. Its principle is
+found in the necessity we feel of surmounting the uncertainties and the
+limitations of destiny, by attaching ourselves individually to the
+loftier Spirit revealed by nature outside us and within; and this
+principle has always remained the same; nor am I one of those who hold
+that we must now renounce it in the name of philosophy and science. For
+neither philosophy nor science can make us other than the poor creatures
+we are, with an unquenchable thirst for blessedness and life, yet
+constantly broken, crushed at every moment, by the very elements on the
+bosom of which we are forced to live. Philosophy and science may guide
+religion, may reveal its true object in ever-growing purity, may cleanse
+it from the pollutions in which ignorance and sin still plunge it, but
+they cannot replace and they cannot destroy it. There is a Dutch
+proverb, the profundity of which it would be difficult to exaggerate,
+"De natuur gaat boven de leer"--_Nature is too strong for doctrine._ The
+evolutions of philosophy may seem to make the heavens void, and inspire
+man with the idea that all is over with the poetic or terrific visions
+that rocked the cradle of his infancy. But stay! Nature, human nature,
+is still there; and under the impulse of the indestructible thirst for
+religion, human nature renews her efforts, looks deeper and looks
+higher, and finds her God once more.
+
+    Jérusalem renait plus brillante et plus belle.
+
+But let not this conclusion, confirmed as it seems to me by the whole
+history of religion, prevent our boldly declaring how much that is
+small, puerile, often even immoral and deplorable, there is in the
+religious past of humanity. It is no otherwise with art, with
+legislation, with science herself, with all that constitutes the
+privilege, the power, the joy of our race. It is just the knowledge of
+these aberrations which should serve to keep us from falling back into
+the errors and false principles of which they were the consequence. And
+in this respect the study of the religions of ancient Mexico and Peru is
+profoundly instructive. It teaches us that there is a principle,
+bordering closely upon that of religion itself, which must serve as the
+torch to guide the religious idea in its development--not to supplant
+it, but to direct it to the true path. It is the principle of humanity.
+The truer a religion is, the more absolute the homage it will render to
+the principle of humanity, and the more will he who lives by its light
+feel himself impelled to goodness, loving and loved, trustful and free.
+The last word of religious history is, that there exists an affinity, a
+mysterious relationship, between our spirit and the Spirit of the
+universe; that this nobility of human nature embraces in itself all the
+promises, all the hopes, all the latent perfections, all the infinite
+ideals of the future; that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary,
+the Supreme Will is good to each one of the beings which it summons and
+draws to itself; and that man, in spite of his errors, his failures,
+his corruptions, his miseries, was never wrong in following the sacred
+instinct that raised him slowly from the mire, was always right in
+renewing his efforts, so constant, so toilsome--often, too, so woful--to
+mount the rounds
+
+    De cette échelle d'or qui va se perdre en Dieu.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, it only remains for me to bid you
+farewell, while giving you my warmest thanks for the perseverance, the
+encouragement and the sympathy, with which you have supported me. The
+reception you have given me has touched me deeply, and my stay in 1884
+in your imposing and splendid capital will always remain amongst the
+most prized and the pleasantest recollections of my life. You have been
+good enough to pardon my linguistic infirmity. You have spared from your
+business or pleasure the time needed to listen to a stranger, who has
+come to speak to you of matters having no direct utility, and of purely
+historical and theoretical interest. This is far more to your honour
+than to mine. I thank you, but at the same time I congratulate you; for
+it is a trait in the nobleness in our human nature to be able thus to
+snatch ourselves from the vulgar pre-occupations of life, to contemplate
+the truth on those serene heights where it reveals itself to all who
+seek it with an upright heart. Cease not to love these noble studies,
+which touch upon all that is most exalted and most precious in us! If we
+search history for light in politics and the higher interests of our
+fatherlands, and learn thereby to understand, to appreciate, to love
+them more, let us turn to history no less for light on the path which we
+must tread in that order of sublime realities, necessities and
+aspirations, in which the soul of each one of us becomes a temple and a
+sanctuary, lying open to the Eternal Spirit that fills the universe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now to the Eternal, the Invisible, to Him whose name we can but
+stammer, whose infinite perfections we can but feel after, be rendered
+all our homage and our hearts!
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The second, third and fourth despatches (the first is lost) from
+_Fernando Cortes_ to Charles V., written in 1520, 1522 and 1524
+respectively. Original editions as follows: "Carta de relacio_n_
+e_m_biada a su S. majestad del e_m_p_er_ador n_ues_tro señor ... por el
+capita_n_ general de la nueva spaña: Llamado ferna_n_do cortes," &c.:
+Seville, 1522. "Carta tercera de relacio_n_: embiada por Ferna_n_do
+cortes," &c.: Seville, 1523. "La quarta relacion q_ue_ Ferna_n_do cortes
+gouernador y capitan general ... embio al muy alto ... rey de España,"
+&c.: Toledo, 1525. Recent edition, with notes, &c.: "Cartas y Relaciones
+de Hernan Cortés al Emperador Carlos V. colegidas é ilustradas por Don
+Pascual de Gayangos," &c.: Paris, 1866. English translation: "The
+Despatches of Hernando Cortes," &c., translated by George Folsom: New
+York and London, 1843.--_Francisco Lopez de Gómara_ (Cortes' chaplain):
+"Hispania Victrix. Primera y segunda parte de la historia general de las
+Indias co_n_ todo el descubrimiento, y cosas notables que han acaescido
+dende que se ganaron hasta el año de 1551. Con la conquista de Mexico y
+dela nueva España:" Modina del Campo, 1553. Also printed in Vol. XXII.
+of the "Biblioteca de Autores Españoles:" Madrid, 1852 (to the
+pagination of which references in future notes will be made). There is
+an old English translation of Part II. of this work, entitled, "The
+Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India, now called new
+Spayne, Atchieved by the worthy Prince Hernando Cortes, Marques of the
+Valley of Huaxacac, most delectable to Reade: Translated out of the
+Spanishe tongue by T. N. [Thomas Nicholas], Anno 1578:" London.--_Bernal
+Diaz_: "Historia Verdadera de la Nueva España escrita por el Capitan
+Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Uno de sus Conquistadores. Sacada a luz por el
+P. M. Fr. Alonso Remon," &c.: Madrid, 1632. English translation: "The
+Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, written by
+Himself," &c.: translated by John Ingram Lockhart, F.R.A.S. 2 vols.:
+London, 1844. There is also a good French translation: "Histoire
+Véridique de la conquête ... par le Capitaine Bernal Diaz del Castillo,"
+&c., by Dr. Jourdanet. Second edition: Paris, 1877.--_Las Casas._
+Numerous works collected by Llorente: "Collecion de las obras del
+Venerable Obispo de Chiapa, Don Bartolomé de las Casas, Defensor de la
+Libertad de los Americanos." 2 vols.: Paris, 1822. Also translated into
+French, with some additional matter, by the same Llorente, and published
+in the same year at Paris. His "Historia de las Crueldades de los
+Españoles," &c., was translated into English in 1655 by J. Phillips,
+under the title of "The Tears of the Indians," &c., and dedicated to
+Oliver Cromwell. [N.B. Translations in full or epitomized of several of
+the above works, together with others, may be found in Vols. III. and
+IV. of "Purchas his Pilgimes," &c.: London, 1625-26.]--_Sahagun's_
+history of New Spain, a work of the utmost importance for the religious
+history of Mexico, remained unpublished till the present century, and
+appeared almost simultaneously in Mexico and London: "Historia General
+de las Cosas de Nueva España ... escribió el R. P. Fr. Bernardino de
+Sahagun ... uno de los primeros predicadores del santo evangelio en
+aquellas regiones," &c. 3 vols.: Mexico, 1829-30. The same work appeared
+in Vols. V. and VII. of Lord Kingsborough's collection. Vid. infr. A
+French translation by Jourdanet appeared in 1880.--_Acosta_: "Historia
+Natural y Moral de las Indias ... compuesta por el Padre Joseph de
+Acosta Religioso de la Campañia de Jesus," &c.: Seville, 1590. English
+translation: "The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West
+Indies," &c.: translated by E. G.: London, 1604. E[dward] G[rimstone]'s
+translation was edited, with notes, for the Hakluyt Society, by Clements
+R. Markham, in 1880.--_Torquemada_: "Los veynte y un libros Rituales y
+Monarchia Yndiana ... Compuesto por Fray Ivan de Torquemada," &c. 3
+vols.: Seville, 1615. Printed again at Madrid in 1723.--_Herrera_
+(official historiographer of Philip II.): "Historia General de los
+Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas i Tierra Firme del mar Oceano,"
+&c., by Antonio de Herrera; to which is prefixed, "Descripcion de las
+Indias Ocidentales," &c., by the same. 4 vols.: Madrid, 1601. English
+translation in epitome by Capt. John Stevens, "The General History of
+the vast Continent and Islands of America," &c. 6 vols.: London,
+1725-26.
+
+The following native writers may also be consulted. _Ixlilxochitl_
+(Fernando de Alva): "Historia Chichimeca" and "Relaciones," in Lord
+Kingsborough's "Mexican Antiquities," Vol. IX. (vid. infr.). French
+translations in Vols. VIII. XII. and XIII. of H. Ternaux-Compans'
+collection: "Voyages, Relations et Memoires originaux pour servir a
+l'histoire de la Découverte de l'Amérique:" Paris, 1837-41.--_Camargo_:
+"Histoire de la République de Tlaxcallan, par Domingo Muñoz Camargo,
+Indien, natif de cette ville," translated from the Spanish MS. in Vols.
+XCVIII. and XCIX. of the "Nouvelles Annales des Voyages," &c.: Paris,
+1843.--_Pomar (J. B. de)_: "Relacion de las Antiquedades de los Indios."
+Pomar was a descendant of the royal house of Tezcuco, and his memoirs
+were made use of in MS. by Torquemada.
+
+Amongst later authorities may be mentioned (in addition to Prescott's
+well-known work, and those cited in the following notes): _W.
+Robertson_: "History of America."--_Alx. von Humboldt_: "Vues des
+Cordillières et Monuments des peuples de l'Amérique:" Paris, 1810;
+forming the "Atlas Pittoresque" of Part III. of "Voyage de Humboldt et
+Bonpland."--_Francesco Saverio Clavigero_: "Storia antica del Messico,"
+&c. 4 vols.: Cesena, 1780-81. English translation by Charles Cullen:
+"The History of Mexico," &c. 2 vols.: London, 1787.--_Th. Waitz_:
+"Anthropologie der Naturvölker," Vol. IV.: Leipzig, 1864.--_Brasseur de
+Bourbourg_: "Histoire des Nations civilisées du Mexique et de
+L'Amérique-centrale," &c. 4 vols: Paris, 1857-59.--_Müller (Joh.
+George)_, Professor at Bâle: "Geschichte der Amerikanischen
+Urreligionen." Second edition: Basel, 1867.--To these should be added
+the narratives and works of M. _D. Charnay_, still in the course of
+publication.
+
+References will be given to the originals, but in such a form, wherever
+possible, as to serve equally well for the English and French
+translations. Where, as is not unfrequently the case, the chapters or
+sections of the translations do not correspond to the originals, a note
+of the vol. and page of the former will generally be added.
+
+[2] The original collection is in seven magnificent folio volumes.
+"Antiquities of Mexico: comprising Facsimiles of Ancient Mexican
+Paintings and Hieroglyphics ... together with The Monuments of New
+Spain, by M. Dupaix ... the whole illustrated by many valuable inedited
+Manuscripts by Augustine Aglio:" London, 1830. Two supplementary
+volumes, on the title-page of which Lord Kingsborough's own name
+appears, were added in 1848, and a tenth volume was projected, but only
+a small portion of it (appended to Vol. IX.) was printed.
+
+[3] Five volumes: New York, 1875-76.
+
+[4] See _Bancroft_, Vol. II. pp. 311, 312.
+
+[5] See _Sahagun_, Tom. I. p. 201, Appendix to Lib. ii. (Vol. II. p.
+174, in Jourdanet's translation).
+
+[6] The story is given by _Bancroft_, Vol. III. p. 471, on the authority
+of _Lopez Medel_.
+
+[7] See _Torquemada_, Lib. viii. cap. xx. at the end. On the Mexican
+temples in general, see _Müller_, pp. 644-646.
+
+[8] On the great temple of Mexico and its annexes, see _Waitz_, IV. 148
+sqq., where the scattered data of Sahagun, Acosta, Gomara, Bernal Diaz,
+Ixtlilxochitl, Clavigero, &c., are drawn together. See also _Bancroft_,
+II. 577-587, III. 430 sq.
+
+[9] Op. cit. cap. xcii.
+
+[10] Compare the German "Schlangenberg" and the old French "Guivremont."
+
+[11] See the legend in _Clavigero_, Lib. vi. § 6.
+
+[12] See _Müller_, pp. 602 sqq., and _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 1, 237,
+sqq., Lib. i. cap. i., and Lib. iii. cap. i., &c.
+
+[13] See _Clavigero_, Lib. vi. § 2. _Acosta_, pp. 324 sqq., Lib. v. cap.
+ix. (pp. 353 sq. in E. G.'s translation); _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 2 sq.,
+241 sq., Lib. i. cap. iii., Lib. iii. cap. ii. See also
+_Ternaux-Compans_, Vol. XII. p. 18.
+
+[14] On Quetzalcoatl, see _Müller_, pp. 577-590; _Bancroft_, Vol. III.
+pp. 239-287; _Torquemada_, Lib. vi. cap. xxiv., Lib. iii. cap. vii.;
+_Clavigero_, Lib. vi. § 4; _Ixtlilxochitl_ in _Ternaux-Compans_, Vol.
+XII. pp. 5-8 (further, pp. 9-27 of the same volume on the Toltecs);
+_Prescott_, Bk. i. chap, iii., Bk. iv. chap, v., and elsewhere;
+_Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 3-4, 245-6, 255-259, Lib. i, cap. v., Lib. iii.
+cap p. iv. xii.-xiv.
+
+[15] See _Clavigero_, Lib. iv. §§ 4, 15, Lib. vii. § 42; _Humboldt_, pp.
+319-20, cf. p. 95; _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. i. and elsewhere;
+_Bancroft_, Vol. V. pp. 427-429; _Müller_, pp. 526 sq.
+
+[16] _Clavigero_, Lib. vi. §§ 5, 15, 34; _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 16-19,
+Lib. i. cap. xiii.; _Bancroft_, Vol. III. p. 385.
+
+[17] See _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 10-16, Lib. i. cap. xii.
+
+[18] See _Boturini_, "Idea de una nueva historia general de la America
+Septentrional," &c.: Madrid, 1746, pp. 63-65.
+
+[19] _Bancroft_, Vol. III. pp. 403-417; _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 22-25,
+29-33, Lib. i. capp. xv. xvi. xix.
+
+[20] _Bancroft_, Vol. III. pp. 396-402; _Clavigero_, Lib. vi. §§ 1, 5.
+
+[21] _Sahagun_, Tom. I. p. 86 (cf. p. 88), Lib. ii. cap. xx.
+
+[22] _Sahagun_, Tom. I. p. 50, Lib. ii. cap. i.
+
+[23] Compare the detailed description of the festivals of the ancient
+religion of Mexico in _Bancroft_, Vol. II. pp. 302-341, Vol. III. pp.
+297-300, 330-348, 354-362, 385-396.
+
+[24] Amongst all the indigenous races of North America, prolonged
+fasting is regarded as the means _par excellence_ of securing
+supernatural inspiration. The Red-skin to become a sorcerer or to secure
+a revelation from his _totem_, or the Eskimo to become _Angekok_, will
+endure the most appalling fasts.
+
+[25] _Torquemada_, Lib. vi. cap. xxxviii.; cf. _Sahagun_, Tom. I. p.
+174, Lib. ii. cap. xxiv.
+
+[26] _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 35--39, Lib. i. cap. xxi.
+
+[27] _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 11-16, Tom. II. pp. 57-64, Lib. i. cap.
+xii., Lib. vi. cap. vii.
+
+[28] Elements were not wanting for the formation of a dualistic system
+analogous to Mazdeism. The _Tzitzimitles_ nearly corresponded to the
+Iranian _Devas_. They were a kind of demon servants of Mictlan, who
+delighted in springing upon men to devour them, and the protection of
+the celestial gods was needed to escape from their attacks. _Sahagun_,
+Tom. II. p. 67, Lib. vi. cap. viii. (in the middle of a prayer to
+Tlaloc). Cf. also Tom. II. pp. 14 sqq., Lib. v. capp. xi.-xiii.
+
+[29] On the Mexican priesthood, see _Bancroft_, Vol. II. pp. 200-207,
+Vol. III. pp. 430-441; _Clavigero_, Lib. vi. §§ 13--17; cf. Lib. iv. §
+4; _Humboldt_, pp. 98, 194, 290; _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.;
+_Torquemada_, Lib. ix. capp. i.-xxxiv.
+
+[30] _Camargo_ (in Nouv. An. d. Voy. xcix.), pp. 134-5.
+
+[31] _Bancroft_, Vol. II. pp. 204-206, Vol. III. pp. 435-436;
+_Torquemada_, Lib. ix. capp. xiv. xv.; _Sahagun_, Tom. I. pp. 227-8
+(last section of Appendix to Lib. ii.); _Acosta_, Lib. v. cap. xvi.;
+_Clavigero_, Lib. vi. capp. xvi. xxii.
+
+[32] See the "Cuadro historico-geroglifico," &c., contributed by Don
+_José Fernando Ramirez_ (curator of the national Museum at Mexico) to
+_Garcia y Cubas_, "Altas geographico, estadistico e historico de la
+Republica Mexicana," Entrega 29a (1858).
+
+[33] On all that concerns the Mexican cosmogonies, see _Müller_, pp. 477
+sq., 509--519; _Bancroft_, Vol. III. pp. 57--65; _Ixtlilxochitl_,
+"Historia Chichimeca," capp. i. ii.; _Kingsborough_, "Mexican
+Antiquities," Vol. V. pp. 164-167; _Humboldt_, pp. 202--211.
+
+[34] See _Sahagun_, Tom. II. pp. 281--283, Lib. viii. cap. vi.
+
+[35] The sacerdotal year was lunar. The civil year, which was doubtless
+of later origin, and had been adopted as better suited to the purposes
+of agriculture, was solar. Every thirteenth year the two coincided. The
+number _four_, which plays an important part in Mexican symbolism (cf.
+the Mexican cross) gave a kind of cosmic significance to 13 × 4 = 52.
+
+[36] See _Bancroft_, Vol. III. pp. 393-396.
+
+[37] Compare the Appendix to Jourdanet's translation of Bernal Diaz, pp.
+912 sqq.
+
+[38] On the conversion of the Mexicans, &c., compare the anonymous
+treatise at the end of _Kingsborough's_ "Mexican Antiquities," Vol. IX.
+Cf. also _Torquemada,_ Lib. xvii. cap. xx., Lib. xix. cap. xxix.
+
+[39] See _P. Pauke,_ "Reise in d. Missionen von Paraguay:" Vienna, 1829,
+p. 111.
+
+[40] In addition to the works of _Acosta_, _Gomara_, _Herrera_,
+_Humboldt_, _Waitz_ and _Müller_, already cited in connection with
+Mexico, and _Prescott's_ "Conquest of Peru," we may mention the
+following authorities for the political and religious history of Peru:
+
+_Xeres_ (Pizarro's secretary): "Verdadera relacion de la conquista del
+Peru y provincia del Cuzco llamada la nueva Castilla ... por Francisco
+de Xeres," &c.: Seville, 1534. English translation by Markham in
+"Reports on the Discovery of Peru:" printed for the Hakluyt Society,
+London, 1872.--_Zarate_ (official Spanish "auditor" in Peru): "Historia
+del descubrimiento y conquista del Peru.... La qual escriua Augustin de
+Çarate," &c.: Antwerp, 1555. English translation: "The strange and
+delectable History, &c.: translated out of the Spanish Tongue by T.
+Nicholas:" London, 1581.--_Cieza de Leon_ (served in Peru for seventeen
+years): "Parte Primera Dela chronica del Peru," &c.: Seville, 1553. The
+second and third Parts have never been printed. English translation by
+Markham: Hakluyt Society, 1864. [N. B. _Xeres_ (or _Jeres_), _Cieza de
+Leon_ and _Zarate_, are all contained in Tom. XXVI. of Aribau's
+"Biblioteca de autores Españoles."]--_Diego Fernandez_ of Palencia
+(historiographer of Peru under the vice-royalty of Mendoza): "Primera, y
+Segunda Parte, de la Historia del Peru," &c.: Seville, 1571.--_Miguel
+Cavello Balboa:_ "Histoire du Pérou," in Ternaux-Compans, Vol.
+XV.--_Arriaga_: "Extirpacion de la Idolatria del Piru ... Por el Padre
+Pablo Joseph de Arriaga de la Compañia de Jesus:" Lima, 1621. Extracts
+are given in Ternaux-Compans, Vol. XVII.--_Fernando Montesinos_:
+"Memoires historiques sur l'Ancien Pérou:" translated from the Spanish
+MS. in Ternaux-Compans, Vol. XVII. Montesinos rectifies Garcilasso de la
+Vega on more points than one.--_Johannes de Laet_: "Novus Orbis," &c.:
+Leiden, 1633.--Velasco: "Historia del Reino de Quito," &c.: Quito, 1844.
+This work is in three Parts, the second of which, the "Historia
+Antigua," is the one referred to in future notes. This second Part is
+translated in Ternaux-Compans, Vols. XVIII. XIX.
+
+The Abbé _Raynal's_ "Histoire philosophique et politique des
+établissements ... des Européens dans les deux Indes" (10 vols.: Geneva,
+1770) made a great stir in its time, the English translation by
+Justamond reaching a third edition in 1777; but it is now completely
+forgotten, and has no real value for our purposes. I cannot refrain from
+a passing notice of a romance which is now almost as completely
+forgotten as the Abbé Raynal's History, in spite of its long popularity:
+I mean _Marmontel's_ "Les Incas et la Destruction de l'empire du Pérou:"
+Paris, 1777. The author derived his materials from Garcilasso de la
+Vega. In spite of the florid style and innumerable offences against
+historical and psychological fact which characterize this work, it
+cannot be denied that Marmontel has disengaged with great skill the
+profound causes of the irremediable ruin of the Peruvian state.
+
+_Lacroix_: "Pérou," in Vol. IV. of "L'Amérique" in "L'Univers
+Pittoresque."--_Paul Chaix_: "Histoire de l'Amerique méridionale au
+XVI^e siècle," Part I.: Geneva, 1853.--_Wuttke_: "Geschichte des
+Heidenthums," Theil I., 1852.--_J. J. von Tschudi_: "Peru. Reiseskizzen
+aus den Jahren 1838-1842:" St. Gallen, 1846.--_Thos. J. Hutchinson_:
+"Two Years in Peru, with explorations of its Antiquities:" London, 1873.
+Hutchinson had good reason to point out the exaggerations in which
+Garcilasso indulges with reference to his ancestors the Incas, but he
+himself speaks too slightingly of their government. Had it not been in
+the main beneficent and popular, it could not have left such
+affectionate and enduring memories in the minds of the native
+population.
+
+For the method of citation, see end of note on p. 18.
+
+[41] This work is in two Parts, the first of which (Lisbon, 1609) gives
+an account of the native traditions, customs and history prior to the
+Spanish conquest, while the second (published under the separate title
+of _Historia General del Peru_: Cordova, 1617) deals with the Spanish
+conquest, &c. English translation by Sir Paul Rycaut: London, 1688, not
+at all to be trusted; both imperfect (omitting and condensing in an
+arbitrary fashion) and incorrect. As it may be in the possession of some
+of my readers, however, reference will be made to it in future notes.
+The earlier and more important part of Garcilasso's work has recently
+been translated for the _Hakluyt Society_ by _Clements R. Markham_, 2
+vols.: London, 1869, 1871. References are to the _Commentarios reales_
+(Part I.), unless otherwise stated.
+
+[42] _Herrera_, Decada v. Libro iv. cap. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 335, in
+Stevens's epitomized translation).
+
+[43] _Garcilasso_, Lib. iv. cap. viii., Lib. v. capp. vi. vii. viii.
+xiii.; _Acosta_, Lib. vi. capp. xiii. xvi.; _Montesinos_, p. 57.
+
+[44] _Garcilasso_, Lib. vi. cap. xxxv.
+
+[45] _Garcilasso_, Lib. v. cap. xii.; _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. iv. cap.
+iv. (Vol. IV. p. 344, in Stevens's translation). See also _Hazart_,
+"Historie van Peru," Part II. chap. iv.; in his "Kerckelijcke Historie
+van de Gheheele Wereldt," Vol. I. p. 315: Antwerp, 1682.
+
+[46] See _Gomara_ (in Vol. XXII. of the Bibliotheca de Autores
+Españoles), p. 228a; _Garcillasso_, "Historia General," &c., Lib. i.
+cap. xviii.; cf. _Prescott_, Bk. iii. chaps. v. vi., and Appendices
+viii. ix.
+
+[47] _Gomara_, p. 232 a.
+
+[48] Cf. _Waitz_, Theil IV. S. 411, 418.
+
+[49] Cf. _Garcilasso_, Lib. v. cap. xiii.; _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. ii.
+
+[50] _Müller_, p. 406.
+
+[51] See _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. iv. cap. iii. (Vol. IV. pp. 337 sqq. in
+Stevens's translation); _Garcilasso_, Lib. ii. capp. xii. xiii. xiv. (p.
+35 of Rycaut's translation, in which the passage is much shortened),
+Lib. v. cap. xi.; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 6.
+
+[52] _Acosta_, Lib. vi. cap. xviii.; _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. iv. cap. i.
+and end of cap. iii. (Vol. IV. pp. 329 sq., 342, in Stevens's
+translation).
+
+[53] _Garcilasso_, Lib. iv. cap. vii.; _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. iv. capp.
+ii. iii. (Vol. IV. pp. 334, 341, in Stevens's translation); cf.
+_Montesinos_, p. 56.
+
+[54] _Garcilasso_, Lib. iv. cap. xix.; cf. Lib. viii. cap. viii. (ad
+fin.).
+
+[55] Cf. _Tschudi_, Vol. II. p. 387; _Hutchinson_, Vol. II. pp. 175-6.
+
+[56] _Montesinos_, p. 119, cf. pp. 33, 108.
+
+[57] _Garcilasso_, Lib. v. cap. iii.
+
+[58] _Humboldt_, pp. 108, 294.
+
+[59] _Gomara_, p. 277 b.
+
+[60] _Prescott_, Bk. iii. chap. viii.
+
+[61] Cf. _Garcilasso_, Lib. vi. cap. iv.
+
+[62] _Garcilasso_, Lib. i. capp. ix.-xvii.; cf. Lib. ii. cap. ix., Lib.
+iii. cap. xxv.
+
+[63] Such at least is the etymology proposed by Garcilasso (Lib. i. cap.
+xviii.). Modern Peruvian scholars rather incline to refer _Cuzco_ to the
+same root as _cuzcani_ ("to clear the ground").
+
+[64] See the critical summary of the history of the Incas in _Waitz_,
+Theil. IV. S. 396 sq. The following table of the successive Incas
+follows Garcilasso:
+
+    Manco Capac,                 died about 1000
+    Sinchi Roca,                      "     1091
+    Lloque Yupanqui,                  "     1126
+    Mayta Capac,                      "     1156
+    Capac Yupanqui,                   "     1197
+    Inca Roca,                        "     1249
+    Yahuar Huacac,                    "     1289
+    Viracocha Inca Ripac,             "     1340
+    [Inca Urco, who only reigned 11 days, is omitted by Garcilasso]
+    Tito Manco Capac Pachacutec,      "     1400
+    Yupanqui,                         "     1438
+    Tupac Yupanqui,                   "     1475
+    Huayna Capac,                     "     1525
+    Huascar,  }                       "    {1532
+    Atahualpa,}                       "    {1533
+
+[65] _Garcilasso_, Lib. viii. cap. viii. Garcilasso says that he
+translates this passage, word for word, from the Latin MS. of the Jesuit
+Father, _Blas Valera_.
+
+[66] _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. iv. cap. iv. (Vol. IV. p. 346, in Stevens's
+translation).
+
+[67] Lib. ix. cap. x.
+
+[68] _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. i. capp. ii. iii., Lib. iii. cap. xvii.
+(Vol. IV. pp. 240 sqq., 325 sqq., in Stevens's translation).
+
+[69] _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. iii. cap. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 266, in
+Stevens's translation); _Gomara_, p. 231 a.
+
+[70] In the course of a few months, Pizarro amassed such immense wealth
+that, after deducting the _fifth_ for the king and a large sum for the
+reinforcements brought him by Almagro, he was still able to give £4000
+to each of his foot-soldiers, and double that sum to each horseman. The
+calculation is made by Robertson, who estimates the _peso_ at a pound
+sterling. To obtain the equivalent purchasing power in our own times,
+these sums would have to be more than quadrupled!
+
+[71] _Herrera_, Dec. v. Lib. viii. capp. i. sqq. (Vol. V. pp. 23 sqq. in
+Stevens's translation).
+
+[72] See _Alcedo_, "Diccionario Geográfico-Historico de las Indias
+Occidentales," &c.: Madrid, 1786-9: article _Chunchos_.
+
+[73] See _Waitz_, Vol. IV. pp. 477-497; _Tschudi_, Vol. II. pp. 346-351;
+cf. _Castelnau_, "Expedition dans les Parties centrales de l'Amerique du
+Sud," &c.: Paris, 1850, &c., Part I. Vol. III. p. 282.
+
+[74] _Tschudi_, ibid.
+
+[75] Cf. Spanish MS. cited by _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.; _Velasco_,
+Lib. ii. § 4, sec. 15.
+
+[76] _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.
+
+[77] Cf. _Garcilasso_, Lib. v. cap. xxi., where the current etymology of
+the word is rejected.
+
+[78] See _Müller_, pp. 313 sqq., where all the views concerning him are
+collected and discussed.
+
+[79] This hymn was found by _Garcilasso_ (see Lib. ii. cap. xvii., pp.
+50, 51, in Rycaut's translation) among the papers of Father _Blas
+Valera_, and has been freed by _Tschudi_ from the misprints, &c., that
+disfigured it in the printed editions of Garcilasso and all subsequent
+reproductions. See _Tschudi_, Vol. II. p. 381.
+
+[80] _Johannes de Laet_, Lib. x. cap. i. (p. 398, ll. 51, 52).
+
+[81] _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. i.; _Garcilasso_, Lib. vi. cap. xxx.
+
+[82] _Gomara_, p. 233a; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 2, sec. 4.
+
+[83] _Garcilasso_, Lib. ii. capp. ii. iii.
+
+[84] See _Montesinos_, pp. 3 sqq., whose version of the legend has been
+mainly followed in the text. Cf. however, for some of the details,
+_Garcilasso_, Lib. i. cap. xviii. (omitted by Rycaut); _Acosta_, Lib. i.
+cap. xxv.; _Balboa_, pp. 4 sqq., &c.
+
+[85] _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 4, sec. 17; _Ph. H. Külb_ in _Widenmann_ and
+_Hauff's_ "Reisen u. Länderbeshreibungen," Lief, xxvii.: Stuttgart,
+1843, pp. 186-7.
+
+[86] _Acosta_, Lib. v. cap. iv.; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 4, sec. 16;
+_Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.; _Külb_, ibid.
+
+[87] _Prescott_, ibid. In cloudy weather they had recourse to the method
+of friction.
+
+[88] _Prescott_, ibid.
+
+[89] _Arriaga_, pp. 17, 32; _Külb_, ibid.
+
+[90] Cf. _Arriaga_, pp. 10-17, &c. (cf. _Ternaux-Compans_, Vol. XVII.
+pp. 13, 14).
+
+[91] _Acosta_, Lib. v. cap. v.; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 3, sec. 2;
+_Arriaga_, ibid.
+
+[92] _Tschudi_, Vol. II. pp. 396-7.
+
+[93] _Arriaga_, p. 18 (cf. _Ternaux-Compans_, Vol. XVII. p. 15).
+
+[94] Cf. _Arriaga_, pp. 10-17 (cf. _Ternaux-Compans_, Vol. XVII. pp. 13,
+14); _Acosta_, Lib. v; cap. v.; _Montesinos_, pp. 161-2; _Velasco_, Lib.
+ii. § 3, sec. 1.
+
+[95] On the priesthood, cf. _Arriaga_, pp. 17 sqq. (cf.
+_Ternaux-Compans_, Vol. XVII. p. 15); _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.;
+_Balboa_, p. 29; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 3, sec. 8; _Garcilasso_, Lib. v.
+capp. viii. (ad fin.) xii. xiii.; _Müller_, p. 387; _Külb_, l.c. p. 187.
+
+[96] Cf. _Acosta_, Lib. v. cap. xv.; _Montesinos_, p. 56; _Velasco_,
+Lib. ii. § 3, sec. 12, § 9, sec. 10; _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii. and
+elsewhere.
+
+[97] Cf. _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.; _Garcilasso_, Lib. iii. capp.
+xx.-xxiv.; _Paul Chaix_, Vol. I. pp. 249 sqq. On the temples of
+Pachacamac, which must have attained gigantic proportions before the
+time of the Incas, see _Hutchinson_, Vol. I. pp. 147-176.
+
+[98] _Richard Inwards_, "The Temple of the Andes:" London, 1884.
+
+[99] _Acosta_, Lib, v. cap. xviii.; _Garcilasso_, Lib. ii. cap. viii.
+(p. 31 in Rycaut), Lib. vi. cap. xxi.; _Arriaga_, p. 77.
+
+[100] _Acosta_, ibid.; _Arriaga_, pp. 24-27 (cf. _Ternaux-Compans_, Vol.
+XVII. pp. 15, 16); _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iii.
+
+[101] _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 4, sec. 20.
+
+[102] _Acosta_, ibid.; _Arriaga_, ibid.
+
+[103] _Garcilasso_, Lib. i. cap. xi., Lib. ii. cap. xviii., Lib. iv.
+cap. xv., and elsewhere (pp. 6, &c., in Rycaut, who omits some of the
+passages).
+
+[104] _Montesinos_, p. 121; _Acosta_, Lib. v. capp. v. xix., Lib. vi.
+cap. xxii.; _Prescott_, Bk. i. chaps, i. ii.; _Garcilasso_, Lib. vi.
+cap. v.; _Acosta_, Lib. v. cap. vii.; _Velasco_, Lib. iii. § 1, sec. 1.
+
+[105] _Gomara_, p. 234 a. Cf. _Montesinos_, p. 68, and _Pöppig_ in Ersch
+u. Gruber's "Encyklopädie," art. _Incas_, p. 287 b, note 35.
+
+[106] _Garcilasso_, Lib. ii. capp. xxii, xxiii. (pp. 43, 44, in Rycaut);
+_Prescott_, Bk. i. chap. iv.; _Acosta_, Lib. vi. cap. iii.
+
+[107] _Garcilasso_, Lib. v. cap. ii.; _Tschudi_, Vol. II. p. 382;
+_Rivero y Tschudi_: Antigüedades Peruanas: Viena, 1851. pp. 135-141. N.
+B. An English translation of this work by F. L. Hawks appeared at New
+York in 1853.
+
+[108] _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 5, secc. 4, 17 (Ternaux-Compans, Vol. XVIII.
+pp. 137, 148-9); _Külb_, l.c. p. 190.
+
+[109] _Garcilasso_, Lib. vi. capp. xx.-xxii.; _Prescott_, Bk. i. chap.
+iii.
+
+[110] _Acosta_, Lib. v. cap. xxviii. [wrongly numbered xxvii. in the
+original edition]; _Garcilasso_, Lib. vii. capp. vi. vii.
+
+[111] _Acosta_, ibid.
+
+[112] _Acosta_, ibid.; _Garcilasso_, Lib. vi. capp. xxiv.-xxvii.
+
+[113] Cf. _Acosta_, ibid.; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 5.
+
+[114] _Gomara_, p. 233 b; _Garcilasso_, Lib. ii. cap. xxiii.; cf.
+_Montesinos_, pp. 67, 68.
+
+[115] _Balboa_, pp. 29, 30.
+
+[116] Cf. _Arriaga_, pp. 17-23, and _passim_ (Ternaux-Compans, Vol.
+XVII. p. 15).
+
+[117] See _Prescott_, ibid.
+
+[118] Cf. _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 3, secc. 4, 5.
+
+[119] _Balboa_, p. 3; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 3, sec. 6; _Arriaga_, pp.
+28, 29 (Ternaux-Compans, Vol. XVII. pp. 16, 17).
+
+[120] Cf. _Tschudi_, Vol. II. pp. 355-6, 397-8.
+
+[121] _Acosta_, Lib. v. capp. vi. vii.; _Velasco_, Lib. ii. § 3, sec. 3;
+_Arriaga_, p. 15 (cf. Ternaux-Compans, Vol. XVII. p. 14); _Garcilasso_,
+Lib. ii. capp. ii. (Supay), vii. (omitted by Rycaut); _Prescott_, Bk. i.
+chap. iii.
+
+[122] Compare _W. B. Stevenson_, "A Historical and Descriptive Narrative
+of Twenty Years' Residence in South America:" London, 1825, Vol. I. pp.
+394 sqq.
+
+
+
+
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