must understand that Sun-worship and ancestor-worship were the practical
elements of the Inca cult. This appears to have been distasteful to the
Inca Huayna Ccapac, for at a Sun feast he gazed hard on the Sun, was
remonstrated with by a priest, and replied that the restless Sun 'must
have another Lord more powerful than himself.'[16]
This remark could not have been necessary if Pachacamac were really an
article of living and universal belief. Perhaps we are to understand that
this Inca, like his father, who seems to have been the original author of
the saying, meant to sneer at the elaborate worship bestowed on the Sun,
while Pachacamac was neglected, as far as ritual went.
In Garcilasso's book we have to allow for his desire to justify the creed
of his maternal ancestors. His criticism of Spanish versions is acute, and
he often appeals to his knowledge of Quichua, and to the direct traditions
received by him from his uncle. Against his theory of Pachacamac as a
result of philosophical thought, it may be urged that similar conceptions,
or nearly similar, exist among races not civilised like the Incas, and not
provided with colleges of learned priests. In fact, the position of
Pachacamac and the Sun is very nearly that of the Blackfoot Creator Nà-pi,
and the Sun, or of Shang-ti and the Heaven, in China. We have the Creative
Being whose creed is invaded by that of a worshipped aspect of nature, and
whose cult, quite logically, is _nil_, or nearly _nil_. There are also, in
different strata of the Inca empire, ancestor-worship, or mummy-worship,
Totemism and polytheism, with a vague mass of _huaca = Elohim, kalou,
wakan._
Perhaps it would not be too rash to conjecture that Pachacamac is not a
merely philosophical abstraction, but a survival of a Being like Nà-pi or
Ahone. Cieza de Leon calls Pachacamac 'a devil,' whose name means
'creator of the world'![17] The name, when it _was_ uttered, was spoken
with genuflexions and signs of reverence. So closely did Pachacamac
resemble the Christian Deity, that Cieza de Leon declares the devil to
have forged and insisted on the resemblance![18] It was open to Spanish
missionaries to use Pachacamac, as to the Jesuits among the Bantu to use
Mpungu, as a fulcrum for the introduction of Christianity. They preferred
to regard Pachacamac as a fraudulent fiend. Now Nzambi Mpungu, among the
Bantu, is assuredly not a creation of a learned priesthood, for the Bantu
have no learned priests, and Mpungu would be useless to the greedy
conjurers whom they do consult, as he is not propitiated. On grounds of
analogy, then, Pachacamac may be said to resemble a savage Supreme
Being, somewhat etherealised either by Garcilasso or by the Amautas, the
learned class among the subjects of the Incas. He does not seem, even so,
much superior to the Ahone of the Virginians.
We possess, however, a different account of Inca religion, from which
Garcilasso strongly dissents. The best version is that of Christoval de
Molina, who was chaplain of the hospital for natives, and wrote between
1570 and 1584.[19] Christoval assembled a number of old priests and other
natives who had taken part in the ancient services, and collected their
evidence. He calls the Creator ('not born of woman, unchangeable
and eternal') by the name Pachayachachi. 'Teacher of the world' and
'Tecsiviracocha,' which Garcilasso dismisses as meaningless.[20] He also
tells the tale of the Inca Yupanqui and the Lord of the Sun, but
says that the Incas had already knowledge of the Creator. To Yupanqui he
attributes the erection of a gold image of the Creator, utterly denied by
Garcilasso.[21] Christoval declares, again contradicted by Garcilasso,
that sacrifices were offered to the Creator. Unlike the Sun, Christoval
says, the Creator had no woman assigned to him, 'because, as he created
them, they all belonged to him' (p. 26), which, of course, is an idea that
would also make sacrifice superfluous.
Christoval gives prayers in Quichua, wherein the Creator is addressed as
_Uiracocha_.
Christoval assigns images, sacrifice, and even human sacrifice, to the
Creator Uiracocha. Garcilasso denies that the Creator Pachacamac had any
of these things, he denies that Uiracocha was the name of the Creator,
and he denies it, knowing that the Spaniards made the assertion.[22] Who
is right? Uiracocha, says Garcilasso, is one thing, with his sacrifices;
the Creator, Pachacamac, without sacrifices, is another, is GOD.
Mr. Markham thinks that Garcilasso, writing when he did, and not
consciously exaggerating, was yet less trustworthy (though 'wonderfully
accurate') than Christoval. Garcilasso, however, is 'scrupulously
truthful.'[23] 'The excellence of his memory is perhaps best shown in
his topographical details.... He does not make a single mistake,' in the
topography of three hundred and twenty places! A scrupulously truthful
gentleman, endowed with an amazing memory, and a master of his native
language, flatly contradicts the version of a Spanish priest, who also
appears to have been careful and honourable.
I shall now show that Christoval and Garcilasso have different versions of
the same historical events, and that Garcilasso bases his confutation of
the Spanish theory of the Inca Creator on his form of this historical
tradition, which follows:
The Inca Yahuarhuaccac, like George II., was at odds with his Prince of
Wales. He therefore banished the Prince to Chita, and made him serve as
shepherd of the llamas of the Sun. Three years later the disgraced
Prince came to Court, with what the Inca regarded as a cock-and-bull story
of an apparition of the kind technically styled 'Borderland.' Asleep or
awake, he knew not, he saw a bearded robed man holding a strange animal.
The appearance declared himself as Uiracocha (Christoval's name for the
Creator), a Child of the Sun; by no means as Pachacamac, the Creator of
the Sun. He announced a distant rebellion, and promised his aid to the
Prince. The Inca, hearing this narrative, replied in the tones of
Charles II., when he said about Monmouth, 'Tell James to go to hell!'[24]
The predicted rebellion, however, broke out, the Inca fled, the Prince
saved the city, dethroned his father, and sent him into the country. He
then adopted, from the apparition, the throne-name _Uiracocha,_ grew a
beard, and dressed like the apparition, to whom he erected a temple,
roofless, and unique in construction. Therein he had an image of the god,
for which he himself gave frequent sittings. When the Spaniards arrived,
bearded men, the Indians called them Uiracochas (as all the Spanish
historians say), and, to flatter them, declared falsely that Uiracocha was
their word for the Creator. Garcilasso explodes the Spanish etymology of
the name, in the language of Cuzco, which he 'sucked in with his mother's
milk.' 'The Indians said that the chief Spaniards were children of the
Sun, to make gods of them, just as they said they were children of the
apparition, Uiracocha.'[25] Moreover, Garcilasso and Cieza de Leon agree
in their descriptions of the image of Uiracocha, which, both assert,
the Spaniards conceived to represent a Christian early missionary, perhaps
St. Bartholomew.[26] Garcilasso had seen the mummy of the Inca Uiracocha,
and relates the whole tale from the oral version of his uncle, adding many
native comments on the Court revolution described.
To Garcilasso, then, the invocations of Uiracocha, in Christoval's
collection of prayers, are a native adaptation to Spanish prejudice: even
in them Pachacamac occurs.[27]
Now, Christoval has got hold of a variant of Garcilasso's narrative,
which, in Garcilasso, has plenty of humour and human nature. According to
Christoval it was not the Prince, later Inca Uiracocha, who beheld the
apparition, but the Inca Uiracocha's _son,_ Prince of Wales, as it were,
of the period, later the Inca Yupanqui.
Garcilasso corrects Christoval. Uiracocha saw the apparition, as Père
Acosta rightly says, and Yupanqui was _not_ the son but the grandson of
this Inca Uiracocha.[28] Uiracocha's own son was Pachacutec, which simply
means 'Revolution,' 'they say, by way of by-word _Pachamcutin,_ which
means "the world changes."'
Christoval's form of the story is peculiarly gratifying in one way.
Yupanqui saw the apparition _in a piece of crystal_, 'the apparition
vanished, while the piece of crystal remained. The Inca took care of it,
and they say that he afterwards saw everything he wanted in it.' The
apparition, in human form and in Inca dress, gave itself out for the Sun;
and Yupanqui, when he came to the throne, 'ordered a statue of the Sun to
be made, as nearly as possible resembling the figure he had seen in the
crystal.' He bade his subjects to 'reverence the new deity, as they had
heretofore worshipped the Creator,'[29] who, therefore, was prior to
Uiracocha.
Interesting as a proof of Inca crystal-gazing, this legend of Christoval's
cannot compete as evidence with Acosta and Garcilasso. The reader,
however, must decide as to whether he prefers Garcilasso's unpropitiated
Pachacamac, or Christoval's Uiracocha, human sacrifices, and all.[30]
Mr. Tylor prefers the version of Christoval, making Pachacamac a title of
Uiracocha.[31] He thinks that we have, in Inca religion, an example of 'a
subordinate god' (the Sun) 'usurping the place of the supreme deity,' 'the
rivalry between the Creator and the divine Sun.' In China, as we shall
see, Mr. Tylor thinks, on the other hand, that Heaven is the elder god,
and that Shang-ti, the Supreme Being, is the usurper.
The truth in the Uiracocha _versus_ Pachacamac controversy is difficult to
ascertain. I confess a leaning toward Garcilasso, so truthful and so
wonderfully accurate, rather than to the Spanish priest. Christoval, it
will be remarked, says that 'Chanca-Uiracocha was a _huaca_ (sacred place)
in Chuqui-chaca.'[32] Now Chuqui-chaca is the very place where, according
to Garcilasso, the Inca Uiracocha erected a temple to 'his Uncle, the
Apparition.'[33] Uiracocha, then, the deity who receives human sacrifice,
would be a late, royally introduced ancestral god, no real rival of the
Creator, who receives no sacrifice at all, and, as he was bearded, his
name would be easily transferred to the bearded Spaniards, whose arrival
the Inca Uiracocha was said to have predicted. But to call several or all
Spaniards by the name given to the Creator would be absurd. Mr. Tylor and
Mr. Markham do not refer to the passage in which Christoval obviously gets
hold of a wrong version of the story of the apparition.
There is yet another version of this historical legend, written forty
years after Christoval's date by Don Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui
Salcamayhua. He ranks after Garcilasso and Christoval, but before earlier
_Spanish_ writers, such as Acosta, who knew not Quichua. According to
Salcamayhuia, the Inca Uiracocha was like James III., fond of architecture
and averse to war. He gave the realm to his bastard, Urca, who was
defeated and killed by the Chancas. Uiracocha meant to abandon the
contest, but his legitimate son, Yupanqui, saw a fair youth on a rock, who
promised him success in the name of the Creator, and then vanished. The
Prince was victorious, and the Inca Uiracocha retired into private
life. This appears to be a mixture of the stories of Garcilasso and
Christoval.[34]
It is not, in itself, a point of much importance whether the Creator was
called Uiracocha (which, if it means anything, means 'sea of grease!'), or
whether he was called Pachacamac, maker of the world, or by both names.
The important question is as to whether the Creator received even human
sacrifices (Christoval) or none at all (Garcilasso). As to Pachacamac, we
must consult Mr. Payne, who has the advantage of being a Quichua scholar.
He considers that Pachacamac combines the conception of a general spirit
of living things with that of a Creator or maker of all things.
'Pachacamac and the Creator are one and the same,' but the conception of
Pachayachacic, 'ruler of the world,' 'belongs to the later period of the
Incas.'[35] Mr. Payne appears to prefer Christoval's legend of the Inca
crystal-gazer, to the rival version of Garcilasso. The Yunca form of the
worship of Pachacamac Mr. Payne regards as an example of degradation.[36]
He disbelieves Garcilasso's statement, that human sacrifices were not
made to the Sun. Garcilasso must, if Mr. Payne is right, have been a
deliberate liar, unless, indeed, he was deceived by his Inca kinsfolk.
The reader can now estimate for himself the difficulty of knowing much
about Peruvian religion, or, indeed, of any religion. For, if Mr. Payne
is right about the lowest savages having no conception of God, or even of
spirit, though the idea of a great Creator, a spirit, is one of the
earliest efforts of 'primitive logic,' we, of course, have been merely
fabling throughout.
Garcilasso's evidence, however, seems untainted by Christian attempts to
find a primitive divine tradition. Garcilasso may possibly be refining on
facts, but he asks for no theory of divine primitive tradition in the case
of Pachacamac, whom he attributes to philosophical reflection.
In the following chapter we discuss 'the old Degeneration theory,' and
contrast it with the scheme provisionally offered in this book. We have
already observed that the Degeneration theory biasses the accounts of some
missionaries who are obviously anxious to find traces of a Primitive
Tradition, originally revealed to all men, but only preserved in a pure
form by the Jews. To avoid deception by means of this bias we have chosen
examples of savage creative beings from wide areas, from diverse ages,
from non-missionary statements, from the least contaminated backward
peoples, and from their secret mysteries and hymns.
Thus, still confining ourselves to the American continent, we have the
ancient hymns of the Zuñis, in no way Christianised, and never chanted in
the presence of the Mexican Spanish, These hymns run thus: 'Before the
beginning of the New Making, Awonawilona, the Maker and container of All,
the All-Father, solely had being.' He then evolved all things 'by thinking
himself outward in space.' Hegelian! but so are the dateless hymns of the
Maoris, despite the savage mythology which intrudes into both sets of
traditions. The old fable of Ouranos and Gaia recurs in Zuñi as in
Maori.[37]
I fail to see how Awonawilona could be developed out of the ghost of chief
or conjurer. That in which all things potentially existed, yet who was
more than all, is not the ghost of a conjurer or chief. He certainly is
not due to missionary influence. No authority can be better than that of
traditional sacred chants found among a populace which will not sing them
before one of their Mexican masters.
We have tried to escape from the bias of belief in a primitive divine
tradition, but bias of every kind exists, and must exist. At present the
anthropological hypothesis of ancestor-worship as the basis, perhaps (as
in Mr. Spencer's theory) the only basis of religion, affects observers.
Before treating the theory of Degeneration let us examine a case of the
anthropological bias. The Fijians, as we learned from Williams, have
ancestral gods, and also a singular form of the creative being, Ndengei,
or, as Mr. Basil Thomson calls him, Degei. Mr. Thomson writes: 'It is
clear that the Fijians humanised their gods, because they had once existed
on earth in human form.... Like other primitive people, the Fijians
deified their ancestors.' Yet the Fijians 'may have forgotten the names
of their ancestors three generations back'! How in the world can you deify
a person whom you don't remember? Moreover, only malevolent chiefs were
deified, so apparently a Fijian god is really a well-born human
scoundrel, so considerable that _he_ for one is not forgotten--just as if
we worshipped the wicked Lord Lyttelton! Of course a god like Ahone could
not be made out of such materials as these, and, in fact, we learn from
Mr. Thomson that there are other Fijian gods of a different origin.
'It is probable that there were here and there, _gods that were the
creation of the priests that ministered to them, and were not the
spirits of dead chiefs_. Such was the god of the Bure Tribe on the Ra
coast, who was called Tui Laga or "Lord of Heaven." When the missionaries
first went to convert this town they found the heathen priest their
staunch ally. He declared that they had come to preach the same god that
he had been preaching, the Tui Laga, and that more had been revealed to
them than to him of the mysteries of the god.'
Mr. Thomson is reminded of St. Paul at Athens, 'whom then ye ignorantly
worship, him declare I unto you.'[38]
Mr. Thomson has clearly no bias in favour of a God like our own, known to
savages, and _not_ derived from ghost-worship. He deduces this god, Tui
Laga, from priestly reflection and speculation. But we find such a God
where we find no priests, where a priesthood has not been developed. Such
a God, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private
practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood.
For these reasons--that a priesthood 'sees no money in' a God of this
kind, and that Gods of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where
there are no priesthoods--we cannot look on the conception as a late one
of priestly origin, as Mr. Thomson does, though a learned caste, like the
Peruvian Amantas, may refine on the idea. Least of all can such a God be
'the creation of the priests that minister to him,' when, as in Peru, the
Andaman Isles, and much of Africa, this God is ministered to by no
priests. Nor, lastly, can we regard the absence of sacrifice to the
Creative Being as a mere proof that he is an ancestral ghost who 'had
lived on earth at too remote a time;' for this absence of sacrifice occurs
where ghosts are dreaded, but are not propitiated by offerings of food (as
among Australians, Andamanese, and Blackfoot Indians), while the Creative
Being is not and never was a ghost, according to his worshippers.
At this point criticism may naturally remark that whether the savage
Supreme Being is fêted, as by the Comanches, who offer puffs of smoke: or
is apparently half forgotten, as by the Algonquins and Zulus: whether
he is propitiated by sacrifice (which is very rare indeed), or only by
conduct, I equally claim him as the probable descendant in evolution of
the primitive, undifferentiated, not necessarily 'spiritual' Being of such
creeds as the Australian.
One must reply that this pedigree cannot, indeed, be historically traced,
but that it presents none of the logical difficulties inherent in the
animistic pedigree--namely, that the savage Supreme Being is the last and
highest result of evolution on animistic lines out of ghosts. It does not
run counter to the evidence universally offered by savages, that their
Supreme Being never was mortal man. It is consistent, whereas the
animistic hypothesis is, in this case, inconsistent, with the universal
savage theory of Death. Finally, as has been said before, granting my
opinion that there are two streams of religious thought, one rising in the
conception of an undifferentiated Being, eternal, moral, and creative, the
other rising in the ghost-doctrine, it stands to reason that the latter,
as best adapted to everyday needs and experiences, normal and supernormal,
may contaminate the former, and introduce sacrifice and food-propitiation
into the ritual of Beings who, by the original conception, 'need nothing
of ours.' At the same time, the conception of 'spirit,' once attained,
would inevitably come to be attached to the idea of the Supreme Being,
even though he was not at first conceived of as a spirit. We know, by our
own experience, how difficult it has become for us to think of an eternal,
powerful, and immortal being, except as a spirit. Yet this way of looking
at the Supreme Being, merely as _being_, not as spirit, must have existed,
granting that the idea of spirit has ghost for its first expression, as,
by their very definition, the high gods of savages are not ghosts, and
never were ghosts, but are prior to death.
Here let me introduce, by way of example, a Supreme Being _not_ of the
lowest savage level. Metaphysically he is improved on in statement,
morally he is stained with the worst crimes of the hungry ghost-god, or
god framed on the lines of animism. This very interesting Supreme Being,
in a middle barbaric race, is the Polynesian Taa-roa, as described by
Ellis in that fascinating book 'Polynesian Researches.'[39] 'Several of
their _taata-paari_, or wise men, pretend that, according to other
traditions, Taa-roa was only a man who was deified after death.'
Euhemerism, in fact, is a natural theory of men acquainted with
ancestor-worship, but a Euhemeristic hypothesis by a Polynesian thinker is
not a statement of national belief. Taa-roa was 'uncreated, existing from
the beginning, or from the time he emerges from the _po_, or world of
darkness.' In the Leeward Isles Taa-roa was _Toivi_, fatherless and
motherless from all eternity. In the highest heavens he dwells alone. He
created the gods of polytheism, the gods of war, of peace, and so on. Says
a native hymn, 'He was: he abode in the void. No earth, _no sky_, no men!
He became the universe.' In the Windward Isles he has a wife, Papa the
rock = Papa, Earth, wife of Rangi, Heaven, in Maori mythology. Thus it may
be argued, Taa-roa is no 'primaeval theistic idea,' but merely the
Heaven-God (Ouranos in Greece). But we may distinguish: in the Zuñi hymn
we have the myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, but Heaven is not
the Eternal, Awonawilona, who 'thought himself out into the void,' before
which, as in the Polynesian hymn, 'there was no sky.'[40]
Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a
ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may
be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin
had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more
plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental
polytheism to develop them out of. In Tahiti, _Atuas_ are gods, _Oramutuas
tiis_ are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors. These
were mischievous: they, their images, and the skulls of the dead needed
propitiation, and these ideas (perhaps) were reflected on to Taa-roa, to
whom human victims were sacrificed.[41]
Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early
savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen,
the Andamanese, and so on. I therefore suggest that in an advanced
polytheism, such as that of Polynesia, the evil sacrificial rites
unpractised by low savages come to be attached to the worship even of the
Supreme Being. Ghosts and ghost-gods demanded food, and food was therefore
also offered to the Supreme Being.
It was found difficult, or impossible, to induce Christian converts, in
Polynesia, to repeat the old prayers. They began, trembled, and abstained.
They had a ritual 'for almost every act of their lives,' a thing
unfamiliar to low savages. In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal
acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, increase as
religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to
the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture. The Supreme Being is succeeded
in advancing civilisation, and under the influences of animism, by
ruthless and insatiable ghost-gods, full of the worst human qualities.
Thus there is what we may really call degeneration, moral and religious,
inevitably accompanying early progress.