THE ANDEAN NORTH
I. THE CULTURED PEOPLES OF THE ANDES[111]
From the Isthmus of Panama the western coast of South America is marked
by one of the loftiest and most abrupt mountain ranges of the world,
culminating in the great volcanoes of Ecuador and the high peaks of
western Argentina. A narrow coastal strip, dry and torrid in tropical
latitudes; deep and narrow valleys; occasional plateaux or intramontane
plains, especially the great plateau of central Bolivia--these are
the primary diversifications from the high ranges which, rising
precipitously on the Pacific side, decline more gradually toward
the east into the vast forested regions of the central part of the
continent and into the plains and pampas of the south.
Throughout this mountain region, from the plateau of Bogotá in the
north to the neighbourhood of latitude 30º south, was continued
in pre-Columbian times the succession of groups of civilized or
semi-civilized peoples of which the most northerly were the Nahua of
Mexico, or perhaps the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. The ethnic boundary
of the southern continent is to be drawn in Central America. The
Guetare of Costa Rica, and perhaps the Sumo of Nicaragua, constitute
northerly outposts of the territorially great Chibchan culture, the
centre of which is to be found in the plateau of Bogotá, while its
southerly extension leads to the Barbacoa of northern Ecuador. South
of the Chibcha, in the Andean region lying between the Equator and
the Tropic of Capricorn, is the aboriginal home of the Quechua-Aymara
peoples, nearly the whole of which, at the time of the Conquest was
embraced in the Empire of the Incas. This empire had even reached into
the confines of the third culture area of the southern continent; for
the Calchaqui of the mountains of northern Argentina, who were the most
representative and probably the most advanced nation of the Diaguité
group, had even then passed under Inca subjection. Other tribes of
this most southerly of the civilized peoples of America had never been
conquered; but bounded, as they were, by the aggressive empire of the
north, by the warlike Araucanians to the south, and by the savages
of the Gran Chaco to the east, their opportunities for independent
development were slight; indeed, it is not improbable that the peoples
of this group represent the last stand of a race that had once extended
far to the north and had played an important part in the pre-Inca
cultures of the central Andes. Beyond the Diaguité lay the domains of
savagery, although the Araucanians of the Chilean-Argentine region were
not uninfluenced by the northward civilizations and in most respects
were superior to the wild tribes that inhabited the great body of the
South American continent; but the indomitable love of liberty, which
has kept them unconquered through many wars, gave to their territory a
boundary-line marked no less by a sharp descent in culture than by its
untouched independence.
In Columbian times these three Andean groups--the Chibchan tribes, the
Quechua-Aymara, and the Diaguité-Calchaqui--possessed a civilization
marked by considerable advancement in the arts of metallurgy (gold,
silver, copper), pottery, and weaving, by agriculture (fundamentally,
cultivation of maize), and by domestication of the llama and alpaca.
In the art of building, in stone-work, and, generally, in that plastic
and pictorial expression which is a sign of intellectual advancement,
the central group far excelled its neighbours. Nor was this due to the
fact that it alone, under Inca domination, had reached the stage of
stable and diversified social organization; for the archaeology of Peru
and Bolivia shows that the Empire of the Incas was only the last in a
series of central Andean civilizations which it excelled, if at all, in
political power rather than in the arts, industrial or aesthetic.
Our knowledge of the religious and mythic ideas of these various groups
reflects their relative importance at the time of the Spanish conquests
more than their natural diversity. Of the Chibchan groups, only the
ideas of a few tribes have been described, and these fragmentarily; of
the mythology of the Calchaqui, who had yielded to Inca rule, even less
has come down to us; while what is known of the religious conceptions
of the pre-Inca peoples of the central region is mainly in the form of
gleanings from the works of art left by these peoples, or from such
of their cults as survived under the Inca state or in Inca tradition.
Inevitably the central body of Andean myth, as transmitted to us, is
that of the Incas, who, having reached the position of a great imperial
clan, naturally glorified both their own gods and their own legendary
history.
II. THE ISTHMIANS[112]
The Isthmus of Panama (and northward perhaps as far as the confines of
Nicaragua) was aboriginally an outpost of the great Chibchan stock.
Tribes of other stocks, some certainly northern in origin, dwelt
within the region, but the predominant group was akin to the peoples
of the neighbouring southern continent; although whether they were
immigrants from the south or were parents of the southern stem can
scarcely be known. So far as traditions tell, the uniform account given
by the Bolivian tribes is of a northerly origin. The tales seem to
point to the Venezuelan coast, and perhaps remotely to the Antilles,
rather than to the Isthmus, and it is certain that there are broad
similarities in culture--especially in the forms and use of ceremonial
objects--pointing to the remote unity of the whole region from Haiti to
Ecuador, and from Venezuela to Nicaragua. It is entirely possible that
within this region the drift of influence has been southerly; though it
is more likely that counter-streams, northward and southward, must give
the full explanation of the civilization.
On the linguistic side it is agreed that the Guetare of Costa Rica
represent a branch of the Chibchan stock, while neighbouring tribes
of the same stock are either now extinct or little known. The Spanish
conquests in the Isthmian region were as ruthlessly complete as
anywhere in America, and for the greater part our knowledge of the
aborigines is the fruit of archaeology. In the writings of Oviedo and
Cieza de León some facts may be gleaned--enough, indeed, to picture the
general character of the rituals of the Indian tribes--but there is no
competent contemporary relation of the native religion and beliefs.
[Illustration: PLATE XXVI.]
Jade pendant representing a Vampire. After Hartman, _Archaeological
Researches on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica_, Plate XLIV. For
reference to the significance of the bat, as a deity, see page 177 and
Note 102.
Oviedo's description[113] of the tribes about the Gulf of Nicoya, where
the civilizations of the two Americas meet, indicates a religion in
which the great rites were human sacrifices of the Mexican type and
feasts of intoxication. Archaeological researches in the same region
have brought to light amulets and ornaments, some anthropomorphic
in character, but many representing animal forms, usually highly
conventionalized--alligators, jaguars and pumas, frogs, parrots,
vampires, denizens of earth, air, and sea, all indicative of a populous
pantheon of talismanic powers; while cruciform, swastika, and other
symbolic ornamentation implies a development in the direction of
abstraction sustained by Oviedo's mention of "folded books of deerskin
parchment," which are probably the southern extension of the art of
writing as known in the northern civilization. The archaeology of the
Guetare region, in central, and of the Chiriqui region, in southern
Costa Rica, disclose the same fantasy of grotesque and conventionalized
animals--saurians, armadilloes, the cat-tribe, composites--indicative
of a similarly zoomorphic pantheon. Benzoni, speaking of the tribes
of this region, states that they worshipped idols in the forms
of animals, which they kept hidden in caves; while Andagoya declares
that the priests of the Cuna or Cueva (dwelling at the juncture of
the Isthmus and the southern continent) communed with the devil and
that Chipiripa, a rain-god, was one of their most important deities;
they are said, too, to have known of the deluge. Of the neighbouring
Indians, about Uraba, Cieza de León gives us to know that "they
certainly talk with the devil and do him all the honour they can.... He
appears to them (as I have been told by one of themselves) in frightful
and terrible visions, which cause them much alarm." Furthermore, "the
devil gives them to understand that, in the place to which they go
[after death], they will come to life in another kingdom which he has
prepared for them, and that it is necessary to take food with them for
the journey. As if hell was so very far off!"
Peter Martyr devotes the greater part of a book (the tenth of the
Seventh Decade)[114] to a description of the rites and beliefs of the
Indians of the region where the Isthmus joins the continent. Dabaiba,
he says, was the name both of a river and of a divinity whose sanctuary
was about forty leagues from Darien; and thither at certain seasons
the caciques, even of the most distant countries, sent slaves to be
strangled and burnt before the idol. "When the Spaniards asked them
to what divinity they addressed their prayers, they responded that
it is to the god who created the heavens, the sun, the moon, and all
existing things; and from whom every good thing proceeds. They believe
that Dabaiba, the divinity universally venerated in the country, is
the mother of this creator." Their traditions told of a great drought
which, making the rivers dry, caused the greater part of mankind to
perish of thirst, while the survivors emigrated from the mountains to
the sea-coast; for this reason they maintained priests and addressed
prayers to their divinity, who would seem to be a rain-goddess.
Another legend recorded by Peter Martyr tells of a frightful tempest
which brought with it two great birds, "similar to the harpies of
the Strophades," having "the face, chin, mouth, nose, teeth, eyes,
brows, and physiognomy of a virgin." One of these seized the people
and carried them off to the mountains to devour them, wherefore, to
slay the man-eating bird, certain heroes carved a human figure on the
end of a log, which they set in the ground so that the figure alone
was visible. The hunters concealed themselves near by, and when the
monster, mistaking the image for prey, sunk its talons into the wood,
falling upon it, they slew it before it could release itself. "Those
who killed the monster were honoured as gods." Interesting, too, is
Martyr's account of the reason given for the sinfulness of incest: the
dark spots on the moon represent a man cast into that damp and freezing
planet to suffer perpetual cold in expiation of incest committed
with his sister--the very myth that is told in North Greenland; and
the belief that "only nobles have immortal souls" (or, more likely,
that they alone enjoy a paradise) is cited to explain why numbers of
servants gladly throw themselves into the graves of their masters,
since thus they gain the right to accompany their lords into the
afterworld of pleasure; all others, apparently, go down to a gloomy
hades, though there may be truth in Martyr's statement that it is
pollution which brings this fate.
The account of the religion of the Isthmian tribes in later times, by
W. M. Gabb and Pittier de Fábrega,[115] probably represents faithfully
their earlier beliefs. There are deities who are the protectors of
game-animals, suggesting the Elders of the Kinds so characteristic of
North American lore; though they appear to men in human form, taking
vengeance on those who only wound in the chase: "When thou shootest, do
it to kill, so that the poor beast doth not fall a prey to the worms,"
is the command of the King of the Tapirs to the unlucky hunter who is
punished for his faulty work by being stricken with dumbness during
the period in which a cane grows from a sprout to its full height. The
Isthmian peoples recognize (as do most other Americans) a _fainéant_
supreme being, Sibú, in the world above, with a host of lesser, but
dangerous, powers in the realm of environing nature; and there is a
paradise, at least for the noble dead, situated at the zenith, though
the way thither is beset by perils, monsters, and precipices. Las Casas
also mentions the belief in a supreme deity, Chicuna, Lord of All
Things, as extending from Darien to Nicaragua; and he says that along
with this god the Sun, the Moon, and the Morning Star were worshipped,
as well as divinities of wood and stone which presided over the
elements and the sowings (_sementeras_).
The allusion to deities of the _sementeras_ is interesting in connexion
with the Bribri and Brunka (or Boruca) myths, published by Pittier de
Fábrega. According to these tribes of Indians, men and animal kinds
were originally born of seeds kept in baskets which Sibú entrusted to
the lesser gods; but the evil powers were constantly hunting for these
seeds, endeavouring to destroy them. One tale relates that after Surá,
the good deity to whom the seed had been committed, had gone to his
field of maize, Jáburu, the evil divinity, stole and ate the seed;
and when Surá returned, killed and buried him, a cacao-tree and a
calabash-tree growing from the grave. Sibú, the almighty one, resolving
to punish Jáburu and demanding of him a drink of chocolate, the wives
of the wicked deity roasted the cacao, and made a drinking-vessel of
the calabash. "Then Sibú, the almighty god, willed--and whatever he
wills has to be: 'May the first cup come to me!' and as it so came to
pass, he said, 'My uncle, I present this cup to thee, so that thou
drink!' Jáburu swallowed the chocolate at once, with such delight that
his throat resounded, _tshaaa!_ And he said, 'My uncle! I have drunk
Surá's first fruit!' But just at this moment he began to swell, and
he swelled and swelled until he blew up. Then Sibú, the almighty god,
picked up again the seed of our kin, which was in Jáburu's body, and
willed, 'Let Surá wake up again!' And as it so happened he gave him
back the basket with the seed of our kin to keep." In another tale a
duel between Sibú and Jáburu, in which each should throw two cacao-pods
at the other, and he should lose in whose hand a pod first broke, was
the preliminary for the creation of men, which Sibú desired and Jáburu
opposed. The almighty god chose green pods, the evil one ripe pods;
and at the third throw the pod broke in Jáburu's hand, mankind being
then born from the seed. A third legend, of a man-stealing eagle who
devoured his prey in company with a jaguar (who is no true jaguar, but
a bad spirit, having the form of a stone until his prey approaches),
is evidently a version of the story of the bird-monster told by Peter
Martyr.
III. EL DORADO
Not the quest of the Golden Fleece itself and the adventures of the
Argonauts with clashing rocks and Amazonian women are so filled with
extravagance and peril as is the search for El Dorado.[116] The legend
of the Gilded Man and of his treasure city sprang from the soil of
the New World in the very dawn of its discovery--whether wholly in
the imaginations of _conquistadores_ dazzled with dreams of gold, or
partly from some custom, tale, or myth of the American Indians it
is now impossible to say. In its earlier form it told of a priest,
or king, or priest-king, who once a year smeared his body with oil,
powdered himself with gold dust, and in gilded splendour, accompanied
by nobles, floated to the centre of a lake, where, as the onlookers
from the shore sang and danced, he first made offering of treasure to
the waters and then himself leaped in to wash the gold from his body.
Later, fostered by the readiness of the aborigines to rid themselves of
the plague of white men by means of tales of treasure cities farther
on, the story grew into pictures of the golden empire of Omagua, or
Manoa, or Paytiti, or Enim, on the shores of a distant lake. Expedition
after expedition journeyed in quest of the fabled capital. As early
as 1530, Ambros von Alfinger, a German knight, set out from the
coast of Venezuela in search of a golden city, chaining his enslaved
native carriers to one another by means of neck-rings and cutting off
the heads of those who succumbed to fatigue to save the trouble of
unlinking them; Alfinger himself was wounded in the neck by an arrow
and died of the wound. In 1531 Diego de Ordaz conducted an expedition
guided by a lieutenant who claimed to have been entertained in the city
of Omoa by El Dorado himself; in 1536-38 George of Spires, afterward
governor of Venezuela, made a journey of fifteen hundred miles into
the interior; and another German, the red-bearded Nicholas Federman,
departed upon the same quest. On the plains of Bogotá in 1539 they met
Quesada and Belalcazar, who, coming from the north and from the south
respectively, had subdued the Chibcha realm. Hernan Perez de Quesada,
brother of the conqueror, led an unlucky expedition, behaving with
such cruelty that his death from lightning was regarded as a divine
retribution; while the expeditions of the chivalrous Philip von Hutten
(1540-41) and of Orellana down the Amazon (1540-41) were followed by
others, down to the time of Sir Walter Raleigh's quest in 1595,--all
enlarging the geographical knowledge of South America and accumulating
fables of cities of gold and nations of warlike women. Of all these
adventures, however, the most amazing was the "jornada de Omagua y
Dorado" which set out from Peru in 1559 under the leadership of Don
Pedro de Ursua, a knight of Navarre. Ursua was a gentleman, worthy of
his knighthood, but his company was crowded with cut-throats, of whom
he himself was an early victim. Hernando de Guzman made himself master
of the mutineers, and renouncing allegiance to the King of Castile,
proclaimed himself Prince and King of all Tierra Firme; but he, in turn
fell before his tyrant successor, Lope de Aguirre, whose fantastic
and blood-thirsty insanity caused half the continent to shudder at
his name, which is still remembered in Venezuelan folk-lore, where
the phosphorescence of the swamp is called _fuego de Aguirre_ in the
belief that under such form the tortured soul of the tyrant wanders
abroad.
The true provenance of the story of the Gilded Man (if not of the
treasure city) seems certainly to be the region about Bogotá in the
realm of the Chibcha. Possibly the myth may refer to the practices of
one of the nations conquered by the Muyscan Zipas before the coming
of the Spaniards, and legendary even at that time; for as the tale is
told, it seems to describe a ceremony in honour of such a water-spirit
as we are everywhere told the Colombian nations venerated; and it
may actually be that the Gilded Man was himself a sacrifice to or
a personation of the deity. Whatever the origin, the legends of El
Dorado have their node in the lands of the Chibcha--a circumstance not
without its own poetic warrant, for from no other American people have
jewelleries of cunningly wrought gold come in more abundance.
[Illustration: PLATE XXVII (_A_).]
Colombian gold work. Ornaments in the forms of human and monstrous
beings, doubtless mythological subjects. The originals are in the
American Museum of Natural History.
[Illustration: PLATE XXVII (_B_).]
Colombian gold work. The human figure apparently holds a staff or wand
and may represent Bochica or similar personage. The originals are in
the American Museum of Natural History.
The Zipa of Bogotá, at the period of the conquest, was the most
considerable of the native rulers in what is now Colombia, having an
empire only less in extent than those of the Peruvian Incas and of the
Aztec Kings. He also was a recent lord, engaged at the very time of the
coming of the whites in extending his power over neighbouring rulers;
it is probable that Guatavita, east of Bogotá had fallen to the Zipa
not many decades before the conquest and this Guatavita is supposed
to have been the scene of the rite of El Dorado; in any case it had
remained a famous shrine. Tunja was another power to the east of Bogotá
declining before the rising power of the Zipas, its Zaque (as the
Tunjan caciques were called) being saved from the Zipa's forces by the
arrival of the Spaniards.
Besides these--the Chibcha proper[117]--there were in Colombia in
the sixteenth century other civilized peoples, akin in culture and
language, whose chief centres were in the elongated Cauca valley
paralleling the Pacific coast. Farthest north were the tribes in
the neighbourhood of Antioquia--the Tamahi and Nutabi; south
of these, about Cartago, were the most famous of gold-workers, the
Quimbaya; while near the borders of what is now Ecuador dwelt the
Coconuco and their kindred. All these peoples possessed skill in
pottery, metal-working, and weaving; and the inhabitants of the Cauca
valley were the most advanced of the Colombians in these arts. Indeed,
the case of Peru seems to be in a measure repeated; for the Chibcha
surpassed their neighbours in the strength of their military and
political organization rather than in their knowledge of the arts.
It is even possible that the Chibcha had been driven eastward by the
western tribes, for the inhabitants of the Cauca valley possessed
traditions of a northern origin, claiming to be immigrants; while
the Chibcha still regarded certain spots in the territories of their
western enemies, the Muzo, as sacred. Little is known of the mythic
systems of any of these peoples save the Chibcha. The Antioquians
preserved a deluge-myth (as doubtless did all the other Colombians);
and they recognized a creator-god, Abirá, a spirit of evil, Canicubá,
and a goddess, Dabeciba, who was the same as Dabaiba, the Darien Mother
of the Creator. Cieza de León says[118] that the Antioquians "carve
the likeness of a devil, very fierce and in human form, with other
images and figures of cats which they worship; when they require water
or sunshine for their crops, they seek aid from these idols." Of the
Quimbaya Cieza tells how there appeared to a group of women making salt
beside a spring the apparition of a disembowelled man who prophesied
a pestilence that soon came. "Many women and boys affirmed that they
saw the dead with their own eyes walking again. These people well
understand that there is something in man besides the mortal body,
though they do not hold that it is a soul, but rather some kind of
transfiguration." The Sun, the Moon, and the Rainbow were important
divinities with all these tribes, and they made offerings of gold and
jewels and children to water-spirits in rivers and in springs. Human
sacrifice was probably universal, and too many of the Indians, as
Cieza puts it, "not content with natural food, turned their bellies
into tombs of their neighbours."
IV. MYTHS OF THE CHIBCHA[119]
Fray Pedro Simon wrote his _Noticias Historiales_ in 1623, some four
score years from the conquest, giving in his fourth _Noticia_ an
account of the myths and rites of the Chibcha which is our primary
source for the beliefs of these tribes. Like other American peoples the
Chibcha recognized a Creator, apparently the Heaven Father, but like
most others their active cults centred about lesser powers: the Sun
(to whom human sacrifices were made), the Moon, the Rainbow, spirits
of lakes and other _genii locorum_, culture deities, male and female,
and the manes of ancestors. Idols of gold and copper, of wood and clay
and cotton, represented gods and fetishes, and to them offerings were
made, especially of emeralds and golden ornaments. Fray Pedro says
that the Pijaos aborigines and some of those of Tunja had in their
sanctuaries images having three heads or three faces on a single body
which, the natives said, represented three persons with one heart; and
he also records their use of crosses to mark the graves of those dead
of snake-bite, as well as their belief that the souls of the dead fared
to the centre of the earth, crossing the Stygian river on _balsas_ made
of spiders' webs, for which reason spiders were never killed. Like the
Aztec they held that the lot of men slain in battle and of women dying
in child-birth was especially delectable in the other world.
The worship of mountains, serpents, and lakes was implied in many of
the Chibcha rites. Slaves were sacrificed, and their bodies were buried
on hill-tops; children, who were the particular offering to the Sun,
were sometimes taken to mountain-tops to be slain, their bodies being
supposed to be consumed by the Sun; and an interesting case of the
surrogate for human victims was the practice of sacrificing parrots
which had been taught to speak. In masked dances, addressed to the
Sun, tears were represented on the masks as a supplication for pity;
and another curious rite, apparently solar, was performed at Tunja,
where twelve men in red, presumably typifying the moons of the year,
danced about a blue man, who was doubtless the sky-god. The ceremony
of El Dorado is only one of many rites in which the divinities of
the sacred lakes were propitiated; and it is probable that these
water-spirits were conceived in the form of snakes, as when, at Lake
Guatavita, a huge serpent was supposed to issue from the depths to
secure offerings left upon the bank.
The same concept of serpentiform water-deities appears in the curious
and novel creation-myth of the Chibcha, briefly told by Fray Simon. In
the beginning all was darkness, for light was imprisoned in a great
house in charge of a being called Chiminigagua, whom the friar names
as the Supreme God, omnipotent, ever good, and lord of all things.
After creating huge black birds, to whom he gave the light, commanding
them to carry it in their beaks until all the world was illumined and
resplendent, Chiminigagua formed the Sun, the Moon (to be the Sun's
wife and companion), and the rest of the universe. The human race was
of another origin, for shortly after the creation of light, from Lake
Iguaque, not far from Tunja, emerged a woman named Bachue or Turachogue
("the Good Woman"), bearing with her a boy just out of infancy. When
he was grown, Bachue married him; and their prolific offspring--she
brought forth four or six children at a birth--peopled the earth; but
finally the two returned beneath the waters, Bachue enjoining upon the
people to keep the peace, to obey the laws which she had given them,
and in particular to preserve the cult of the gods; while the pair
assumed the form of serpents, in which they were supposed sometimes to
reappear to their worshippers.
The belief that the ancestors of men issued from a lake or spring was
common to many Andean tribes, being found far to the south, where the
Indians of Cuzco pointed to Lake Titicaca as the place whence they had
come. The myth is easy to explain for the obvious reason that lakesides
are desirable abodes and that migrating tribes would hark back to
abandoned lakeside homes as their primal sites; however, another
suggestion is made plausible by various fragments of origin-myths which
have been preserved, namely, that the Andean legends belong to the
great cycle of American tales which make men immigrants to the upper
world from an under-earth realm whence they have been driven by the
malevolence of the water-monster, a serpent or a dragon. There are many
striking parallels between the Colombian tales and those of the Pueblo
tribes of North America--the great underworld-goddess, the serpent and
the spider as subaqueous and subterranean powers, the return of the
dead to the realm below, the importance of birds in cosmogony, the
cult of the rainbow; and along with these there are tales of a culture
hero and of a pair of divine brothers such as are common to nearly all
American peoples.
[Illustration: PLATE XXVIII.]
1. Ceremonial dish of black ware with monster or animal forms
found near Anoire, Antioquia. The original is in the Museum of the
University of Nebraska.
2. Image of mother and child, red earthenware, from the coastal
regions of Colombia. The original is in the Museum of the University
of Nebraska.
Other Colombian legends of the origin of men include the Pijaos
belief, recorded by Fray Simon, that their ancestors had issued from
a mountain, and the tradition of the Muzo--western neighbours of the
Chibcha--that a shadow, Aré, formed faces from sand, which became men
and women when he sprinkled them with water. A true creation-story (as
distinguished from tales of origin through generation) was told also by
the people of Tunja. In the beginning all was darkness and fog, wherein
dwelt the caciques of Ramiriqui and of Sogamozo, nephew and uncle. From
yellow clay they fashioned men, and from an herb they created women;
but since the world was still unillumined, after enjoining worship upon
their creatures, they ascended to the sky, the uncle to become the Sun,
the nephew the Moon. It was at Sogamozo that the dance of the twelve
red men--each garlanded and carrying a cross, and each with a young
bird borne as a crest above his head--was danced about the blue
sky-man, while all sang how human beings are mortal and must change
their bodies into dust without knowing what shall be the fate of their
souls.
Fray Simon relates an episode of these same Indians which is
enlightening both as to the missionary and as to the aboriginal
conception of the powers that be. After the first missionary had
laboured among the natives of Tunja and Sogamozo, "the Demon there
began to give contrary doctrines; and among other matters he sought
to discredit the teaching of the Incarnation, telling them that such
a thing had not yet taken place. Nevertheless, it should happen that
the Sun, assuming human flesh in the body of a virgin of the pueblo
of Guacheta, should cause her to bring forth that which she should
conceive from the rays of the sun, although remaining virgin. This was
bruited throughout the provinces, and the cacique of the pueblo named,
wishing to prove the miracle, took two virgins, and leading them forth
from his house every dawn, caused them to dispose themselves upon a
neighbouring hill, where the first rays of the sun would shine upon
them. Continuing this for some days, it was granted to the Demon by
Divine permission (whose judgements are incomprehensible) that the
event should issue according to his desire: in such manner that in a
few days one of the damsels became pregnant, as she said, by the Sun."
At the end of nine months the girl brought forth a _hacuata_, a large
and beautiful emerald, which was treated as an infant, and after being
carried for several days, became a living creature--"all by the order
of the Demon." The child was called Goranchacha, and when he was grown
he became cacique, with the title of "Child of the Sun." It is to be
suspected that the story of the virgin-born son of the Sun was older
than the first preaching of the Incarnation, and that Spanish ears had
too eagerly misheard some tale of rites or myths which must have been
analogous to the Inca legends of descent from the Sun and to their
consecration of virgins to his worship.
Like the other civilized American nations the Chibcha preserved the
tradition of a bearded old man, clothed in long robes who came from
the east to instruct them in the arts of life and to raise them from
primeval barbarism; and like other churchly writers Fray Pedro Simon
regarded this as evidence of the preaching of the Gospel by an apostle.
Nempterequeteva, or Nemquetheba, and Xue, or Zuhé, are two of the
names of this culture hero, worshipped as the god Bochica. He taught
the weaving of cotton, the cultivation of fruits, the building of
houses, the adoration of the gods; and then he passed on his mysterious
way, leaving as proof of his mission designs of crosses and serpents,
and the custom of erecting crosses over the graves of the victims of
snake-bite--to Fray Pedro an obvious reminiscence of the brazen serpent
raised on a cross by Moses in the Wilderness. One of the epithets of
this greybeard was Chiminizagagua, or "Messenger of Chiminigagua," the
supreme god; and when the Spaniards appeared they were called Gagua,
after the light-giver; but later, when their cruelties had set them
in a different context, the aborigines changed the name to Suegagua
("Demon with Light") after their principal devil, Suetiva, "and this
they give today to the Spaniards." Piedrahíta says the Spaniards were
termed _Zuhá_, but he identifies the name as belonging to the hero
Bochica.
A curious episode follows the departure of the culture hero. Among the
people appeared a woman, beautiful and resplendent--"or, better to say,
a devil in her figure"--who taught doctrines wholly opposed to the
injunctions of Chiminizagagua. Dancing and carousal were the tenets of
her evangel; and in displeasure at this, Chiminizagagua transformed the
woman (variously known as Chie, Huytaca, or Xubchasgagua) into an owl,
condemning her to walk the night. Humboldt says that Bochica changed
his wife Chia into the Moon (_chia_ signifies "moon" in the Chibchan
tongue, says Acosta de Samper); and it seems altogether likely that in
the culture hero, Messenger of Light, and the festal heroine, with
their opposite doctrines, we have a myth of sun and moon.
The Chibcha, of course, had their deluge-legend. In the version
given by Fray Pedro Simon it is associated with the appearance of
the rainbow as the symbol of hope; and since the rainbow cult was
important throughout the Andean region, it may everywhere have been
associated with some such myth as the friar recounts. Chibchachum,
the tutelary of the natives of Bogotá, being offended by the people,
who murmured against him and indeed openly offended, sent a flood to
punish them, whereupon they, in their peril, appealed to Bochica, who
appeared to them upon a rainbow, and, striking the mountains with his
staff, opened a conduit for the waters. Chibchachum was punished, as
Zeus punished the Titans, by being thrust beneath the earth to take
the place of the lignum-vitae-trees which had hitherto upheld it, and
his weary restlessness is the cause of earthquakes; while the rainbow,
Chuchaviva, was thenceforth honoured as a deity, though not without
fear; for Chibchachum, in revenge for his disgrace, announced that
when it appeared, many would die. In the version of this tale given
by Piedrahíta, Huytaca plays a part, for it is as a result of her
artifices that the waters rise; but Bochica is again the deliverer,
and the place opened for the issuance of the waters was shown at the
cataract of Téquendama--"one of the wonders of the world."
The myth of Chibchachum, shaking the world which he supports, has its
analogue not only in the tale of Atlas but also in the Tlingit legend
of the Old Woman Below who jars the post that upholds the world. It
would seem, however, not impossible that the story is an etymological
myth, for Fray Pedro Simon says that Chibchachum means "Staff of the
Chibcha," a name which might easily lend itself to the mythopoesy of
the deluge-tale; nor is it unreasonable from the point of view of
cultural advancement, for the Chibcha were beyond the stage in which
it is profitable to refer all deifications to natural phenomena.
Chibchachum, says the friar, was god of commerce and industries--a
complex divinity, not a mere hero of myth--and Bochica, the most
universally venerated of Chibchan deities, was revered as a law-giver,
divinity of caciques and captains; served with sacrifices of gold and
tobacco, he was worshipped with fasts and hymns, and his image was that
of a man with the golden staff of authority. There was a fox-god and
a bear-god, but Nemcatacoa, the bear-god, was patron of weavers and
dyers, and, oddly, of drunkards; in his bear's form he was supposed
to sing and dance with his followers. Chukem, deity of boundaries
and foot-races, must have been an American Hermes, and Bachue,
goddess of agriculture and of the springs of life, was, no doubt, a
personification of the earth itself, a Ge or Demeter. Chuchaviva, the
Rainbow, aided women in child-birth and those sick with a fever--and
we think of the images of the rainbow goddess on the sweat lodges of
the Navaho far to the north, and of the rainbow insignia of the royal
Incas in the imperial south. Certain it is that here we have to do with
a pantheon that reflects the complexity of a life developed beyond the
primitive needs of those whom we call nature-folk.
V. THE MEN FROM THE SEA
The most picturesque account of the landing of gigantic strangers on
the desert-like Pacific coast, just south of the equator, is that given
by Cieza de León.[120] "I will relate what I have been told, without
paying attention to the various versions of the story current among
the vulgar, who always exaggerate everything." With this proclamation
of modesty, he proceeds with the tale which the natives, he says, have
received from their ancestors of a remote time.
"There arrived on the coast, in boats made of reeds, as big as large
ships, a party of men of such size that, from the knee downwards, their
height was as great as the entire height of an ordinary man, though
he might be of good stature. Their limbs were all in proportion to the
deformed size of their bodies, and it was a monstrous thing to see
their heads, with hair reaching to the shoulders. Their eyes were as
large as small plates. They had no beards and were dressed in the skins
of animals, others only in the dress which nature gave them, and they
had no women with them. When they arrived at this point [Santa Elena],
they made a sort of village, and even now the sites of their houses
are pointed out. But as they found no water, in order to remedy the
want they made some very deep wells, works which are truly worthy of
remembrance, for such is their magnitude that they certainly must have
been executed by very strong men. They dug these wells in the living
rock until they met with water, and then they lined them with masonry
from top to bottom in such sort that they will endure for many ages.
The water in these wells is very good and wholesome, and always so cold
that it is very pleasant to drink it. Having built their village and
made their wells or cisterns where they could drink, these great men,
or giants, consumed all the provisions they could lay their hands upon
in the surrounding country, insomuch that one of them ate more meat
than fifty of the natives of the country could. As all the food they
could find was not sufficient to sustain them, they killed many fish
with nets and other gear. They were detested by the natives, because in
using their women they killed them, and the men also in another way;
but the Indians were not sufficiently numerous to destroy this new
people who had come to occupy their lands.... All the natives declare
that God, our Lord, brought upon them a punishment in proportion to the
enormity of their offence.... A fearful and terrible fire came down
from heaven with a great noise, out of the midst of which there issued
a shining angel with a glittering sword, with which, at one blow, they
were all killed, and the fire consumed them. There only remained a few
bones and skulls, which God allowed to remain without being consumed
by the fire, as a memorial of this punishment."
Cieza de León's story is only one among a number of accounts of this
race of giants, come from the sea and destroyed long ago by flame from
heaven for the sin of sodomy. To these legends recent investigations
have added a new interest; for during excavations in the coast region
to the north of Cape Santa Elena the members of the George G. Heye
Expeditions (1906-08) discovered the remains of a unique aboriginal
civilization in this region, among its monuments being stone-faced
wells corresponding to those mentioned by the early narration. Another
and peculiarly interesting type of monument, found here in abundance,
is the stone seat, whether throne or altar, carved with human or
animal figures to support it, and reminiscent of the _duhos_ of the
Antilles and of carved _metates_ and seats found northward in the
continent and beyond the Isthmus. It is the opinion of the excavators
that these seats were thrones for deities; possibly also for human
dignitaries, especially as clay figures represent men sitting upon
such seats--images, perhaps, of household gods; while the figures of
men, pumas, serpents, birds, monkeys, and other figures crouching
caryatid-like are, no doubt, depictions of supporting powers, divine
auxiliaries or gods themselves. Monstrous forms, composite animals,
and grotesquely frog-like images of a female goddess in bas-relief on
stele-like slabs--mute emblems of a forgotten pantheon--add curious
interest to the vanished race, remembered only in distorted legend when
the first-coming Spaniards received the tale from the aborigines.
[Illustration: PLATE XXIX.]
Scene from a vase, Truxillo, showing balsa. The drawing is in the
Chimu style. After Joyce, _South American Archaeology_, page 126.
Juan de Velasco,[121] in the beginning of his history of Quito, places
the coming of the giants about the time of the Christian era; and six
or seven centuries later, he declares, another incursion of men from
the sea appeared on this coast, destined to leave a more permanent
trace, for the present city of Caraques not only marks the site of
their first power, but bears the name of the Cara. These invaders are
said to have come on _balsas_--the strange boats of this coast,
formed of logs bound together, the longest at the centre, into the form
of a hull, on which a platform was built, while masts bore cloth sails;
and it is stated that the Spaniards encountered such craft capable
of carrying forty or fifty men. The Cara were an adventurous people,
and after dwelling for a time upon the coast, they advanced into the
interior until, about 980 A. D., according to Velasco, they eventually
established their power in the neighbourhood of Quito, where the Scyri
(as the Cara king was called) became a powerful overlord. From that
time until Quito was subdued by the Incas Tupac Yupanqui and Huayna
Capac in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the Scyris reigned
over the northern empire, constantly extending their territories by
war; but their power was finally broken when the Inca added the emerald
of the Scyris to the red fringe of Cuzco to complete his imperial crown.
The followers of the Scyris, Velasco says, were mere idolaters, having
at the head of their pantheon the Sun and the Moon who had guided them
on their journeys; and he describes the temples built to these deities
on two opposite hills at Quito, that to the Sun having before the door
two pillars which served to measure the solar year, while twelve lesser
columns indicated the beginning of each month. Elsewhere in their
empire were the usual local cults,--worship of animals and elements,
with tales of descent from serpentiform water-spirits and with
adoration of fish and of food animals--while on the coast the Sea was a
great divinity, and the islands of Puna and La Plata were the seats of
famous sanctuaries, at the former shrine prisoners being sacrificed to
Tumbal, the war-god, by having their hearts torn out. The neighbouring
coast was the seat of the veneration of the great emerald (mentioned by
Cieza de León and Garcilasso de la Vega) which was famous as a god of
healing; and it is altogether probable that the Scyris brought their
regard for the emerald from this region in which the gem abounded,
though this may well have been merely a local intensification of that
belief in the magic of green and blue gems which is broadcast in the
two Americas.
Besides the stories of the giants and the Cara, there is a third legend
of an ancient descent of seamen upon the equatorial coast. Balboa[122]
is the narrator of the tale of the coming of Naymlap and his people
to Lambeyeque, a few degrees south of Cape Santa Elena, and the story
which he tells is given with a minuteness as to name and description
that leaves no doubt of its native origin. At a very remote period
there arrived from the north a great fleet of _balsas_, commanded by a
brave and renowned chieftain, Naymlap. His wife was called Ceterni, and
a list of court officers is given--Pitazofi, the trumpeter; Ninacolla,
warden of the chief's litter and throne; Ninagentue, the cup-bearer;
Fongasigde, spreader of shell-dust before the royal feet (a function
which leads us to suspect that the royal feet, for magic reasons, were
never to touch the earth); Ochocalo, chief of the cuisine; Xam, master
of face-paints; and Llapchilulli, charged with the care of vestments
and plumes. From this account of the _entourage_, one readily infers
that the chieftain is more than man, himself a divinity; and, indeed,
Balboa goes on to say that immediately after the new comers had landed,
they built a temple, named Chot, wherein they placed an idol which they
had brought and which, carved of green stone in the image of the chief,
was called Llampallec, or "figure of Naymlap." After a long reign
Naymlap disappeared, leaving the report that, given wings by his power,
he had ascended to the skies; and his followers, in their affliction,
went everywhere in search of their lord, while their children inhabited
the territories which had been acquired. Cium, the successor of
Naymlap, at the end of his reign, immured himself in a subterranean
chamber, where he perished of hunger in order that he might leave the
reputation of being immortal; and after Cium were nine other kings,
succeeded by Tempellec, who undertook to move the statue of Naymlap.
But when a demon, in the form of a beautiful woman, had seduced him,
it began to rain--a thing hitherto unknown on that dry coast--and
continued for thirty days, this being followed by a year of famine,
whereupon the priests, binding Tempellec hand and foot, cast him into
the sea, after which the kingdom was changed into a republic.
This tale bears all the marks of authentic tradition. We may well
suppose that Naymlap and his successors were magic kings, reigning
during the period of their vigorous years and then sacrificed to
make way for a successor who should anew incarnate the sacred life
of Llampallec. Such rulers, as corn-spirits and embodiments of the
communal soul of their people, have been made familiar by Sir James G.
Frazer's monumental _Golden Bough_; and in this case it would appear
that the sacred king was regarded as a marine divinity, probably as
the son of Mother Sea. Certainly this would not merely explain the
shell-dust spread beneath his feet, but it might also account for the
punishment of Tempellec, who had brought the cataclysm of water to the
land and so was cast back to his own element; while it is even possible
that the worship of the emerald, which all writers mention in connexion
with this coast, may have here received its especial impetus from the
colour and translucency of the stone, suggesting the green waters of
the ocean.