That the Inca and the Nahua, at least, had made important advances in literary form is suggested by a few surviving fragments, as noted under Fine Arts (p. 141). The celebrated Inca drama, "Apu Ollantay", has strong claim to being pre-Columbian and certain poetical fragments have come down to us from the Maya and Nahua. That these should have been of a high order is to be expected for, as noted under Fine Arts, we find even among the tribes of the bison area, song rituals of dramatic and poetical merit.[1] In some cases, conspicuously in some Pueblo and North Pacific Coast ceremonies, well-composed rituals are enacted, staging sacred mythical tales in which the characters are impersonated by the use of masks and other accessories. The purely literary side of these rituals and songs has never been seriously studied.
MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS CONCEPTIONS
Some of the older writers[2] have noted the wide distribution of a kind of white-man god, and sought to demonstrate its origin in the phenomena of the sun. This interpretation has not survived criticism, but it serves to call attention to an interesting mythical character. As we have noted, in the god systems of the Inca, Chibcha, Maya, and Nahua, there appears a distinctly human god who lives among men and establishes the present order, but after a time departs. The names under which he is known are, respectively: Viracocha, Bochica, Kukulcan, and Quetzalcoatl. In each case, he is regarded as clothed in white cloth or paint, as having arrived from the East, and as having a beard. When Europeans appeared upon the scene, the local term for this god was applied to them, and entered into the future terminology. We thus have the associated characters of whiteness, bearded, human-like, dawn-like, culture leader, and reformer continuously distributed from Chile to the Rio Grande. But this complex extends even farther afield. In the bison area the Cheyenne Vihuk, the Arapaho Nili-an-can, and the Blackfoot Napiwa possess all of these except the beard, yet each in turn forms the term applied to individuals of our race. In South America the Tsuma of Venezuela seems to have been identical with the
