Marcos Jimenez de la Espada at Madrid, but again without any attempt to translate the Quichua hymns. This was at last done through the instrumentality of Don Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo. The text was very corrupt, the words were misspelt and not divided from each other, and it would require a most profound Quichua scholar to restore the meaning of the original. Señor Lafone Quevedo secured the services of Dr. Miguel Mossi, of Bolivia, now no more, by far the best modern scholar of the language of the Incas. The result was the publication in 1892 of Spanish translations of the hymns to Uira-cocha.[1] These hymns are the expression of a longing to know the invisible god, to walk in his ways, and to have the prayers heard which entreat the Deity to reveal himself. They show a strong sense of his guiding power in regulating the seasons and the courses of the heavenly bodies, and in making provision for reproduction in nature. There is a strange expression of wonder respecting the sex of the Deity; but this is wonder and nothing more, not, as Señor Lafone Quevedo suggests, an allusion to phallic worship. There is, indeed, a plaintive note in these cries to the Deity for a knowledge of the unknowable, which is touching in its simplicity.
- ↑ Revista del Museo de la Plata, J. III. p. 320. Ensayo Mitologico. El culto de Tonapa. Los himnos sagrados de los Reyes del Cuzco, segun el Yamqui-Pachacuti por Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo (Talleres del Museo de la Plata, 1892).
