especially to the Sun the title of Teotl, God.[1] Again, the high plateau of Bogota in New Granada was the seat of the semi-civilized Chibchas or Muyscas, of whose mythology and religion the leading ideas were given by the Sun. The Sun was the great deity to whom the human sacrifices were offered, and especially the holiest sacrifice, the blood of a pure captive youth daubed on a rock on a mountain-top for the rising sun to shine on. In native Muysca legend, the mythic civilizer of the land, the teacher of agriculture, the founder of the theocracy and institutor of sun-worship, is a figure in whom we cannot fail to discern the personal Sun himself.[2] It is thus, lastly, in the far more celebrated native theocracy to the south. In the royal religion of Peru, the Sun was at once ancestor and founder of the dynasty of Incas, who reigned as his representatives and almost in his person, who took wives from the convent of virgins of the Sun, and whose descendants were the solar race, the ruling aristocracy. The Sun's innumerable flocks of llamas grazed on the mountains, and his fields were tilled in the valleys, his temples stood throughout the land, and first among them the 'Place of Gold' in Cuzco, where his new fire was kindled at the annual solar festival of Raymi, and where his splendid golden disc with human countenance looked forth to receive the first rays of its divine original. Sun-worship was ancient in Peru, but it was the Incas who made it the great state religion, imposing it wherever their wide conquests reached, till it became the central idea of Peruvian life.[3]
- ↑ Torquemada, 'Monarquia Indiana,' ix. c. 34; Sahagun, 'Hist. de Nueva España,' ii. App. in Kingsborough, 'Antiquities of Mexico;' Waitz, vol. iv. p. 138; J. G. Müller, p. 474, &c.; Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 487; Tylor, 'Mexico,' p. 141.
- ↑ Piedrahita, 'Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,' Antwerp, 1688: part i. book i. c. iii. iv.; Humboldt, 'Vues des Cordillères;' Waitz, vol. iv. p. 352, &c.; J. G. Müller, p. 432, &c.
- ↑ Garcilaso de la Vega, 'Commentarios Reales,' lib. i. c. 15, &c., iii. c. 20; v. c. 2, 6; 'Rites and Laws of the Yncas,' tr. & ed. by C. R. Markham, (Hakluyt Soc., 1873) p. 84; Prescott, 'Peru,' book i. ch. iii.; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 447, &c.; J. G. Müller, p. 362, &c.
