queen, might enter the consecrated precincts....
Woe to the unhappy maiden who was detected in an intrigue! By the stern
laws of the Incas she was buried alive, her lover strangled, and the
town or village to which he belonged was razed to the ground and sowed
with stones as if to efface every memorial of his existence. One is
astonished to find so close a resemblance between the institutions of
the American Indian, the ancient Roman, and the modern Catholic.
Chastity and purity of life are virtues in woman that would seem to be
of equal estimation with the barbarian and with the civilized--yet the
ultimate destination of the inmates of these religious houses (there
were hundreds of them), was materially different.... Though Virgins of
the Sun, they were the brides of the Inca."[57] The monarch had
thousands of these hetarae in his various palaces. When he wished to
lessen the number in his seraglios, he sent some of them to their own
homes, where they lived ever after respected and revered as holy
beings.[58] The religion of the Peruvians had reached a high degree of
development, and many of the crudities of simple phallic worship had
either been entirely abandoned or so idealized that they had been lost
in the mists of ritual and ceremony. For "the ritual of the Incas
involved a routine of observances as complex and elaborate as ever
distinguished that of any nation, whether pagan or Christian."[59]

[57] Prescott: _Conquest of Peru_, vol. i, p. 110 _et seq._

[58] _Ibid._, p. 112.

[59] _Ibid._, p. 103.

Notwithstanding the fact that the descendants of the Incas have been
under the guardianship of the priests of the Catholic church for
hundreds of years, a close, careful, painstaking, and accurate observer
informs me that he has repeatedly noticed unmistakable phallic rites
interwoven with their Christian ceremonials and beliefs. The same can be
said of a kindred race and a kindred religion. Biart, writing of the
descendants of the Aztecs, says: "In grottoes unexpectedly discovered, I
have frequently found myself in the presence of Mictlanteuctli, at the
foot of which a recent offering of food had been placed."[60] How
exceedingly basic and fundamental the worship of the generative
principle must be in Psychos itself, is indicated by these facts!

[60] Biart: _The Aztecs_, p. 139.

In the very beginnings of history we find that many races of people held
the worship of the generative princip