descendants."[1] But in the _Inquiry_ above
quoted it is explained that the belief, in fact, was that the soul of the
Inca went at death to the presence of the deity Viracocha, and its emblem,
the actual body, carefully preserved, was paid divine honors in order that
the soul might intercede with Viracocha for the fulfillment of the
prayers.[2]

[Footnote 1: Clements R. Markham, _Journal of the Royal Geographical
Society_, 1871, p. 291. _Pacarina_ is the present participle of
_pacarini_, to dawn, to begin, to be born.]

[Footnote 2: _Informacion_, etc., p. 209.]

We are compelled, therefore, by the best evidence now attainable, to adopt
the conclusion that the Inca religion, in its purity, deserved the name of
monotheism. The statements of the natives and the terms of their religious
language unite in confirming this opinion.

It is not right to depreciate the force of these facts simply because we
have made up our minds that a people in the intellectual stage of the
Peruvians could not have mounted to such a pure air of religion. A
prejudgment of this kind is unworthy of a scientific mind. The evidence is
complete that the terms I have quoted did belong to the religious language
of ancient Peru. They express the conception of divinity which the
thinkers of that people had formed. And whether it is thought to be in
keeping or not with the rest of their development, it is our bounden duty
to accept it, and explain it as best we can. Other instances might be
quoted, from the religious history of the old world, where a nation's
insight into the attributes of deity was singularly in advance of their
general state of cultivation. The best thinkers of the Semitic race, for
example, from Moses to Spinoza, have been in this respect far ahead of
their often more generally enlightened Aryan contemporaries.

The more interesting, in view of this lofty ideal of divinity they had
attained, become the Peruvian myths of the incarnation of Viracocha, his
life and doings as a man among men.

These myths present themselves in different, but to the reader who has
accompanied me thus far, now familiar forms. Once more we meet the story
of the four brothers, the first of men. They appeared on the earth after
it had been rescued from the primeval waters, and the face of the land was
divided between them. Manco Capac took the North, Colla the South, Pinahua
the West, and the East, the region whence come the sun and the light, was
given