establishments and ceremonial.] The
Peruvian religion ostensibly consisted of a worship of the Sun, but the
higher classes had already become emancipated from such a material
association, and recognized the existence of one almighty, invisible
God. They expected the resurrection of the body and the continuance of
the soul in a future life. It was their belief that in the world to come
our occupations will resemble those we have followed here. Like the
Egyptians, who had arrived at similar ideas, the Peruvians practised
embalming, the mummies of their Incas being placed in the Temple of the
Sun at Cuzco, the kings on the right, the queens on the left, clad in
their robes of state, and with their hands crossed on their bosoms,
seated in golden chairs, waiting for the day when the soul will return
to reanimate the body. The mummies of distinguished personages were
buried in a sitting posture under tumuli of earth. To the Supreme Being
but one temple was dedicated. It was in a sacred valley, to which
pilgrimages were made. In the Peruvian mythology, heaven was above the
sky, hell in the interior of the earth--it was the realm of an evil
spirit called Cupay. The general resemblance of these to Egyptian
doctrines may forcibly impress upon us that they are ideas with which
the human mind necessarily occupies itself in its process of
intellectual development. As in all other countries, the educated
classes were greatly in advance of the common people, who were only just
emerging from fetichism, and engrossed in the follies of idolatry and
man-worship. Nevertheless, the government found it expedient to
countenance the vulgar delusion; indeed, the political system was
actually founded upon it. But the Peruvians were in advance of the
Europeans in this respect, that they practised no persecutions upon
those who had become mentally emancipated. Besides the sun, the visible
god, other celestial bodies were worshipped in a subordinate way. It was
supposed that there were spirits in the wind, lightning, thunder; genii
in the mountains, rivers, springs, and grottoes. In the great Temple of
the Sun at Cuzco an image of that deity was placed so as to receive the
rays of the luminary at his rising; a like artifice had been practised
in the Serapion at Alexandria. There was also a sanctuary dedicated to
the Sun in the island of Titicaca, and, it is said, between three and
four hundred temples of a subordinate kind in Cuzco. To the great temp