river,(4) or lake, or even from the sea, OR FROM A WILD
ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur
(condor), or some other bird of prey ".(5) A certain amount of worship
was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts and natural
objects. Men offered up to their totems "what they usually saw them
eat".(6) On the seacoasts "they worshipped sardines, skates, dog-fish,
and, for want of larger gods, crabs.... There was not an animal, how
vile and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god," including
"lizards, toads and frogs." Garcilasso (who says they ate the fish
they worshipped) gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the
beginning men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one
human stock from another. "The one desired to have a god different from
the other.... They only thought of making one different from another."
When the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they
pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed "splendour and
beauty" as contrasted with "the ugliness and filth of the frogs and
other vermin they looked upon as gods".(7) Garcilasso, of course, does
not use the North American word totem (or ote or otem) for the family
badge which represented the family ancestors. He calls these things, as
a general rule, pacarissa. The sun was the pacarissa of the Incas, as it
was of the chief of the Natchez. The pacarissa of other stocks was
the lion, bear, frog, or what not. Garcilasso accounts for the belief
accorded to the Incas, when they claimed actual descent from the sun, by
observing(8) that "there were tribes among their subjects who professed
similar fabulous descents, though they did not comprehend how to select
ancestors so well as the Incas, but adored animals and other low and
earthly objects". As to the fact of the Peruvian worship of beasts, if
more evidence is wanted, it is given, among others, by Cieza de Leon,(9)
who contrasts the adoration of the Roman gods with that offered in Peru
to brutes. "In the important temple of Pacha-camac (the spiritual deity
of Peru) they worshipped a she-fox or vixen and an emerald." The devil
also "appeared to them and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce".
Other examples of totemism in South America may be studied in the
tribes on the Amazon.(10) Mr. Wallace found the Pineapple stock, the
Mosquitoes, Woodpeckers, Herons, and other totem kindreds. A curious
example of similar