but chiefly from beasts
and birds, the various savage stocks of Peru claimed descent, and they
revered and offered sacrifice to their totemic ancestors.(1) Garcilasso
adds, what is almost incredible, that the Indians tamely permitted
themselves to be eaten by their totems, when these were carnivorous
animals. They did this with the less reluctance as they were cannibals,
and accustomed to breed children for the purposes of the cuisine from
captive women taken in war.(2) Among the huacas or idols, totems,
fetishes and other adorable objects of the Indians, worshipped before
and retained after the introduction of the Inca sun-totem and solar
cult, Garcilasso names trees, hills, rocks, caves, fountains, emeralds,
pieces of jasper, tigers, lions, bears, foxes, monkeys, condors, owls,
lizards, toads, frogs, sheep, maize, the sea, "for want of larger gods,
crabs" and bats. The bat was also the totem of the Zotzil, the chief
family of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala, and the most high god of the
Cakchiquels was worshipped in the shape of a bat. We are reminded of
religion as it exists in Samoa. The explanation of Blas Valera was that
in each totem (pacarissa) the Indians adored the devil.

(1) Com. Real., vol. i., chap. ix., x. xi. pp. 47-53.

(2) Cieza de Leon, xii., xv., xix., xxi., xxiii., xxvi., xxviii., xxxii.
Cieza is speaking of people in the valley of Cauca, in New Granada.

Athwart this early religion of totems and fetishes came, in Garcilasso's
narrative, the purer religion of the Incas, with what he regards as a
philosophic development of a belief in a Supreme Being. According to
him, the Inca sun-worship was really a totemism of a loftier
character. The Incas "knew how to choose gods better than the Indians".
Garcilasso's theory is that the earlier totems were selected chiefly as
distinguishing marks by the various stocks, though, of course, this
does not explain why the animals or other objects of each family were
worshipped or were regarded as ancestors, and the blood-connections of
the men who adored them. The Incas, disdaining crabs, lizards, bats
and even serpents and lions, "chose" the sun. Then, just like the other
totemic tribes, they feigned to be of the blood and lineage of the sun.

This fable is, in brief, the Inca myth of the origin of civilisation and
of man, or at least of their breed of men. As M. Reville well remarks,
it is obvious that the Inca claim is an adaptation of the local myth
of Lake