savage stage, comes the philosophical Inca belief in Pachacamac. This deity, to Garcilasso's mind, was purely spiritual: he had no image and dwelt in no temple; in fact, he is that very God whom the Spanish missionaries proclaimed. This view, though the fact has been doubted, was very probably held by the Amautas, or philosophical class in Peru.[1] Cieza de Leon says "the name of this devil, Pachacamac, means creator of the world." Garcilasso urges that Pachacamac was the animus mundi; that he did not "make the world," as Pund-jel and other savage demiurges made it, but that he was to the universe what the soul is to the body.
Here we find ourselves, if among myths at all, among the myths of metaphysics—rational myths; that is, myths corresponding to our present stage of thought, and therefore intelligible to us. Pachacamac "made the sun, and lightning, and thunder, and of these the sun was worshipped by the Incas." Garcilasso denies that the moon was worshipped. The reflections of the sceptical or monotheistic Inca, who declared that the sun, far from being a free agent, "seems like a thing held to its task," are reported by Garcilasso, and appear to prove that solar worship was giving way, in the minds of educated Peruvians, a hundred years before the arrival of Pizarro and Valverde with his missal.[2]
From this summary it appears that the higher Peruvian religion had wrested to its service, and to
