Page:Native Religions of Mexico and Peru.djvu/150

land, and the Sun himself was the great deity of the country. To obey the Incas was to obey the supreme god. Their person was the object of a veritable cultus, and they had succeeded so completely in identifying the interests of their own family with those of religion, of politics and of civilization, that it was no longer possible to distinguish them one from another. And yet it was this very method, so essentially theocratic, of insisting on the minute regulation of all the actions of human life in the name of religion, which finally ruined the Incas. Peru, in the sixteenth century, had become one enormous convent, in which everything was mechanically regulated, in which no one could take the smallest initiative, in which everything depended absolutely upon the will of the reigning Inca; so that the moment Pizarro succeeded in laying hold of this Inca, this "father Abbé," everything collapsed in a moment, and nothing was left of the edifice constructed with such sagacity but a heap of sand. And indeed this is the fatal result of every theocracy, for it can never really be anything but a hierocracy or rule of priests. On the one