wart all these lower myths, survivals from the savage stage, comes
what Garcilasso regards as 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.

(1) Com. Real., vol. i. p. 106.

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.(1)

(1) Garcilasso, viii. 8, quoting Blas Valera.

From this summary it appears that the higher Peruvian religion had
wrested to its service, and to the dynastic purposes of the Incas, a
native myth of the familiar class, in which men come ready made out of
holes in the ground. But in Peru we do not find nearly such abundance of
other savage origin myths as will be proved to exist in the legends of
Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The reason probably is that Peru left no
native literature; the missionaries disdained stories of "devils," and
Garcilasso's common sense and patriotism were alike revolted by the
incidents of stories "more like dreams" than truthful records. He
therefore was silent about them. In Greece and India, on the other hand,
the native religious literature preserved myths of the making of man out
of clay, of his birth from trees and stones, of the fashioning of things
out of the fragments of mutilated gods and Titans, of the cosmic egg, of
the rending and wounding of a personal heaven and a pers