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or wand of gold, directed them to go forward, till they should find a place where the staff on being struck against the ground entered and stuck fast. They travelled to the north for many days, and the wand finally entered the earth at Cuzco, where they accordingly built a city and founded their dominion, Manco being the first of the Inca dynasty. The other tale is that for a long, long time there was darkness over the earth and great sorrow among men till at last the Sun suddenly rose out of the Rock on Titicaca, which was thenceforward sacred and a place of sacrifice and oracles. Other traditions, more or less differing from these in details, agree in making Titicaca the original home of the Incas, and one of them curiously recalls a Mexican story by placing on it a great foreign Teacher whom the Spaniards identified with St. Thomas the Apostle.29 In these stories, some written down by Spanish explorers or treasure seekers at the time of the Conquest or collected subsequently by learned ecclesiastics, some still surviving, with grotesque variations, in the minds of the peasantry, we may distinguish three salient points, – first, the veneration for the Rock as an object; secondly, its close relation to Sun worship; and thirdly, its connection with the Inca rulers of Cuzco. It is a plausible view that from ancient pre-Inca times the Rock was a Huaca or sacred object (in fact a fetish, i. e. an object inhabited by a spirit) to the primitive tribes of the island and lake coasts, as the cleft rock of Delphi was to the Greeks, even as the Black Stone which they called the Mother of the gods was to the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele, as perhaps the Stone of Tara – perhaps even the Lia Fail or Coronation Stone of Scone and now of Westminster Abbey – was to our Celtic ancestors. When the Incas established their dominion over the region round the lake they made this spot a sanctuary of the sun, following their settled policy of superadding the imperial religion of Sun worship – the Sun being their celestial progenitor – to the primitive veneration and propitiation of local spirits which their subjects practised. It was thus that the Roman Emperors added the worship of the goddess of Rome to that of the local deities of Western Asia and Africa and set up to her great temples, like that at Pergamos, among and above the older shrines. If there be truth in the legend that the Incas were themselves originally a tribe of the Collas of the plateau who quitted their former seats to go northward to the conquest of Cuzco, it would be all the more natural for them to honour this sanctuary as an ancient home of their race.Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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