174 IDEAS OF A DIVIITITT. 



shore," to the same place from whence he cr_me. Since the 

 natives have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine, that 

 Europe is this ' other shore ;' and one of them inquired 

 with great simplicity, of Father Gili, whether he had there 

 seen the great Amalivaca, the father of the Tamanacs, who 

 had covered the rocks with symbolic figures. 



These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two 

 human beings saved on the submit of a mountain, and 

 casting behind them the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, 

 to repeople the earth; of that national divinity, Amalivaca, 

 who arrived by water from a distant land, who prescribed 

 laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their 

 migrations ; these various features of a very ancient system 

 of belief, are well worthy of attention. "What the Tamanacs, 

 and the tribes whose languages are analogous to the 

 Tamanao tongue, now relate to us, they have no doubt 

 learned from other people, who inhabited before them the 

 some regions. The name of Amalivaca is spread over a 

 region of more than five thousand square leagues; he is 

 found designated as ' the father of mankind,' or ' our great 

 grandfather,' as far as to the Caribbee nations, whose idiom 

 approaches the Tamanac only in the same degree as the 

 German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sans- 

 crit. Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit, the Aged 

 of Heaven, the invisible being, whose worship springs from 

 that of the powers of nature, when nations rise insensibly to 

 the consciousness of the unity of these powers ; he is rather a 

 personage of the heroic times, a man, who, coming from 

 afar, lived in the land of the Tamanacs and the Caribs, 

 sculptured symbolic figures upon the rocks, and disappeared 

 by going back to the country he had previously inhabited 

 beyond the ocean. The anthropomorphism of the divinity 

 has two sources diametrically opposite ; and this opposition 

 seems to arise less from the various degrees of intellectual 

 culture, than from the different dispositions of nations, 

 some of which are more inclined to mysticism, and others 

 more governed by the senses, and by external impressions. 

 Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon earth, 

 charging them with the care of ruling nations, and giving 

 them laws, as in the fables of the East ; sometimes, as 

 among the Greeks and other nations of the West, trey are 



