599 



rather a personage of the heroic times, a man, 

 who, coming from afar, lived in the land of the 

 Tamanacs and the Caribbees, sculptured sym- 

 bolical figures upon the rocks, and disappeared 

 by going back to the country he had previously 

 inhabited beyond the Ocean. The anthropo- 

 morphitism 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, they are 

 the first monarchs, priest-kings, who are strip- 

 ped of what is human in their nature, to be 

 raised to the rank of national divinities. Ama- 

 livaca was a stranger, like Manco-Capac, Bo- 

 chica, and Quetzalcohuatl ; those extraordinary 

 men, who, in the alpine or civilized part of Ame- 

 rica, on the table lands of Peru, New Grenada, 

 and Anahuac, organized civil society, regulated 

 the order of sacrifices, and founded religious 

 congregations. The Mexican Quetzalcohuatl, 



* Creuzer, Symbolik der alien V&lhtr, vol. iy, p. 89. 



