134 
have a connexion with astrological ideas. The 
human victim was called guesa, wandering, 
houseless, and quihica^ door, because his death 
announced as it were the opening of a new cycle 
of a hundred and eighty-five moons. This denomi- 
nation reminds us of the Janus of the Romans, 
placed at the gates of Heaven, and to whom 
Numa dedicated the first month of the year, 
tanquam bicipitis dei mensem The guesa 
was a child torn from the paternal home. He 
must necessarily be taken from a certain village, 
situate in the plains called at the present day the 
Llanos de San Juan, which extend from the 
eastern slope of the Cordilleras to the banks of 
the Guaviare. It was from this same country of 
the east that Bochica, the emblem of the Sun, 
came, when he made his first appearance among 
the Muyscas. The guesa was most carefully 
educated in the temple of the Sun at Sogamozo, 
till the age of ten years ; he was then made to 
go out to walk in the paths, which Bochica had 
trodden, at the period when, in his instructions 
to the people, he had consecrated those spots by 
his miracles. At the age of Jif teen years, when 
the victim had attained a number of sunas equal 
to that contained in the in diction of the Muysca 
cycle, he was sacrificed in one of those circular 
places in the centre of which was an elevated 
Macrobius, Lib. h 13. ' 
