474 
IDEAS OF A DIVINin. 
shore,” to the same place from whence he came. Since the 
natives have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine, that 
Europe is this 1 other shore and one of them inquired 
with great simplicity, of Father Gill, 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 summit 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 
Taman ao 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 1 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, they are 
