Amongst the higher classes, the ideas entertained on this same subject had become a little less naive. The Incas were supposed to be transported to the mansion of the Sun, their father, where they still lived together as his family. The Curacas or nobles would either follow them there, or would still live under the earth beneath the sceptre of the god of the dead, Supay, the Hades or Pluto of the Peruvian mythology. Do not identify this deity with a Satan or Ahriman of any kind. He was not a wicked, but rather a sinister god, the conception of whom could wake no joyous or even serene emotions. He was a voracious deity, of insatiable appetite. At Quito, at any rate before the conquest of the country by the Incas, a hundred children were sacrificed to him every year. There is no idea of positive suffering inflicted on the wicked under his direction. But the subterranean abode is gloomy and dismal, like the place of shades in the Odyssey. Exceptional considerations of birth, rank or valour in war, determine the passage of chosen souls to heaven, where their lot will of course be far more brilliant and happy than that of the souls that remain in the subterranean regions. Thus the aristocratic point of view, barely modified by the high importance attributed to the warlike virtues, still dominates the ideas of a future life in ancient Peru, as in Mexico, in Polynesia and in Africa. This is a final proof that the moral element was but feebly present in the ancient Peruvian religion. For wherever a clear and definite belief in a conscious life beyond the grave is united to a sense of the religious character of morality, it is likewise held, by an obvious connection of ideas, that the lot of departed souls will depend completely upon their moral condition, without distinction of birth or rank.[121] This Peruvian religion, then, in spite of its elevation and refinement in some respects, forcibly reminds us of the walls of its own temples, all plated with gold, but covered in with straw, and poor and unvaried in architecture. A monotonous, unformed, gloomy spirit seems to pervade the whole institution, in spite of its brilliant exterior. The air of the convent broods over it. Those thousands of functionaries who spent their lives in superintending the furniture, the dress, the work, the very cookery, of the families under their charge, and inflicting corporal chastisement on those whom they surprised in a fault, might succeed in forming a correct and regular society, drilled like the bees in a hive, might form a nation of submissive slaves, but could never make a nation of _men_; and this is the deep cause that explains the irremediable collapse of this Peruvian society under the vigorous blows of a handful of unscrupulous Spaniards. It was a skilfully constructed machine, which worked like a chronometer; but when once the mainspring was broken, all was over.