Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)Lang, Andrew
Religion
Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Lang, Andrew
Myth; Mythology; Religion; Rites and ceremonies
Here we find ourselves, if among myths at all, among the myths of
metaphysics--rational myths; that is, myths corresponding to our present
stage of thought, and therefore intelligible to us. Pachacamac "made the
sun, and lightning, and thunder, and of these the sun was worshipped
by the Incas". Garcilasso denies that the moon was worshipped. The
reflections of the sceptical or monotheistic Inca, who declared that the
sun, far from being a free agent, "seems like a thing held to its task,"
are reported by Garcilasso, and appear to prove that solar worship was
giving way, in the minds of educated Peruvians, a hundred years before
the arrival of Pizarro and Valverde with his missal.(1)
(1) Garcilasso, viii. 8, quoting Blas Valera.
From this summary it appears that the higher Peruvian religion had
wrested to its service, and to the dynastic purposes of the Incas, a
native myth of the familiar class, in which men come ready made out of
holes in the ground. But in Peru we do not find nearly such abundance of
other savage origin myths as will be proved to exist in the legends of
Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The reason probably is that Peru left no
native literature; the missionaries disdained stories of "devils," and
Garcilasso's common sense and patriotism were alike revolted by the
incidents of stories "more like dreams" than truthful records. He
therefore was silent about them. In Greece and India, on the other hand,
the native religious literature preserved myths of the making of man out
of clay, of his birth from trees and stones, of the fashioning of things
out of the fragments of mutilated gods and Titans, of the cosmic egg, of
the rending and wounding of a personal heaven and a personal earth, of
the fishing up from the waters of a tiny earth which grew greater, of
the development of men out of beasts, with a dozen other such notions as
are familiar to contemporary Bushmen, Australians, Digger Indians, and
Cahrocs. But in Greece and India these ideas coexist with myths and
religious beliefs as purely spiritual and metaphysical as the belief in
the Pachacamac of Garcilasso and the Amautas of Peru.
CHAPTER VII. INDO-ARYAN MYTHS--SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.
Authorities--Vedas--Brahmanas--Social condition of Vedic
India--Arts--Ranks--War--Vedic fetishism--Ancestor worship--Date
of Rig-Veda Hymns doubtful--Obscurity of the Hymns--Difficulty
of interpreting the real character of Veda--Not primitive but
sacerdotal--The moral purity not innocence but refinement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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