The great god Tamagastad, of whom mention is made in this dialogue, is evidently the same as Thomagata, the awful-visaged spirit of fire, whose cultus was anterior among a portion of the Muyscas at Tunga and Sogamosa to that of Botchica. This, therefore, brings us back to the religious and cosmogonic traditions of the very advanced civilization in the high table-land of Cundinamarca, and we are led to recognize in the Flood-legend of Botchica a certain echo of the so universally spread tradition of the Deluge of early ages, mingled with the memory of a local event, from which the ancestors of the Muyscas had suffered at the time of their first settlement. Neither must we forget that Botchica and his wicked spouse, who brought about the inundation of Cundinamarca, are no other than personifications of the sun and moon, as were the pair Manco-Capac and Mama-Oello in the empire of the Incas. "The moon of Peru is gentle and beneficent," well observes M. Girard de Realle, "she helps her brother and husband in the work of civilization; on the plateau of Cundinamarca, on the contrary, she is a witch, a veritable deity of night and of evil, worthily represented by the lugubrious owl." Some have believed themselves to have discovered the Flood-tradition among the Peruvians, but careful criticism disproves this. For it only arises from an unintelligent interpretation of the myth of Viracocha or Con, god of waters, or more precisely, the personification of the element, as shown by the legend which represents him as having no bones, and yet stretching himself out afar, lowering the mountains and filling up the valleys in his course. He was the chief god of the Aymaras, who, according to them, had created the earth; and who, issuing from Lake Titicaca, to manifest himself on earth, had assembled the earliest men at Tiahuanaco. Later, the official cosmogony of the Incas led to his undergoing an euhemeristic transformation diminishing his religious importance; and he is represented as one of the sons of the Sun, come upon earth to dwell among and civilize mankind, a younger brother of Manco-Capac. Now it is under the government of Viracocha that the Deluge is placed by the writers of very recent date, who mention this event, of which the native tradition was unknown to the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, to Montesinos, Balboa, Gomara, F. Oliva, and, in short, to all authorities of any weight in Peruvian matters. MacCulloch does indeed quote Acosta and Herrera, but these authors never speak of a Deluge involving all humanity; they only say that Viracocha gave laws to the earliest men at the close of a primordial period anterior to their creation, when the whole surface of the earth had been under water.