[1]
[Footnote 1: Garcilasso de La Vega, _Comentarios Reales_, Lib. ix, caps.
xiv, xv; Cieza de Leon, _Relacion_, MS. in Prescott, _Conquest of Peru_,
Vol. i, p. 329. The latter is the second part of Cieza de Leon.]
We need no longer entertain about such statements that suspicion or
incredulity which so many historians have thought it necessary to indulge
in. They are too generally paralleled in other American hero-myths to
leave the slightest doubt as to their reality, or as to their
significance. They are again the expression of the expected return of the
Light-God, after his departure and disappearance in the western horizon.
Modifications of what was originally a statement of a simple occurrence of
daily routine, they became transmitted in the limbeck of mythology to the
story of the beneficent god of the past, and the promise of golden days
when again he should return to the people whom erstwhile he ruled and
taught.
The Qquichuas expected the return of Viracocha, not merely as an earthly
ruler to govern their nation, but as a god who, by his divine power, would
call the dead to life. Precisely as in ancient Egypt the literal belief in
the resurrection of the body led to the custom of preserving the corpses
with the most sedulous care, so in Peru the cadaver was mummied and
deposited in the most secret and inaccessible spots, so that it should
remain undisturbed to the great day of resurrection.
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