from remote parts of the land; a circumstance which suggests the idea,
that the worship of this Great Spirit, though countenanced, perhaps, by
their accommodating policy, did not originate with the Peruvian
princes.7

The deity whose worship they especially inculcated, and which they
never failed to establish wherever their banners were known to penetrate,
was the Sun. It was he, who, in a particular manner, presided over the
destinies of man; gave light and warmth to the nations, and life to the
vegetable world; whom they reverenced as the father of their royal
dynasty, the founder of their empire; and whose temples rose in every
city and almost every village throughout the land, while his altars
smoked with burnt offerings,--a form of sacrifice peculiar to the
Peruvians among the semi-civilized nations of the New World.8

Besides the Sun, the Incas acknowledged various objects of worship in
some way or other connected with this principal deity. Such was the
Moon, his sister-wife; the Stars, revered as part of her heavenly train,-
though the fairest of them, Venus, known to the Peruvians by the name
of Chasca, or the "youth with the long and curling locks," was adored as
the page of the Sun, whom he attends so closely in his rising and in his
setting. They dedicated temples also to the Thunder and Lightning,9 in
whom they recognized the Sun's dread ministers, and to the Rainbows
whom they worshipped as a beautiful emanation of their glorious
deity.10

In addition to these, the subjects of the Incas enrolled among their
inferior deities many objects in nature, as the elements, the winds, the
earth, the air, great mountains and rivers, which impressed them with
ideas of sublimity and power, or were supposed in some way or other to