Garcilasso distinguishes between the beliefs of the tribes previous
to the rise of the Inca empire and the sun-worship of the Incas.
But it is plain, from Garcilasso's own account and from other
evidence, that under the Incas the older faiths and fetichisms
survived, in subordination to sun-worship, just as Pagan
superstitions survived in custom and folk-lore after the official
recognition of Christianity. Sun-worship, in Peru, and the belief
in a Supreme Creator there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico,
China and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise with the
lower beliefs, and to have been content to allow a certain amount
of bowing down in the temples of the elder faiths. According,
then, to Garcilasso's account of Peruvian totemism, "An Indian was
not looked upon as honourable unless he was descended from a
fountain, river,[4] or lake, or even from the sea, OR FROM A WILD
ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call
cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey ".[5] A certain amount
of worship was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts
and natural objects. Men offered up to their totems "what they
usually saw them eat".[6] On the seacoasts "they worshipped
sardines, skates, dog-fish, and, for want of larger gods,
crabs. . . . There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever,
that they did not worship as a god," including "lizards, toads and
frogs." Garcilasso (who says they ate the fish they worshipped)
gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the beginning
men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one human
stock from another. "The one desired to have a god different from
the other. . . . They only thought of making one different from
another." When the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic
stocks, they pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed
"splendour and beauty" as contrasted with "the ugliness and filth of