The Sun is by many believed to have taken the previous place of Na-pi in religion; or perhaps Na-pi is the Sun.  However, he is still separately addressed in prayer.  The Sun receives presents of furs and so forth; a finger, when the prayer is for life, has been offered to him.  Fetishism probably shows itself in gifts to a great rock.  There is daily prayer, both to the Sun and to Na-pi.  Women institute Medicine Lodges, praying, ‘Pity me, Sun.  You have seen my life.  You know that I am pure.’  ’We look on the Medicine Lodge woman as you white people do on the Roman Catholic Sisters.’  Being ‘virtuous in deed, serious, and clean-minded,’ the Medical Lodge woman is in spiritual rapport with Na-pi and the Sun.  To this extent, at least, Blackfoot religion is an ethical influence.

The creed seems to be a nascent polytheism, subordinate to Na-pi as supreme Maker, and to the personified Sun.  As Blackfoot ghosts are ‘vaporous, ineffectual’ for good, there seems to be nothing like ancestor worship.

These two cults and beliefs, Pawnee and Blackfoot, may be regarded as fairly well authenticated examples of un-Christianised American religion among races on the borderland of agriculture and the chase.  It would be difficult to maintain that ghost-worship or ancestor-worship is a potent factor in the evolution of the deathless Ti-ra-wa or the immortal Creator Na-pi, who has nothing of the spirit about him, especially as ghosts are not worshipped.[12]

Let us now look at the Supreme Being of a civilised American people.  There are few more interesting accounts of religion than Garcilasso de la Vega’s description of faith in Peru.  Garcilasso was of Inca parentage on the spindle side; he was born in 1540, and his book, taken from the traditions of an uncle, and aided by the fragmentary collections of Father Blas Valera, was published in 1609.  In Garcilasso’s theory the original people of Peru, Totemists and worshippers of hills and streams, Earth and Sea, were converted to Sun worship by the first Inca, a child of the Sun.  Even the new religion included ancestor-worship and other superstitions.  But behind Sun worship was the faith in a Being who ’advanced the Sun so far above all the stars of heaven.’[13] This Being was Pachacamac, ’the sustainer of the world.’  The question then arises, Is Pachacamac a form of the same creative being whom we find among the lowest savages; or is he the result of philosophical reflection?  The latter was the opinion of Garcilasso.  ‘The Incas and their Amautas’ (learned class) ’were philosophers.’[14]

‘Pacha,’ he says, = universe, and ‘cama’ = soul.  Pachacamac, then, is Anima Mundi.  ’They did not even take the name of Pachacamac into their mouths,’ or but seldom and reverently, as the Australians will not, in religious matters, mention Darumulun.  Pachacamac had no temple, ’but they worshipped him in their hearts.’  That he was the Creator appears in an earlier writer, cited