Now, Christoval has got hold of a variant of Garcilasso’s narrative, which, in Garcilasso, has plenty of humour and human nature.  According to Christoval it was not the Prince, later Inca Uiracocha, who beheld the apparition, but the Inca Uiracocha’s son, Prince of Wales, as it were, of the period, later the Inca Yupanqui.

Garcilasso corrects Christoval.  Uiracocha saw the apparition, as Pere Acosta rightly says, and Yupanqui was not the son but the grandson of this Inca Uiracocha.[28] Uiracocha’s own son was Pachacutec, which simply means ‘Revolution,’ ’they say, by way of by-word Pachamcutin, which means “the world changes."’

Christoval’s form of the story is peculiarly gratifying in one way.  Yupanqui saw the apparition in a piece of crystal, ’the apparition vanished, while the piece of crystal remained.  The Inca took care of it, and they say that he afterwards saw everything he wanted in it.’  The apparition, in human form and in Inca dress, gave itself out for the Sun; and Yupanqui, when he came to the throne, ’ordered a statue of the Sun to be made, as nearly as possible resembling the figure he had seen in the crystal.’  He bade his subjects to ’reverence the new deity, as they had heretofore worshipped the Creator,’[29] who, therefore, was prior to Uiracocha.

Interesting as a proof of Inca crystal-gazing, this legend of Christoval’s cannot compete as evidence with Acosta and Garcilasso.  The reader, however, must decide as to whether he prefers Garcilasso’s unpropitiated Pachacamac, or Christoval’s Uiracocha, human sacrifices, and all.[30]

Mr. Tylor prefers the version of Christoval, making Pachacamac a title of Uiracocha.[31] He thinks that we have, in Inca religion, an example of ’a subordinate god’ (the Sun) ‘usurping the place of the supreme deity,’ ’the rivalry between the Creator and the divine Sun.’  In China, as we shall see, Mr. Tylor thinks, on the other hand, that Heaven is the elder god, and that Shang-ti, the Supreme Being, is the usurper.

The truth in the Uiracocha versus Pachacamac controversy is difficult to ascertain.  I confess a leaning toward Garcilasso, so truthful and so wonderfully accurate, rather than to the Spanish priest.  Christoval, it will be remarked, says that ’Chanca-Uiracocha was a huaca (sacred place) in Chuqui-chaca.’[32] Now Chuqui-chaca is the very place where, according to Garcilasso, the Inca Uiracocha erected a temple to ’his Uncle, the Apparition.’[33] Uiracocha, then, the deity who receives human sacrifice, would be a late, royally introduced ancestral god, no real rival of the Creator, who receives no sacrifice at all, and, as he was bearded, his name would be easily transferred to the bearded Spaniards, whose arrival the Inca Uiracocha was said to have predicted.  But to call several or all Spaniards by the name given to the Creator would be absurd.  Mr. Tylor and Mr. Markham do not refer to the passage in which Christoval obviously gets hold of a wrong version of the story of the apparition.