Ant. viii. 135).  In Vera Paz a god, called by some Chin and by others Cavial and Maran, taught it by committing the act with another god.  Some fathers gave their sons a boy to use as a woman, and if any other approached this pathic he was treated as an adulterer.  In Yucatan images were found by Bernal Diaz proving the sodomitical propensities of the people (Bancroft v. 198).  De Pauw (Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains, London, I77I) has much to say about the subject in Mexico generally:  in the northern provinces men married youths who, dressed like women, were forbidden to carry arms.  According to Gomara there were at Tamalpais houses of male prostitution; and from Diaz and others we gather that the pecado nefando was the rule.  Both in Mexico and in Peru it might have caused, if it did not justify, the cruelties of the Conquistadores.  Pederasty was also general throughout Nicaragua, and the early explorers found it amongst the indigenes of Panama.

We have authentic details concerning Le Vice in Peru and its adjacent lands, beginning with Cieza de Leon, who must be read in the original or in the translated extracts of Purchas (vol. v. 942, etc.), not in the cruelly castrated form preferred by the Council of the Hakluyt Society.  Speaking of the New Granada Indians he tells us that “at Old Port (Porto Viejo) and Puna, the Deuill so farre prevayled in their beastly Deuotions that there were Boyes consecrated to serue in the Temple; and at the times of their Sacrifices and Solemne Feasts, the Lords and principall men abused them to that detestable filthinesse;” i.e. performed their peculiar worship.  Generally in the hill-countries the Devil, under the show of holiness, had introduced the practice; for every temple or chief house of adoration kept one or two men or more which were attired like women, even from the time of their childhood, and spake like them, imitating them in everything; with these, under pretext of holiness and religion, principal men on principal days had commerce.  Speaking of the arrival of the Giants[FN#414] at Point Santa Elena, Cieza says (chap. lii.), they were detested by the natives, because in using their women they killed them, and their men also in another way.  All the natives declare that God brought upon them a punishment proportioned to the enormity of their offence.  When they were engaged together in their accursed intercourse, a fearful and terrible fire came down from Heaven with a great noise, out of the midst of which there issued a shining Angel with a glittering sword, wherewith at one blow they were all killed and the fire consumed them.[FN#415] There remained a few bones and skulls which God allowed to bide unconsumed by the fire, as a memorial of this punishment.  In the Hakluyt Society’s bowdlerisation we read of the Tumbez Islanders being “very vicious, many of them committing the abominable offence” (p. 24); also, “If by the advice of the Devil any Indian commit the abominable crime, it is thought little of and they call him a woman.”  In chapters lii. and lviii. we find exceptions.  The Indians of Huancabamba, “although so near the peoples of Puerto Viejo and Guayaquil, do not commit the abominable sin;” and the Serranos, or island mountaineers, as sorcerers and magiclans inferior to the coast peoples, were not so much addicted to sodomy.