“Ere sun and moon was made, Viracocha, the White One, rose from the bosom of Lake Titicaca, and presided over the erection of those wondrous cities whose ruins still dot its islands and western shores, and whose history is totally lost in the night of time."[2]

He constructed the sun and moon and created the inhabitants of the earth.  These latter attacked him with murderous intent (the comet assailed the sun?); but “scorning such unequal contest he manifested his power by hurling the lightning on the hill-sides and consuming the forests,” whereupon the creatures he had created humbled themselves before him.  One of Viracocha names was At-achuchu.  He civilized the Peruvians, taught them arts and agriculture and religion; they called him “The teacher of all things.” He came from the east and disappeared in the Western Ocean.  Four civilizers followed him who emerged from the cave

[1.  “Popular Science Monthly,” October, 1879, p, 799.

2.  Brinton’s; “Myths of the New World,” p. 192.]

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Pacarin Tampu, the House of Birth.[1] These four brothers were also called Viracochas, white men.

Here we have the White One coming from the east, hurling his lightning upon the earth and causing a conflagration; and afterward civilized men emerged from a cave.  They were white men; and it is to these cave-born men that Peru owed its first civilization.

Here is another and a more amplified version of the Peruvian legend: 

The Peruvians believed in a god called At-achuchu, already referred to, the creator of heaven and earth, and the maker of all things.  From him came the first man, Guamansuri.

This first mortal is mixed up with events that seem to refer to the Age of Fire.

He descended to the earth, and “there seduced the sister of certain Guachemines, rayless ones, or Darklings”; that is to say, certain Powers of Darkness, “who then possessed it.  For this crime they destroyed him.”  That is to say, the Powers of Darkness destroyed the light.  But not for ever.

“Their sister proved pregnant, and died in her labor, giving birth to two eggs,” the sun and moon.  “From these emerged the two brothers, Apocatequil and Piguerao.”

Then followed the same great battle, to which we have so many references in the legends, and which always ends, as in the case of Cain and Abel, in one brother slaughtering the other.  In this case, Apocatequil “was the more powerful.  By touching the corpse of his mother (the sun?) he brought her to life, he drove off and slew the Guachemines (the Powers of Darkness), and, directed by

[1.  Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 193.]

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At-achuchu, released the race of Indians from the soil by turning it up with a golden spade.”

That is to say, he dug them out from the cave in which they were buried.