Since The Natives Have Seen The Missionaries Arrive, They Imagine That Europe Is This Other Shore; And One Of Them Inquired With Great Simplicity Of Father Gili, Whether He Had There Seen The Great Amalivaca, The Father Of The Tamanacs, Who Had Covered The Rocks With Symbolic Figures.

These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings saved on the summit of a mountain,

And casting behind them the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief, are well worthy of attention. What the Tamanacs, and the tribes whose languages are analogous to the Tamanac tongue, now relate to us, they have no doubt learned from other people, who inhabited before them the same regions. The name of Amalivaca is spread over a region of more than five thousand square leagues; he is found designated as the father of mankind, or our great grandfather, as far as to the Caribbee nations, whose idiom approaches the Tamanac only in the same degree as the German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sanscrit. Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit, the Aged of Heaven, the invisible being, whose worship springs from that of the powers of nature, when nations rise insensibly to the consciousness of the unity of these powers; he is rather a personage of the heroic times, a man, who, coming from afar, lived in the land of the Tamanacs and the Caribs, sculptured symbolic figures upon the rocks, and disappeared by going back to the country he had previously inhabited beyond the ocean.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 705 of 777
Words from 191830 to 192125 of 211397