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This article, which was originally delivered as a public lecture at University College, London, in 1937, is based partly on the author's own
observations in Peru and partly on facts supplied by Dr. Salaman's articles in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, and other sources. Among these Dr. Hopkins stresses a number which point to mechanisms with which the psycho-analyst is familiar, such as phallic symbols, myths which are birth-stories, survivals of totemism and expressions of neurotic anxiety. As an example of the first are notable the figurines of potato deities in which the eyes of the potato, realistically associated with that vegetable's fertility, are exaggerated, mutilated and treated grotesquely. The famous 'stone which cried blood' is as phallic as the Kaaba at Mecca; and the adjacent miles-long tunnel to the Temple of the Sun is remarkably like an oviduct. Birth myths crystallize around many Inca origins. Heroes spring out of a three-windowed temple, are planted by the sun-god on an island in Lake Titicaca or found a city on the spot where with one stroke they can drive a gold wedge into the earth. Among totem-animals the llama, so useful as a beast of burden, must prehistorically have been one; and we have an ancient description by the Spaniard, Cieza de Leon, of a gorgeous procession and a ceremony of spilling the creature's warm blood over potatoes. Tsudi, as late as 1847, tells how men divided in parties to fight so that the women might collect blood to inter in the fields. But there were no human sacrifices. Salaman had noted that 'the native mentality seems to be one in which fear, suspicion, cruelty, melancholy and resignation are the guiding forces.' He could only suppose that it was a heritage of times when their ancestors immigrated viâ the lowlands and were 'moulded by the terrors of the jungle'. But the analyst will suspect other sources of neurotic anxiety.
Author's Abstract.