Generally, speaking, the sun was the great object of Peruvian idolatry during the dominion of the Incas. Its worship was the most solemn, and its temples the most splendid in their furniture and decorations, and the common people, no doubt, reverenced that luminary as their chief god.
Herrera mentions the circumstance that at one of the festivals, they exhibited three statues of the sun, each of which had a particular name, which as he translated them were Father and Lord Sun, the Son Sun, and the Brother Sun. He also says, “that at Chucuisaea, they worshipped an idol called Tangatanga, which they said was three and one.”
The Spanish writers consider this doctrine to have been stolen by the devil from Christianity, and imparted by him to this people. By this opinion they evidently declare its antiquity in Peru to have been greater than the time of the Spanish conquest.
Those writers and scholars who refuse to believe that the doctrine of the Trinity as taught in the Christian religion, was known during the patriarchal or judaical dispensations, and therefore will not allow that the trinity of the Peruvians had any reference to the dogma of Christianity, contend that their trinity was founded in those early corruptions of patriarchal history, in which men began to represent Adam, and his three sons; and Noah, and his three sons; as being triplicates of the same essential person, who originally was the universal father of the human race: and secondly, being triplicated in their three sons, who also were considered the fathers of mankind. They say therefore, Adam and Noah were each the father of three sons; and to the persons of the latter of these triads, by whose descendants the world was repeopled, the whole habitable earth was assigned in a threefold division. This matter, though it sometimes appears in an undisguised form, was usually wrapped up in the cloak of the most profound mystery. Hence instead of plainly saying, that the mortal who had flourished in the golden age and who was venerated as the universal demon father both of gods and men, was the parent of three sons, they were wont to declare, that the great father had wonderfully triplicated himself.
Pursuing this vein of mysticism, they contrived to obscure the triple division of the habitable globe among the sons of Noah, just as much as the characters of the three sons themselves. A very ancient notion universally prevailed that some such triple division had once taken place; and the hierophants when they had elevated Noah and his three sons to the rank of deity, proceeded to ring a variety of corresponding changes upon that celebrated threefold distribution. Noah was esteemed the universal sovereign of the world; but, when he branched out into three kings (i.e., triplicating himself into his three sons), that world was to be divided into three kingdoms, or, as they were sometimes styled, three worlds. To one of these kings was assigned the empire of heaven; to another, the empire of the earth, including the nether regions of Tartarus; to a third, the empire of the ocean.
So again, when Noah became a god, the attributes of deity were inevitably ascribed to him, otherwise, he would plainly have become incapable of supporting his new character: yet even in the ascription of such attributes, the genuine outlines of his history were never suffered to be wholly forgotten. He had witnessed the destruction of one world, the new creation (or regeneration) of another, and the oath of God that he would surely preserve mankind from the repetition of such a calamity as the deluge. Hence when he was worshipped as a hero-god, he was revered in the triple character of the destroyer, the creator, and the preserver. And when he was triplicated into three cognate divinities, were produced three gods, different, yet fundamentally the same, one mild though awful as the creator; another gentle and beneficent as the preserver; a third, sanguinary, ferocious, and implacable as the destroyer.[11]
The idea of a trinity was rather curiously developed amongst the Druids, especially amongst the Welsh. They used a number of triplicated sentences as summaries of matters relating to their religion, history, and science, in order that these things might be the more easily committed to memory and handed down to future generations. The triads were these:—
1. There are three primeval Unities, and more than one of each cannot exist:
One God;
One Truth;
One Point of Liberty, where all opposites equiponderate.