For the better understanding of the idolatry, mode of life, and customs of the Indians of Peru it will be necessary for us to divide those times into two epochs. We shall narrate how they lived before the time of the Yncas, and afterwards we shall give an account of the government of those kingdoms by the Yncas, that the one may not be confounded with the other, and that neither the customs nor the gods of the period before the Yncas may be attributed to the Ynca period. It must be understood, then, that in the first epoch some of the Indians were little better than tame beasts, and others much worse than wild beasts. To begin with their gods, we must relate that they were in unison with the other signs of their folly and dulness, both as regards their number and the vileness of the things they adored. For each province, each nation, each house had its gods, different one from another; for they thought that a stranger's god, occupied with some one else, could not attend to them, but only their own. Thus it was that they came to have such a variety of gods, and so many that they could not be counted. And as they did not understand, like the gentile Romans, how to make ideal gods, as Hope, Victory, Peace, and such like, because they did not raise their thoughts to invisible things, they adored what they saw.