We meet with it in Nicaragua as well. Oviedo relates that Pedsarias Davila, governor of the province in 1538, charged F. Bobadilla, of the Order of St. Dominic, to inquire into the spiritual condition of those Indians whom his predecessors boasted of having converted in great numbers to Catholicism, which he, Davila, with good reason, doubted. The monk accordingly examined the natives, and Oviedo has transmitted several dialogues which show us the creed of the Nicaraguans a few years after the Spanish conquest. The following bears directly on our subject:--
"_Question by Bobadilla._ Who has created heaven and earth, the stars and moon, man and all else?
"_Answer (by the Cacique Avogoaltegoan)._ Tamagastad and Cippatoval, the one is a man, the other a woman.
"_A._ No one. On the contrary, all men and women descend from them.
"_A._ I do not know, but the Indians descend from Tamagastad and Cippatoval.
"_Q._ Are there any gods greater than they?
"_A._ No; we believe them to be the greatest.
"_Q._ Are they gods of flesh or wood, or any other substance?
"_A._ They are of flesh; they are man and woman, brown in colour like us Indians. They walked on earth dressed like us, and ate what Indians eat.
"_A._ In heaven, according to what our ancestors have told us.
"_A._ I only know that it is their home. I do not know how they were born, for they have no father nor mother.
"_A._ They eat what Indians eat, for maize and all food proceeds from the place where dwell the _teotes_ (gods).
"_Q._ Do you know, or have you heard tell, whether since the _teotes_ created the world it has been destroyed?
"_A._ Before the present race existed, the world was destroyed by water and all became sea.
"_A._ They were in heaven, for that was their dwelling, and afterwards they came down to earth and re-made all things as they now are, and we are their issue.
"_Q._ You say the whole world was destroyed by water. Did not some individuals save themselves in a canoe, or by some other way?
"_A._ No. All the world was drowned, according to what my ancestors told me."
The great god Tamagastad, of whom mention is made in this dialogue, is evidently the same as Thomagata, the awful-visaged spirit of fire, whose cultus was anterior among a portion of the Muyscas at Tunga and Sogamosa to that of Botchica. This, therefore, brings us back to the religious and cosmogonic traditions of the very advanced civilization in the high table-land of Cundinamarca, and we are led to recognize in the Flood-legend of Botchica a certain echo of the so universally spread tradition of the Deluge of early ages, mingled with the memory of a local event, from which the ancestors of the Muyscas had suffered at the time of their first settlement. Neither must we forget that Botchica and his wicked spouse, who brought about the inundation of Cundinamarca, are no other than personifications of the sun and moon, as were the pair Manco-Capac and Mama-Oello in the empire of the Incas. "The moon of Peru is gentle and beneficent," well observes M. Girard de Realle, "she helps her brother and husband in the work of civilization; on the plateau of Cundinamarca, on the contrary, she is a witch, a veritable deity of night and of evil, worthily represented by the lugubrious owl."