ABSTRACT
The long discussion of Amerindian cosmology, ritual, and belief that follows is mediated by constant comparison with ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman paganism. Their mythology, worship, priestly structure, and temples provided the standard against which Las Casas measured the Indians. But this was no innocent comparison of modern and ancient religion. Less attention has been devoted to following up Arnaldo Momigliano's hints about the impact of antiquarianism on the shaping of the subsequent history of scholarship. John Selden was one of the great English polymaths of the first half of the seventeenth century, a lawyer and Member of Paliament who dominated scholarship on feudal and international law, medieval history, and the world of Biblical and post-Biblical Judaism. If the origin of idolatry lay in the corruption of Judaism, later heresies were, similarly, distortions of Christianity. From the beginning of Christianity various intellectual structures had been articulated to make sense of the prior flowering of sophisticated, erudite, and even virtuous pagans.
