The tradition of the apotheosis probably arose through the confluence of native and European beliefs and actions, rather than as simply a one-sided European creation or imposition. Indigenous understandings of the significance of white men originated not with Europeans but with native peoples themselves. Natives are on record as rejecting European claims, and they formed their own view independently. There is no evidence for an apotheosis in Mesoamerica or the Andes in the original sixteenth-century sources, especially those written at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival. The myth of Viracocha and the myth of Quetzalcoatl both reflect a retrospective view rather than one held at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival. Europeans channeled a life force that made them “more-than-human,” or “human-plus.” Both native peoples and Europeans interpreted their mutual contact in terms of their preexisting mythology. The traditional contrast between scientific, rational, modern Europeans, on the one hand, and myth-bound, irrational, premodern indigenous peoples, on the other, is entirely misleading. Both groups made interpretations based on reason and rational enquiry, and at the same time employed mythological explanations.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.