TARASCAN RELIGION. The Tarascan Indians, speakers of a genetically unaffiliated language, created one of the major empires of pre-Conquest Mexico, rivaling and successfully repulsing the Aztec. Like the latter, they had a complex religious hierarchy, a priest-king, and a developed system of rites, myths, and religious legends. During and following the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, however, more than 90 percent of these people were destroyed in a holocaust of slaughter, disease, and slave labor. In the early twenty-first century about ninety thousand Indians (about two-thirds Tarascan speaking)—surrounded by non-Tarascans—live on in the high, cool, green Sierra Tarasca, where they subsist by various combinations of lumbering, arts and crafts, fishing, farming (mainly maize), and raising livestock. Immediate to moderately extended families are grouped into villages of several hundred to several thousand persons. Factional rivalries within the villages are exceeded by the nearly ubiquitous intervillage...