Coricancha

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In May of 1950 the ground under Cusco moved, and the churches came down. Vaults split, bell towers dropped into the naves, and the great baroque pile of Santo Domingo cracked along its length. When the dust settled and the friars looked at what the shaking had opened, they found something under the failed plaster of their convent: a wall of dark andesite, laid without mortar, the joints so tight a knife blade would not enter them, curving in a long smooth apse that no seismic wave had troubled. The colonial building had shifted on its foundations. The foundations had not moved at all. They belonged to the sanctuary the Inca called Qorikancha, the golden enclosure, and they had been standing at the center of the Andean world for five hundred years before the church was set on top of them.

The wall is the most photographed stone in the Andes. It is a retaining wall of graded courses, tapering inward as it rises, its face ground to a single continuous curve — the only major curved surface in Inca building, and the one on which the Dominican order anchored the church of Santo Domingo after the conquest. The image of the baroque nave rising directly from the Inca masonry is the conquest of Peru compressed into a single object. But the wall came first, and it is worth beginning with what it enclosed before the gold was torn from it.

The golden enclosure

The name is Quechua: quri, worked gold, and kancha, a walled precinct or compound. Qorikancha, which the Spanish wrote Coricancha, is the golden enclosure — a kancha of the highest rank, a wall ringing a central court around which stood a row of single-room shrines. It sat at the lower, eastern end of Cusco, the capital the Inca called Qosqo, near the confluence of the city’s two canalized rivers, at the point the Inca reckoned the tail of the puma whose body the city was laid out to trace.

The enclosure was older than its imperial form. The chronicles, and the mestizo author Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in his Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609), record earlier names for the shrine — Intikancha, “the enclosure of the Sun,” and Inti Wasi, “the house of the Sun” — from a foundational period of the Cusco dynasty, when the sanctuary belonged first to Inti, the Sun and divine ancestor of the Sapa Inca. In the reconstruction that follows the official king-list, the temple took its mature, gold-sheathed shape under Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the ninth ruler, who from around 1438 rebuilt Cusco as the capital of an expanding state and made its temple the architectural argument for that state’s claim. It is Pachacuti to whom the chroniclers attribute the sheathing of the walls, the garden of gold, and the seating of the royal dead within the enclosure.

That attribution has to be held at arm’s length. Everything known of the working temple reaches the record through Spanish, mestizo, and indigenous writers who set it down a century or more after the events they describe — Pedro de Cieza de León, Juan de Betanzos, Garcilaso, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (completed 1653), and the Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. The king-list chronology itself is contested against the archaeological record, which does not divide the growth of Inca Cusco as cleanly among named rulers as the dynastic account would have it. The precise crediting of the temple to a single builder is a claim of the chroniclers, read critically, not a fixed date. What is not in doubt is the finished thing: the masonry survives, the finest the Inca produced, in the imperial coursed style reserved for the highest sacred building — the same idiom that distinguishes the royal estate at Machu Picchu, the terraced temple-fortress of Ollantaytambo, and the vast fitted blocks of Sacsayhuamán above the city.

The house of the powers

What every Spaniard who entered remembered was the gold. The walls of the principal hall were sheathed, cornice to floor, in plates of hammered gold, nailed in a band across the ashlar so that when the sun rose over the eastern cordillera the light ran along the metal and the whole precinct seemed for a moment to catch fire from within. The wealth the first observers described was, in the phrasing that comes down through the chronicles, beyond belief. In the Andean reckoning gold was not ornament. It was qori, the sweat of the Sun, the residue of his heat left in the ground, as silver was the tears of the Moon; to line the temple in gold was to line it with the substance of the god himself. The account of the metal and its meaning is given in Mark Cartwright’s entry on the Coricancha for the World History Encyclopedia.

Beyond the hall lay an enclosed garden that the chroniclers describe as a marvel of goldsmithing: a field of maize reproduced at life size in gold and silver — stalk, leaf, and cob — and among it life-size llamas with their herders, and jaguars, birds, and even insects worked in precious metal. It was a permanent metallic harvest, an offering-in-perpetuity to Inti that did not depend on the rains. Whatever the exact inventory, the idea is legible: the temple held a garden that could not wither, the sun’s own field made of the sun’s own metal.

The enclosure was a model of the visible sky rendered as a house. The largest chamber belonged to Inti, and around him the row of shrines held the powers of the heavens: Mama Killa, the Moon, Inti’s sister and consort, whose hall was lined not in gold but in beaten silver, the cold light against the hot; Illapa, the conjoined power of thunder, lightning, and the bolt who held the rain; the rainbow that arched between earth and sky; and the stars, among them the bright day-star Venus. Set above this celestial family, honored apart rather than housed among them, was Wiraqocha, the creator who made the world at Lake Titicaca and then walked north and vanished over the sea. The Inca did not separate astronomy from theology; the chambers of Qorikancha ranked the powers as a court is ranked around a throne, and the deities who lived in them were the same lights that crossed the Cusco horizon.

The chief image of Inti was not the wall but a single object: the Punchao, the word for the day or the high midday sun, worked as a young seated child of gold, crowned and fitted with ear-spools, set so the rising sun struck it and the polished metal threw the light back into the chamber. The Punchao was hollow. Its cavity held a paste compounded from the burned vital organs of the dead rulers, so that the living essence of every Sapa Inca was gathered into the body of the sun-child — the dynasty folded into its god, the noon disk carried out each dawn to meet the sun that was its father.

The colonial church and convent of Santo Domingo raised directly on the tapering ashlar and curved retaining wall of the Qorikancha, Cusco. Brian Jeffery Beggerly, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The royal dead and the ceque

Qorikancha was also the house of the ancestors. The mummified bodies — the mallqui — of the dead Sapa Incas and their queens were kept seated within the enclosure, tended by attendants, brought out at the solstices, dressed, fed, and consulted, their deeds recited before the living court. A dead Inca did not relinquish his place: his lineage maintained his body and his estate in perpetuity, and the great festivals seated the preserved dead among the heavenly powers as members of the court who happened to have died. The enclosure was where that logic touched the sky. Here the aqllakuna and mamakuna, the women dedicated to the cult, wove fine cloth and brewed the maize beer for the offerings; and here at the June solstice festival of Inti Raymi the Sapa Inca, Inti’s living son, kindled the sacrificial fire by catching the sun’s rays in a concave mirror, so that the new flame came down out of the sky itself.

From this single point the sacred order of the whole valley was drawn. Radiating outward from the Qorikancha ran the ceque system — a set of conceptual sightlines, ceques, from the Quechua siq’i, a line or mark, grouped into the four quarters whose name the empire bore, Tawantinsuyu, the four parts united. The lines were strung with huacas: springs, worked stones, fields, bridges, tombs, and crossings, places where the sacred concentrated, each in the keeping of an assigned kin group who tended it in turn. The count that comes down from the colonial record is about forty-one or forty-two ceques carrying more than three hundred and twenty-eight huacas — the figure is given as uncertain, since it rests on a single reconstruction. That reconstruction is the great inventory set down from Andean informants in the sixteenth century and preserved in fullest form by Bernabé Cobo, recovered for modern scholarship by the ethnohistorians R. Tom Zuidema and Brian Bauer.

Zuidema read the catalog not as a map alone but as a calendar laid over the ground. The number 328 is close to twelve sidereal lunar months — the time the moon takes to return to the same star — and close to the span of the year across which the Pleiades stand above the Cusco horizon; if each huaca answered to a day, the ceque system encoded a lunar-and-stellar count walked and worshiped rather than written down, a calendar whose keeper was the kin group responsible for each line. Working with the archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni, Zuidema argued that solar observations sighted from the Qorikancha fixed the solstices and the sun’s zenith passages against this count. The enclosure was the instrument’s origin: the point from which the lines were drawn and the sun observed.

Along those same lines the empire coordinated its great offerings. The most solemn was the capacocha, in which the finest goods, and — at the highest and rarest register, a fact attested not by the chroniclers alone but by archaeology on the frozen summits of the high peaks — chosen children were carried out from the center to the shrines of the mountains. It is named here soberly and once, at the register of the historical and archaeological record, as one function of the hub the temple formed: the point from which the sanctity of the land was surveyed, and to which its powers were gathered back.

The gold torn off

The gold made the enclosure the first target of the conquest. After Francisco Pizarro seized the Sapa Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 and set the ransom — a room to be filled once with gold and twice with silver — much of the treasure was drawn from the Qorikancha. Envoys sent down from the temple stripped the plates from the walls, carried them north over the highland road, and they were melted into ingots through 1533 and parceled out in shares; the garden of golden maize went the same way, into the furnace. Atahualpa was executed in the middle of that year despite the ransom paid. When the Spanish took Cusco the sanctuary was despoiled and its images seized; the Punchao itself was eventually carried off, and after passing through later hands its trail is lost.

The stripped enclosure passed to the Dominican order, which raised the church and convent of Santo Domingo directly upon and within the surviving Inca masonry — the baroque church anchored to the tapering ashlar and set on the great curved retaining wall of the sun temple. The extirpation of idolatries pursued the cult the temple had anchored, and the sacred geography of the ceque lines was overwritten, on the ground, by a Christian city. The full account of the conquest and the breaking of the imperial religion belongs to the Inca as a people and a polity; what the enclosure itself records is narrower and sharper — a specific wealth carried to a specific furnace, and a specific church set on the wall it could not replace.

A restored interior chamber of the Qorikancha, the fitted ashlar and trapezoidal niches of the Inca sun-temple now open onto the Dominican cloister. Jorge Láscar, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Stone that outlasted the church

Twice the colonial building came down, and twice the stone beneath it did not. The earthquake of 1650 leveled much of Spanish Cusco and wrecked the first convent; the curved Inca wall stood. The earthquake of 1950 brought down more than half the city, Santo Domingo among it, and again the curved wall held — and this time the shaking exposed lengths of Inca masonry that had been hidden for four centuries behind colonial plaster. The rebuilding that followed deliberately opened the sun-temple to view: the trapezoidal niches of the original chambers were cleared and restored, and the fitted walls that had been buried in the fabric of the convent were left standing bare. Mass is said in the church above; the swept, empty chambers of the sun open onto the cloister below. The two structures are fused at the foundation into a single standing object — Andean stone bearing a European nave that could not have stood without it.

The site sits at roughly 3,400 meters, within the World Heritage City of Cuzco that UNESCO inscribed in 1983 for its Inca and colonial fabric together. The gold is gone and the mummies are gone and the Punchao was carried off the map; the ceque lines survive as a catalog on paper and a problem for scholars rather than a living geography. But the reverence the sun-temple once crowned did not end with the state cult it housed. Older and lower than Inti in the Andean world was Pachamama, the earth-mother who must be fed, and she is fed still — in the despacho offerings and the August rites of the living Quechua and Aymara, woven now through Catholic devotion, in the same valley where the golden enclosure keeps its lower courses beneath the church that replaced it.

→ Related: Inti · Viracocha · Pachamama · Mama Quilla · Illapa · Cusco · Lake Titicaca · Pachacamac · The Inca · The Quechua · The Aymara