Illapa

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High over the plateau, in the black afternoon of the rainy season, the whole sky performs one action and is heard as three. A man in a coat of gold turns to throw. He carries a sling, the braided waraq’a that any herdboy on the grass carries against foxes, and he has loaded it not with a stone but with water — water dipped from the river of stars that arches over the plateau at night. He whirls it once and lets it fly at a great jar he keeps in the sky, and the jar breaks. The crack of the sling is the thunder. The flash of his turning garment is the lightning. The water spilling from the shattered vessel is the rain, and the hail with it. One gesture, and the storm is made. The man is Illapa, and among the powers the Inca set over the world he was not the greatest — the sun outranked him, and the creator stood above the sun — but on a plateau where a failed rainy season empties a valley, he was, for the farmer bent over the terraces, the one most worth asking.

The word that is also the god

Illapa is a word before he is a person. In Quechua illapa names the thing itself — the lightning-flash, the thunderclap, the bolt that falls — so that the deity and the phenomenon share a single stretch of the language, and to say the god’s name is to say the weather he makes. He is written also as Ilyap’a and Apu Illapu, lord lightning. He is Chuquiylla or Chuqui Illa, the shining lance; he is Catuilla and Katoylla; he is Intiillapa, sun-lightning, when the flash is thought of as fire fallen out of the day-sky. On the Pacific coast the same power was called Libiac. He is not, in the strict sense, one figure with one hometown. He is the storm as it was known the length of the mountains, and the names are the dialects of a shared sky.

Almost everything that can be said of him as a system reaches the present through the conquest that ended his open cult. The Inca kept no alphabetic writing, and the priesthood that held the liturgy in memory and in khipu was broken in the decades after 1532; the textual Illapa is therefore a colonial composition, set down by Spanish and mestizo authors writing under Christian rule and read here critically. The fullest single account is the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo’s Historia del Nuevo Mundo, completed in 1653. Cobo ranks the Thunder among the highest powers of the state cult — the greatest, in his ordering, after the creator and the Sun — and gives him under a cluster of names, Chuquiilla, Catuilla, Intiillapa, the same divided naming the other sources show. He describes a temple of the Thunder in the Totocacha district of Cusco holding a golden statue that the ninth ruler, Pachacuti, is said to have made and named Intiillapa, taking the god as a brother and carrying him along in war. And he sets down the figure the Inca imagined in the sky: a man formed of stars with a war-club in one hand and a sling in the other, dressed in bright robes that gave off the splendor of lightning when he turned to loose the sling, the crack of it making the thunder when he wished the water to fall.

Cobo is late, and he is a priest, and the shape he gives the pantheon owes something to the creed he brought to it. That his three names might mean three gods, or one god in a genuine triad of flash, crack, and bolt, or simply one god under a run of epithets, is a question the sources do not settle and scholars still divide over; a colonial cleric was not a neutral witness to the inner arithmetic of a religion he was helping to dismantle. The safe reading holds the number open. What the sources agree on is firmer: the Thunder stood third in the imperial ordering, below Viracocha the maker and below Inti the sun, and above Mama Quilla the moon. Third place in a state theology is a serious place. It set the weather-lord immediately beneath the two powers on which the ruling house grounded its legitimacy, and above the luminary that kept the calendar — which is to say, it ranked the rain just under the dynasty’s own ancestor.

The storm-power ran deeper in the Andes than Cusco, and older. Long before the Inca built their pantheon the highland cultures had raised a radiant sky-figure gripping a weapon in each hand — the staff-bearing deity carved on the great gateway at Tiwanaku, above the southern lake, stands somewhere behind every later Andean image of an armed lord of the sky. In the northern highlands the thunder answered under another name entirely: Catequil, or Apocatequil, a lightning-huaca whose oracle at Porcón was among the most consulted in the north until Spanish friars destroyed it. Catequil is often read as a cousin or a mask of Illapa, and the equation is tempting, but the two are attested in different regions and different chronicles, and the honest course is to hold them near without flatly merging them. The Inca did not invent the thunder. They inherited a power the mountains had worshipped for a very long time, and gave it a rank.

The river of stars and the broken jar

The core of Illapa is not a biography but a working account of where rain comes from, run on the visible sky. Its first term is the Milky Way. To the Andean sky-watchers the broad band of light was Mayu, the celestial river, and in the Smithsonian’s account of that cosmology it was “the source of all water on earth”. Earth and sky were one circulating system: the water running in the rivers of the ground was the same water running overhead in the river of stars, and the two answered each other across the year. Illapa is the hand that moves the water between them. He goes to the Mayu and draws its water up into a great jar — an urpu, the wide-bellied vessel of Andean storage — and the jar is not his to keep. He gives it to his sister the moon to hold. When the season turns and the fields below need water, he whirls his sling and looses a stone at the jar, and the crack of the sling with the breaking of the vessel is the thunder, the glitter of his garment as he turns is the lightning, and the water pouring from the shattered urpu is the rain and the hail.

He is figured to match the act. He belongs to the hanan pacha, the upper world, and the sources describe an imposing man standing in the sky in a shining coat of gold and precious stones, carrying the waraq’a, the braided sling, in one hand and in the other a golden makana, the war-club — the sign of his force. He is celestial herder and celestial soldier at once, the two vocations of a man who lives high and defends what is his; the sling that scatters foxes from a flock is the same sling that cracks the sky. His household is told within the weather rather than through any fixed dynastic line. His sister keeps his water, and in the tellings the chroniclers preserved that sister is Mama Quilla, the silver moon, into whose care the jar is given until the moment to break it comes. His proper dwelling was never really a walled room; it was the mountaintops, where the storms are born and the first rain falls, and where the peak-lords keep the snows that feed the rivers. The thunder lived where the weather lived.

He kept a house in the capital all the same. Cobo’s Totocacha temple and the shrine-lists of Cusco place the Thunder among the huacas of the sacred city, and his image is reported to have stood in the Coricancha, the gold-sheathed Temple of the Sun at the center of Cusco, alongside the images of the Sun and the Moon — the weather set in gold beside the two luminaries. The sacred geography of the capital, the ceque system of sight-lines radiating from the Coricancha and strung with shrines, gathered the Thunder into its count of holy places along with the rest of the sky. But the walled image was the smaller part of him. The larger part was overhead, jar in hand, waiting.

The god of the drought

What made Illapa beloved was not his rank but his usefulness, and the two did not point the same way. The Sun was the ancestor of the ruling dynasty, the god of the state and of the Sapa Inca who called himself the son of the Sun; the solar cult was, in a real administrative sense, a department of empire. The Thunder was closer to the ground. He was the power on whom highland farming actually depended, the giver of the rain without which the terraces cracked and the maize failed, and in the common cult — the devotion of the ordinary farmer, not the royal solar liturgy — he was among the most loved of all the gods. He was, above everything, the god of the drought: the one processed to, sung to, and fed when the rains did not come.

To live under such a power was to stand in a relation of ayni, reciprocity. Rain was not automatic. It was given, and being given it had to be asked for, and being asked for it had to be answered with an offering; the exchange between the living and the sacred ran both ways, and a season of water was a debt as much as a gift. When the season failed the aim of the rites was to move the god — to make him notice, and to make him pity. There were dances and chanted supplications, processions and festivals, and the offering of llamas, the standard currency of Andean devotion. And there was a sharper, stranger measure that Cobo records: in a hard drought black dogs were tied up and left without food or water, so that their howling and their suffering would rise to the sky and stir the storm-lord’s compassion, the animals’ misery enlisted to bend a god toward mercy. At the imperial extreme the state could reach for its gravest and rarest offering, the capacocha, the qhapaq hucha, directed in a great emergency toward the weather and the high peaks; that most solemn of Andean rites belongs to the account of the state cult and is treated there, and is recorded here only as the historians and archaeologists record it, soberly and at the public register.

The bolt itself was holy and dangerous, and its touch marked whatever it fell on. A place struck by lightning became sacred ground, set apart. A person struck and not killed did not walk away as before: he or she had been touched by the god and had lived, and the survival was a summons — such a one could be set apart to become a ritual specialist, a healer and a reader of the hidden, carrying the storm in the body ever after. This was not an Inca peculiarity but a deep Andean grammar of lightning that reached back long before Cusco and reaches forward past the conquest; the essays gathered by John Staller and Brian Stross in Lightning in the Andes and Mesoamerica trace that unbroken thread from the pre-Inca storm-powers to the lightning-marked shaman of the present Andes. In this world to be struck by the bolt was to be moved toward the sacred. The scar was a credential.

The saint who kept the thunder

Then the sky changed masters, and did not. When the Spanish under Francisco Pizarro seized the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, the empire of Tawantinsuyu began to come apart; Atahualpa was executed in 1533, and the gold that sheathed the Coricancha — the temple where the Thunder’s image had stood beside the Sun and the Moon — was torn from the walls to fill the ransom room and melted into bullion. In the decades that followed, the campaigns to extirpate the old religion hunted the huacas the length of the Andes, pulled down shrines, and burned the sacred bundles; Catequil’s northern oracle at Porcón was one casualty among thousands. The apparatus of the state cult was dismantled. But the rain-god was harder to erase than a temple, because he was not, in the end, a building. He was the weather, and the weather went on happening.

He was not so much erased as re-clothed. The conquistadors carried into every battle the war-cry of their patron, Saint James the Greater — Santiago! — shouted at the moment the firearms went off, and the Andean people who heard the shout and the crack of the guns heard thunder, and saw in the saint on his white horse, sword raised, arriving out of the smoke of battle, a figure they already knew. Santiago’s feast falls on the twenty-fifth of July, deep in the Andean dry season, when the first thought turns to the rains ahead; he rode a white horse across the sky exactly as the thunder-lord had always ridden it. The saint the Spanish sent to break the old god became the old god’s new body. What the extirpation could not do — kill the thunder — was undone by the very saint sent to do it. Illapa did not die under the conquest. He changed his name.

He is worshipped under it still. Across the highlands of Peru and Bolivia the storm-lord is Santiago, Tata Santiago, patron of the herds and of the rain that fills the furrows, celebrated at the July festival and turned to for the healing and the reading of hidden things that were always the province of the lightning-struck. Among the Quechua and the Aymara of the plateau this is not a folk memory of a dead god but a living devotion, present-tense, kept by people who are wholly Christian and wholly Andean in the same breath and without contradiction — of a piece with the veneration of Pachamama the earth-mother, who is still fed the first of every cup, and of the mountain lords who are still named and still asked for water. When the sky cracks over the fields the old reflex still goes up under the new name. The name is Christian. The gesture is older than the conquest.

The scholarly reception has spent a century reading the chroniclers against the ground. Cobo’s seventeenth-century Historia remains the fullest single window onto the pantheon, and it is also late, Christian in its framing, and given to arrangements that flatter the recorder’s own creed; it is trusted for its detail and held at arm’s length for its theology. The ceque system and the shrine-lists of Cusco, mapped shrine by shrine by later archaeology from the colonial reports, locate the Thunder concretely among the huacas of the capital and confirm that a power the empire ranked third had a real place in its sacred geography. And the anthropology of the living Andes, following the lightning-marked specialist from the highland villages back through the record, closes the distance between the god Cobo described and the saint the herders name today. Read together, the late chronicle, the mapped shrines, and the living cult give three angles on one figure who was never only in any of them.

The empire that ranked him is four centuries gone. Its sun-cult was banned and driven underground, its creator’s temples pulled down, its golden Thunder-statue melted like the sheets of the Coricancha into anonymous metal. The thunder kept working. Each rainy season it still stacks black over the peaks in the early afternoon, and when the sky finally splits, a herder on the high grass still names the one who split it — a warrior in a bright coat slinging water out of the river of stars, breaking a jar of rain above the fields. The god the Inca placed third was the one the plateau could least afford to lose, and of all the powers of that sky he is the one it never did.

Santiago on his white horse, sword raised, in the colonial Cusco-school manner — the saint whose galloping hooves the Andes heard as thunder and whose blade they read as lightning, and under whose July feast the old storm-lord is worshipped still. Cuzco School, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The arid altiplano between Sicuani and Ayaviri, southern Peru, at about 3,900 meters — the highland world whose harvest turned on the rain the thunder-lord was asked, in the dry years, to send. Maurice Chédel, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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