Inca Religion (Inti and Viracocha)

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At dawn in Cusco the Sapa Inca turned to the east and greeted his father. The light coming up over the eastern cordillera was Inti, the sun, and the man who greeted it ruled because he descended from it. Sacred kingship in the Andes was not a metaphor laid over politics; it was a genealogy. The Inca lineage held that it had issued from the sun, and the daily return of the sun over the mountains was, each morning, the renewal of that descent. Around this single claim the imperial religion of Tawantinsuyu was built — a cult of the sun anchored in a gold-walled temple at the center of the city, set within an older and stranger Andean order of sacred places, sacred lines, and ancestors who did not so much die as change their condition.

Inti, and the sun-descended king

Inti was the sun: warmth, the ripening of maize, the measure of the year. He was rendered as a disk of gold with a human face and radiating rays, and his great image in the capital, the Punchao, was a figure of worked gold whose hollow interior is reported to have held the ashes of dead rulers — the dynasty literally lodged inside the sun. He was a male sky-being whose sister and consort was Mama Killa, the moon, who governed the night, the months, and the festival calendar; their pairing set the rhythm of a society that watched both luminaries closely.

What distinguished Inti from the other powers of the Andean sky was his political charge. The reigning Inca was the Intip churin, the son of the sun, and the cult of Inti was therefore inseparable from the legitimacy of the man who sat on the throne. To worship the sun in the imperial manner was to affirm that the house of the Inca held a mandate written into the cosmos. This was a deliberately dynastic theology. As the empire expanded out of the Cusco valley after about 1438, the solar cult traveled with the armies and the administrators: provincial sun-temples, lands set aside to feed the cult, and a priesthood organized under a high priest of the sun extended the dynasty’s sky-father into newly absorbed territory. The sun was, in effect, a state.

Its central festival was Inti Raymi, the feast of the sun held at the June solstice — the depth of the southern winter, the moment the sun stands farthest north and then begins its return. The solstice was not an abstraction but an observed event: from fixed points in and around Cusco the priests watched the sun rise and set against marked horizon pillars, reading the turning of the year off the skyline. The return of the sun after its lowest passage was the empire’s most consequential annual reassurance, and the rite that accompanied it gathered the living court, the priesthood, and — as will become clear — the dead rulers as well.

Viracocha, the maker who withdrew

Above and behind the sun stood a different kind of power. Wiraqocha — Viracocha in the Spanish chroniclers — was the creator: the maker of the earth and sky, of the sun and moon and stars, and of humankind. The myths set his work at Lake Titicaca, in the high country toward Tiwanaku, where he is said to have brought forth the heavenly bodies and shaped a first race, then a second made from stone or clay, sending each people out to its appointed valley. Having ordered the world and taught the arts of living, he walked north and west across the land and, at the Ecuadorian coast near Manta, set out over the Pacific, promising one day to return.

The creator is a remote figure — a maker who, having made, withdraws and leaves the running of the world to the powers he set in the sky. He received reverence and a temple in Cusco, but not the dense apparatus of daily sacrifice that surrounded the sun; he was honored, in the chroniclers’ telling, in the heart as much as on the altar. This pairing of a distant high creator with an active, intervening solar deity is the structural spine of the imperial religion. Inti is near, dynastic, and addressed every dawn; Viracocha is first in rank, comprehensive, and largely silent.

The creator’s image had a long Andean prehistory. The front-facing figure carved on the Gate of the Sun at Tiwanaku, weeping rays and gripping a staff in each hand — the so-called Staff God of the Middle Horizon, diffused across the central Andes by Tiwanaku and Wari between roughly 600 and 1000 CE, with antecedents reaching back to the staff-bearing deity of Chavín — is widely taken to stand behind the later Inca conception of a radiant creator-and-sun complex. The Inca inherited an iconographic vocabulary far older than their own dynasty and bent it to a dynastic purpose. (The deity Viracocha is not to be confused with the eighth Inca ruler who bore the god’s name as a regnal title.)

The creator had a coastal counterpart and rival in prestige. On the central coast the great power was Pacha Kamaq, “the one who animates the world,” a creator-and-oracle of deep antiquity worshipped by the Lima, Wari, and Ychsma peoples long before the Inca arrived. When the empire absorbed his sanctuary it ranked him below Wiraqocha rather than displacing him, and the two were sometimes spoken of as versions of a single creating power — a syncretism that wrote the politics of conquest into theology. His oracle is treated in its own right at Pachacamac.

Beneath the creator and the sun ran a populous order of powers: Mama Killa the moon; Illapa, the thunder, who held rain, hail, and lightning and whose voice crossed the sky; the host of stars, among them the Pleiades, known as Qullqa, the “storehouse,” whose heliacal reappearance was watched as a sign for the coming harvest and the turning of the year (the Andean sky was read both for its bright constellations and for the dark cloud-shapes along the Milky Way, taken as celestial animals). And under all of it lay Pachamama, the earth, mother of fields and crops, addressed in the present tense of the planted ground. The cosmos was layered: Hanan Pacha, the world above, of the sky powers; Kay Pacha, the present world of the living; and Uku Pacha, the inner or lower world of the dead and the springs of life — a vertical order whose creatures, in the familiar shorthand, were the condor, the puma, and the serpent. For the wider field of offering and propitiation across Andean and other traditions, see sacrifice; for the reading of signs in sky and shrine, see divination and the Pleiades.

The huacas: a landscape that was holy

No account of this religion holds together without the huaca. A huaca was a sacred thing — but the category was wider than any single English word. A spring, a peculiar boulder, a mountain peak, a cave, a bend in a river, a worked idol, a tomb, a battlefield, the body of an ancestor, a place where something decisive once happened: any of these could be a huaca, a node where the sacred concentrated and could be addressed. The Andean world was not a neutral terrain dotted with a few temples. It was saturated, a field of charged places to which one owed offering, attention, and address. The high mountains, the apus, were the greatest of these — lords whose snows fed the rivers and whose moods governed the weather of the valleys below.

This is why the imperial religion cannot be reduced to the sun cult. The sun was the dynasty’s deity, raised to imperial scale; the huacas were the substrate, the immemorial Andean relationship to a living landscape that the Inca organized but did not invent. To rule Tawantinsuyu was, in part, to administer the sacred geography — to register the huacas, assign their upkeep, and fold local powers into a system centered on Cusco.

The ceque lines

The instrument of that organization, in the capital, was the ceque system. From the Qorikancha, the gold-sheathed temple of the sun at the center of Cusco, a set of imaginary lines — ceques — radiated outward toward the horizon. Along these lines were strung the huacas of the Cusco valley, each line carrying a sequence of shrines from the temple out toward the mountains. The fullest account, set down by the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo in the seventeenth century from the lost report of the colonial magistrate Polo de Ondegardo, counts forty-one ceques holding three hundred and twenty-eight huacas, distributed across the four suyus that quartered the empire and overlaid on the upper-and-lower (hanan and urin) division of Cusco society.

The system was at once a map, a calendar, and a roster of duties. Each ceque was the responsibility of a named kin group — an ayllu or a royal panaca — which maintained its shrines and made the offerings due along its line, so that the social order of the capital was inscribed directly onto its sacred terrain. The anthropologist R. T. Zuidema, who reopened the question in the twentieth century, observed that the three hundred and twenty-eight huacas correspond to the number of days in twelve sidereal lunar months and argued that the ceque system functioned as a vast calendrical and ritual device, each shrine answering to a day of the ceremonial year. Brian Bauer, who carried out a sustained archaeological survey around Cusco between 1990 and 1995 to relocate the actual shrines and published the results as The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque System (1998), showed that the lines did not run dead straight but zigzagged across the broken terrain, following the real points they linked — a system organized by sequence and direction rather than by Euclidean geometry. Between them the calendrical reading and the relocated shrines describe a capital whose every direction was a line of pilgrimage and obligation, anchored at the temple of the sun.

The mallquis: the dead who governed

The dead, in this order, were not gone. The mummified body of a Sapa Inca was a mallqui — a term that also named a young tree or seedling, the living shoot, so that the preserved ancestor carried the sense of a root from which the lineage grew. The royal mallquis were not buried and forgotten. They were kept, dressed, fed, brought out into the sun, carried in procession, seated among the living at the great festivals, and consulted. A dead ruler remained, in a real institutional sense, a person.

This had concrete consequences for the structure of the state. Each dead Inca was attended by his panaca, the corporate descent group that kept his memory, his estate, and his body. Under the rule of split inheritance, the office of Inca passed to the heir, but the dead ruler’s lands, servants, and palaces stayed with the mummy and its panaca, which administered them in his name and in his continuing interest. The deceased went on owning, hosting, and being visited; the maize from his fields still fed his household; his opinion, sought through his attendants, still carried weight in council. The royal mummies were thus active social agents — proprietors and personages, not relics — and the cult of the ancestors was woven into the workings of property and power. (This Inca veneration of the recently dead ruler is a distinct phenomenon from the far older artificial mummification of the coastal preceramic peoples treated at Chinchorro; the two belong to different worlds and millennia.) When the living court greeted the sun at Inti Raymi, the line of seated mallquis greeted it too — the whole dynasty, the dead alongside the reigning, facing their common ancestor as he rose.

The capacocha

The gravest of the imperial rites bound the sun, the huacas, and the body of the empire into a single act. The capacocha — qhapaq hucha, the “royal obligation” — was performed at the great turning points: the accession of a new Sapa Inca, a grave illness, a death, the birth of a royal son, or a calamity such as drought or earthquake. Children chosen from across the provinces for their physical perfection were brought to Cusco, where they were honored and consecrated at the center of the empire, and then sent back out along ritual paths to high and sacred huacas — above all the apus, the mountain lords — to be given to the powers there.

Its meaning lay in the geometry it enacted. Children gathered from the edges of Tawantinsuyu to the capital and then dispatched to mountaintop shrines across the realm drew the periphery into the center and bound it back out again, the offering tying every province to Cusco and to the sun. It was reciprocity at imperial scale — the most sacred form of the exchange that, in ordinary life, ran between the living and the huacas. The archaeology is unambiguous about the rite’s reality: the frozen children recovered from the summit of Llullaillaco, a volcano of 6,739 meters on the Argentine-Chilean border, were found in 1999 by Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti and dated to about 1500, among the best-preserved human remains known, accompanied by fine textiles and figurines of gold, silver, and Spondylus shell — the material confirmation of what the chroniclers described. These are the dead of a living people, and they are handled here as the structure and meaning of a rite, not as anything to be reconstructed or performed.

The colonial witnesses

Almost everything that can be said about this religion as a system reaches the present through the conquest. The Inca kept no alphabetic writing; the cult’s own records were khipu, sung liturgy, painted boards, and the maintained landscape itself, and the priesthood that held them was broken in the decades after 1532. The textual portrait of Inti, Viracocha, the huacas, the mallquis, and the capacocha is therefore a colonial composition, set down by Spanish administrators and clergy and by Andean and mestizo authors writing under Christian rule, each filtering the material through his own purposes and frame.

Two voices stand out, and both are partly inside the tradition they describe. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega — the son of a conquistador and an Inca ñusta, raised in Cusco and writing in Spain — produced the Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609; a second part at Córdoba in 1617), the first canonical literary work by an author born in the Americas. His account of the sun cult, the huacas, the mallquis, Pachamama, and the capacocha is shaped by a Renaissance and Neoplatonic education and by an apologist’s wish to present his mother’s people as a rational, providentially prepared civilization: where he describes Pacha Kamaq as an invisible, unknown god worshipped in the heart and held above the visible sun, the Christian and Platonic categories of his Spanish schooling are doing much of the work, and the historian reads him for the Cusco childhood beneath the European frame. The Crown’s ban on Quechua-language editions of the book in Peru after the Túpac Amaru II uprising of 1780 is a measure of how charged the text remained.

The second is more radically Andean. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a provincial nobleman of Andean descent, composed around 1615 a manuscript of some twelve hundred pages with nearly four hundred line drawings, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, addressed to Philip III of Spain as an indictment of colonial rule and a plea for reform. His drawings of the months, the sun-greeting of the Inca, the huacas, and the capacocha processions toward peaks such as Coropuna are among the fullest visual witnesses to the imperial religion that survive — drawn, however, by a Christian convert intent on showing his own people as morally upright and the colonizers as the true idolaters, so that the images carry an argument as much as a record. The autograph manuscript, long lost, surfaced in the Royal Library in Copenhagen in 1908 and was entered on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2007; it is now reproduced in full in the library’s digital edition of the Nueva corónica.

Both works are now in the public domain and are read against the modern archaeology of the ceque shrines and the mountain sacrifices, the two kinds of evidence checking each other. Yet the religion they record was never wholly a matter of the conquered past. In the high villages of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes the relationship to the huaca did not end with the colonial extirpation campaigns that hunted the shrines and the mummies. Quechua and Aymara households today open a meal or a drink by giving the first of it to Pachamama, and the apus — the same mountain lords to whom the capacocha was carried — are still named, still fed, still asked for water and for safe passage. The frame within which a peak is a person and a spring is owed an offering remains the working cosmology of the people who live among those peaks and springs; the sun the Inca greeted at the eastern cordillera comes up over the same ground, for those who keep the greeting, as the same father it always was.

→ Related: Inca Empire Tawantinsuyu · Qorikancha Temple Of The Sun · Pachacamac Oracle · Machu Picchu · Sacsayhuaman · Ollantaytambo · Tiwanaku · Wari · Chavin · Chinchorro Mummies · Sacrifice Ritual · Divination · Pleiades · Syncretism