Mama Killa

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The moon began to go out over the Cusco valley, and the city rose against the dark. Men climbed onto the flat roofs and shook their spears and slings at the sky; women came out shouting into the streets; and, strangest of all to the Spanish who set the scene down, householders fell to beating their dogs, hauling them by the ears and striking them so they would howl and bark, all the noise flung upward at once. A predator had the moon in its jaws — a great cat, a puma, or a serpent uncoiling across the heavens — and it was eating her. If the din could not frighten the beast off before it finished, the fear ran, the sky would go wholly black, and the creature, gorged and heavy, would fall to the earth and turn on the living. The moon being devoured was Mama Killa. The whole valley was fighting to keep her alive.

The mother-moon and her house of silver

Her name is Quechua: Mama Killa, Mother Moon. The Spanish chroniclers wrote it Mama Quilla or Mama Kilya, and the root killa carries a doubled sense that is the whole of her — it means both the moon in the sky and the month on the ground, so that the goddess and the unit of time she rules are one word. She belongs to the Inca state pantheon, and the chroniclers rank her among its highest powers, named in the same breath as Inti the sun and Illapa the thunder. Where the survey of that pantheon is given elsewhere — Inti, the creator Wiraqucha, the huacas and the ancestral dead — this is the account of the moon it leaves open: her silver, her calendar, her women, her eclipse. For the frame around her, see Inca religion; for the storm who is her brother-power in the sky, Illapa.

She reaches the record the way every Andean power does. The peoples of the Andes — the Runa, the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking nations of the high country — kept no alphabetic writing before the invasion of 1532. The past was held in the knotted khipu, in oral memory, and in the built and sung landscape; the moon’s theology was carried in feasts, in the ordering of the queens, in the count of the months. What survives in prose was written afterward, by the Spanish clergy and administrators who came to record and to suppress, and by Andean and mestizo authors writing under Christian rule. Two of them stood partly inside the world they described: the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, raised in Cusco, and the Andean nobleman Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose vast illustrated petition to the king of Spain is among the fullest witnesses to the Inca year. The moon comes down to us in their hands, and in the hands of the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo and the soldier-chronicler Juan de Betanzos — interested witnesses, Catholic and post-conquest, to be read with care.

Her genealogy places her at the center of the sky’s household. Mama Killa is at once the sister and the wife of Inti the sun, and by tradition the daughter of the creator Wiraqucha; from the union of moon and sun come Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, the founding pair who, in the origin story, walked out from Lake Titicaca to found Cusco and teach the arts of living. The sun-and-moon marriage of siblings was not a scandal but a model: it patterned the ideal Inca royal union, in which the Sapa Inca took as his principal wife the qoya, the queen, often his own sister, so that the reigning couple mirrored on earth the luminous couple in the sky. The moon-mother stood behind every queen.

Her substance is silver. In the Andean idiom, worked into the metallurgy of the state, gold is the sweat of the sun and silver the tears of the moon — the hot metal Inti’s, the cold metal hers. The pale disc overhead and the bright veins in the mountains were the same thing, the moon’s own stuff; and the votive figurines and vessels of the Inca were cast in both metals to hold both powers, the study of Inca metalwork reading the pairing directly off the objects, gold as the sun’s sweat and silver as the moon’s tears. This is a distinct and developed deity, not a decorative consort. She should not be folded into Pachamama, the earth-mother of the planted ground, who is a different power and who is living still; Mama Killa is the sky-moon, and the two are not the same. Nor is she the star Venus, Chaska, or the rainbow, K’uychi, whose minor chapels shared her temple. One late thread, entering through the Inca absorption of the coastal Chimu, makes her the mother of the great oracle Pacha Kamaq; the notion is thin and poorly attested, and is best left flagged as contested rather than asserted.

Inca miniature votive llama figurine in worked gold, about AD 1500, British Museum. BabelStone, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The keeper of time and the guardian of women

Two offices belong to the moon: she keeps the count of time, and she guards the lives of women.

Time first, because the calendar is her body. The year was divided into twelve killa, twelve moons or months, each carrying its own feast and its own agricultural work, and the ritual and planting year turned on that lunar sequence laid against the sun’s solstices. To read the moon was to know where one stood in the year — when to sow the maize, when to bring in the harvest, when the great festivals fell. The Andean sky was watched with precision from Cusco, and the moon’s phases set the smaller rhythm inside the sun’s larger one; the two luminaries between them ran the clock of the state.

The most charged of her months came in September, at the spring equinox of the southern year. The Andean chronicler Guaman Poma, drawing the twelve months around 1615, labeled it Coya Raymi Killa — the month of the feast of the queen, the qoya — the one month of the year named for the queen and given to the moon and her women. Coya Raymi carried the Situa, the great purification of Cusco. As the rains returned and with them the season of sickness, the city was cleansed: armed men ran out from the central plaza along the roads toward the four quarters of the empire, driving illness and evil ahead of them out of the valley, and the people washed their bodies and their houses with water to carry the sickness away. The queen’s month opened the turning of the year by scouring it clean.

For her women, the moon governs the female cycle in the largest sense. She is the power of marriage, of menstruation, of the rhythms of the body that keep their own count alongside hers, and she is the protector of married women; her cult in Cusco was served by dedicated priestesses, women set apart for the moon as others were set apart for the sun. In an imperial theology usually read for its sun-kings and their male line, Mama Killa anchors a whole female sphere of power — the queens, the priestesses, the chosen women, the wives — with the moon standing over it as the sun stood over the men.

That female sphere had a house, and the house was made of silver. Inside the Qorikancha, the gold-clad temple at the center of Cusco, beside the sun’s own hall stood the chamber of the moon, and where Inti’s walls were sheathed in gold, hers were plated in beaten silver, a great silver disc or image of the moon set on the wall to carry her cold light as the sun’s gold carried his hot. The building itself is treated in its own right at Qorikancha; what belongs to the moon is what her chamber held. For the silver hall was also a tomb of queens. The mummified bodies of the dead qoyas were kept there, seated in order of antiquity along the walls, flanking the silver moon — the queens lodged in the moon’s house exactly as the dead kings were lodged with the sun. It is a precise mirror. The venerated royal dead of the male line, the mallqui who went on owning estates and being carried to the festivals, had their female counterpart in the moon’s chamber: silver moon to the queens as gold sun to the kings, the two lines of the dynasty kept each with its luminary, greeting the sky each morning from the two halls of one temple.

September in the Inca year drawn as Coya Raymi Killa, the queen’s-festival month, from Guaman Poma’s chronicle. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Cobo, writing his history in the following century, recorded that the moon was revered for her admirable beauty and for the benefits she bestows on the world — a benign and luminous power, mother and queen. But the moon could also be in danger, and when she was, her benignity gave way to terror. This is the eclipse. To the watchers below, the darkening of the moon was Mama Killa attacked, a celestial predator — the puma, or the serpent — closing its jaws on her and beginning to feed. The response was the scene the Spanish found so strange: not prayer but battle. The valley made war on the sky. Spears and weapons were shaken at the shadow, voices were raised in a wall of noise, and the dogs were beaten to make them howl and bark, because the moon in health was thought to love dogs and their crying might rouse her, or the sheer volume of it might drive the beast back. Behind the din lay a cosmological fear with teeth: if the predator finished the moon and the sky went black, the gorged animal would drop to earth and hunt the living. To save Mama Killa was to save themselves. The rite was not superstition to be smiled at; it was crisis-response at the scale of a city, the whole valley acting as one body to keep the mother of time from being eaten out of the sky.

The stripping of the silver and the moon that kept its count

Almost everything in this account passed through the eye of the needle of the conquest. The Spanish came in 1532, and within a generation the priesthood that held the moon’s liturgy was broken and her temple emptied. What the chroniclers preserved they preserved as outsiders or as converts — Cobo and Betanzos from within the Catholic mission, Garcilaso and Guaman Poma from within an Andean world already under Christian rule and writing in part to defend it. Their portrait of Mama Killa is a colonial composition, and it is read now against the archaeology and against the living Andean tradition, each checking the others.

Her cult was not merely neglected; it was hunted. Through the seventeenth century the campaigns the Church called the extirpation of idolatry moved through the Andes to find and destroy the huacas, the mallquis, and the shrines, and to punish devotion to them — “idolatry” and “superstition” the vocabulary in which the campaigns justified themselves, a vocabulary that belongs to the extirpators and not to the world they were breaking. The silver moon chamber was stripped of its plate along with the rest of the Qorikancha’s metal, and the Dominican order raised the church and convent of Santo Domingo directly on the Inca enclosure, the friary riding the temple’s masonry, the moon’s hall overbuilt with a Christian nave. The moon lost her house of silver to the same conquest that took the sun’s house of gold.

And the silver itself has a long, dark afterlife, because the metal the Inca had called the moon’s tears became the engine of a colonial economy. After Viceroy Francisco de Toledo systematized the mining draft from the 1570s, the mita — an Andean labor obligation bent to a new and murderous purpose — sent conscripted workers by the thousand from communities across the highlands to the mines, above all to Potosí and its silver mountain, the Cerro Rico, in what is now Bolivia. The mountain took a Quechua name that has held: the mountain that eats men. Forced Andean laborers and enslaved Africans were consumed in its shafts to feed silver into the Spanish empire and thence into the wider world; the total number of dead across the colonial centuries is disputed and often inflated — figures in the millions are cited and contested, and the sober estimates run to the hundreds of thousands — but by any count the toll was immense. The moon’s tears, in the chroniclers’ idiom, were mined out of the mountain in the blood of the people who lived beneath it.

Yet the lunar order did not simply die, because the Andean world did not die. It is present and alive. Pachamama, the living earth, is still fed and toasted, still given the first of a drink poured to the ground and the first of a meal set aside for her; the apus and achachilas, the mountain-lords, are still named and still honored; and the offerings of the despacho and the ch’alla continue as living practice, not as relic. The Catholic centuries did not erase this world but interwove with it, and the interweaving is itself the living faith of the Andean present — the Marian feasts and the female-moon complex braided together, the saints folded into the agricultural year, not a thin survival of something older but a religion as it is actually lived. Modern Cusco’s revived Inti Raymi, restaged since 1944 as a great civic and tourist spectacle, throws its light on the sun and the sun-king; the moon-queen’s month keeps a quieter place, marked in September observances and in the recovery, by Quechua and Aymara scholars and by Andean women, of the female sphere of power the moon presided over. She never needed the temple to keep her office. The month still answers to the moon; the count of the year is still hers to keep; and over the same valley where the city once rose in the dark to fight for her life, Mama Killa still rises, waxes, wanes, and returns, doing the one thing that was always most hers to do — keeping time.

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