Mama Quilla

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At the heart of Cusco stood an enclosure whose inner walls were dressed in metal, and not all of it was gold. Inti’s hall was sheathed in hammered gold, the sun’s own substance nailed across the fitted stone; but off to one side, in a room of her own, the walls were plated in silver, and on them, the chroniclers report, hung a great disc — or a silver figure of a woman, her face worked into the metal. Silver was the moon’s as gold was the sun’s, the cold light answering the hot. The chamber was tended by her own women, apart from the sun’s, and the disc it held was Mama Quilla, the Moon.

She was not a lesser reflection of Inti but a power in her own right, and the Andean sky was read as a household with her near its center. The moon measured the months and set the feasts; she watched over women and their marriages; and when she darkened in eclipse the whole valley rose in the night to save her from the thing that was eating her. To follow Mama Quilla is to move from that silver room outward — to the calendar she keeps, and up to the night a beast takes her in its jaws.

Mother Moon, and how she reaches the record

Her name is Quechua: Mama Killa, Mother Moon, which the Spanish wrote Mama Quilla or Mama Kilya. The root carries a double weight that is nearly the whole of her, for killa names both the moon in the sky and the month on the ground, so that the goddess and the span of time she governs are one word. She belongs to the state cult of the Inca, ranked among its high powers below the creator Wiraqocha and beside Inti the sun and Illapa the thunder — the luminous and the storm-borne powers of the sky, each with its office.

She reaches the written record the way every Andean power does, through the conquest that ended her open cult. The peoples of the mountains kept no alphabetic writing before the invasion of 1532; the past was held in the knotted khipu, in oral memory, in the ordering of feasts and queens and the count of the months. What survives in prose was set down afterward, by Spanish clergy and administrators who came to record the old religion in order to root it out, and by Andean and mestizo authors writing under Christian rule. The moon comes down chiefly in four hands: the soldier-chronicler Juan de Betanzos, married into the Inca nobility; the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, raised in Cusco, whose Comentarios reales de los Incas appeared at Lisbon in 1609; the Andean nobleman Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose illustrated petition to the king of Spain, finished about 1615, drew the months of the Inca year from inside the Andean world; and the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, whose Historia del Nuevo Mundo, completed in 1653, preserved much that the earlier writers left aside. They are datable, partial, Catholic, and often at odds, and a claim about the moon rests on whichever of them one is reading.

Her genealogy sets her at the center of the sky’s family. Mama Quilla is at once the older sister and the wife of Inti, and by tradition the daughter of Wiraqocha the creator; from the marriage of moon and sun come Manco Capac and Mama Uqllu — Mama Ocllo in the Spanish spelling — the founding pair who, in the dynastic story, walked out to found Cusco and teach the arts of living. That the moon should be mother of the whole royal house is a large claim, and it is one of the contested ones. The origin myth exists in rival versions the chroniclers could not reconcile, and the tidy list of thirteen kings that carries Manco Capac at its head is a dynastic memory shaped for legitimacy rather than a settled chronicle; historians read the mother-of-the-line story for its charter and hold it apart from the archaeology of the empire’s actual growth. The sibling marriage of sun and moon was not a scandal within the frame but a model. It patterned the ideal royal union, in which the Sapa Inca took as his principal wife the coya, the queen — often his own sister — so that the reigning couple on earth mirrored the luminous couple in the sky. Behind every coya stood the moon-mother.

One further thread, thin and late, ran the maternity outward. After the Inca absorbed the coastal peoples of the central shore, some accounts made Mama Quilla the mother of the great earth-oracle Pacha Kamaq; the notion is poorly attested and best marked as contested rather than asserted. And there is a caution the chroniclers themselves supply: in certain communities of the coast the moon was reckoned more important than the sun. The solar cult of Cusco, for all its gold, was one sky among several, and the moon’s standing shifted with the ground one stood on.

The silver calendar and the women’s world

Her substance is silver, and the association ran deeper than value. In the worked theology of the state, gold was the sweat of the sun and silver the tears of the moon — the hot metal Inti’s, the cold metal hers, the same celestial stuff left glinting in the veins of the mountains. A study of Inca metalwork from Yale, “Tears of the Sun,” reads the pairing directly off the objects while noting that the exact wording of the formula owes its modern currency to a twentieth-century report rather than the earliest colonial texts; what the chronicles and the archaeology sustain is the logic beneath it, that gold belonged to the sun and silver to the moon, and that metal was the medium in which a sky-power could be given a body. Her body in the Qorikancha was a great silver disc, or a silver woman, in a hall whose walls were sheathed in silver plate. A recurring image held that Mama Quilla herself wept tears of silver, so that the pale metal was read as the moon’s own grief made solid.

If silver was her substance, time was her office. Because the ritual year was counted by her waxing and waning, the lunar months fixed the great festivals, which were then adjusted against the solar year so that they held their season — Inti Raymi at the June solstice, Capac Raymi in December, the rites of planting and of harvest, all of them moving to her measure before the sun corrected the drift. The month of the queen, Coya Raymi, fell with the first moon after the spring equinox, and it carried the year’s great cleansing. On that new moon the Inca held the Situa, the purification of Cusco, when the sicknesses of the past year were driven bodily out of the capital: armed runners were posted at the center of the city and sent shouting outward along the four great roads toward the four quarters of the empire, passing the cry from hand to hand until it left the valley, and at dawn the people bathed in the rivers and springs and ordered their illnesses to depart. That a rite so central to the health of the state was timed to a new moon in the queen’s own month shows how far the moon’s reckoning reached into the workings of the empire. The Inca calendar was a negotiation between the two luminaries, and the moon set the terms of the first draft.

She governed the world of women. Marriage was under her care, and the menstrual cycle that her own waxing and waning seemed to keep time with, and the protection of women in general. Her precinct was served by priestesses, and above them stood the acllas, the chosen women gathered from across the empire into the houses attached to the temples, who wove the fine cloth burned in offering and kept a ritual purity in her service. Over the whole female order stood the coya, the queen, who as the moon’s earthly counterpart embodied Mama Quilla among the living as the Sapa Inca embodied the sun. The pairing was exact and it was political: the moon beside the sun, the queen beside the king, silver beside gold, each the measure and consort of the other.

Coya Raymi, the feast-month of the queen, drawn by the Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in his manuscript of about 1615 — the month timed to the moon and named for the coya, the moon’s earthly counterpart. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why the moon should be so honored, Cobo set down plainly. The Moon was venerated, in the account he preserved, for her admirable beauty and for the benefits she bestows upon the world — a reverence for the near, bright, cyclical power that ordered the night and the month and the tides of a woman’s body. There was tenderness in it, and there was also a story the Inca told to explain the shadow that mars the bright face. A fox, the tale runs, fell in love with Mama Quilla for her beauty and climbed the sky to reach her; and when he came to her she pressed him against herself so hard that his shadow stayed on her face, and stays there still — the dark patches of the moon read as a creature held forever to the breast of the goddess he adored.

The night the beast takes her

The gentlest myth of her face had a terrible counterpart overhead. When the moon went into eclipse and darkened and reddened, the Inca did not see a shadow of the earth. They saw an attack. A beast had seized Mama Quilla and was devouring her — a great cat, a puma or jaguar, or a serpent uncoiling across the heavens — and the reddened light was her blood, spilled as the creature ate. The National Geographic account of eclipse traditions records the Inca telling with its jaguar and its blood-red moon, and with the answer the valley made. For the danger was not only to the moon. If the din the people raised could not drive the beast off before it finished, the fear ran, the sky would be left wholly dark, and the creature, gorged and heavy, would fall to the earth and turn on the living to eat them there.

So the whole city fought to keep her alive. Men climbed to the flat roofs and shook their spears and slings at the sky; the people shouted into the streets and beat their drums; and — the detail that most struck the Spanish who set the scene down — householders beat their dogs, hauling and striking them so they would howl and bark, all the noise flung upward at once to frighten the predator from its meal. The tumult held until the moon brightened and came clear of the shadow and was safe, and the beast, so the reckoning went, had been driven off. It is among the most vivid rites the chroniclers preserved: an entire population, in the middle of the night, making war on the dark with every sound it could raise, because the alternative was a sky gone black and a monster loosed upon the earth.

The scene is a theology in miniature. The moon is not a serene abstraction but a living power that can be wounded and can be lost, and whose safety is bound up with the safety of the world below. Her monthly dying and returning was a rhythm the Inca could trust; the eclipse was the rhythm broken, the death that might not reverse, and it called for everything at once. That the danger passed each time did not make the vigilance idle. It made it effective — the moon came back, and the people had helped to bring her.

The stripping of the silver, and the moon that stayed

When Francisco Pizarro’s men took Cusco in 1533, the Qorikancha was stripped. The gold of Inti’s sanctuary went first, pulled from the walls toward the ransom gathered for the captive Inca Atahualpa; but the silver of the moon’s precinct was plundered too, and the great enclosure was given over to the Dominicans, who raised the church and convent of Santo Domingo directly upon the Inca stonework — the colonial walls standing to this day on the fitted stone the smiths had dressed in silver and gold.

The Qorikancha at Cusco: the fitted Inca masonry of the golden enclosure, which once held gold and silver chambers for the sun and the moon, with the church and convent of Santo Domingo built over it after the conquest. Håkan Svensson (Xauxa), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Her disc is gone with the conquest, most likely melted, like the temple’s plate, into anonymous bullion. The fuller account of that stripping and of the empire’s fall belongs with the Inca and with the golden enclosure itself, the Qorikancha; here it is enough to mark that the moon lost her house and her silver body in the same season the sun lost his gold.

Under the seventeenth-century campaigns to extirpate the old religion, the open cult of Mama Quilla, like that of the huacas, was suppressed and driven from view. The irony the historian learns to hold is that much of what survives of her theology survives only because the clergy recorded it in order to destroy it: Cobo cataloged the moon-cult to condemn it, and Garcilaso, writing from Spain as the son of an Inca princess, gave it a nostalgic literary shape from across the ocean. Her portrait comes down filtered through pens that were hostile or homesick, rarely neutral, and the careful reader weighs each accordingly.

Yet the moon did not go out with her silver. In the living Quechua and Aymara Andes her calendar-keeping persists inside a syncretized Catholic year, the old lunar count folded into the feasts of the saints, so that a festival dated by the Church still answers, underneath, to the phase of the moon. The reverence for the female powers of the Andean world endures in present festival and rite — Mama Quilla above in the silver sky, and below her Pachamama, the earth-mother who is fed still. The two are felt together and must not be merged: Pachamama is the planted ground that must be given its offering, while Mama Quilla is the sky-moon of time and women and marriage, a different power with a different office. Modern scholarship reads the moon-goddess through the archaeology of the Qorikancha and the sight-lines of the ceque system that radiated from it, and treats the story that makes her mother of the founding pair, with the thirteen-ruler king-list beside it, as reconstruction to be argued rather than fact to be repeated.

Her silver disc was carried off and never found. But the word that named it did not go anywhere. Across Quechua- and Aymara-speaking Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador the moon is still Mama Killa, and the month is still killa, and the two meanings still travel in one word. The night she was eaten and saved is remembered; the fox is still held to her face; and the pale light that measures the months over the high country is counted, by those who keep the reckoning, as it always was.

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