Viracocha

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Near Manta, where the northern coast of the Andes runs down to the Pacific, the Cusco storytellers set the last thing anyone saw of the maker. An old man had come down out of the mountains, walking north a long time, leaning on a staff, poorly dressed, in some tellings mistaken for a beggar and turned away. At the shore he did not stop. He walked out onto the water as though it were a road, west, into the ocean, and did not look back and did not return. His work was finished. He had made the world and lit it, and now he left it to run on the sun he had set moving. The people he had taught watched him go, and the name they gave him was really a whole sentence of names — none of them quite his, because the tradition held that his true name was too sacred to say aloud.

He is Viracocha, in the older orthography Wiraqucha. He is the creator: the one who was there before the light and who made the light, and from whom the sun itself proceeds. Almost nothing about him comes down as a shrine or a rite. What comes down is a story of beginnings and a departure, and a long argument, still unsettled, about what kind of god the chroniclers were describing when they wrote him into their books.

The name that is a title

The name resists a single translation. Broken into its Quechua parts it says something concrete and strange — wira, “fat” or “grease,” and qucha, “lake” or “sea” — so that a flat reading yields “sea fat” or “sea foam,” and a few early writers took it exactly that way, an image of pale foam thrown up from the water. But the titles that cluster around it point somewhere else. Ticci, sometimes written T’iqsi, means origin, foundation, the beginning of things; Ilya carries a sense of light, or of something ancient and radiant; Pachayachachic joins pacha — world and time together, the whole fabric of existence — to yachachiq, the one who teaches or causes to know, and so means the maker-and-teacher of the world. Con-Tici, Kon-Tiki, folds yet another element onto the front. Set side by side, these are less a name than a stack of epithets for one office: the ancient ground of things, the lord, the world-teacher. The Spanish who wrote him down noticed that Andean speakers seemed unwilling to use any of the words plainly, trading one title for another, and reported that his proper name was held too holy to be spoken. If that reluctance is authentic, it tells against the notion that he was ever a familiar god with a face and a feast day; it fits better a first principle addressed at a careful distance.

Almost everything that survives as narrative was written after the empire had already fallen, by Spanish and mixed-descent chroniclers taking down Cusco oral tradition a generation or more into the colony. The accounts do not agree, and this is the load-bearing fact about them: the disagreement is treated by scholars as evidence, not as noise to be averaged away. Juan de Betanzos, who married into the Inca nobility and knew Quechua as few Spaniards did, set down about 1551, in his Suma y narración de los Incas, the version reckoned closest to the Cusco telling. Pedro Cieza de León recorded a version in 1553; Cristóbal de Molina compiled the rites and fables about 1575; Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa produced an official history for the viceroy in 1572; the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo synthesized the whole tradition as late as 1653; and the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, writing in Spain in 1609, carried his own noble family’s memory of it. Each transmits a Viracocha, and no two are identical.

Out of that tangle a further difficulty rises. The eighth Sapa Inca, the father of the empire-builder Pachacuti, bore the same name — Viracocha Inca — and the word could apparently attach itself to more than one figure at once. So the deepest question about the creator is contested at the root, and modern scholarship leaves it open: whether the chronicles describe a single supreme maker, or whether “Viracocha” was a title, roughly “the Lord,” that Andean usage and Spanish monotheist expectation together hardened into one high god where there had been a looser field of creative power. The early writers, reaching for a category they understood, gave the Andes a supreme being shaped a little like their own. Whether the Andes had handed them one is exactly what cannot be settled from their pages alone.

Out of the dark lake

In the fullest tellings the world begins in water and darkness. There was no sun yet, and no day. Viracocha rose out of Lake Titicaca — the great cold lake high on the plateau between the eastern and western cordilleras, ground the later Inca themselves treated as sacred antiquity — and into that dark he brought the light. He made the sun, Inti, and the moon, Mama Killa, and the stars, and he set time itself in motion by commanding the sun to travel its road across the sky. The order in which the chronicles put these acts varies, and so does the detail; what holds across them is the sequence of a maker working in the dark and then flooding it with day.

His first humankind did not satisfy him. In Betanzos the earliest race were oversized beings, giants shaped in the darkness; in other tellings a first world of people who transgressed against their maker. Displeased, he unmade the work. The instrument was a flood — Unu Pachakuti, the water that overturns the world — said to have covered everything for sixty days and sixty nights, drowning the first creation and leaving, in some versions, only a remnant. Then, at the ruined ceremonial city the chronicles call Tiahuanaco — the pre-Inca Aymara site of Tiwanaku, on the southern shore of the same lake, already ancient when the Inca found it — he made the present humankind afresh. He shaped the nations out of stone or clay, and he painted each one with its own dress and gave it its own language, and then he sent the peoples down into the earth to travel underground and emerge, each at its appointed place: a spring, a cave, a hill, a stone. This is why, in the Andean order of things, every people belongs to its own sacred point of origin, its huaca of emergence, and is bound to it. The maker did not scatter an undifferentiated humanity; he distributed peoples to their places, and the places kept them.

His making done, Viracocha set out to see it work. He took the shape the opening remembers — an old man walking, staff in hand, plainly dressed — and went north across the high country, and as he went he called the plants and animals by name and taught the peoples the arts of living: how to farm the terraces, how to order their days, the crafts and the decencies of a settled world. He worked wonders along the road, and, the chronicles add, was not always welcomed; in some tellings the very people he came to help rose against him, and he answered with fire or with restraint before moving on. Two companions or sons walk with him in several versions, sent along the coast and the mountains while he holds the middle way. And the road ends where the story begins: at the ocean edge near Manta he stepped out over the Pacific and was gone. A maker who leaves is not a maker one petitions each morning. He is a cause that has finished its work and withdrawn, leaving the running of the world to the powers he set going.

Above the sun

That withdrawal is the key to his rank. In the Andean cosmos the sun is not the first thing; the sun is a made thing. Inti crosses the sky each day and is the divine ancestor of the ruling line — the Sapa Inca is the son of the Sun, and the golden Coricancha at the heart of Cusco is the sun’s house and the state’s. But above and behind the sun stands the one who made it. Viracocha is the remote high god from whom Inti proceeds, less a cult thronged with pilgrims than a first cause: invisible, the chroniclers say, dwelling nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, addressed by the ruler and the nobility rather than in the daily devotions of the fields, and invoked above all in times of crisis, when the ordinary powers were not enough. His theology is philosophical where the sun’s is dynastic. He explains why there is a world for the sun to cross.

Something of how he was addressed survives despite the remoteness. Among the rites Cristóbal de Molina gathered in Cusco are prayers directed to the creator — invocations that call on the maker of the world and of humankind, that ask him to let the people multiply and be kept in peace, and that reach for him as one who is far off and hard to find. Their tone is not the bargaining of a farmer with the rain but the appeal of a whole order to the source of order, and they were spoken, the record suggests, by the ruler and the priesthood on behalf of everyone rather than by everyone in their own courtyards. That is consistent with the rest of the picture: a god too high and too abstract for a personal cult, reserved for the moments and the offices where the whole made world was at stake.

The imperial religion gave this ordering a physical form. The chronicles credit Pachacuti, the ninth ruler and the maker of the empire, with raising Viracocha’s standing and rebuilding the Coricancha to hold it. In the sun-temple the golden image of Inti stood at the center, and the accounts gathered by Cobo place a golden image of the creator to the right of the Sun and the image of Illapa, the thunder-and-lightning that draws the rain, to the left — creator, sun, and storm set in a deliberate order, the maker given the place of honor beside his most radiant creature. The elevation had a story behind it. Before the war that would make him, the prince who took the throne-name Pachacuti was said to have received a vision of Viracocha at a spring outside Cusco, on the eve of the Chanca assault that nearly ended the young kingdom; strengthened by it, he broke the Chanca and turned a lordship into an empire. Whether the vision belongs to the prince or to the chroniclers’ need to explain his rise, it fixed the creator at the center of the imperial cult he did not otherwise dominate — honored at the summit, and precisely because he was remote, kept for the summit’s use.

Written down by those who unmade it

Viracocha’s afterlife cannot be separated from the act of writing him down, and that act was performed by the people dismantling his world. The Spanish reached the Coricancha in 1533 and stripped its gold — most of the metal for the ransom of the captured Atahualpa was collected there — and after the fall of Cusco the temple’s stones were built into the Church and Convent of Santo Domingo, which stands on the Inca masonry still. The extirpators of idolatry who came after hunted the sacred places as demonic. The chroniclers who preserved the creation cycle were, in the same motion, its undertakers: they recorded a religion because they were ending it, and everything they wrote must be read with that pressure in view. A date, a name, a placement can be checked and trusted; a theology filtered through men who needed the Andes to have had a supreme being cannot simply be taken at its word.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the most quoted description of him. Sarmiento de Gamboa set down that Viracocha appeared as a man of medium height, white, in a white robe “like an alb” belted at the waist, carrying a staff and a book. The white skin, the beard that later tellings add, the book — modern scholarship reads these widely as colonial overlay rather than secure pre-conquest traits. A bearded white teacher was a convenient figure: it let the Spanish be received, at least in the hopeful retellings, as returning viracochas, and it let missionaries fold the creator into their own god, an assimilation that runs down through centuries of apologetic literature arguing that Viracocha was Christ, or a wandering apostle, come early to the Andes. The book especially gives the game away, since the Andes had no books. What the description records most reliably is the expectation of the man holding the pen.

Two further threads resist a clean answer. Along the coast the high creative power went by another name, Pachacamac, the earth-maker of the great oracle south of Lima, sometimes treated by the chroniclers and by later scholars as a lowland counterpart to the highland Viracocha and sometimes as a rival; which of the two held the elder claim, and whether they were ever one power, scholars still dispute. And at Tiwanaku, where the tradition set the making of humankind, the famous gateway carved with a frontal, staff-bearing figure is sometimes linked to the same creative complex; the identification is suggestive rather than proven, and the figure keeps its own silence about whose face it is. The archaeology can confirm the ground — Tiwanaku was real, ancient, and holy to the Inca — without recovering the god who is said to have stood on it.

Detail of the Gate of the Sun at Tiwanaku, Bolivia, showing the frontal staff god above the lintel. Marc Davis, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

One strand of the afterlife carried the maker back across his own last road. In 1947 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, out to show that ancient people could have crossed the Pacific on rafts, built a balsa vessel and sailed it west from Peru; he named it Kon-Tiki, after Kon-Tiki Viracocha and the tradition of the creator who walked out over the western sea and did not return. The name outran the theory. It fixed the image of a maker vanishing into the Pacific in a place the Andean tradition never put it — the popular imagination of the twentieth century — where it still mostly lives.

Fitted Inca stonework of the Qorikancha, Cusco. McKay Savage, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The imperial cult of the creator fell with the empire in 1533, and the golden image beside the Sun went the way of the ransom. But the deeper thing his story carries — a sense of the world as something made, and made reciprocal, owed attention at every spring and stone — did not end at the conquest. The Quechua and Aymara who carried this cosmos are living peoples, and the earth-mother Pachamama is fed still, each August, with offerings laid out and burned, now braided together with the Catholic calendar. The remote maker walked west and left the world to its sun; the peoples he sent down into the earth to rise at their own springs and stones have gone on paying the powers their due, and go on paying it now.

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