Inca Religion

The Inca began as one of many small groups in the valley of Cusco, high in the southern Andes of Peru. Their own origin stories told that the first ruler, Manco Capac, and his sister-wife Mama Ocllo were sent by the sun, emerging either from Lake Titicaca or from a cave at Pacaritambo, and founded Cusco where a golden staff sank into the ground. These myths gave the ruling family a divine ancestry: the Inca ruler was the son of the sun.

According to Inca tradition, recorded by Spanish chroniclers, the ruler Pachacuti defeated the rival Chanka in about 1438 and began a dramatic expansion. Within a century his successors ruled an empire they called Tawantinsuyu, ‘the four parts together’, stretching some 4,000 kilometres from present-day Ecuador to central Chile. Historians use these traditional dates with caution, since the Inca kept no written records in the European sense, but archaeology confirms a rapid rise in the fifteenth century.

The empire inherited a religious world thousands of years old. Andean peoples had long revered mountains, springs, ancestors and great shrines such as Pachacamac on the coast and Tiwanaku near Lake Titicaca. The Inca did not sweep these away. They placed the cult of the sun above them, brought the sacred objects of conquered peoples to Cusco, and wove local gods into a single imperial order.

At the summit of the state religion stood Inti, the sun, the ancestor of the ruling dynasty. Beside him were Viracocha, the creator who in myth rose from Lake Titicaca and shaped the world and its peoples; Mama Quilla, the moon; and Illapa, the god of thunder and rain. Pachamama, the earth mother, gave the crops, and Mama Qocha, the mother sea, was honoured on the coast.

Yet the most important idea in everyday Andean religion was the huaca. A huaca could be a mountain, a spring, a boulder, a shrine, a carved stone or the preserved body of an ancestor: anything in which sacred power was present. Every community and lineage had its huacas, which had to be fed with offerings and could speak through oracles. The great mountains, the apus, were protectors who controlled water and weather.

Ancestors remained part of the living world. The mummies of past rulers kept their palaces and estates, were served by their descendants, and took part in festivals and councils. Andean thought valued ayni, reciprocity: people gave to the gods, the earth and the ancestors, and expected protection and fertility in return.

The Inca sun cult was also a tool of empire. Temples of the sun were built in provincial capitals, and the most sacred objects of conquered peoples were taken to Cusco, where they were honoured but also, in effect, held as hostages for their communities’ loyalty. The ruler, as son of the sun, stood at the meeting point of heaven and earth, and the great festivals of Cusco displayed his role to the whole empire. Yet the Inca also respected powerful local shrines: the oracle of Pachacamac on the coast kept its prestige under Inca rule, and the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, honoured as the birthplace of the sun, became an important imperial pilgrimage site.

The heart of the empire was the Coricancha in Cusco, the ‘golden enclosure’. Its walls of finely fitted stone were, according to Spanish witnesses, covered with sheets of gold, and its rooms housed images of the sun, the moon, thunder and other gods, along with the mummies of rulers. From the Coricancha, colonial writers said, 41 imaginary lines called ceques radiated across the landscape, linking some 328 huacas that the lineages of Cusco tended in turn.

The year was marked by festivals tied to farming and the sun. The greatest was Inti Raymi at the June solstice, when the ruler and nobles gathered in Cusco to honour the sun at the start of the new year. Other festivals celebrated ploughing, the maize harvest and the coming of age of noble youths. Offerings included maize beer, coca leaves, fine textiles, gold and silver figurines and, above all, llamas.

A large body of religious specialists served this system. The high priest of the sun, the Willaq Umu, was usually a close relative of the ruler. Below him were priests and diviners who read omens in coca leaves, in the lungs of sacrificed llamas and in the flight of birds, and who heard confessions before major rites. The aqllakuna, the ‘chosen women’, lived in enclosed houses where they wove fine cloth and brewed chicha for ceremonies; some served the sun for life, while others were given as wives to nobles. Spanish writers likened them to nuns, a comparison that historians treat with caution.

On rare occasions, such as the death of a ruler, a great victory or a natural disaster, the state held a capacocha. Chosen children, often of high status, were brought to Cusco and then taken to distant shrines or high summits, where they were sacrificed as messengers to the gods. Archaeologists have found the remains of such offerings on Andean peaks, most famously the three children discovered in 1999 near the summit of Llullaillaco in Argentina, now cared for in a museum in Salta. Scholars stress that the ceremony was exceptional and, in Inca understanding, conferred great honour on the families and communities involved.

In 1532 Francisco Pizarro and fewer than two hundred Spaniards captured the ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca, in an empire already weakened by epidemic disease and civil war. Atahualpa was executed in 1533, the gold of the Coricancha was melted down, and a Dominican church rose on its walls. An Inca state survived in the forests of Vilcabamba until 1572, when the Spanish captured and executed Túpac Amaru.

The old religion did not disappear at once. In the 1560s the Taki Onqoy movement called on Andean people to return to the huacas. In the seventeenth century the church organised campaigns for the ‘extirpation of idolatries’, destroying huacas and ancestor mummies, and the reports of these campaigns, together with the Quechua-language Huarochirí Manuscript, are among our best sources for Andean belief.

Andean traditions continue today. Millions of people speak Quechua and Aymara, and many make offerings of coca, food and drink to Pachamama, especially in August, and to the mountain spirits, often as part of a Catholic life. Pilgrimages such as Qoyllur Rit’i near Cusco join Christian devotion with older reverence for the mountains. Since 1944 Cusco has also staged a reconstructed Inti Raymi each 24 June at Sacsayhuamán, a festival of identity and heritage that draws visitors from around the world.