Llama

The Inca state ran on llamas in a literal sense. They carried cargo, they supplied wool and meat, and they were the standard offering, given in numbers that the Spanish chroniclers found difficult to credit: hundreds at a single festival, with colour and age specified for the occasion. Brown llamas went to the creator, white to the sun, and a particular spotted animal to the thunder.

One white llama was kept at Cusco, dressed in a red tunic and gold ornaments and treated as a representative of the sun rather than as a sacrifice. The care of the state herds was an administrative function with its own officials, and the herds themselves were divided between the sun, the state and the community.

Divination came with it. Chroniclers describe the inspection of the lungs of a sacrificed llama, inflated through the trachea, with the pattern of the veins read for the outcome of a campaign or a season. The practice is close to what several Old World traditions did with sheep livers, and the two are independent.

Llama offerings did not stop with the empire. Fat, wool and dried foetuses remain standard components of the mesa, the offering bundle burned or buried for the earth, and they are sold openly in markets in La Paz and elsewhere. The continuity is not an antiquarian survival; it is a working practice with a market behind it.

Andean sky-watching reads two kinds of constellation. There are the star-to-star figures familiar everywhere, and there are the dark cloud constellations, animal shapes read from the dust lanes that block the light of the Milky Way. The second kind is rare in the world and the Andes is its best documented home.

Yacana, the llama, is the largest of them, lying along the Milky Way with two bright stars in Centaurus as its eyes. Beside it is a smaller shape read as its offspring. The set continues with Machacuay the serpent, Hanp'atu the toad, Yutu the tinamou and Atoq the fox, and their rising and setting order through the year is tied to the agricultural and herding calendar.

An account recorded in the Huarochiri manuscript, the one substantial religious text written in Quechua in the colonial period, has Yacana come down at midnight to drink from a spring, and says that a man on whom it descends will be fortunate. It is also said that if it did not drink, the world would flood.

The dark constellations were reported by Spanish observers who did not understand what they were being shown and recorded them as superstition about black patches. They were properly documented only in the twentieth century, and the fullest account is Gary Urton's fieldwork in the community of Misminay, which established that the system was still in use.