Recorded by Administrators, Not by Believers

The Spanish chroniclers and colonial administrators who recorded this prayer, unlike Sahagun's comparatively systematic ethnographic project among the Aztec discussed elsewhere in this atlas, generally approached Inca religious material with more varied and less consistently rigorous methodology, some writing primarily as administrators documenting a conquered people's customs for practical governance purposes, others as missionaries seeking to understand indigenous belief in order to replace it, a mixed and less uniformly careful body of colonial source material that scholars of Andean religion must navigate with correspondingly greater caution than applies even to the already carefully qualified Aztec material. The absence of any pre-conquest Inca writing system comparable to Mesoamerican hieroglyphics, discussed in the broader Inca corpus entry elsewhere in this atlas, means this prayer to Viracocha, however elevated and theologically significant its content, cannot be cross-checked against any independent pre-conquest textual source in the way some Maya material can at least partially be checked against surviving hieroglyphic codices, leaving colonial-era transcription as the sole and irreplaceable, if imperfect, window onto this specific prayer's content and use.