Inca religious policy characteristically incorporated rather than eliminated the religious practices of conquered peoples across their large multi-ethnic empire, layering official state worship of Inti, the sun god from whom the Inca ruling dynasty claimed direct descent, and Viracocha, the creator deity, over a very wide range of local and regional deities and shrines, called huacas, that continued to be venerated by specific communities even under Inca imperial rule, meaning surviving colonial-era records of Inca-era prayer likely reflect this same layered mixture of state-level and local religious practice rather than a single uniform Inca theology.
Spanish colonial chroniclers recording this material after the conquest often had their own reasons, whether missionary, administrative or personal, for emphasizing certain aspects of Inca state religion over local practice or vice versa, adding a further layer of selection and potential distortion on top of the basic challenge of working through Quechua-speaking intermediaries and translation. This entry records the corpus as a whole and its specific colonial transmission history, while individually recoverable prayers with identifiable content, including those addressed separately to Viracocha and Inti elsewhere in this atlas, rest on this same generally cautious evidentiary foundation.