Inti

Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, was the greatest ceremony of the Inca year, held at Cusco around the June solstice, which in the southern hemisphere is midwinter and the point at which the sun is furthest away and must be called back. The account most often followed is that of Garcilaso de la Vega, born at Cusco in 1539 to an Inca noblewoman and a Spanish captain, who wrote in Spain decades later, having seen the last observances as a child.

By his description the Sapa Inca and the nobility fasted beforehand, then gathered before dawn in the great square, barefoot, facing east, and waited in silence for the sun to rise, at which they crouched and raised their hands and made the kissing gesture of reverence. The Inca poured chicha to the sun from a gold vessel, some of it channelled toward the Coricancha. New fire was kindled by focusing the sun's rays with a concave mirror onto cotton, and if cloud prevented it the fire was made by friction, which was taken as a bad omen. Llamas were offered and their entrails read. Feasting and dancing went on for days.

The Spanish banned it. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who also had the last Inca ruler Tupac Amaru executed in the square at Cusco in 1572, prohibited the ceremony as idolatry, and the public festival ended, though observances continued privately and in altered forms alongside the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi, which falls at nearly the same time and absorbed some of the same processional practice.

In 1944 a group of Cusco intellectuals and artists staged a reconstruction of Inti Raymi at the fortress of Sacsayhuaman above the city, working from Garcilaso's text. It has been performed every 24 June since and now draws large audiences. What it is remains genuinely contested: a civic pageant, a piece of heritage theatre, an assertion of indigenous identity against five centuries of suppression, and for some participants an act of worship. It is not a survival and does not claim to be.

The Coricancha functioned as more than a single shrine; Spanish chroniclers and modern archaeological and ethnohistorical research, most influentially the work of the anthropologist Tom Zuidema, describe it as the organizing centre of an elaborate system of forty one or so imaginary lines, called ceques, radiating outward from the temple across the Cusco valley like spokes from a hub, each line passing through a sequence of huacas, sacred shrines, springs, rocks, and other significant sites maintained by specific kin groups responsible for their upkeep and ritual observance on an assigned schedule through the year. The ceque system tied the state religion of the sun quite literally to the social and administrative organization of the Inca capital, since responsibility for maintaining particular shrines along particular lines mapped onto specific lineage groups and their place in Cusco's social hierarchy, while the sequence of ritual observances at the huacas along the ceques was coordinated with the agricultural and ceremonial calendar that Inti Raymi itself belonged to.

Some ceque lines are argued by researchers to have had genuine astronomical significance, marking the risings or settings of the sun at the solstices or other significant celestial events as seen from the Coricancha, linking the physical geography radiating from the sun god's temple directly to the sky he was understood to govern, though the precise astronomical function of every individual ceque and huaca remains a matter of ongoing scholarly reconstruction rather than fully settled fact, since much of the system had to be reconstructed from fragmentary and sometimes inconsistent colonial-era testimony rather than direct archaeological survival of the huacas themselves.