Viracocha

Viracocha is the creator of the Andean world. In the account that Juan de Betanzos, a Spaniard married into Inca nobility, recorded in Cusco in the 1550s, Viracocha rose from Lake Titicaca in a time of darkness, made the sun, moon and stars, then formed the ancestors of each people and sent them underground to emerge afterward at their own appointed places, the springs, caves and rocks (pacarinas) that were the origin-places of each community, and finally walked northwest across the land teaching, until at the coast he went out across the sea. The Inca kept a temple to him at Cacha, with its distinctive great wall, and an image in the Coricancha at Cusco, and one emperor took Viracocha as his throne-name. The meaning of the name is disputed, with sea-foam, fat and origin among the proposals.

A once-popular claim, that Andean peoples mistook the Spanish conquistadors for the returning god Viracocha because of an old prophecy describing him as white and bearded, closely parallels a similar story told about the Aztec Quetzalcoatl and the arrival of Cortes; modern historians treat both traditions with considerable scepticism, arguing the story was substantially shaped, retrospectively, by Spanish chroniclers and later colonial-era writers keen to present the conquest as fulfilling indigenous prophecy rather than as straightforward invasion. The episode is now widely cited by historians as a caution against taking colonial-era religious reporting about indigenous belief at face value.

A persistent claim holds that Viracocha was described as a bearded white man, and that Andean people therefore mistook the arriving Spaniards for the returning god, a story often repeated to explain the ease of the conquest. This should be treated with real caution. The bearded-white-god image and the returning-god motif owe a great deal to Spanish authors writing after the conquest, who had reasons to cast the invasion as prophesied and providential, and who were also reading their own Christian expectations into Andean belief (some even tried to identify Viracocha with a wandering apostle).

Modern scholars generally regard the "the natives thought we were gods" narrative as a colonial construction rather than reliable pre-conquest Andean belief. Viracocha the creator is genuinely central to Inca religion; the flattering legend that grew up around European arrival is a separate and far less trustworthy thing.