Browse By

Practice Status

This page groups sacred sites by whether their sacred status is still actively maintained. Wikipedia notes that Mircea Eliade "argues that while the concept of a sacred space is often associated with religious traditions, it is not exclusive to them," since secular societies can keep treating a place as significant too. Browsing this way lets a visitor tell a site with living religious observance apart from one preserved mainly for its history.

Facts

Overview

What Defines This Grouping

Temples, mountain shrines and sacred stones of the Andean world, in which the landscape itself is the sacred object: peaks, springs, caves and worked and unworked stones are huacas. At Cusco they were organised on a system of sight-lines radiating out from the Qorikancha, each line maintained by a named kin group. 2

Peoples and Traditions Covered

The Inca state was one Andean polity among many and its religion was built on older ones - Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimu and the local cults it absorbed as it expanded. Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities live in the same landscape today, and offerings to mountains and to the earth continue to be made there. 3

Origins

Whose Classification This Is

Much of what is recorded of Inca religion reaches us through the Spanish chroniclers and through the seventeenth-century campaigns to extirpate idolatry, whose purpose was to find and destroy the shrines they describe. The written record is a record of that destruction as much as of the cult. 3