Inca Religion

The Inca did not convert anyone. Their expansion laid a state religion over local religion, and the two operated at different levels.

The state cult centred on Inti, the sun, whose principal temple stood at Cusco with its walls plated in gold and whose service was supported by dedicated land, herds and labour. A high priest presided. The aqllakuna, women selected in childhood and removed to enclosed houses, wove cloth and brewed maize beer for the cult and were also bestowed in marriage by the state. Viracocha, a creator figure, Illapa, thunder and weather, Mama Killa, the moon, and several constellations all had a place. The Sapa Inca was held to descend from the sun, which made obedience to him a religious matter as well as a political one.

Local religion was older and largely untouched. Every community had its huacas (a spring, a rock formation, a boulder, a field, an object, a mummified ancestor), and its own founding ancestor and place of origin. The Inca strategy was incorporation rather than suppression. Local huacas were ranked within a system radiating from Cusco, the sons of provincial elites were educated in the capital, and prominent cult objects were installed there. Conquered peoples continued their own observances, and when Inca power collapsed those observances remained. That is a large part of why the state cult vanished within a generation and the rest of it did not.

Cusco itself was organised religiously. Lines described in colonial sources as ceques radiated from the sun temple, each strung with shrines assigned to particular kin groups for maintenance and offering. The system is known from a seventeenth-century description drawing on earlier material, and its details are debated. What it indicates is a religion mapped onto landscape and onto social obligation rather than gathered into congregations.

Death did not remove an Inca ruler from public life. His body was preserved and kept in his own household with his lands and servants, brought out at festivals, seated among the living, offered food and drink, and consulted; a corporate lineage existed to maintain him. Each new ruler therefore inherited the office but not his predecessor's estate, which is one explanation that has been offered for the pressure toward continual expansion, though it is an argument rather than an established fact.

Ordinary ancestors were treated in a related way at a smaller scale. The dead were kept in tombs and caves on community land, brought out and given offerings, and understood to hold title to the land their descendants worked. The Spanish grasped the importance of this quickly, and made the destruction of preserved bodies a priority of the campaigns against Andean religion.

Mountains were powers in their own right, and remain so in Andean communities. High peaks were addressed and given offerings, and the Inca built shrines at extreme altitude on them.

It is at those summit shrines that the rite the chronicles call capacocha is directly attested. Children and adolescents, chosen for physical perfection, were brought from the provinces to Cusco, honoured there, and then taken to a shrine and killed, often on a mountain top. Unlike much of what is said about Inca religion, this does not rest on Spanish testimony alone. Frozen burials excavated on Andean summits, including those recovered on Ampato in 1995 and at Llullaillaco in 1999, have produced bodies accompanied by the goods the chronicles describe, and analysis of hair has been used to reconstruct changes in diet in the months before death. The evidence suggests an occasional rite tied to accessions, crises or major shrines rather than a routine one. How often it was performed, and how many people were involved, is not known.

No Inca account of Inca religion exists, because the Inca had no writing in the sense that word usually carries. They kept khipu, assemblages of knotted cords, and these certainly recorded numbers: censuses, tribute, and accounting and calendrical data, read by trained specialists. Whether any khipu encoded language, and could therefore have carried narrative or ritual text, is an open research question and not an established fact. No khipu has been read as connected prose, and claims that particular surviving cords record histories or myths should be treated as proposals rather than findings.

What exists instead is Spanish. Soldiers and officials wrote first: Cieza de Leon; Juan de Betanzos, who married into an Inca family; and Polo de Ondegardo, an administrator who located and removed the preserved royal bodies and whose reports were written to make suppressing Andean religion easier. Missionaries followed, and the seventeenth-century campaigns known as the extirpation of idolatry generated trial records and handbooks describing local practice in unusual detail, precisely because their purpose was to identify it and end it. Bernabe Cobo, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, preserved earlier material now lost.

Two authors of indigenous or mixed descent stand somewhat apart. Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish captain and an Inca noblewoman, published an account in 1609 that is invaluable and openly apologetic, presenting Inca religion as an orderly near-monotheism awaiting Christianity. The long illustrated letter that Guaman Poma de Ayala completed around 1615 records detail available nowhere else and was written as an indictment of colonial rule.

The consequences are structural. These sources describe the state cult far better than provincial practice, impose European categories of god, idol and devil, and were often compiled from testimony given under duress. Reconstruction is possible, but nearly every statement about Inca religion carries an implicit qualification: according to Spanish sources, written after the conquest.