Incas

The ancient South American religion of the Incas encompasses both political and spiritual elements as an integral part of the largest empire in the Americas, historically beginning in 1438 with the rise to power of Emperor Pachacuti Yupanqui. Governing more than 906,000 square miles of South America by the time of the Spanish conquest in 1532, the Inca Empire, or Tawantinsuyu, held a general belief system and series of religious practices that intertwined with the ideology of the ruling elite. While this ruling class called themselves Incas, the term was not a widespread cultural denotation; instead, individual descent groups retained the names that tied them to their region of origins. The religious beliefs and practices discussed here were spread by the Incas but without the need for active evangelization as the Incaic religion grew out of and accommodated the long-standing religious culture of the South American peoples they conquered.

Western South America was home to complex civilizations since at least 3000 BCE, referred to as Andean cultures. None of these cultures, including that of the Incas, developed a writing system, necessitating the scholar to seek information from extant material culture, archaeological investigations, the writings of Spanish missionaries and other chroniclers of the Colonial Period, and contemporary ethnographic comparisons. Ancient Andean societies were agriculture based, despite the environmental difficulties of life in the harsh coastal desert, the thin air of the mountains, and the recurring El Niño weather events.

With their capital in the central Peruvian highland Cuzco, the Incas developed systems to control, supervise, and organize their massive empire, much of which centered on management of religious symbols and rituals. Water scarcity was a consistent problem in the ancient Andean world, and water gods and goddesses were worshipped, mythologized, and given sacrifices in the hope of ensuring human survival. With elaborate canal systems, the Incas managed this crucial resource and the religious import it carried. A number of imperial holidays publicly placed the Inca emperor as the regulator of agricultural life, who ritually planted and harvested the first ears of corn every year.

The Inca emperor was more than just the singular man who controlled the vast empire and its subjects. The emperor embodied complementary spiritual and physical presences that were widely accepted as part of the Andean worldview. Male and female forces were one major aspect of the duality central to Andean understanding. The Inca emperor was balanced in this way by his wife, connected spiritually through ceremony and physically as his full-blooded sister. Furthermore, the Inca emperor's tacitly understood supernatural descent allowed him to embody the complementary corporeal and divine realms. With parentage claimed to be from the sun deity Inti, the Incas emphasized his role in agricultural welfare.

Inti was the patron deity of the Incas but was only one of the forces that made up the complex Incaic supernatural realm. The supernatural was a constant and very real presence in Andean life, consisting of two main categories: deities and animistic forces taking physical form or huacas. Notions of duality and complementarity were central to religious beliefs. All things, whether supernatural, mundane, political, or social, existed in a crucial balance of forces such as male and female, good and bad, civilization and disorder, upper and lower, dry and wet, highlands and lowlands. Maintenance of this balance was essential to life and the prevention of chaos. Each deity had a complement that checked his or her power. The principal deity of the Incas was Viracocha, a creator god who initiated [Page 546]life, according to differing accounts, on an island in Lake Titicaca in Bolivia or nearby. After creating life and instituting human civilization, Viracocha played a passive role in everyday occurrences and was worshipped for his act of origins. When conquering a new territory, the Incas established Viracocha as a central deity, requiring reverence to this symbolic presence of the Inca Empire. Other deities played a significantly active role in the lives of Inca subjects, wielding both destructive and beneficial powers over the agriculture-based society. The earth-mother goddess, Pachamama, was an active counterpart to Viracocha, receiving constant praise and gifts to ensure her beneficence. Mamaquilla, the moon, was the sister-wife of Inti, marking agricultural time as a necessary complement to the sun. A dualistic set of deities had jurisdiction over water: the male thunder and rain, Illapa, and the female ocean and streams, Mamacocha. These and other deities were added to the pantheons of conquered territories. If a particular region already worshipped gods similar to the Incaic deities, they would be renamed to comply with imperial consistency.

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