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Whereas the pre-Columbian cultures of
Mesoamerica developed systems of writing, their Andean
counterparts did not. As a result, only two Incan
accounts by Native American authors survive. Both
authors wrote in the second decade of the 17th century,
in a mixture of Spanish and native languages. Neither
man was ethnically Incan; both traced their ancestry to
tribes that had been conquered by the Incas. Nueva
Coronica y Buen Gobierno (translated as Letter to a King,
1978), by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, is a 1200-page
letter addressed to the King of Spain, illustrated with
the author's own line drawings. It was lost for nearly
300 years and was discovered in the royal library of
Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1906. The second work is
Relación de Antigüedades deste Regno del Pirú (about
1615; An Account of the Antiquities of Peru, 1873), by
Joan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, much of
which is virtually incomprehensible because the author
was only semiliterate. A third figure who could be
considered a native author is Garcilaso de la Vega,
called El Inca (Spanish for "The Inca"). He was born in
Peru, the son of a Spanish father and an Incan mother.
However, he went to Spain at the age of 21 and did not
write Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609; Royal
Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru,
1966), an account of Incan culture and history, until he
was an old man.
The Nature of the Universe
Like the Mayas and Aztecs, the Incas believed in
previous creations and destructions of the universe.
However, the division of cosmological time into major
epochs of creation was not a central concern of Incan
religion. Instead, the Incas emphasized the arrangement
of space into a sacred geography. A crucial aspect of
this sacred geography was the concept of huaca. This
term referred to any person, place, or thing with
supernatural power; almost anything unusual was
considered a huaca. Examples ranged from prominent
features of the landscape (mountain peaks, stone
outcroppings, springs) to oddly shaped or colored
pebbles and plants. There were countless huacas in the
Incan world, and major ones defined the organization of
sacred space.
Cusco, the Incas' capital, was the center of their
universe. More than 300 of the most important huacas in
the area around Cusco were conceived of as lying along
41 lines called ceques. These lines radiated outward
from the Coricancha, the principal temple of Incan state
religion, and extended to the horizon or beyond. Like
the Mayas and Aztecs, the Incas also saw the earth as
being composed of four quarters, whose dividing lines
intersected in Cusco. The ceques subdivided the four
quarters. Each ceque belonged to one of the quarters,
and the care of each huaca on each ceque was assigned to
a particular group of people. In this way the ceques
helped to coordinate social relations among people, as
well as to organize sacred space.
Above the earth were the heavens, while the underworld
lay below. Neither the heavens nor the underworld seems
to have had the elaborate vertical layering common in
Mesoamerican conceptions, but the heavens had a complex
geography. Like the earth, the heavens were divided into
four quarters, separated by a giant cross formed by the
Milky Way as it passed through its zenith. The movement
of astronomical bodies through the four quadrants
determined the Incan agricultural and ceremonial
calendars, and the ceques also served as sight lines for
astronomical observations.
Gods and Goddesses
As in other pre-Columbian religions, Incan gods and
goddesses actually represented a number of shifting and
overlapping divine powers. The upper pantheon contained
a creator-sky-weather complex with three principal
components: Viracocha, the creator; Inti, the sun god
and ancestor of the ruling dynasty; and Illapa, the
thunder or weather god. The most important female
supernaturals were Pachamama, the earth; Mamacocha, the
sea; and Mamaquilla, the moon. The core of Incan
religion was ancestor worship. Ancestors were venerated
as protective spirits, and the bodies and tombs of the
dead were treated as sacred objects. Many other
important huacas were also explicitly identified with
the ancestors. For example, some of the most important
shrines around Cusco were believed to be the petrified
forebears of the Incas. The bodies of dead rulers were
among the holiest huacas in the Inca realm. As sons of
Inti and embodiments of Illapa, the mummies of past
rulers were the direct, visible links between the Incas
and their pantheon. Maintaining these links, and through
them the proper order of the universe, required
perpetual care of the royal mummies.
Religious Leadership and Rituals
The Incan ruler and the mummies of his predecessors
were the most important religious leaders. They were
assisted by a hierarchical priesthood headed by the high
priest of the Coricancha. Important shrines also had
staffs of female attendants who wove cloth and brewed
chicha (maize beer) for use in festivals. Most
ceremonies involved sacrifices of cloth, chicha, plants,
or animals. Human sacrifice was practiced, but only on
the most solemn occasions and in times of disaster. An
elaborate ritual life surrounded the mummies of deceased
rulers, who were treated as if they were still alive.
They were maintained in state in their palaces, and they
continued to own the property they had accumulated
during their lifetimes. Their descendants managed the
mummies' property for them, consulted them as oracles (bearers
of messages from the gods), made sacrifices to them, ate
and drank with them, took them to visit one another, and
brought them out of their palaces to participate in
major ceremonies. Much simpler rituals of ancestor
worship were practiced in rural areas.
The Destination of Souls
The Incas had a more optimistic view of the
afterlife than the Mayas or Aztecs. As protective
ancestral spirits, dead Incas continued to play an
active role in the world of the living. They revealed
themselves through the huacas and were cared for and
worshipped by their descendants. The Incas were strongly
moralistic, and they believed the souls of virtuous
people joined the sun in heaven. Those souls had plenty
to eat and drink. They remained connected to their
descendants, and their lives continued much as they had
on earth. The souls of evildoers went to the underworld,
a cold and barren place where there was nothing to eat
but stones.
NATIVE RELIGIONS TODAY
In the centuries following the Spanish conquests of
Mexico and Peru most Native Americans were at least
nominally converted to Catholicism (see Roman Catholic
Church). The blending of native and Catholic beliefs was
a complicated process, and it followed different courses
in different areas. In general, the Aztecs made
Catholicism the core of a new religion that also
incorporated native beliefs, while the Mayas retained
native beliefs as the core of their religion and added
Catholic elements. The Incan case, perhaps the most
complicated of the three, represented an intricate
blending of native and Catholic beliefs, aided by
certain parallels between the two. In essence, the
Spanish conquest of 1519-1521 destroyed the core of
Aztec religion—the cult of warfare and human sacrifice.
The Aztecs were no longer able to feed the sun, yet the
universe survived, and Huitzilopochtli was discredited.
Aztec religion had lost its focus by 1531, when,
according to Catholic tradition, the Virgin of Guadalupe
appeared to an Aztec man named Juan Diego. Devotion to
the Virgin spread rapidly, and within six years 9
million Indians had been baptized as Catholics in
central Mexico. Worship of some Aztec gods and goddesses,
most notably ancient agricultural deities, persisted.
These deities were blended with Catholic saints in the
new religion. In contrast to the Aztec case, when the
Spanish began their conquest of the Maya area, Maya
religion was already fragmented. The great religious and
political centers of the Classic period had been
abandoned more than 600 years earlier, and even the
Post-Classic centers were in decline. The religion
practiced in hamlets and villages emphasized ancient
agricultural deities—such as the rain gods (Chacs)—who
proved to endure. Maya folk religion still centers on
these agricultural deities, and Catholic and native
beliefs are more distinct from each other than they are
among the descendants of the Aztecs. The Incas, like the
Aztecs, had a central imperial cult: the worship of the
royal mummies. However, the Incan imperial cult, like
the Mesoamerican worship of agricultural deities, was an
expression of the ancient and widespread religious
tradition of ancestor worship. The Spanish destroyed the
royal Incan mummies and their cult, but not the
underlying tradition of ancestor worship. During the
16th and 17th centuries, Incan and Catholic beliefs were
blended, revealing parallels between the two traditions.
For example, both the Incas and their Spanish conquerors
made special commemoration of the dead during the month
of November and had penitential rites that involved
confessing sins to priests. In recent decades
evangelical Protestantism, especially in the form of
Pentecostalism (see Pentecostal Churches), has been
spreading rapidly among Latin American Indians. At the
same time, community-based social action movements are a
growing force within Latin American Catholicism. Whether
these are short- or long-term trends, and what effects
they will have on native religious traditions, are
unresolved questions.
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