10/01/2024
THE INCA CREATION STORY
Before examining the diverse accounts of the foundation, or occupation, of Cuzco by the Incas, one must first ask: what do we know of their more remote origins? What were their creation myths, and how do these compare with those of other Andean peoples? In more precise terms, did such myths come from the coast, as Demarest suggests, or rather, as Rowe believes, from the Aymara legends of the Lake Titicaca region?
Mircea Eliade aptly describes myth as a form of sacred history in which the actors in the drama are not men but supernatural beings. Myth is thus related to a 'creation' that tells how something first came into existence; it reveals that the world and life itself have a supernatural history and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary. Creation myths, to be found in every part of the globe, are essentially narrative and perform the vital function of anchoring a people's present in their past.
Most of the principal Inca chroniclers write fairly briefly, if at all, of the original creation of man; if mentioned, it tends to be associated with the Lake Titicaca region and often with the site of Tiahuanaco. For instance, Betanzos states that at a time when all was still and dark the creator, Tici Viracocha, ruled over certain people, whose name no one recalls. Viracocha, who first emerged from Lake Titicaca, killed these shadowy beings who had offended him and turned them into stone. Then he rose up from the lake once more and, after creating the sun and the moon, fashioned certain new people out of stone, together with many pregnant women and others who had recently given birth. With these he went to Tiahuanaco and then despatched them to different places, including Cuzco.
Cieza de León (the first two chapters of his ‘Señorio de los Incas’ were lost) deals less specifically with the creation of man, focusing on events that occurred when mankind already lived in the Andean region. This omission is scarcely surprising in Peruvian chronicles; it was hard for Spanish Christians, nurtured on the creation story in the Book of Genesis, to admit to a second creation in the New World, complete with its own Adam and Eve living in an Andean version of the Garden of Eden. Reluctant to contemplate such heresies, few chroniclers speculated as to how people descended from a single creation in the Old World had reached Peru.
Cieza speaks briefly of a flood in Collao in which only six humans survived. Somewhat confusingly, he also writes of a primordial god who equally arose from the island in Lake Titicaca, a being who was tall and white; he did not create mankind but taught the people he found how they should live, including those who eventually reached Cuzco. This creator was commonly called Tici Viracocha. Though he did not create the world, he first caused the sun to shine upon it; he was able to move mountains and produce huge fountains. Writing some twenty years later, Sarmiento de Gamboa recounts a similar legend of a world inhabited by giants, who were ultimately destroyed by a flood; as in the Betanzos account, the sun and the moon originally produced no light. In the second age of the world, Viracocha created the present Indian race in the region of Lake Titicaca.
Garcilasco de la Vega recounts how he learned of Inca creation legends from sages who visited his mother's house in Cuzco. These sages had survived from pre-Conquest times. He refers to the creator as ‘our father, the sun', who took pity on mankind's ignorance and sent two of his sons to earth. They emerged from Lake Titicaca and proceeded to the Cuzco region. But in Andean cosmogony there is really no account of the creation of the world ex nihilo, as there is in so many other cultures. Andean chroniclers tend to write of the appearance of tutelary divinities in a world that already existed.
George Kubler, writing more of the Andean region as a whole than of the Incas in particular, draws attention to stories of multiple creation, or a series of worlds, told by as many as sixteen chroniclers before 1650. Some write of only two creations, or suns; others include as many as four. These sources vividly recall the Mesoamerican accounts of the birth of four or sometimes five suns.
As an example of such chroniclers, Kubler cites López de Gómara, who wrote in 1552 and tells of two primordial gods, Con and Pachacama, for two creations of mankind. Con was a man from the north without bones who called himself Son of the Sun and settled the Earth with men and women. Pachacama was also a son of the sun and moon; he exiled Con, turning humans into black cats. A new race of humans was then destroyed by a flood. Thus, two deities were responsible for two creations; these were followed by two more without named sponsors. The legend of Con also occurs in ethnohistorical data gleaned from many coastal sites described by Rostworowski. Con is a water deity whose cult preceded that of Pachacama.
By Andrew Jones
