THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The early chroniclers give his full name as Con Tici Viracocha. In the accounts of Betanzos and Cieza de León he appears as an unremarkable old man in a white robe that fell to his ankles, staff in hand, so plain that villagers took him for a beggar on the road. He made the world twice. His first people lived in a sunless dark and angered him, and he ended them by flood or turned them to stone. Then, at Tiahuanaco beside Lake Titicaca, he commanded the sun, the moon and the stars to rise out of the lake, and the world had light.
At Tiahuanaco he carved the prototypes of every nation in stone, assigning each its dress, its language and its songs. Two helpers — Betanzos names them Imaymana Viracocha and Tocapo Viracocha — went out along the mountain road and the coast road, calling the peoples up from caves, springs and rock faces, while Viracocha himself walked north through the highlands. At Cacha, now Raqchi, the Cana people came at him with weapons; he called fire down upon the hill, and when they threw themselves at his feet the flames died. A temple to him rose beside the scorched ground, and the walls of the Temple of Wiracocha at Raqchi still stand. At Manta on the coast of Ecuador he and his companions walked out over the sea toward the west and were gone.
The eighth Inca ruler took the name Viracocha, claiming the god had aided him in a dream against invaders. When the Spaniards landed, Andeans called the pale strangers viracochas — a usage that survives in Peruvian Spanish to this day.
