Inca Mythology

The Incas had no writing. Khipu, the knotted cords, were used above all for counting, and whether they carried narrative is still argued. Every sentence in this timeline therefore comes from Spanish-language texts written after the conquest of 1532, by soldiers, priests and royal commissioners, taken down through interpreters from Cusco noblemen, and each with its own agenda. Sarmiento wrote in 1572 on the orders of Viceroy Toledo, whose purpose was to show that the Incas were recent usurpers and Spanish rule therefore legitimate. Garcilaso wrote in Spain in 1609 out of childhood memory and humanist reading, and produced a benign, civilizing dynasty. Cieza's second part sat in manuscript for three centuries. Molina's account survives in a single copy.

The chroniclers do not tell one story. They disagree on how many creations there were: Betanzos has Viracocha come out of the lake twice; Sarmiento has two rounds, but his giants are only trial models made to test the size, and the people the unu pachacuti destroys are the ordinary-sized ones made afterwards in the maker's own likeness — popular retellings collapse the two into a race of giants drowned by the flood, which is not what the text says; other accounts have no giants at all. Whether the first people were drowned or petrified is often left standing both ways within a single book. The two men do not even place Viracocha's emergence from the lake at the same point: Betanzos puts it before the making of people, Sarmiento after the flood. The sequence below follows the Betanzos-Sarmiento spine, and the conflicts are flagged in the stages rather than smoothed over.

Whether Viracocha really stood above the Sun as a supreme creator is unsettled. The state cult of the empire was the Sun's — the Coricancha, Inti Raymi — and how much of the invisible supreme maker is the work of chroniclers reaching for a monotheistic frame is hard to say. Colonial writers went so far as to identify the bearded old wanderer in the white robe with the Apostle Thomas or Bartholomew, which leaves the white robe and the beard themselves under suspicion. The setting is political too: Tiahuanaco had been a ruin for centuries when the Incas took the Collao (the Tiwanaku culture flourished roughly 500-1000 CE), the Titicaca basin was Aymara country, and the local Tunupa was blended into Viracocha in the colonial sources.

Three more things. There is no void here and no parting of sky and earth: the land is already present, merely dark, and that absence is itself information. The founding of Cusco by Manco Cápac is a dynastic charter, a separate cycle that the chroniclers spliced onto the creation, and it comes in two irreconcilable versions of its own (descent at Lake Titicaca with a golden rod; eight siblings out of the three-windowed cave at Pacaritambo). And there is no end of the world in the early record: pachakuti means an overturning, a turn of the age, not a finish. Guaman Poma's five generations of humankind are already fitted into biblical history, and Inkarri is a post-conquest tradition, first written down in the 1950s.

For comparison: the Huarochirí Manuscript, the one substantial early text composed in Quechua, also has a flood, but it belongs to the Huarochirí highlands and not to Cusco. A llama refuses to eat and tells its owner that in five days the sea will rise; the two climb the mountain Huillcacoto, where every animal is already crowded together, and the fox's tail hangs down into the water, which is why its tip is black. It is a different tradition and should not be folded into the one below.