CHAPTER III
MYTHS AND MONUMENTS
I
The Indian worshipped the Inca, his sovereign, because of his divine origin, being the descendant of Manco Ccapac, founder of his race, who was the son of the Sun. Thus, religion was the substance of the empire. But as the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was a pantheon of idols, sacred each one in the mind of some visiting chieftain, though always remaining the Sun Temple, so the religion itself was a synthesis of all the beliefs which those idols represented; blended yet dominated by the all-searching light of the Sun. This may explain, for instance, the confusion of Pachacamac, the supreme deity of the ancient coast tribes, with Uiracocha of the mountains, whom Acosta, among others, declares to be one and the same. Clear-cut
A SWINGING BRIDGE NEAR JAUJA.
distinctions are impossible. The stories are all vague, even among confident writers of legends.
As to the Sun’s descent, the wise men of the Incas learned from their predecessors that he was made by The Ancient Cause, The First Beginning, The Maker of All Created Things, The Supreme Deity, Illa Tici Uira Cocha—the four ultimate, visible forms of the Infinite, to quote the Peruvian Star-chart of Salcamayhua. There is in Quichua a word to express “the-essence-of-being-in-general-as-existent-in-humanity.” Sometimes the name is given as Con Tici Uiracocha, an identification with the supreme god, Con, the center of another group of legends of belief. The mystery surrounding this great, invisible god, generally called Uiracocha, is as complete now as it was to the Sun-worshipping Incas, a sort of dim background for the glittering splendor of Sun-ritual.
Uiracocha has many identities: Uiracocha, the Supreme God; Uiracocha, the hero-god, the white and bearded man in long robes, who with a strange animal in his hand, appeared to that Inca afterwards called by his name, tending the flocks of the Sun among the tops of the Andes; Uiracocha, who raised up an army for the Inca on the Field of Blood out of stones that he set on fire from a sling of gold; he who changed the revelers of Tiahuanacu to stone in wrath. (However misty the connection between Uiracocha, stones, and human beings, it is certain that Peruvians held stones in great awe. The temple to Uiracocha, the war-god, is at the foot of an extinct volcano whence a lava stream had issued. It is paved with black and made of carved and polished stone. The interior was obscure, with an altar for human sacrifices.) Uiracocha who, as Betanzos relates, came out of a lake when all was dark, lord of light and lord of wind, who, as dawn appeared, spread his mantle over the waves of the lake and was wafted away into the rays of morning light. The curling waves followed his evanescent passage, and so he was called Uiracocha, the Foam of the Sea. He gave his wand to the chief in the House of the Dawn. It afterwards became the golden staff of Manco Ccapac, his son.
Uiracocha was the universal god of the Quichua-speaking people. The Sun was peculiar to the Incas.