Then they all proceeded to the temple. Outside, the curacas, or governors, offered to the priests images of many different animals of gold, while the Inca and all the legitimate children of the Sun went in and presented the goblets he had consecrated to the image of the Sun. There were sacrifices of flocks of black llamas, the particular property of the Sun, from which prognostications were made. The animal to be sacrificed was held fast, and with a sliver of black obsidian its breast was opened and the heart torn out. Sometimes as many as two hundred thousand llamas were sacrificed during a year.
It is a horrid chapter from the Incas’ story that they made human sacrifices along with everything else which they valued. Von Tschudi says that they offered to the Sun as many as two hundred children at one time. “The children were strangled and buried with the silver figures of sheep, having first walked around the statues of the Creator, the Sun, the Thunder, and the Moon. Sometimes they were crushed between two stones, sometimes their mouths were stuffed with ground coca.”
The fire for sacrifice was a direct gift of the Sun, kindled from a great polished bracelet upon the left arm of the high priest. The Virgins of the Sun bore away some of it to care for during the following year. No more unhappy omen could occur than its extinction.
The Inca sat within view of all, mounted upon his gold seat, drinking to his kindred and to the curacas in order. The cups his lips had touched were kept as idols.
The Sun had drunk of their offerings; he had kindled their sacrificial fire; he now entertained his subjects with a banquet prepared by the hands of his own Virgin-wives. As three days of universal fasting had preceded the feast of the Sun, so for nine days reveling followed. They ate the bread of the Sun Virgins, and drank their chicha, they shouted and danced and masqueraded, each tribe of the empire with differing head-dresses of feathers and grotesque
IN A FERTILE VALLEY OF THE UPLANDS.
masks according to the fashion of their country. “They cast flowers in the highways, ... and their noblemen had small plates of gold upon their beards, and all did sing.”