Inti

The Coricancha in Cusco was the most sacred building in the Inca empire. Its walls were sheathed in gold plates. Inside, a golden disk representing Inti’s face hung on the western wall, positioned so that the rising sun struck it and filled the room with reflected light. Gardens of golden corn, golden llamas, and golden butterflies surrounded the temple. When the Spanish arrived in 1533, they stripped the gold, melted it into ingots, and divided it among themselves.

The Sapa Inca

The ruling Sapa Inca was Inti’s son on earth, a living conduit between the sun and humanity. The empire’s legitimacy rested on this divine descent. The Sapa Inca’s primary wife was his own sister, maintaining the purity of the solar bloodline. The practice horrified the Spanish but followed the same logic as Egyptian pharaonic marriage: the sun’s lineage could not be diluted.

Inti Raymi

The Festival of the Sun was held at the June solstice (winter in the southern hemisphere), when the sun was farthest from the earth. The ceremony at Cusco lasted nine days. Fires were extinguished and relit from a flame kindled by a concave mirror reflecting sunlight. Llamas were sacrificed. The Sapa Inca offered chicha (corn beer) to Inti in golden cups. The Spanish banned the festival after the conquest. In 1944, the Peruvian actor Faustino Espinoza Navarro reconstructed the ceremony from colonial-era descriptions. It has been performed annually at Sacsayhuamán above Cusco ever since, drawing tens of thousands of visitors.

The Flag

The modern flag of the Argentine province of Jujuy and the Whipala flag used by indigenous movements across the Andes both carry solar imagery descended from Inti worship. The sun face on the Argentine national flag, the Sol de Mayo, derives from the same tradition. Inti’s face is still on the money.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609)
• Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú (1553)
• Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1653)