Viracocha

He rose from the darkness of Lake Titicaca before there was light.

Betanzos’s account, written in 1551 from testimony given by Inca nobles, begins there: Viracocha emerged from the lake and created the sun, moon, and stars by calling them out of the water at Titicaca Island. He shaped the first humans from clay at Tiahuanaco, painting their hair and clothing onto them before breathing life in. They displeased him. He sent a flood. He tried again.

The second creation became the Andean peoples. He sent them under the earth to emerge, later, from caves, hills, and lakes across the Andes.

The Walk Through Peru

After the creation, Viracocha did not stay in one place.

He walked the length of Peru dressed as an old man in ragged clothes, accompanied by two assistants. He taught the people he had made. He healed. At Cacha, a town in the Cuzco region, the inhabitants drove him away with stones. He called down fire from the sky and burned the hillside above the town. They surrendered and apologized. He put out the fire and kept walking.

Cieza de León visited Cacha in the 1540s and found a temple there with a stone statue of an old man in a long robe, identified by the local population as Viracocha. The burned hillside was still visible.

The God Who Looked Like a Priest

The Spanish who recorded Viracocha’s attributes in the 1540s and 1550s noted several things about him: he was described as old and bearded, wearing a long white robe. He carried a staff. He performed miracles. He had traveled from east to west and left by sea with a promise to return.

The parallels to Christianity were obvious, and the Spanish drew them immediately. Several early chroniclers suggested that Viracocha’s legend was either a distorted memory of an early Christian missionary or proof that the Andean peoples had received a form of divine revelation before the conquest. These interpretations said more about the chroniclers’ expectations than about Viracocha.

The beard was itself a problem. Andean men generally could not grow full beards, which led some scholars to suggest the bearded Viracocha reflected pre-Columbian contact with outsiders. Others argue the beard was simply a conventional marker of age and wisdom in Andean iconography. The debate has not been resolved.

Viracocha and the Inca State

The Sapa Inca, the ruling emperor, derived his divine legitimacy from descent from Inti, the sun god. Inti was the patron of the state and the object of the primary cult. Viracocha occupied a different position: older, less accessible. He was the precondition of everything else, not the presiding god of any festival cycle.

The eighth Inca ruler took the name Viracocha after a vision in which the god appeared and warned him of approaching enemies. He credited his subsequent victory to Viracocha’s intervention and built a temple to him at Cacha, over the site where Viracocha had burned the hillside.

At Cuzco, the Coricancha housed shrines to Inti, Mama Quilla, Illapa, and Viracocha. His shrine stood apart from the others, reflecting his position as creator rather than one element of a pantheon.

The Sea

At Manta, on the Ecuadorian coast, Viracocha waded into the Pacific and walked west on the water. He did not return.

The sources note that he left with a promise to come back. The year Pizarro landed at Tumbes, 1532, the Inca empire was in the middle of a civil war between Huascar and Atahualpa. Whether the Inca initially interpreted the Spanish arrival through the lens of Viracocha’s return, as some chroniclers claimed, or whether that interpretation was added later to explain the empire’s collapse, is the same unanswered question scholars have raised about Quetzalcoatl and Cortés.

The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, writing decades after the conquest, records that the Inca called the Spanish viracochas before they knew what they were dealing with. He was himself of Inca and Spanish descent, writing from exile in Spain. His account is valuable and partial in equal measure.

Further Reading

• Inti — the sun god whose cult the Inca state built its authority on, created when Viracocha called the sun out of Lake Titicaca
• Pachamama — the earth mother whose domain Viracocha shaped during the creation at Tiahuanaco
• Mama Quilla — the moon goddess, created alongside Inti when Viracocha commanded the celestial bodies to rise
• Illapa — the thunder god who occupied his own shrine in the Coricancha alongside Viracocha