Illapa, the Thunder and Weather God of the Inca
Illapa was the god of thunder, lightning, and rain in the Inca pantheon and the third of the principal celestial deities, after Inti the sun and Mama Killa the moon. He was associated with storms, with the rainbow, and with the masculine force of the rains that made agriculture possible on the high puna, the grasslands above about 4,000 meters in the central Andes. The principal shrine of Illapa stood in the Coricancha in Cusco, where a chapel dedicated to him contained large vessels of water representing the celestial waters that he controlled. His cult was closely tied to the agricultural calendar, and his appearance in the form of lightning and thunder was welcomed at the beginning of the rainy season in November as a sign of fertility. Among the modern Quechua and Aymara populations of Peru and Bolivia, the cult of Illapa persists in various forms, often syncretized with the Catholic devotion to the apostle Santiago, who is said to ride across the sky in similar fashion.
The principal sources for the cult of Illapa are the same as those for the rest of the Inca pantheon: the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657), Pedro Cieza de León (1520–1554), and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535–1616), all of whom wrote within decades of the Spanish conquest in 1532.
Illapa in the Inca Pantheon
In the hierarchy of the Inca pantheon, Illapa was a celestial deity of the second tier, ranked below Inti and Mama Killa but above the terrestrial and underworld deities. Garcilaso de la Vega identified him as the brother of the sun and the moon, and the three were understood to form a celestial family that governed the daily and seasonal cycles of the sky. The chronicler Cobo described Illapa in some detail, and associated him with the constellation of the Pleiades, which was closely tied to the agricultural calendar and to the festival of the maize harvest. The morning and evening star in the Inca sky was more commonly identified with the separate deity Ch’aska (“star”) rather than with Illapa, whose domain was the weather.
The iconography of Illapa typically depicted him as a man holding a sling and a shining club, dressed in a shining garment, and accompanied by a falcon or by a small group of attendants. When he wished to send rain, according to the chroniclers, he would fill a jug with water from a celestial river and smash it with his club; the resulting thunder was the sound of the breaking jug, and the lightning was the glint of the water. The rainbow was understood as the arc of the celestial river itself, and the place where the rainbow appeared in the sky was understood to mark the movement of Illapa as he traveled from one part of the heavens to another. The falcon that accompanied him was understood as a messenger of the weather and as a sign of the god’s presence.
The Shrine in the Coricancha and the Ritual Calendar
The principal shrine of Illapa was a chapel within the Coricancha in Cusco, the great Temple of the Sun. According to Garcilaso de la Vega, the chapel contained large vessels of water, representing the celestial waters that Illapa controlled, and a stone image of the god dressed in a shining garment of blue and white, the colors associated with rain. The chronicler Cobo reported that the chapel was decorated with representations of clouds, of lightning bolts, and of falling rain, and that the priests of Illapa maintained a perpetual ritual of pouring small amounts of water onto the floor of the chapel in imitation of the god’s rain. The chapel was staffed by a small group of priests drawn from the central priesthood of the empire, and the offerings made there consisted of llama fat, coca leaves, and chicha, the fermented maize beer of the Andes.
The cult of Illapa was closely tied to the agricultural calendar. In the central Andes, where the rainy season runs roughly from November to April, the appearance of Illapa in the form of lightning and thunder was welcomed as a sign that the rains had begun and that the planting season could proceed. The chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala described in detail the ceremonies performed during droughts, when the people would process to the highest huacas and to the high mountain apus to invoke the rain. The ceremonies included the sacrifice of black llamas, whose color was associated with rain, the offering of coca leaves to the mountain spirits, and the recitation of prayers asking Illapa to send water to the fields. A common ritual involved the pouring of small amounts of water into the earth, often in the form of chicha, as a kind of sympathetic magic to encourage the fall of rain.
Illapa in Sacrifice and the Agricultural Economy
The cult of Illapa was intimately tied to the practice of sacrifice and ritual in the Inca state. Black llamas were the preferred sacrificial animal for the ceremonies of Illapa, and large numbers of black llamas were kept at the temple of the Coricancha and at provincial shrines dedicated to the god. The chronicler Cobo reports that, in times of severe drought, as many as a thousand llamas might be sacrificed in a single ceremony, and that their blood was poured into the earth and burned before the image of the god. The sacrifice of llamas to Illapa was not limited to the central cult: in rural communities throughout the Andes, the farmers continued to perform small-scale sacrifices of llamas to local weather shrines long after the Spanish conquest, and the practice has survived in some form into the modern period.
The cult of Illapa was also tied to the larger sacrificial system of the empire, of which the Capacocha was the most solemn form. The chronicler Sarmiento de Gamboa recorded that, at the accession of the Sapa Inca Tupac Inca Yupanqui in 1471, a Capacocha was performed in which children were brought to the high mountain shrines and sacrificed in honor of the apus, the sun, and Illapa, the three principal powers of the weather and the fertility of the land. The relation between Illapa and the apus was close, since the apus were understood to control the weather in their respective regions, and Illapa was the celestial power that distributed the rain from the heavens. The combination of apus and Illapa in a single Capacocha is consistent with the general Andean conception of weather as a coordinated system of terrestrial and celestial forces.
The Persistence of Illapa in the Modern Andes
Among the modern Quechua and Aymara peoples of Peru and Bolivia, the cult of Illapa persists in various forms, often syncretized with the Catholic devotion to the apostle Santiago. The Chilean chronicler Gerónimo de Bibar, writing in the 1550s, reported that the indigenous people of the southern Andes identified Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, with Illapa, and that the appearance of Saint James in paintings and on horseback was understood as a continuation of the older cult of the thunder god riding across the sky. The same identification has been documented in modern highland communities, where the festival of Santiago, celebrated on July 25, is often combined with rituals for rain and for the protection of crops.
The persistence of the cult of Illapa has been the subject of modern ethnographic work. The American anthropologist John Murra, in his studies of highland communities in the 1950s and 1960s, recorded the rituals of rain-calling and the offerings made to local weather shrines, and the ethnographer Inge Bolin has described similar practices in her studies of the communities of the high Andes. The Bolivian anthropologist Henry Stobart has documented the survival of the cult of Illapa in the highland communities of Bolivia, and the work of the Peruvian ethnographer Ricardo Valderrama has described the persistence of weather rituals in the Cusco region. The continuity of the cult of Illapa, like that of Pachamama, suggests that the religious traditions of the central Andes have proven remarkably durable in the face of conquest and evangelization.