Mama Killa, the Moon Goddess of the Inca
Mama Killa, called Mama Killa in Quechua and sometimes transliterated as Mama Quilla, was the moon goddess of the Inca and one of the principal deities of the Inca pantheon. She was regarded as the wife and sister of the sun god Inti, the mother of the Inca royal women, and the protector of marriage, the menstrual cycle, and the calendar of female ritual life. Her principal shrine stood in the Coricancha in Cusco, where a chapel dedicated to her reportedly held a large silver disk representing the moon, deliberately set against a golden disk of the sun on the opposite wall. The cult of Mama Killa was central to the religious identity of the Inca nobility and remained particularly important for the coya, the queen, and for the women of the elite who served as priestesses of the moon. The cult of the moon was tied, as recorded in the Inca creation myth, to the cosmic ordering of the world at the beginning of the present sun, and the chroniclers report that eclipses of the moon were occasions of public anxiety throughout the empire.
The principal sources for the cult of Mama Killa are the Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, principally 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). Their accounts preserve a coherent picture of a lunar deity whose functions paralleled those of Inti in the female sphere and whose worship complemented the solar cult at every level of Inca society.
Mama Killa as Wife of Inti and Mother of the Inca
In the official Inca theology, Mama Killa was the sister-wife of Inti and, through this union, the mother of the royal panacas of Cusco. The dynasty founded by Manco Cápac was thus understood to descend from a solar-lunar pairing, and the title coya, borne by the principal wife of the Sapa Inca, carried a lunar resonance. The queen participated in the major lunar rituals, and the Coya Raymi, the festival of the queen, was celebrated in the month associated with the autumn equinox. The priestesses of Mama Killa, drawn from noble families, served in the Coricancha and in the regional temples and were responsible for the maintenance of the lunar calendar, the preparation of chicha for the festivals, and the supervision of the acllacuna, the chosen women who served the temple.
The lunar cult was also closely associated with marriage and with the regulation of female fertility. Cobo reports that the Incas timed certain rituals of marriage to the phases of the moon and that offerings were made to Mama Killa at the time of menstruation, when women were thought to be particularly vulnerable to supernatural influence. Modern Andean villagers in some communities of Peru and Bolivia still attribute menstrual and reproductive events to the moon, in patterns that scholars such as Joseph Bastien have documented in detail.
The Lunar Shrine in the Coricancha
The principal temple of Mama Killa was a chapel within the Coricancha, the great Temple of the Sun in Cusco. The Spanish chroniclers report that this chapel held a large silver disk representing the moon, a smaller replica of which was reportedly presented to the Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro as part of the ransom of the Sapa Inca Atahualpa in 1532. The chronicler Cobo, who visited Cusco in the early seventeenth century, recorded that the silver disk of the moon was kept in a separate chamber of the Coricancha, distinct from the chapel of the sun on the eastern wall, and that the side walls held representations of the stars, especially the Pleiades, the constellation most closely associated with the agricultural cycle.
The iconography of Mama Killa in metalwork and textiles typically depicted her as a silver disk with a human face at the center, often with rays terminating in the form of a woman. Pairs of complementary figures — the sun in gold and the moon in silver — appear in many surviving Inca metalwork objects. The Coricancha was stripped of its metal fittings by the Spanish in the 1530s, and most of the surviving gold and silver objects were melted down to pay soldiers and to ship to the Crown.
Eclipses, the Lunar Calendar, and Ritual Anxiety
Eclipses of the moon were among the most anxiety-provoking events in the Inca ritual calendar. According to the chroniclers, the Incas believed that an eclipse was caused by a celestial animal — variously described as a puma, a serpent, or a jaguar — attacking the lunar orb, and the people would rush out of their houses at the onset of an eclipse, shouting, beating drums, and blowing on trumpets and conch shells in an effort to frighten the animal away. The mummified bodies of the royal ancestors were brought out of their chapels in the Coricancha and presented with offerings during a lunar eclipse, and the Coya Raymi was sometimes postponed or celebrated with extra offerings when an eclipse occurred near the festival date. Similar customs have been recorded in modern Andean communities, where lunar eclipses are still marked with noise, prayer, and the offering of food to the earth.
The lunar cycle was also the basis of a secondary ritual calendar used to time certain agricultural operations and the rituals of the household cult. The Incas recognized that the lunar month of approximately 29.5 days did not align precisely with the solar year, and they used a combination of solar observations at the solstices and lunar counts to keep their agricultural and ceremonial calendars in approximate alignment. Modern scholars, including Gary Urton and Tom Zuidema, have analyzed the surviving evidence for these calendrical practices and have concluded that the Incas maintained a sophisticated lunisolar calendar that was closely tied to the cult of the moon and to the agricultural cycle of the maize harvest.
Mama Killa in the Modern Andes
Devotion to Mama Killa persisted in the Andes well after the Spanish conquest of 1532, often in combination with the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León reported in the 1550s that the indigenous people of the highlands continued to make offerings to the moon and that the priests of the moon had not entirely disappeared from the rural districts. The Jesuit priest José de Acosta, writing in the late sixteenth century, described similar continuities, and the practice of making offerings to the moon at the time of eclipses has been recorded in modern communities in Peru and Bolivia.
The cult of Mama Killa has been the subject of modern ethnographic study by scholars including Catherine Allen, Joseph Bastien, and Inge Bolin, who have documented the survival of lunar rituals in rural Andean communities, particularly in the highland regions of Peru and Bolivia. In these communities, Mama Killa is often identified with the Virgin Mary, and the cult of the moon is celebrated in combination with Catholic festivals such as the Assumption of the Virgin on August 15. The persistence of the cult suggests that, despite the destruction of the Inca state religion in the sixteenth century, the religious traditions associated with the moon remained an important element of Andean life well into the modern period.