Viracocha, the Creator God of the Andes
Viracocha was the supreme creator god of the Inca and the head of the Inca pantheon in theological, if not political, terms. In the myths recorded by the Spanish chroniclers, he had brought the universe into existence, fashioned the first humans, and continued to oversee the cosmic order. He was venerated at the great Coricancha in Cusco, in the principal temples of the empire, and in regional centers such as the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, where the tradition held that he had first emerged from the waters at the beginning of the present world. The eighth Sapa Inca, reigning in the early fifteenth century, took the god’s name as his own, and the famous encounter between Viracocha and the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia at the coastal town of Tumbes in 1532 became one of the most cited episodes of the conquest period. Spanish chroniclers sometimes used the Quechua term saqra (“demon” or “evil spirit”) as a pejorative label for the cult’s priests, but no such priestly class existed by that name; the cult was served by the ordinary Inca priesthood under the Villac Umu. According to the chronicler Pedro Cieza de León, writing in the 1550s, the Incas “believed and held as true that Viracocha created the world and everything in it.”
The historical evidence for the cult of Viracocha is rich but filtered through the categories of sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers. The principal accounts are those of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572), Juan de Betanzos (c. 1551), Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), and Bernabé Cobo (1653). Modern scholarship has long debated the relation between the Inca Viracocha and the much older iconography of the so-called Staff God at the site of Tiwanaku near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, which flourished between approximately 500 and 1000 CE, and the consensus now favors a continuity of religious ideas that extends back more than a thousand years before the rise of the Inca state.
The Myth of Viracocha’s Creation
The most elaborate version of the Viracocha myth was recorded by Sarmiento de Gamboa in 1572, based on interviews with surviving members of the Inca nobility. According to this account, Viracocha emerged from the waters of Lake Titicaca at the beginning of the present world, often specifically from the Island of the Sun, and brought forth the sun, the moon, and the stars. He then fashioned a first race of giants, of great stature and strength, and gave them life. These giants, however, disobeyed their creator, and Viracocha resolved to destroy them. He sent a great flood, which covered the highest mountains of the Andes, drowning all but a few of the giants. Those who survived the flood were turned to stone by the light of the newly created sun, becoming the strange rock outcrops, called huacas, that dotted the Andean landscape.
After the destruction of the first giants, Viracocha created a second humanity, of normal stature, by breathing life into smaller clay figures painted with the clothing, hair, and customs of each people. He assigned to each their language, songs, and lands, and sent them forth from a starting point near Cusco. The chroniclers, particularly Betanzos, record that Viracocha traveled northward through the Andes, calling the peoples into existence at each place where he stopped, before eventually walking out across the Pacific Ocean on a raft of his own making, promising one day to return. The story of his return was to have significant political consequences in the decades after the Spanish conquest.
Viracocha and the Foundation of the Inca Dynasty
In the official Inca tradition, the lineage of the Sapa Inca was traced back to Viracocha through a series of intermediate figures, and the dynasty founded by Manco Cápac was understood to be the product of Viracocha’s creation of the peoples of the Cusco valley. The link between the creator and the ruling line was reinforced by the adoption of the god’s name by the eighth Sapa Inca, Viracocha Inca, who reigned from approximately 1410 to 1438. The chronicle of Sarmiento de Gamboa, written under the supervision of the Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, was intended to reconstruct the legitimacy of the Inca past and the political claims of the surviving Inca nobility; it emphasized the antiquity and continuity of the Inca dynasty in a manner that placed Viracocha at the beginning of the dynastic history.
The cult of Viracocha was also a state cult. The Coricancha reportedly contained a chapel dedicated to him, distinct from the chapel of the sun, and the principal provincial temples of the empire contained altars and images associated with Viracocha. The cult was served by the regular Inca priesthood under the Villac Umu, and Cobo describes the priests of Viracocha as wearing black garments — in deliberate contrast to the white garments of the priests of the sun — and as performing miracles of healing, prophecy, and weather control. They were consulted by the Sapa Inca on matters of state and were the principal interpreters of the cosmogonic myths; the term saqra, which means “demon” in Quechua, was applied to them polemically by some Spanish writers.
The Encounter with the Spanish in 1532
The most famous episode involving Viracocha in the chronicles of the conquest is the encounter at the coastal town of Tumbes, recorded in 1547 by Francisco López de Gómara and repeated in modified form by other writers. According to this account, the Sapa Inca Huayna Cápac had been informed by his diviners that a bearded white god, called Viracocha, would one day return to the Andes from across the sea, and that his return would mark the end of the Inca dynasty. When the Spanish arrived on the coast in 1532, led by Francisco Pizarro and his small band of conquistadors, the Inca on the island of Puna in the Gulf of Guayaquil reportedly worshipped the newcomers as the returning Viracocha, an error that was said to have greatly facilitated the Spanish advance.
The historicity of the Tumbes episode has been debated, and the details vary considerably between sources. The more elaborate version, recorded by the mestizo chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in 1609, has the Spanish being received with great reverence by the local inhabitants, who spread out fine cloth for them to walk on. The episode, whether or not it occurred in exactly this form, is significant for the role it played in the indigenous interpretation of the conquest, since the identification of the Spanish with the returning Viracocha was used by indigenous leaders in the decades after 1532 to legitimize or to resist Spanish rule. The Inca ruler Titu Cusi Yupanqui of the neo-Inca state of Vilcabamba, for example, argued that the bearded strangers were not the true Viracocha but a false version of him.
Viracocha and the Staff God of Tiwanaku
Modern scholarship has established a strong link between the Inca Viracocha and the much older iconography of the so-called Staff God at the site of Tiwanaku, near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia. The Staff God appears on the carved stone gateway known as the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku, a site that flourished between approximately 500 and 1000 CE, and is depicted as a figure with a staff in each hand and a rayed headdress. The iconographic resemblance was first noted in the nineteenth century and has been confirmed by twentieth-century archaeological work, particularly the investigations of the Bolivian archaeologist Carlos Ponce Sanginés.
The continuity of religious ideas from Tiwanaku to the Inca state is now the scholarly consensus. The Inca Viracocha is understood to be a development of an older highland creator deity, whose cult had been maintained in the Lake Titicaca basin for centuries before the rise of the Inca state. The location of Viracocha’s emergence lies only about 30 kilometers from the site of Tiwanaku itself, and the Inca interest in the region is consistent with the hypothesis that they understood themselves to be inheritors of a much older religious tradition.