Mummies, Ancestors and the Cult of the Dead

The cult of the ancestors and the mummification of the dead were among the most distinctive features of Inca religion, and they set Andean practice sharply apart from the customs of contemporary European societies. The Incas believed that death was not an end but a transition to another form of existence in which the deceased continued to participate in the life of the community. The bodies of deceased rulers were mummified through an elaborate process of evisceration, desiccation, and wrapping, and the resulting mallqui, or mummy bundles, were treated as living members of the royal household. The cult of the dead was not limited to the imperial family: lower-status individuals were also mummified, and their mummies were kept in the family home and venerated as part of the daily life of the household. After the Spanish conquest of the empire in 1532, the cult of the ancestors was a major target of the colonial authorities, but the practice persisted in rural communities well into the colonial period and in some cases into the present day.

The mummies and ancestor veneration of the Incas are documented in a rich body of colonial-era sources, including the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega, Bernabé Cobo, Pedro Cieza de León, and the “Relación de la descendencia, gobierno y conquista de los Incas.” These accounts are supplemented by archaeological evidence from the excavation of royal tombs at sites such as Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba, and the mountaintop shrine of Llullaillaco on the border of present-day Argentina and Chile, where Inca and post-Inca mummies have been recovered in remarkable states of preservation. The combination of textual and archaeological evidence has allowed modern scholars, including Tom Zuidema, R. Tom Zuidema, and María Rostworowski, to reconstruct the principal features of the Inca cult of the dead in considerable detail.

Inca Mummification

Inca mummification was a complex and carefully prescribed ritual process, reserved in its most elaborate forms for the Sapa Inca, the emperor, and the members of his immediate family. The process began at the moment of death, when the body of the deceased was seated on the ground and given a small mouthful of chicha and a few coca leaves, in imitation of the journey to the afterlife. The body was then washed, and the internal organs, with the exception of the heart, were removed. The body was eviscerated through an incision in the abdomen, and the organs were either buried separately or placed in the body cavity. The body was then desiccated, either by being placed in a cold, dry environment such as a high mountain cave, or by being dried over a slow fire, with the hair and skin carefully preserved.

Once desiccated, the body was wrapped in layers of fine cotton and llama-wool textiles, often of great value, and was seated in a flexed position with the knees drawn up to the chest. The resulting mallqui, or mummy bundle, was then dressed in the finest clothing of the deceased, including a tunic, a mantle, and a headdress, and was adorned with the gold and silver regalia appropriate to the rank of the dead. The bundle was then placed in a stone-built chamber, called a machay, often within a palace complex or in a cave, where it could be visited by the living. The mummies of the Sapa Inca were kept in the Coricancha in Cusco, in chambers specifically built for the purpose, where they were visited by the priests, the royal family, and the public on the major festivals of the year.

The Royal Panacas

The mummies of the deceased emperors were maintained by kin groups called panacas, which were the royal lineages of Cusco. Each Sapa Inca founded a panaca at his accession, and the panaca took its name from its founder, with the suffix “panaca” indicating the lineage. The members of the panaca were the descendants of the founder through the male line, and they had the obligation to maintain the cult of the founder’s mummy, to perform the prescribed rituals, and to manage the property of the lineage. The panacas were the most important kin groups in the Inca state, and they played a major role in the politics of succession, since the candidate for the throne was typically a member of one of the leading panacas.

The panacas were associated with particular ceques in the sacred geography of Cusco, and the ceque system thus served to organize both the religious and the political life of the capital. The panaca of the reigning Sapa Inca held the largest number of ceques, and the panacas of deceased emperors retained their ceques in perpetuity, since the mummies of the deceased continued to be regarded as members of the lineage. The Spanish chroniclers, particularly Garcilaso de la Vega and Bernabé Cobo, list the ten principal panacas of Cusco, including the panacas of Sinchi Roca, Lloque Yupanqui, Mayta Cápac, Cápac Yupanqui, Inca Roca, Yáhuar Huácac, Viracocha, Pachacuti, Tupac Inca Yupanqui, and Huayna Capac (the last, known as Cusicancha, being the only panaca of an eleventh-ruler to survive into the Vilcabamba period), and they describe the political and religious obligations of each. The panacas were a central institution of the Inca state, and their dissolution by the Spanish in the 1540s and 1550s, when the mummies of the deceased emperors were exhumed and buried in Christian cemeteries, marked a major break in the religious and political life of the Andean nobility.

The Cult of the Mallqui

The cult of the mallqui, or mummy bundles, was the central religious practice of the Inca state. The mummies of the deceased Sapa Inca were seated on thrones in the Coricancha, dressed in fine clothing, and presented with food and chicha at the major festivals of the year. They were consulted on important matters of state, including questions of war, of marriage, and of political alliance, and the chroniclers report that the mummy of Tupac Inca Yupanqui was carried on campaign by his son Huayna Cápac to advise on military matters. The mummies were also paraded in public ceremonies, particularly at the festivals of the solar calendar, and were a visible sign of the continuity of the dynastic line.

The mummies of deceased rulers were not kept in tombs in the European sense. Instead, they were venerated in the home, in palace complexes, often in chambers specifically built to receive them, and in the Coricancha itself. The descendants of the royal lineages maintained the cult of the mummies as a central religious obligation, and the loss of the royal mummies to the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a major cultural trauma for the surviving Inca nobility. The practice of mummification was not limited to the royal family. Lower-status individuals were also mummified, and their mummies were kept in the family home and treated with similar care. The cult of the ancestors was, in essence, the cult of the lineage, and the proper maintenance of the mummies was a religious duty incumbent on all.

Ancestor Veneration in the Home

Ancestor veneration in the home was the household-level expression of the cult of the dead. In the homes of the Inca nobility, a special room or courtyard was set aside for the veneration of the ancestors, where the mummies of deceased family members were kept, along with the associated offerings and ritual paraphernalia. In the homes of commoners, the cult of the ancestors was less elaborate, but it was still a central feature of household religious life, and the small bundles containing the mummified remains of the deceased were typically kept in a corner of the main room, where they could be addressed in prayer and offered food and drink.

The household cult of the ancestors involved a number of regular practices. The mummies were brought out and presented with food on the major festivals of the year, particularly during the festival of the dead, and they were addressed in prayer on the occasions of important family events, such as births, marriages, and harvests. The ancestors were consulted on questions of family dispute, of land use, and of the proper timing of agricultural operations, and the responses were typically conveyed through the medium of a diviner, who chewed coca leaves and interpreted the distribution of the leaves. The household cult of the ancestors was, in essence, a smaller version of the royal cult in the Coricancha, and the principles of the two were the same.

Mummies and the Spanish Conquest

The cult of the mummies came into direct conflict with the Catholic Church after the Spanish conquest in 1532. The first wave of conflict occurred in the 1530s and 1540s, when the Spanish authorities, on the instructions of the Viceroy Francisco Pizarro and the first bishops of Cusco, ordered the mummified remains of the deceased Sapa Inca to be exhumed and buried in Christian cemeteries. The order was deeply resented by the surviving Inca nobility, and the chroniclers report that many of the mummies were hidden by their descendants and venerated in secret for years after the official interment. The mummy of Tupac Amaru, the last Sapa Inca of Vilcabamba, who was executed by the Spanish in 1572, became a particular focus of indigenous devotion, and his burial place remained a site of pilgrimage into the twentieth century.

The cult of the mummies persisted in rural communities well into the colonial period, despite repeated attempts by the Church and the colonial authorities to suppress it. The syncretic combination of Inca and Catholic practices that resulted has been studied by a number of scholars, including Joseph Bastien, who documented the persistence of ancestor veneration among the modern Aymara of Bolivia, and Frank Salomon, who described similar practices among the descendants of the Inca in the highlands of Peru. The cult of the ancestors has, in some respects, never been entirely suppressed, and elements of the practice can still be observed in the rural Andes in the early twenty-first century.

Mummies of Sacrifice: Capacocha and the Llullaillaco Children

A related category of mummies was produced by the practice of Capacocha, in which carefully selected children were sacrificed to the apus and to the Inca state. The children, often drawn from villages at high altitude, were prepared for months before being brought to a high mountain shrine, where they were killed, usually by a blow to the head, and buried with a rich assemblage of offerings, including gold and silver figurines, finely woven textiles, and conopas. The bodies were preserved by the cold and dry conditions of the high mountains, and several examples have been recovered in modern times in remarkable states of preservation.

The most famous such discovery was made in 1999 at the summit of Mount Llullaillaco, on the border of present-day Argentina and Chile, where the American archaeologist Johan Reinhard and his team recovered the bodies of three children, two girls and a boy, who had been sacrificed some five hundred years earlier, probably in the late fifteenth century. The children, who were between the ages of about six and fifteen, had been buried in small stone structures on the summit of the mountain, and the conditions of the site had preserved their skin, hair, and clothing in extraordinary detail. The discovery provided dramatic confirmation of the chroniclers’ accounts of the Capacocha sacrifice and was a major contribution to the archaeology of Inca religion.

Archaeological Evidence and Continuing Research

The archaeological evidence for the Inca cult of the dead has grown substantially in recent decades, and a number of important new finds have been made. The 1999 discovery at Llullaillaco was followed in 2004 by the find of an Inca mummy of a young woman at the site of Ampato in southern Peru, and other Capacocha sites have been identified at elevations above 5,000 meters in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Excavations at the site of Vilcabamba, the last capital of the Inca state of resistance, have yielded additional mummies, and the work of the British archaeologist and explorer Hiram Bingham in the early twentieth century brought to light the royal tombs associated with the estate of Machu Picchu.

The mummies recovered from these sites have provided a wealth of information about Inca life, diet, health, and ritual practice. The Llullaillaco children, in particular, have been the subject of detailed scientific study, including DNA analysis, isotope analysis of diet, and CT scanning, which has yielded insights into Inca sacrificial practice and the social background of the children. The ongoing work at Llullaillaco and other Capacocha sites is being carried out in collaboration with the descendant communities, who regard the children as ancestors deserving of respect, and the ethical dimensions of the work have become a major focus of scholarly discussion.