The Term Huaca in Andean Religion
The word huaca, also spelled wak’a in modern Quechua orthography, was one of the most important terms in the religious vocabulary of the Inca Empire, and it referred to anything that was invested with supernatural power. A huaca could be a strangely shaped rock, a spring, a tree, a hill, a tomb, a meteorite, a rainbow, or a person of extraordinary appearance or behavior. The Spanish chroniclers, particularly Bernabé Cobo in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo of 1653, recorded that the number of huacas in the empire was almost infinite, and they described the great variety of forms they took. The cult of the huacas was a central element of the sacred geography of the Andes, and the ceque system of Cusco, with its 328 shrines distributed across 41 radial lines, was in part a system for managing the relationships between the imperial cult and the local huacas.
The meaning of the term huaca has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. The chroniclers used the word to refer to a very wide range of objects, places, and phenomena, and the modern Spanish derivative huaca, sometimes written guaca, has acquired a similarly broad range of meanings. The word is sometimes translated as “idol,” sometimes as “sacred place,” and sometimes as “supernatural being,” and none of these translations captures the full range of the original. The most accurate general meaning is “a thing or place invested with sacred power,” but the term carried additional connotations of unusual appearance, of fertility, and of access to other worlds.
Categories of Huacas
The Incas recognized several types of huacas, and the classification was an important element of religious practice. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León distinguished between urqu huacas, which were natural features such as mountains, rocks, and springs; rumi huacas, which were man-made stones or buildings; and runa huacas, which were living persons believed to possess supernatural power. Each category had its own particular character, its own set of offerings, and its own calendrical date on which it was to be honored.
The urqu huacas were the most numerous and the most widely venerated. The word urqu means “mountain” in Quechua, and the category included not only mountains but also rocks, hills, springs, lakes, caves, and any other natural feature that was understood to be invested with sacred power. The high mountain peaks of the Andes were particularly important, since they were understood to be the dwelling places of the powerful mountain spirits called apus, and the cult of the apus was one of the most widespread forms of huaca worship in the empire.
The rumi huacas were man-made objects or buildings that were invested with sacred power. The word rumi means “stone” in Quechua, and the category included carved stones, stone buildings, and other man-made objects. The carved stone known as the Sayhuite Stone, which is located in the department of Apurímac in present-day Peru, is a notable example: it is a single block of stone carved with more than 200 figures of animals, plants, and geographical features, and it was understood to be a kind of sacred map of the empire. The buildings of the empire, including the Coricancha in Cusco and the royal estate of Machu Picchu, were also rumi huacas in the sense that they were invested with sacred power.
The runa huacas were living persons believed to possess supernatural power. The category included the deformed, the albino, the mentally ill, and those born under unusual circumstances, particularly during a thunderstorm. The chroniclers report that such persons were often venerated as huacas and that they were consulted as oracles and healers. The cult of the runa huacas was particularly important in rural communities, where the village shaman or the local wise man was often understood to possess supernatural power.
The Cult of the Huacas
The cult of the huacas was a central element of Inca religious practice. Each huaca had a particular character, a particular set of offerings, and a particular calendrical date on which it was to be honored. The offerings typically included coca leaves, llama fat, chicha, small animal sacrifices (especially guinea pigs), and, on the most important occasions, llamas or even humans. The Spanish chroniclers report that the temples contained large stores of these offerings, accumulated over decades or centuries of ritual practice.
The maintenance of huacas was a major task of the Inca state. Each of the major shrines was staffed by a small group of priests and attendants, who were responsible for keeping the sacred fire burning, for making the prescribed offerings at the appropriate times, and for receiving the pilgrims who came to consult the oracle or to make offerings of their own. The archaeological record confirms the chroniclers’ accounts: excavations at major Inca sites, including the Coricancha, the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, the mountaintop shrine of Llullaillaco on the border of present-day Argentina and Chile, and various high-altitude sites have yielded large quantities of offering materials, including gold and silver figurines, finely woven textiles, conopas, and the mummified remains of sacrificed children.
The cult of the huacas was, in essence, the cult of the Andean landscape. The mountains, the rocks, the springs, the tombs — all were understood to be invested with sacred power, and all required the appropriate offerings and rituals. The persistence of the cult of the huacas in the modern Andes is one of the most striking examples of religious continuity in the New World. The American anthropologist Catherine Allen, in her studies of the communities of the Sonqo district in the Cusco region, has documented the persistence of huaca worship in combination with Catholic devotion, and the work of the ethnographer Inge Bolin has described similar practices in the highland communities of Peru.
Huacas and the Ceque System of Cusco
The ceque system of Cusco was, in part, a system for managing the relationships between the imperial cult and the local huacas. According to the chronicler Cobo, the ceques were 41 lines that radiated outward from the Coricancha in Cusco like the spokes of a wheel, passing through 328 huacas distributed across the landscape of the valley. Each ceque was associated with a particular kin group, called a panaca, and each huaca on a ceque was the responsibility of a particular family within that panaca, who were required to maintain the shrine and provide offerings at the prescribed times.
The ceque system was first reconstructed in detail by the American anthropologist Tom Zuidema in his 1964 monograph The Ceque System of Cuzco, which has remained the standard reference for the subject. Zuidema argued that the ceques served not only as a sacred map but also as a solar observatory, since the alignment of certain ceques with the rising and setting of the sun at the solstices allowed priests to regulate the agricultural calendar. The system also organized the social and political structure of Cusco, since each panaca’s ceque was associated with a particular lineage, a particular direction, and a particular set of ritual obligations. The whole system constituted a kind of written record, encoded not in alphabetic script but in the spatial arrangement of shrines across the landscape.
The ceque system is of interest not only for the study of religion but also for the study of Andean record keeping, since the same principles of spatial encoding that produced the ceques also produced the quipu, the system of knotted strings used by the Incas for accounting and possibly for historical record. The system encoded historical, genealogical, and ritual information in a form that could be read by priests trained in the appropriate oral tradition, and it formed a kind of state memory that was stored in the landscape itself.
The Persistence of Huaca Worship
The cult of the huacas was a major target of the Spanish evangelization campaign after the conquest in 1532, and the colonial authorities attempted to suppress the practice by destroying shrines, punishing priests, and replacing huacas with Christian crosses and chapels. The campaign was partially successful in the urban areas and in the regions of intensive Spanish settlement, but in the rural highlands the cult of the huacas persisted, often in combination with Catholic devotion. The persistence of huaca worship has been documented by Joseph Bastien in his studies of the Aymara of Bolivia, by Frank Salomon in his studies of the descendants of the Inca in the highlands of Peru, and by Catherine Allen in her studies of the communities of the Sonqo district in the Cusco region. The continuing cult of the huacas suggests that the religious traditions of the central Andes have proven remarkably durable in the face of conquest and evangelization.