Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [228]
Shrouded in legends, the Inca empire that Pizarro decimated so efficiently had begun in earnest about 1438, when Pachacuti, the ninth Inca ruler, put down an invasion by the neighboring Chanca confederacy. Called the “Alexander the Great” of the Incas, Pachacuti was a military leader and an effective administrator who conquered the regions south of Cuzco and rebuilt the city as the center of the empire and a monument to Inca power. Later looked upon as a Creator god, he began the construction of Machu Picchu around 1450.
From Spanish documents, recovered pottery, and other archaeological clues, scholars estimate that Machu Picchu was largely abandoned after only eighty years. Plague, brought by the Spaniards, had left the rest of the empire in turmoil by then. But, at an elevation of 6,750 feet, remote Machu Picchu was relatively untouched—and never even seen by the Spanish. Though called a “lost city,” it was really not a city at all. Just a splendid hideaway.
Nevertheless, Bingham, who found Machu Picchu and was made famous by it, was not completely mistaken about its religious aspects. There were clearly temples there, and sun worship was part of its rituals, probably along with imbibing some chicha. This local beer was no doubt made at a thousand-year-old site with twenty brewing vats, which was discovered in the Andes in the summer of 2004. Described by one researcher as “a large-scale state-sponsored institutional” brewery, it could produce several hundred gallons at a time. According to scholar Gary Urton, chicha was also brewed in the same field where Mama Huaco, one of the Incan founding ancestral sisters, was mummified and buried.
Did the Incas have a foundation myth?
Since the Incas had no written language, most of what is known of their myths and religion comes from retellings by Spanish conquerors, or Incan accounts told to their Spanish masters. As a result, many of these myths are considered suspect.* These include a variety of Incan foundation myths and legends involving a set of siblings called the Ayars, who may be based on historical figures. Anthropologist and Inca expert Gary Urton explains in Inca Myths that “Ayar comes from the Quechua word aya, ‘corpse,’ establishing a link between the ancestors as mythological characters and the mummified remains of the Inca kings, which were kept in a special room in the Temple of the Sun in Cusco. In addition, this same word ayar was the name of a wild strain of the quinua plant, a high-altitude grain crop of the Andes.”
In one of these foundation myths, we encounter the somewhat common mythic themes of sibling rivalry and incest as four brothers and four sisters in the Ayar family emerge from caves in the mountains and found the Incan empire. Fearing that their powerful troublemaking sibling Ayar Cachi might become dominant, three of the brothers gang up on him and wall him up. Of the remaining brothers, Ayar Oco turns himself into a sacred stone; Ayar Ayca becomes the protector of the fields; and Ayar Manco (later called Manco Capac) seizes Cuzco, the Inca capital city, and marries his sister, Mama Ocllo.
In another version of the legend, the sun god and creator Inti sends his son Manco Capac, and Manco’s daughter and wife Mama Ocllo, to teach civilization to men. Inti gives them a large wedge of gold and tells them to start a city wherever this magical golden block should sink into the ground of its own accord. That proved to be at Cuzco, the Incan capital.
WHO’S WHO OF INCAN GODS
Because the Incas routinely