Inti, the Sun God of the Inca
Inti was the sun god of the Inca and the divine patron of the ruling dynasty at the time of the empire’s greatest extent in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Venerated throughout the Inca Empire, he was regarded as the father of the first Sapa Inca, Manco Cápac, and as the continuing protector of the reigning line, whose members were addressed as “children of the Sun.” The principal temple of Inti was the Coricancha, the great Temple of the Sun in the imperial capital of Cusco, whose eastern wall reportedly held a massive golden disk representing the sun, and whose walls and floors were said to have been sheathed in sheets of gold to reflect the rising rays. The cult of Inti was promoted by the state, centered in the Inca pantheon, and reinforced by a ritual calendar whose most important festival, the Inti Raymi, was celebrated at the June solstice with the gathering of vassals, the presentation of tribute, and the sacrifice of llamas whose blood was offered to the sun.
The historical evidence for the cult of Inti comes almost entirely from post-conquest sources, principally the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657), Pedro Cieza de León (1520–1554), and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532–1592), all of whom wrote within a few decades of the Spanish conquest in 1532. Their accounts, although filtered through Christian categories, preserve a coherent picture of a deity who combined cosmological, dynastic, and agricultural functions.
Inti as Divine Ancestor of the Sapa Inca
In the official Inca tradition, Inti was the father of Manco Cápac, the legendary founder of the dynasty, and the origin of the Inca people was explained by descent from the sun. The title Sapa Inca carried a solar resonance, and the emperors were understood to be Inti’s living representatives on earth. When a Sapa Inca died, his mummified body was referred to as “the dead who became the sun,” and the deceased was incorporated into the lineage cult of the royal panaca that he had founded at his accession. The dynasty traced to Manco Cápac was, in this sense, a solar dynasty, and the legitimacy of each new ruler derived from his place in the line of descent from Inti.
The Sapa Inca wore a golden mask representing the sun on certain ceremonial occasions, and the royal headdress, the maskaypacha, was a tasseled cord of gold symbolizing the radiating power of the sun. The mummy of an emperor was dressed in the regalia of Inti and presented with offerings of food, chicha, and coca at the major festivals, and the chronicler Sarmiento de Gamboa records that the mummy of Tupac Inca Yupanqui was carried on campaign by his son Huayna Cápac to advise on military decisions. The cult of Inti was thus the religious counterpart of imperial authority.
The Temple of the Sun: Coricancha and Provincial Shrines
The principal shrine of Inti was the Coricancha in Cusco, the religious and ceremonial heart of the empire. According to the chroniclers, the temple was rebuilt several times during the imperial period, and the structure encountered by the Spanish in 1533 was reportedly sheathed in gold plates, with a large golden disk of the sun on the eastern wall of the principal sanctuary and a similar silver disk of the moon, dedicated to Mama Killa, on the western wall. Side chapels housed representations of the stars, especially the Pleiades, the rainbow, and the thunder. The Spanish chronicler Cobo reported that the floors of the Coricancha were paved with tiles of gold and silver. Most of this metal was melted down by the Spanish in the 1530s to pay troops and ship to the Crown; the colonial church and convent of Santo Domingo now stand on the foundations of the temple, although the original Inca walls, with their finely fitted ashlar masonry, are still visible around the perimeter.
Beyond Cusco, the state maintained important provincial shrines to Inti. The temple of the sun at Vilcashuamán in the central highlands contained a large stone image of the sun. A solar shrine stood on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, traditionally regarded as the place where Inti first emerged at the beginning of the present world, and another on the mountaintop of Vilcacunca above the Sacred Valley. These provincial shrines were staffed by priests drawn from the central priesthood in Cusco, and they integrated the four suyus, or quarters, of the empire.
The Inti Raymi and the Solar Ritual Calendar
The Inti Raymi, the Festival of the Sun, was the most important public celebration of the Inca year. Held at the June solstice, when the sun was at its northernmost declination and the dry season was beginning in the highland puna, the festival gathered the lords of the four quarters of the empire in the central plaza of Cusco, where they presented tribute and offered llamas whose blood was poured into a golden bowl and burned before the image of the sun. The principal ritual, performed by the Villac Umu, the high priest, involved a libation of chicha and a burnt offering of llamas. Garcilaso de la Vega described the festival in detail in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609), and his account has served as the basis for the modern revival of the celebration in Cusco, held each June 24.
The Capac Raymi at the December solstice was associated with the passage of boys of the elite into adulthood. The equinoctial festivals of the spring and autumn completed the four-part solar round, and a separate set of rituals linked the sun to the agricultural cycle, particularly the planting and harvesting of maize, which was conducted under the joint patronage of Inti and the earth goddess Pachamama. Eclipses of the sun were occasions of public anxiety, in which the people attempted to frighten away the animal believed to be attacking the solar orb.
Iconography, Sources, and the Modern Cult
The iconography of Inti was relatively consistent. The sun was most often represented as a golden disk with a human face at its center, rays radiating outward, sometimes terminating in small human or animal heads. The chronicler Cobo reports that Inti was also venerated in the form of a stone called Intihuatana, the “hitching post of the sun,” found in several Inca sites and associated with the ceremonial tying of the sun at the solstices. The famous Intihuatana at Machu Picchu is the best-preserved example. Gold, the “sweat of the sun” in Inca metallurgy, was the metal associated with Inti, in deliberate contrast to the silver associated with the moon, and the principal offerings to the sun consisted of golden objects, llama fat burned in a golden dish, and chicha poured onto a golden plate.
In the modern Andes, devotion to Inti has not survived in a form comparable to the persistence of the cult of Pachamama or the apus among the Quechua and Aymara communities. The Inti Raymi in modern Cusco is principally a cultural and tourist event. The astronomical and agricultural function of the sun, however, remains a structuring element of highland Andean life, and the calendrical observances tied to the June and December solstices continue to mark the agricultural year in many rural communities.