The Inca Creation Myth

The Inca creation myth is the body of traditional narrative in which the Inca people accounted for the origin of the world, the formation of the sun and the moon, the appearance of the first humans, and the differentiation of the peoples of the Andes. The myth was recorded in greatest detail by the Spanish chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in his 1572 “Historia de los Incas,” based on interviews with Inca nobles shortly after the Spanish conquest, and was supplemented by accounts from Garcilaso de la Vega, Bernabé Cobo, and the anonymous author of the “Relación de la descendencia, gobierno y conquista de los Incas.” Taken together, these sources describe a series of cosmic destructions and renewals, ultimately culminating in the emergence of the present world, in which the Inca people occupy a central place. The cosmogonic system was not only a myth in the modern sense but also a charter for imperial ideology, since it placed the Inca capital of Cusco at the center of the cosmos and provided a theological explanation for the empire’s right to rule the peoples around it.

The Inca creation myth is closely related to the religious traditions of the surrounding Andean peoples, including the Aymara of the Lake Titicaca basin, the Quechua of the central highlands, and the Chimú of the north coast. Scholars including Tom Zuidema, Gary Urton, and Catherine Allen have argued that the cosmogonic narratives of the Incas preserved in colonial-era sources show strong continuities with the religious traditions of earlier Andean cultures, particularly the Tiwanaku culture centered on the city of Tiwanaku near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia, which flourished between approximately 500 and 1000 CE. The iconography of the so-called Staff God at Tiwanaku bears strong resemblance to later Inca depictions of Viracocha, and the pre-Inca origins of the creator deity are now widely accepted in the scholarly literature.

The Four Ages of the World

A distinct version of the four ages of the world was recorded by several chroniclers, most notably the Jesuit priest Bernabé Cobo in his “Historia del Nuevo Mundo” of 1653. According to this scheme, the world had passed through four suns, or ages, each ending in a great catastrophe, before the emergence of the present fifth sun, the sun of the Incas. The first sun, called Uya Pacha, was a sun of people who lived in darkness; they were destroyed by the sun’s first appearance, when the heat of the new sun melted the snows and burned many of the early beings to ash. The second sun, called Runa Pacha, ended in a rain of fire that consumed everything in its path. The third sun, called Uku Pacha, ended in a flood that turned most of the people to stone. The fourth sun, called Hanan Pacha, ended in a rain of fire and the burning of the world. The present fifth sun, called Qhapaq Inti, is destined to end in earthquakes.

The chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala recorded a related scheme in his 1615 chronicle “El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno,” in which he lists four ages, each associated with a moral failing of the people of the time. The first age was destroyed by hunger, the second by plague, the third by war, and the fourth by famine. These four ages formed a moral and cosmological framework that allowed the Incas to interpret historical events and to predict the destiny of their own age. The scheme also paralleled the calendrical division of the year into four quarters and the ceque system of Cusco, which divided the city into four quadrants linked by sacred lines to 328 huacas distributed across the valley. The ceque system, first reconstructed in detail by Tom Zuidema in his 1964 monograph, thus encoded in stone and shrine a cosmogonic history that the chroniclers also preserved in narrative form.

Viracocha and the Dark Giants

According to the myth, the creator god Viracocha emerged from the waters of Lake Titicaca at the beginning of the present world. The location of his emergence is reported variously in the chronicles: most often the Island of the Sun in the lake, and in other versions the site of Tiwanaku on the southern shore, where a large sunken temple known as Kalasasaya has yielded stone carvings that some scholars have linked to the emergence tradition. From Titicaca, Viracocha brought forth the sun, the moon, and the stars, and called the first humans into being. These first humans, called the dark giants, were of great stature and lived in a world of darkness before the sun was created. They were, according to the chroniclers, rebellious against their creator, and Viracocha resolved to destroy them.

The destruction of the dark giants was accomplished by means of a great flood, called a flood myth by comparison with the biblical account, in which the waters rose to cover the highest mountains and drowned almost the entire race. Some of the giants, however, escaped to the high peaks and were there turned to stone by the light of the newly created sun. The petrified remains of these giants were identified by the Incas with the many strangely shaped rock outcrops, called huacas, that dotted the landscape of the Andes. The connection between the giants and the huacas explains the otherwise puzzling reverence with which the Incas approached unusual geological features, since each such feature was understood to be the body of a former giant, capable of supernatural power.

The Second Creation

After the destruction of the dark giants, Viracocha created a second humanity, of normal stature, by breathing life into smaller clay figures that he had fashioned beforehand. The chroniclers, particularly Sarmiento de Gamboa, record that the creator painted the clothing, the hair, and the customs of each people onto the corresponding figure, and assigned each people their language, their songs, and their lands. He then sent them forth from the area around Cusco, the omphalos, or navel, of the world, to populate the four quarters of the earth.

This second creation narrative served several ideological functions for the Inca state. It placed the imperial capital at the center of the cosmos, since all peoples were said to have originated from a starting point in the Cusco valley. It provided a charter for the practice of mit’a, the system of rotational labor tribute by which the empire extracted labor from its subjects, since each people owed labor to the creator in return for the gift of their land. It also explained the existence of huacas as the petrified remains of the first, rebellious people, and it provided a theological basis for the imperial practice of bringing the mummies of conquered rulers back to Cusco, since the proper place for any ruler’s body was at the center of the world. The narrative of Viracocha’s travels thus served to map the empire onto the cosmos.

The Departure of Viracocha

The creation myth ends with the departure of Viracocha. According to the most common version, the creator walked out across the Pacific Ocean on a raft of his own making, promising one day to return. The story of his departure is recorded in several chronicles, including the “Relación de la descendencia, gobierno y conquista de los Incas” and the “Suma y narración de los Incas” of Juan de Betanzos. The chroniclers also report that, in some versions of the myth, Viracocha departed from the vicinity of Manta, on the coast of present-day Ecuador, leaving behind a small group of retainers.

The promise of return was, in the Inca tradition, an important element of the myth, and it had significant political consequences after the Spanish conquest. The story that the god had promised to return was used by a number of indigenous leaders in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to mobilize resistance to Spanish rule, most notably by the neo-Inca state of Vilcabamba, which held out in the jungle east of Cusco from 1536 until 1572. The chronicler Martín de Murúa recorded that the Inca ruler Titu Cusi Yupanqui claimed that the bearded strangers whom the Spanish had brought with them were not the returning Viracocha but a false version of him, and the argument that Viracocha had not yet returned was central to indigenous political theology in the decades after the conquest.

The Sun and the Moon

A related set of myths explained the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars. According to the most common account, the sun and the moon were brought forth by the command of Viracocha from the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca. The sun was the male deity Inti, the divine ancestor of the Inca dynasty, and the moon was the female deity Mama Killa, his sister-wife. The stars were the lesser deities, particularly the Pleiades, which were associated with the agricultural calendar and with the festival of the maize harvest.

The myth of the sun and moon explains several features of the Inca cult. The Incas venerated the sun as the source of life and the divine patron of the ruling line, and the mummies of deceased emperors were referred to as “the dead who became the sun.” The association of the moon with the queen and with the royal women led to the prominence of the priestesses of the moon in the Coricancha, and the astronomical alignments of the Inca calendar, particularly the solstices and the equinoxes, were tied to the cycles of the sun and the moon. The cult of the sun is documented in the architecture of the Coricancha and in the orientation of Sacsayhuamán, the great fortress that overlooks Cusco, whose principal tower is said to mark the spot from which the Inca surveyed the capital at the time of the June solstice ceremony.

The Flood in Comparative Perspective

The Inca flood myth is one of a number of flood stories recorded in the colonial ethnography of the Americas, including the Mesoamerican accounts of the destruction of earlier creations by flood, by fire, and by the falling of the sky. The Andean flood narrative shares with these other accounts a general pattern: an earlier creation is destroyed by the gods because of human wickedness, and a new creation is initiated. The specific details of the Inca account, however, are distinctively Andean. The flood is associated with the petrification of the earlier people and the formation of huacas; the creator emerges from a body of water, the lake of Titicaca, which has its own sacred significance; and the creator departs across another body of water, the Pacific Ocean.

The Andean flood narrative also has features in common with accounts recorded in the Old World, including the biblical account in Genesis, the Babylonian account of the flood of Utnapishtim, and the Greek account of Deucalion. The resemblances have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. The most plausible interpretation, given the absence of any demonstrated pre-Columbian transatlantic contact, is that the similarities are the result of independent development rather than diffusion, and that flood narratives are an example of a near-universal human response to the experience of catastrophic floods. The Inca account, in any case, stands on its own terms and is a central element of the Inca religious tradition.