Viracocha and the Dark Giants of Tiwanaku
The myth of Viracocha and the dark giants is one of the most striking elements of the Inca creation myth, and it accounts for the origin of the strange rock outcrops, called huacas, that dotted the Andean landscape. According to the version recorded by the chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in 1572, the creator god Viracocha emerged from the waters of Lake Titicaca at the beginning of the present world and created a first race of giants of great stature and strength. These giants, who lived in a world of darkness before the sun was made, were rebellious against their creator, and Viracocha resolved to destroy them. He sent a great flood that covered the highest mountains of the Andes, drowning all but a few of the giants. The few who escaped to the high peaks were turned to stone by the light of the newly created sun, becoming the strangely shaped rock outcrops that the Incas identified as huacas. The myth serves both as a cosmogonic narrative and as an explanation of the otherwise puzzling reverence with which the Inca approached unusual geological features.
The principal sources for the myth of the dark giants are Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572), Juan de Betanzos (c. 1551), Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), and Bernabé Cobo (1653). The site of Tiwanaku near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, which flourished between approximately 500 and 1000 CE, has long been associated with the myth, and several scholars, including the archaeologist Carlos Ponce Sanginés, have argued that the site should be identified as the place of the original creation of the giants.
The First Creation at Tiwanaku
The most detailed version of the myth is that of Sarmiento de Gamboa, who recorded the account in 1572 from interviews with surviving members of the Inca nobility, conducted under the supervision of the Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. According to Sarmiento, Viracocha emerged from a cave or from the waters of Lake Titicaca at a place called Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku), and there he created the first humans. He commanded the sun, the moon, and the stars to take their places in the sky, although the chronicler notes that at this stage the sun was not yet fully bright, and the world was a place of twilight and half-light. He then fashioned a first race of humans, called the giants, of great stature and extraordinary physical strength, and gave them life. The chronicler records that the giants were given no clothing and no tools, and that they lived by hunting and gathering in a world that was still being formed.
The identification of Tiwanaku as the place of the first creation is consistent with the importance of the site in the religious traditions of the central Andes. Tiwanaku had been a major ceremonial center for many centuries before the rise of the Inca state, and the Gate of the Sun, a massive carved stone gateway dating to the Tiwanaku IV period (c. 500–1000 CE), is one of the most important monuments of pre-Columbian South America. The iconography of the Gate of the Sun, which depicts the so-called Staff God with attendant winged figures, has been linked by some scholars to the Inca cult of Viracocha, and the identification of the site with the place of the first creation is consistent with the hypothesis that the Inca understood themselves to be the inheritors of a much older Andean religious tradition.
The Rebellion of the Giants and the Flood
The first giants, according to the myth, were rebellious against their creator. The chronicler Sarmiento reports that they disobeyed Viracocha’s commands, refused to acknowledge his authority, and behaved in ways that were offensive to the gods. The exact nature of the offense is not specified in the sources, but several chroniclers suggest that it involved violence, cannibalism, and the violation of the natural order. Viracocha, having created the giants out of clay, resolved to destroy them and to create a new, more obedient humanity in their place.
The destruction was accomplished by means of a great flood. Viracocha summoned the waters of the heavens and the waters of the earth, and the two met in a great wave that covered the highest mountains of the Andes. Almost the entire race of the giants was drowned, and the bodies of those who were killed by the flood were carried to the bottom of the sea. The few giants who managed to escape to the high peaks of the Andes were turned to stone by the light of the newly created sun, which Viracocha commanded to shine with a brilliant light that no living being could withstand. The petrified remains of these giants were identified by the Incas with the many strangely shaped rock outcrops that dotted the landscape of the Andes and that were venerated as huacas.
The flood myth of the Incas has been the subject of comparison with flood myths from other parts of the world, particularly the biblical account in Genesis and the Babylonian account of the flood of Utnapishtim. The resemblances are general, and most scholars have concluded that the similarities are the result of independent development rather than diffusion, given the absence of any demonstrated pre-Columbian transatlantic contact. The specific Andean details — the creator’s emergence from a lake, the destruction of the giants, and the petrification of the survivors as huacas — have no clear parallel in the Old World flood traditions, and the Andean flood myth stands on its own terms as a distinctive element of Andean cosmology.
The Giants as Huacas
The most important consequence of the myth of the dark giants was the explanation it provided for the existence of the huacas, the strangely shaped rocks, mountains, and other geological features that the Incas venerated as sacred. The word huaca, also spelled wak’a, referred to anything that was invested with supernatural power, and the unusual geological features of the Andean landscape were understood to be the petrified remains of the giants who had escaped the flood. Each such feature was understood to be the body of a former giant, capable of supernatural power, and each was the focus of a particular cult.
The relation between the giants and the huacas explains several features of Inca religious practice. First, it explains the wide variety of objects and places that were venerated as huacas, since almost any unusual geological feature could be understood as the body of a giant. Second, it explains the cult of the mountains, since the high peaks of the Andes were understood to be the places where the giants had taken refuge and had been turned to stone. Third, it explains the cult of the stones and rocks that were venerated at the ceque shrines of the Cusco valley, since each such stone was understood to be a relic of the first, rebellious people.
The cult of the giants, like the cult of the huacas more generally, was discouraged by the Spanish after the conquest in 1532, but it has survived in some form in the rural Andes. The Quechua and Aymara peoples of the highland communities of Peru and Bolivia continue to identify certain rock outcrops and mountain peaks as the dwelling places of powerful spirits, and the identification of these features with the giants of the flood is sometimes explicit in oral tradition. The myth of the dark giants has been the subject of modern scholarly analysis by Tom Zuidema, Gary Urton, and Catherine Allen, who have situated it in the broader context of Andean cosmology and shown its relation to the ceque system of Cusco.
The Scholarly Debate and Comparative Mythology
The historicity and the cultural origins of the myth of the dark giants have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. The archaeologist Carlos Ponce Sanginés argued in the 1970s that the site of Tiwanaku should be understood as the place of the original creation of the giants and that the myth preserved in the colonial chronicles was a memory of actual events at the site. Other scholars, including John Janusek and William Isbell, have argued that the myth is a later construction, possibly dating to the Inca imperial period of the fifteenth century, that drew on older Andean religious traditions but combined them in a new way. The debate remains unresolved, but the consensus is that the myth reflects genuine continuities with the religious traditions of Tiwanaku, even if the details of the myth are not historically accurate.
The myth of the dark giants has also been compared with similar myths in other parts 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 general pattern — an earlier creation destroyed by the gods, followed by a new creation — is widespread, but the specific Andean details, including the petrification of the giants as huacas, are distinctive. The myth is, in any case, a central element of the Inca religious tradition and a key to understanding the cult of the huacas and the sacred geography of the Andes.