A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.
A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.
A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.
Droppedin the bottom of yawning red gulfs, with snow-peaks glistening overhead, are wild valleys of differing climates, the mightyquebradasof the Andes. These canyons, which the famous hanging bridges used to span, intersect the wilderness. They lie in dusk while the over-arching cliffs are bathed in full sunlight, for sunrise and sunset are within a few hours of each other. The warm air, steaming upward, pushes the snow boundary far above. Strata of black sand on the valley’s walls have been tunneled by cave-dwellers of ancient times. French sisters of charity move about in cloisters under eucalyptus trees.
Such a surprise is Yucay, tucked in snugly between two mountains, wrapped in soft air and scents of unknown flowers, the loveliest spot in all the empire of the Incas. Streams of clear water descend to it from above and form the smooth, deep river of Yucay. The Incas sought it out for their gardens of pleasure and were lulled to rest by bells of gold tied to the hammocks in which they slept.
Water has a very tranquillizing effect. It sweeps along a valley, and the jagged remnants of volcanic action are smoothed out into long undulating lines.
Water collects in all crevices; lakes green as iron vitriol, fed by subterranean springs, lie in the surly country like jewels in their setting. When night shadows have settled in the valleys, the alpine glow is reflected in the quiet surface.
There are no fish in the lake of Chinchaycocha, Laguna de Reyes. Though their element is water and they die in air, here they die in pure water for lack of air. Theingahuallpasings a monotonous note from the bank at the close of every hour during the night. The outlet of the lake is narrow and deep, and its clear water flows smoothly and without noise.
All the lakes have their secrets. The little lake of Orcos still holds the golden chain with links wrist-thick made by Huayna Ccapac at the birth of his eldest son. It encompassed the market-place of Cuzco. It was so weighty that “two hundred Indians having seized the links of it to the rings in their ears were scarce ableto raise it from the ground.” After the coming of the Spaniards, it was thrown for safe-keeping into this round, deep pool filled by unknown springs. Safe indeed it is. Orcos has not given up its charge, though repeated attempts have been made to reach the bottom. Trying to drain it by a sluice and trench, the Spaniards “unhappily crossed upon a vein of hard rock, at which, pecking a long time, they found that they struck more fire out of it than they drew water"—the opposite element from the one they expected.
Up against the sky lies a sea where men sail in boats of grass—Lake Titicaca, where ships are silently struck by lightning without crash of thunder. On these high seas the navigator has to go by instinct, because of the loadstone round about—magnetic iron, it is now less picturesquely called. Saint Elmo’s fire blazes from ships’ masts on stormy nights. Sometimes a pointed tongue of black clouds swings from above, “like the trunk of some gigantic elephant searching the ground.” A similar one raises itself from the surface of the water, slapping back and forth, seeking the point of thetongue above, and when they have found each other, they join in a mighty, black column, out of which burst thunder and lightning. It whirls off everything within reach and sucks down a passingbalsa(boat of reeds) into a depth never sounded.
The water of Lake Titicaca is ice-cold and brackish. Its strangely fashioned fishes never come to the surface. It is inhabited by great animals like sea-cows, occasionally seen resting on a beach of some remote inlet. The grottoes along the shore are guarded by gray and black night herons and inhabited by the sea-cow or other monsters!
Queer birds haunt the wide stretches oftotoragrowing along the shore, reeds whose stems are used for making boats, and whose tips are used as salad. Here live the statelypunageese, dazzling white, with green wings shading into violet; black water-hens, whitequinlla, dark greenyanahuicowith long, thin, bent bills, finely etched ducks, ibises,licli, metallically bright, and sea-gulls from the Atlantic.
Coal is found on the shores of Titicaca, which suggests a mystery. At what elevation couldtropical coal plants grow? The bones of mastodons are also here. But rocks even higher up are smoothed as if by waves, and beaches are found like those of the actual sea. Both Humboldt and Darwin found shells, once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now embedded fourteen thousand feet above its level.
Small lakes are sources of small rivers, by which they are emptied. But great Titicaca forms no stream at all. Its outlet has no outlet of its own. The rush of nauseous water is poured into a shallow lake-twin not far away—Poopo, through whose mysterious whirlpools the water drops back again in subterranean escapes. This tumultuous torrent, the Desaguadero, was spanned in former days by a bridge of reeds.
Recent measurements show that the level of these two lakes is constantly lowering, and eventually they will disappear. They were once the source of the greatest river in the world, but some day there will be only a salty deposit in the hollows they now fill.
Titi, the cat,kaka, the rock, Lake Titicaca was named for a little island within it, aroundwhich cluster legends of the origins of things. It was the most revered shrine in the empire of the Incas. Neither the wide fields of Chita, where the flocks of the Sun gamboled, nor the valley of Yucay could equal this enchanted isle of Titicaca.
Before the arrival of man, the island was inhabited by a tiger, carrying on its head a magnificent ruby, whose light illuminated the whole lake as the afterglow the snow-covered peaks above. The Hawaiians have an expression for the shifting of colors in a rainbow. The Indians on Lake Titicaca have special words for the glow of fading sunlight on the mountain summits and the purple of the glaciers in their hollows.
The Sun had preserved himself from the flood by hiding in the depths of Lake Titicaca. This was his island, out of whose sacred rock, after the deluge, he soared like a big flame into the sky. His footsteps are still to be seen perpetuated in iron ore. The original Incas were let down by the Sun, their father, on to the small island and commanded to go forth to teach the savage inhabitants.
But the worship given this spot by the Incas was only absorbed in that of former times. This “Island of the Wild Cat” is a field of aboriginal myth and tradition.
The sacred cliff where the Sun had risen was covered by the Incas with sheets of gold and silver, “so that, in rising, he might see the whole rock ablaze, a signal to worship.” “Sixteen hundred attendants manufacturedchichato throw at it, and pilgrims from the entire empire brought offerings of silver and gold.” Garcilasso says that “after all the vessels and ornaments of the temple were supplied, there was enough gold and silver left to raise and complete another temple without other material whatsoever.” All the treasure was thrown into Lake Titicaca to save it from the Spaniards. Ten of them were drowned in 1541, while hunting for it. Titicaca guards its secrets well.
The approach to the temple was a very complicated structure known as “the place where people lose themselves.” The pilgrims, after much fasting on the sacred ground of the island, were allowed to pass barefoot through the first gate above, the “door of the puma,”pumapuncu. After more fasting, they might go down through the second gate, the “door of the humming-bird,”kenti-puncu, so called from feathers of humming-birds plastered over its inner side. They were especially honored by the Incas, colored like the rainbow emblem. After more ceremonies, the pilgrims were allowed to go through the “door of hope,”pillco-puncu, covered with feathers of the bird of hope. Those who had come so far might now worship the holy cliff, but they were not allowed to touch the face of the cliff nor to walk upon it. Sacrifices to it were small children, whose heads the priests cut off with sharp stones. The sacrificial stone of the Island of Titicaca still remains, rubbed smooth by the iron tooth of time, split into three pieces by a thunderbolt. So does the queen’s meadow below the terraces, where the carmine, yellow, and whitecantut,flor-del-Inca, recalls the blazing color of other days, when fruit ripened here twelve thousand feet above the sea, and maize of which Sun-virgins made the bread of sacrifice.
Beyond, is the island called Coati, consecrated to the Moon, where her temple used to be. Thelife-size statue of a woman was found here, gold in the upper half, silver in the lower.
The Fountain of the Incas still gushes two streams of clear water. “A stolid Indian sits watching it pour away, never dreaming whence it comes, as no one, indeed, knows.”
TheIndian worshipped the Inca, his sovereign, because of his divine origin, being the descendant of Manco Ccapac, founder of his race, who was the son of the Sun. Thus, religion was the substance of the empire. But as the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was a pantheon of idols, sacred each one in the mind of some visiting chieftain, though always remaining the Sun Temple, so the religion itself was a synthesis of all the beliefs which those idols represented; blended yet dominated by the all-searching light of the Sun. This may explain, for instance, the confusion of Pachacamac, the supreme deity of the ancient coast tribes, with Uiracocha of the mountains, whom Acosta, among others, declares to be one and the same. Clear-cut
A SWINGING BRIDGE NEAR JAUJA.
A SWINGING BRIDGE NEAR JAUJA.
A SWINGING BRIDGE NEAR JAUJA.
distinctions are impossible. The stories are all vague, even among confident writers of legends.
As to the Sun’s descent, the wise men of the Incas learned from their predecessors that he was made by The Ancient Cause, The First Beginning, The Maker of All Created Things, The Supreme Deity, Illa Tici Uira Cocha—the four ultimate, visible forms of the Infinite, to quote thePeruvian Star-chartof Salcamayhua. There is in Quichua a word to express “the-essence-of-being-in-general-as-existent-in-humanity.” Sometimes the name is given as Con Tici Uiracocha, an identification with the supreme god, Con, the center of another group of legends of belief. The mystery surrounding this great, invisible god, generally called Uiracocha, is as complete now as it was to the Sun-worshipping Incas, a sort of dim background for the glittering splendor of Sun-ritual.
Uiracocha has many identities: Uiracocha, the Supreme God; Uiracocha, the hero-god, the white and bearded man in long robes, who with a strange animal in his hand, appeared to that Inca afterwards called by his name, tending the flocks of the Sun among the tops of the Andes;Uiracocha, who raised up an army for the Inca on the Field of Blood out of stones that he set on fire from a sling of gold; he who changed the revelers of Tiahuanacu to stone in wrath. (However misty the connection between Uiracocha, stones, and human beings, it is certain that Peruvians held stones in great awe. The temple to Uiracocha, the war-god, is at the foot of an extinct volcano whence a lava stream had issued. It is paved with black and made of carved and polished stone. The interior was obscure, with an altar for human sacrifices.) Uiracocha who, as Betanzos relates, came out of a lake when all was dark, lord of light and lord of wind, who, as dawn appeared, spread his mantle over the waves of the lake and was wafted away into the rays of morning light. The curling waves followed his evanescent passage, and so he was called Uiracocha, the Foam of the Sea. He gave his wand to the chief in the House of the Dawn. It afterwards became the golden staff of Manco Ccapac, his son.
Uiracocha was the universal god of the Quichua-speaking people. The Sun was peculiar to the Incas.
The hazy red deity Con was the personification of subterranean fire. “He is light as air, has neither arms nor legs, nor muscles nor bones, nor joints nor nerves nor flesh, but runs very fast in all directions.” He came from the sea and flattened the hills and filled up the valleys, and by his simple word gave life to man. Viciously he converted the race of men he had created into black cats and other horrible animals, devastated the earth, deprived it of rain, and—retreated into the sea. His first temple was a volcano.
This left a free field for his equally omnipotent, equally hazy brother Pachacamac, who benignly created another race of men. Since Pachacamac was invisible and beyond their conception, the Incas built him no temples, but gave him secretly a superstitious worship, bowing their heads, lifting their eyes, and kissing the air as evidences of the reverence they felt at the mention of his name.
Here is a prayer reported by Geronimo de Ore: “O Pachacamac, thou who hast existed from the beginning, and shalt exist unto the end, powerful and pitiful; who createdst manby saying, ‘Let man be;’ who defendest us from evil, and preserves! our life and health;—art thou in the sky or in the earth, in the clouds or in the depths? Hear the voice of him who implores thee, and grant him his petitions. Give us life everlasting, preserve us, and accept this our sacrifice.”
The Inca mind could not reconcile the anterior existence of Uiracocha, Con, and Pachacamac with Sun-supremacy. We find them all called sons of the Sun, and so their importance could consistently fade away.
The origin of the two first Incas was mystery-veiled. Men discussed whether they were saved from the primeval waters robed in garments of light, or whether they came from three shining eggs laid by the lightning in a mountain cave after the deluge. Did they escape from the lower world through a giant reed, or were they imprisoned in a cave, over which Uiracocha appeared with wings of brilliant feathers to give Manco Ccapac the insignia—the scarlet fillet and the round gold plates? Some thought they emerged from Paccari-tampu, the Lodgings of the Dawn, not far from Cuzco. They had beenled thither through caverns of the earth. Sarmiento relates that the Incas came out of a rich window, by order of Uiracocha, without parentage. The first Inca had an enchanted bird and a staff of gold, and came conferring fairy-tale benefits to mankind.
The legend most widely accepted taught that the Incas, who in the person of Manco Ccapac and his wife and sister Mama Ocllo came out of the cave of Paccari-tampu, were children of the Sun. He himself placed them on the Island of Titicaca and told them to wander until they should reach a place where their wedge of gold would be swallowed up by the ground at a touch. There they should build the capital of their empire. At the foot of the fortress of Sachsahuaman it disappeared, and so the city of Cuzco, the Navel of the World, was founded.
The poetic fiction of all these legends conceals an historic background of curious details. But with Father Acosta we should consider that “it is not matter of any great importance to know what the Indians themselves report of their beginning, being more like unto dreams than to true histories.” He continued: “Theybelieve confidently they were created at their first beginning at this new world where they now dwell. But we have freed them of this error by our faith, which teacheth us that all men came from the first man.”
Besides all this maze of divinity and a symbolic astronomy, everything in nature had for them a soul that they might pray to for help. Not only the sun, moon, stars, thunder, and lightning, the rainbow, the elements, and rivers, but that deep sea from which they issued had a mysterious worship. They adored high mountains, homes of majestic gods whom they never saw, whence streams proceeded to water their terraces. They sacrificed to distant objects by blowing the ashes of burnt sacrifices into the air, offering them to the hills and to the wind. They adored all great stones, the mouths of rivers, all things in nature different from the rest, and offered to them small stones or a handful of earth or an eyelash.
Moreover, there was an elaborate fetishism. They had idols with a personal interest; they carried talismans; they had miniature domestic altars, where they offeredchichaor flowers.
They tried to appease things that might injure them. They drank a handful of water from a dangerous river before crossing, and ate a bit of the stone which had harmed them, and offered in sacrifice a leaf of coca. The mysteries of coca epitomize the country where it grows. It not only fortifies the teeth, controlling mountain sickness, preventing fatigue, keeping off disease, strengthening broken bones; it cheers the spirit and invigorates the mind, and gives courage to perform impossible tasks.
Its juice softens hard veins of metal. The odor of burning coca propitiates the deities-of-metals, who would render the mountains impenetrable without it. Coca-leaves in the mouths of the dead insure a welcome in lands beyond.
No wonder it was the divine plant of the Incas. A sacrifice at festivals, its smoke an offering to the gods, whose priests chewed the solemn herb to gain their favor, it was a benediction for any enterprise. Mama-coca, its spirit, was worshipped.
Coca, preferred to gold, silver, or precious stones, was dubbed by the Spaniards “una elusión del demonio.”
Almostas well known as the stories of silver and gold from Peru are those relating to its mammoth buildings made of mammoth stones. The ruins are a better witness to the greatness of the ancient Peruvians than the wealth looted from them.
It is the first fact mentioned by a homecoming traveler that there is a twelve-cornered stone in the Street of Triumph in Cuzco, and into and around each corner other stones are so perfectly fitted that a knife-blade cannot be inserted between them. That fact is perfectly true. So also is the fact that ancient Peruvians transported stones weighing tons with llamas and human beings as their only beasts of burden. They lifted them to great heights without machinery, cut them without steel implements, blasted them without gunpowder, and polished by rubbing them with other stones and bundles of rough grass. They had no resources in building but their own energy. The vast “stones were raised by socialinstitutions, supplying want of instruments by numbers of people.” This world of ruins, comparable to Egypt, “is isolated in the region of the clouds.”
Stupendous scenes upon these elevated plains were object lessons—nearness of gigantic peaks, appalling depth of chasms. The Incas learned much from nature: from salt-strewn deserts to lay waste their criminals’ property, sowing their fields with salt; from the sea, maker of terraces. They finished off the mountain-sides with smallandenes, or hanging gardens, which received the flow of water bestowed by the Inca upon his subjects with every patch of ground. They brought loam from the jungle in baskets and created land upon bare rocks. Where opportunity offered, the terraces widened, following the natural excrescences of the mountain.
And when nature failed to point lessons, models were provided by far-receding civilizations so remote that they almost seemed to have relapsed into the domain of nature. Each served as the foundation for the next, like the rhythmic life of the jungle.
Ancient Peruvians hesitated at nothing.They built an artificial city on a high, cold, almost waterless, plain, with a palace for the Inca to visit in, a garrison for his protection, and magazines and granaries for his soldiers’ food. Countless royal palaces, too, their niches covered with plates of gold, and convents like the House of the Virgins of the Sun in Cuzco, were duplicated all over the empire for other wives of the Inca as he chose among them, “storehouses sheltering his tribute in women.” There were baths and fountains and places of pleasure and round stonechulpas, towers of the dead.
Since no one traveled except by order of the Inca, the highways were reserved for himself, the armies, and thechasqui, or royal runners. From Zarate to Humboldt, they have been described as fit to rank with the seven wonders of the world. One highway pierced walls of solid rock, crossing profound chasms and the treacherous marshes of thepunaon walls of solid masonry. Being a pedestrian road, it slipped in flights of stone steps over the brow of the mountains. It traversed the whole empire for two thousand miles among the mountain-tops. The other, flanked by mud walls,lay along the low deserts of the coast, “shaded by trees whose branches hung over the road loaded with fruit, and filled with parrots and other birds,” to quote Cieza de Leon. Humboldt said that “part of the coast road was macadamized.”
At regular intervals, “every ten thousand paces,”tamboswere scattered along the roads, houses of pleasure for the Inca and waiting-houses for the relays of messengers of the Sun as they bore news of royal necessity, or brought fish from the sea or other delicacies from distant provinces to the Inca’s table. Garcilasso describes the stone stairs up to these inns “where the chairmen who carried the sedans did usually rest, where the Incas did sit for some time taking the air, and surveying in a most pleasant prospect all the high and lower parts of the mountains, which wore their coverings of snow, or on which the snow was falling, for from the tops of some mountains one might see a hundred leagues round.”
The Incas threw a swinging osier-bridge of spider-web construction across a vicious torrent to lead their armies over. So-called historianstell of bridges of feathers used in Inca days, but, as Garcilasso adds, “omit to declare the manner and fashion of them!”
The secrets of the Inca ruins are not yet told. For their industry moulded underground as well, connecting palaces and convents by hidden passageways, and chambers and depositories for army supplies like those made by the great Yupanqui in his campaign against the Chimus.
The subterranean system of water-works was stupendous. Near Cajamarca is a channel several hundred miles long paved with flagstones throughout its entire length. It forms the outlet to a little lake. Another aqueduct traversed the whole province of Cuntisuyu, twelve feet deep and over one hundred and twenty leagues long, leading waters of the snows to barren plains. Water was stored in cisterns on the mountain-tops. “They conducted rivers in straightened channels through hills of solid rock,” they brought water through pipes of gold from distant hot and cold springs, whose sources are now unknown. It trickled into the baths of the Inca through golden jaws of animals, birds, or snakes, and then welled
AN HEIR OF THE “MAKERS OF RUINS.”
AN HEIR OF THE “MAKERS OF RUINS.”
AN HEIR OF THE “MAKERS OF RUINS.”
over through properly regulated pathways to the terraces, where growing things were in want of irrigation.
This civilization had taken ages to evolve, as the development of certain plants and animals alone would show. It was reduced in a few years to an empire of ruin. One shivers at the “hideous energy of destruction evinced by man.” But in spite of all that has been done to annihilate the achievements of the Incas, benefits accruing from them still remain. “Makers of ruins” indeed, yet by them the present flimsy civilization exists. Upon their terraces, climbing to the mountain-tops, Indians now live in mud huts, little towns clutching at a far-off slope, apparently deserted but for the cemetery. Irrigating prospectors stand aghast before their mighty systems. The railway builder may take lessons in road construction.
There is practical value in ruins, if from them comes inspiration for modern industry. And there is poetry in ruins, because they speak of men and things which are gone, never to return, “the shrines of by-gone ideals, makable when they were made and then only.”
Noone dared to look upon the Inca, as he radiated the light of his divine Sun-father. He lived and ruled as a deity, representative of God, supreme arbiter of all creatures breathing the air or living in the water. “The very birds will suspend their flight if I command it,” Atahualpa once said. His person being holy, his body after death, preserved in its living likeness, was still worshipped. Carried about on a golden litter, the Prince Powerful in Riches moved from palace to palace, and his feet never touched any but sacred ground, consecrated by his contact, if not previously hallowed. To carry his person was so singular an honor that his weight was not a burden, as cultivating his fields was a labor performed with hymns of joy. This Sun of Cheerfulness passed beneath flower-covered arches, while his bearers crushed out sweet odors from flowers beneath theirfeet. Indeed, “the shouts of the multitude as he passed along caused the birds flying over to fall to the ground!”
If these “facts” seem more like romance than truth, they have at least masqueraded under the guise of history for more than three hundred years.
The Inca was clothed in garments made of the silky hair of the vicuña, which lives above the line of perpetual snow. Woven as they were to be worn, from threads of invisible fineness, the soft garments were made by cloistered Virgins of the Sun. They were enriched with bits of gold, silver, emeralds, a fringe of gorgeous feathers, and with mother-of-pearl. Pearls were not used, as their “search endangered the lives of the seekers.” The Inca wore a suit but twice, then conferring it upon some person of royal blood. These were the garments taken as sumptuous gifts to the monarchs of Spain.
Many were the Incas’ marks of distinction. Their heads were shorn, all but one lock, as Manco Ccapac had ordained. The “shearing” was done by means of a sharp flint. Anotherdistinction was enlarging the velvet of the ear by inserting ornaments, so that it reached the shoulder, suggesting the Spanish title,Orejones.
The peculiar badge of the Inca was a fringe encircling his brow, called thellautu, “the mark whereby he took possession of the realm, a red roll of wool more fine than silk, which hung in the midst of his forehead.” And his chief distinction, worn in his colored wreath and pointing upward, were the two long pinions of thecorequenque, that mysterious pair of birds which, isolated in a snowy desert beside a little lake, lived at the foot of an inaccessible mountain. Though there are other snowy deserts and other little lakes and other inaccessible mountains, no similar pair of birds could ever be found. In fact, there never were but two alive at the same time—symbol of the two original parents. They recall the screamingoo, a blackbird of the Hawaiian Islands, famed for concealing under each wing a single yellow feather, used in making those magical feather cloaks for the kings on ceremonial occasions.
Each Inca must have new pinions, as each must have his new palace, for the apartmentsof a dead sovereign were closed at death; his golden utensils, jewels, and treasure were buried with him. Men and women, practised in the art of lamentation, cried for one year after his death, when his account was closed. Then the heir “bound his head with the colored wreath” and started forth through his dominions.
With the rainbow as their emblem, even Inca facts had distinctive colors and were interwoven with facts of other colors, ideas being expressed directly without the technique of words. Knots in a parti-colored twist were their hieroglyphics, the famousquipus, and the Officers of the Knots were their historians. They intertwined the bright filaments of different sizes as well as colors, and tied into remembrance everything from laws and army supplies to ballads of the poets, sung on days of triumph.
Such a Sovereign-deity as the Inca could force the equality of all his people, commanding them to be happy. Here was a whole nation moved by sameness of will—desire to please their sovereign. Observance of law was natural to these industrious subjects, who were treated with absolute justice by an absolutedespot. Each was just as well fed, just as well clothed, just as well housed, just as well amused, as his neighbor. Emissaries from the king inspected his neighbor to see that it should remain so. All persons had to allow messengers from the Inca to inspect what they were doing at any time. Such as were found commendable were praised in public. Such as were idle and slovenly were scourged on the arms and legs. One punishment was whipping by a deformed Indian with a lash of nettles.
“There never could be any scarcity or famine, for, if a man failed to take his turn at the water for irrigation, he received publicly three or four thumps on the back with a stone ... shamed with the disgraceful term of ...mizqui tullu, being a word compounded ofmizqui, which signifies sweet, andtullu, which is bones.”
As labor was the only tribute, the rich were not taxed more than the poor. The blind were required to cleanse cotton of seeds and rub maize from the ears. “The old men and women were set to affright away the birds from the corn, and thereby gained their bread and clothing.” No one, however impotent, could
INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.
INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.
INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.
escape tribute. The poorest gave lice, “making themselves clean and not void of employment in so doing.” Who, indeed, were the poor? Those who were incapable of work, who had to be fed and clothed out of the king’s store.
“There were no particular tradesmen ... but every one learned what was needful for their persons and houses and provided for themselves.”
Laws would hardly seem necessary to control so exemplary a nation. Here, however, are a few paternal laws, thought necessary by the Lover of the Poor: against the adornment of clothing with gold and silver and jewels; against profuseness in banquet and delicacies in diet; against the ill manners of children; of good husbandry and hospitality; providing a new division of lands every year, according to the increase and diminution of families; punishing those who destroyed landmarks or turned the water aside; devoting the services of all master workmen to the Inca, and supplying them with gold and silver and other materials for the exercise of their ingenuity.
Since the Sun-god, or the Inca, had benignly bestowed them for the people’s good, laws received the same veneration as the precepts of religion, from which no subject of the Incas could dissociate them. A breaker of the law was guilty of sacrilege, and no punishment could be too severe. In fact, most crimes were punishable by death. The sinner was thrown over a precipice or into a ditch of serpents, jaguars, and pumas. The worst sin of all, high treason, exacted in expiation not only the death of the sinner, but that of his family, even of his neighbors. His very trees were pulled up by the roots, and his fields sown with salt. “But as there was never any such offense committed, so there was never any such severity executed,” a mitigating remark of Garcilasso in connection with a certain crime.
The basis of the Inca government was tribute, personal labor given to the Sun and to the Inca, a source of continual delight, a supreme privilege. So the Sun, or his representative the Inca, was furnished by his people with food, tilled by them from his own ground; clothing for his soldiers or his needy from the wool of his own flocks; bows and arrows, lances andclubs, ropes for carrying burdens, helmets and targets each where most easily procurable. Temples and palaces of the Inca, his aqueducts, roads, and bridges were built with hymns of rejoicing. The laborers never got out of breath so as to spoil the cadence of the hymn of triumph; the chroniclers fail to say whether in obedience to law or from a sense of good taste.
In addition, all the provinces paid tribute of the most beautiful women, who were kept in convents as wives of the Inca; and he might choose any who suited him.
The great maxim of the Incas was increase of empire, their plea being the best interest of the tribes they were to conquer. The Inca sent word that he would come “not to take away their lives or estates, but to confer upon them all those benefits which the Sun, his father, had commanded him to perform toward the Indians. He (would come) to do them good, by teaching them to live according to rules of reason and laws of nature, and that, leaving their idols, they should henceforward adore the Sun for their only god, by whose gracious command he had received them to pardon. To whichend, and to no other purpose (for he stood in no need of their service) he traveled from country to country.”
So well did most of the surrounding tribes realize this, that messages of submission came before the conquerors had even turned in their direction. If it happened that because of ignorance they held out against the benefits an indulgent sovereign was waiting to bestow, the Inca’s messengers informed them of his exact intentions. All good gifts would be theirs, provided only they would renounce their independence, their language and religion, and send their chief god as an hostage of submission to the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. Honored servants of the Inca would come to them in return to acquaint them more in particular with the new benefits they were about to receive. Skilled workmen would teach them the arts. The sons of theircacique(chieftain) would be sent to Cuzco to receive instruction. Moreover, the Inca would confer upon them the garments worn by his own gracious person.
Nearly all perceived the wisdom of such a course at once. But if in blindness any stillrebelled, messengers brought word that “the Inca pitied their folly which had so unnecessarily betrayed them to the last extremity of want and famine.” For enlightened they were to be, in spite of themselves.
Wonderful are the tales of these victorious campaigns, for the Inca’s army never knew defeat. The soldiers were as plentifully supplied from vast granaries as if in Cuzco. If the march led through lowlands, the entire army was relieved every two months. Though the Indians of the mountain-tops did not object to cold, they succumbed to fevers soon after descending into the comfortable valleys. When a new province had been incorporated, the gracious Inca “confirmed the right of possession to the natives of it.”
The empire extended from the Chibchas and Caras of Ecuador, beyond the Chilean deserts. Only one region dared defiance; that was the primeval jungle. The armies might skirmish about upon its edges, and exact exotic tribute of the savages who ventured forth. But within its grim interior they were secure.
In the provinces of Antis, people “killed oneanother as they casually met,” and worshipped a jaguar, the original lord of the jungle. They sacrificed hearts and blood of men to huge snakes “thicker than a man’s thigh.” They made war only to eat the flesh of their enemies. They were called “nose of iron” because they bored the bridge between the nostrils to hang in it a jewel or long piece of gold or silver. With a handful of men, Yupanqui visited these savages below the Andes and imposed worship of the Sun. With a handful of men, the Spaniards wiped the great organization of the Empire of the Sun off the face of the earth and established upon its ruins a Christian civilization.
The people in the Valley of Palta bound tablets upon the head of a new-born child and tightened them each day for three years, until the skull was elongated, in order to fit the pointed woolen cap which it was the fashion to wear.
The Chachapoyas wore a black binder about their heads, stitched with white flies, and instead of a feather, the tip of a deer’s horn. Their chief weapons were slings bound abouttheir heads, and they adored the condor as their principal god.
The Chancas were the most dangerous opponents of Cuzco, a powerful race owing their origin to a jaguar, who dressed in skins of their god and carried effigies of jaguars with a man’s head to their sacrifices of children, by whose eyes they prognosticated.
Thecaciquesof all dependent tribes were obliged to appear once a year at court, or if they lived very far away, once in two years. They brought with them gold and silver from their mines, for all such things were devoted to worship of the Inca. Failing these, they presented jaguars, droll monkeys, parrots, wondrous condors, and giant toads and snakes that were very fierce, kept in dens for the grandeur of the court. People from all climates presented indigenous gifts, the most beautiful or the most curious of any creature or plant within their domains. Any known thing preëminent in any way added the name of its peculiar excellence to the titles of the Inca. His court in Cuzco consisted of more than eight thousand persons, nobles who traced descent from theSun, and representatives of all the fantastic tribes blest by the Inca’s clemency. Even the greatest lords carried bundles in his presence.
The noble city of Cuzco, where the children of Inti first stopped with their wedge of gold, was itself worshipped. Those who lived in Cuzco had a certain superiority. Divisions of the city were the Terrace of Flowers, the Lion Picket with the dens of pumas, the Field of Speech, the Quarter of the Great Serpents, the Scarlet Cantut—the flower of the Inca—the Holy Gate, the Shoulder Blade, the Seaweed Bridge, and so on, bounded by small streams and long, somber walls of perfectly fitted stones.
Up above the city hangs the stupendous fortress of Sachsahuaman, exceeding all the seven wonders of the world, a cyclopean work of the primitive age. Squier says: “The largest stone in the fortress has a computed weight of 361 tons.” Sachsahuaman must indeed have been raised by enchantment in a night like Tiahuanacu, for it surpasses the art of man, the labyrinth of passageways contracting here and there so that a single man could keep back an army, subterranean tunnels leading to temples
IN THE MARKET,PLAZA PRINCIPAL, CUZCO.
IN THE MARKET,PLAZA PRINCIPAL, CUZCO.
IN THE MARKET,PLAZA PRINCIPAL, CUZCO.
and palaces of the city. From the inmost recesses of the fortress, a fountain of clear water bubbles. Its mysterious murmur fills the secret passageways.
Even a single stone destined as a part of the fortress partakes of the enchantment. According to legend, twenty thousand Indians had dragged it from a distant quarry, up and down over the wild mountains. Once it fell, killing “three or four thousand of those Indians who were the guides to direct and support it.” And when, after its painful journey, the monster finally beheld the lofty fortress of which it was to form a part, it fell for the last time, shedding bloody tears from the hollow orbs of its eyes. It still lies on the same spot, receding deeper and deeper into the ground whenever attempts are made to remove it.
“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born lord of all that is. He established the earth and the sky.“Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice?“He who gives life; he who gives strength; whose command all the bright gods revere; whose light is immortality; whose shadow is death. He who through his power is the one god of the breathing and awakening world.... He whose greatness these snowy mountains, whose greatness the sea proclaims, with the distant river. He through whom the sky is bright and the earth firm.... He who measured out the light in the air, ... wherever the mighty water clouds went, where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose he who is the sole life of the bright gods.... He to whom heaven and earth, standing firm by his will, look up, trembling inwardly....“May he not destroy us! He, the creator of the earth; he, the righteous, who created heaven."—Hymn of Indian Sun-worship from the Rig-Veda.
“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born lord of all that is. He established the earth and the sky.
“Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice?
“He who gives life; he who gives strength; whose command all the bright gods revere; whose light is immortality; whose shadow is death. He who through his power is the one god of the breathing and awakening world.... He whose greatness these snowy mountains, whose greatness the sea proclaims, with the distant river. He through whom the sky is bright and the earth firm.... He who measured out the light in the air, ... wherever the mighty water clouds went, where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose he who is the sole life of the bright gods.... He to whom heaven and earth, standing firm by his will, look up, trembling inwardly....
“May he not destroy us! He, the creator of the earth; he, the righteous, who created heaven."—Hymn of Indian Sun-worship from the Rig-Veda.
Primitivepeoples usually adore that natural force which is their greatest good. Gratitude for benefits conferred is the basis of all pagan religion. Primitive peoples also worship thesky and the bright objects within it. Sun worshippers combine the two.
Inti, the Sun, child of the Universal Spirit, is his mighty emblem, a symbol of his uncreated glory, the quickening principle in nature, the great wizard of Peru, the only source of vitality upon earth, by whose energy the winds arise, the glaciers slide over the mountains, by whose energy even the rain descends, the rivers swell, and cascades leap through the valleys down toward the sea. In how much more real a sense than the Incas knew is Peru the land of the sun!
The Sun, ruler of the stars, together with Quilla, the Moon, ruler of winds and waters, his sister, wife, and queen, created beautiful Chasca, the Dawn, “whose time was the gloaming and twilight, whose messengers the fleecy clouds which sail through the sky ... and who, when he shakes his clustering hair, drops noiselessly pearls of dew on the green grass fields.”
The light-rays emanating from the Sun and the morning star of double course are his messengers, bringing strength and power. They precede to announce his coming in the morning, and follow him as, by the force of his power and heat, the sea parts in the evening to receive him.
The name of Sun-temples in Peru was Intihuatana, the binding of the Sun, the place where the eternal light or fire was held fast. Though there were many such throughout the kingdom, the Holy of Holies was at Cuzco, the Place of Gold, Inti-cancha, oriented to the sunrise, golden crown gleaming, sheltering walls and cornices lined with gold plates under its roof of straw. There flamed the great golden image of the Sun, glistening with emeralds and other precious stones, completely covering one side of the temple opposite the eastern portal. The mummies of all former kings, perfect replicas of themselves, sat staring as in more active days from their thrones of gold along the walls, the eyes shining with a mixture of gold. “And so light were these bodies that an Indian could easily carry one of them in his arms to the houses of Spanish gentlemen who desired to see them.”
Beyond, twinkled the temple of the Moon, the Sun’scoya. The queens, her descendants,were also calledcoya, “not being worthy a title so truly magnificent as Inca.” This was the Place of Silver, surrounded by the dark shadow of night, receiving the silent homage of the queens, the sister-wives of the Incas, reposing on silver thrones. At full moon the festival of the deities of water was held here.
A white cross of crystalline jasper hung from a silver chain in a secret place. The white light in it increased and decreased with the moon. It was beneficent and associated with the morning light, whose compartment came next, sacred to the Dawn with the Morning Star,chasca coyllur, ragged with earth mist, he of the long curling locks, the page of the Sun. The royal runners were named for him, messengers of the Inca as he of the Sun. All the other stars, companions of the Moon, which vanish at the coming of the Sun, glittered each in its proper magnitude from a starry ceiling.
The temple belonging to Thunder, Lightning, and the Thunderbolt—servants of the Sun, but messengers of an angry god—shone with tiles of gold, but was without symbol. As the arms of the Inca, the dread liquid fire whichdarted from heaven like a golden serpent with quick spring and mortal bite, surrounded the Rainbow, beautifulcuychi, whose image spanned one wall of the room beyond, a multi-colored ray of the Sun, flickering over the showery hillside, announcing his gracious reappearance after the tempest and promising peace. The all-powerful Sun could subdue the dark cloud and draw from its depths the shining rainbow, whose fragile arch widens as the Sun sinks. He lives in the clouds, and the rainbow is the hem of his garment. Is it strange that the Incas should have held it in such veneration that when they saw it in the air they shut their mouths and clapped their hands before it? Is it not stranger that they only should have worshipped the rainbow and placed it on their banners as an emblem of God?
All the priests of the Sun in Cuzco were of the blood royal, a privileged class. As many as thirty thousand officiated in Inti-cancha. They washed the sacrifices in fountains of water which bubbled up in golden cisterns and celebrated the great festivals in glittering dresses of feathers with drums of serpents’ skins.