Chapter 5
No artefacts or monuments, no cities or temples, have endured in recognizable form for longer than the most resilient religious traditions. Whether expressed in the Pyramid Texts of Ancient Egypt, or the Hebrew Bible, or the Vedas, such traditions are among the most imperishable of all human creations: they are vehicles of knowledge voyaging through time.
The last custodians of the ancient religious heritage of Peru were the Incas, whose beliefs and ‘idolatry’ were ‘extirpated’ and whose treasures were ransacked during the thirty terrible years that followed the Spanish conquest in AD 1532.1 Providentially, however, a number of early Spanish travellers made sincere efforts to document Inca traditions before they were entirely forgotten.
Though little attention was paid at the time, some of these traditions speak strikingly of a great civilization that was believed to have existed in Peru many thousands of years earlier.2 Powerful memories were preserved of this civilization, said to have been founded by the Viracochas, the same mysterious beings credited with the making of the Nazca lines.
‘Foam of the Sea’
When the Spanish conquistadores arrived, the Inca empire extended along the Pacific coast and Andean highlands of South America from the northern border of modern Ecuador, through the whole of Peru, and as far south as the Maule River in central Chile. Connecting the far-flung corners of this empire was a vast and sophisticated road system: two parallel north-south highways, for example, one running for 3600 kilometres along the coast and the other for a similar distance through the Andes. Both these great thoroughfares were paved and connected by frequent links. In addition, they exhibited an interesting range of design and engineering features such as suspension bridges and tunnels cut through solid rock. They were clearly the work of an evolved, disciplined and ambitious society. Ironically, they played a significant part in its downfall: the Spanish forces, led by Francisco Pizarro, used them to great effect to speed up their ruthless advance into the Inca heartland.3
The capital of the Inca empire was the city of Cuzco, a name meaning ‘the earth’s navel’ in the local Quechua language.4 According to legend it was established by Manco Capac and Mama Occlo, two children of the Sun. Here, though the Incas worshipped the sun god, whom they knew as Inti, quite another deity was venerated as the Most Holy of all. This was Viracocha, whose namesakes were said to have made the Nazca lines and whose own name meant ‘Foam of the Sea.’5
No doubt it is just a coincidence that the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who was born of the sea, received her name because of ‘the foam [aphros] out of which she was formed’.6 Besides, Viracocha was always depicted uncompromisingly as a male by the peoples of the Andes. That much about him is known for certain. No historian, however, is able to say how ancient was the cult of this deity before the Spanish arrived to put a stop to it. This is because the cult seemed always to have been around; indeed, long before the Incas incorporated him into their cosmogony and built a magnificent temple for him at Cuzco, the evidence suggests that the high god Viracocha had been worshipped by all the civilizations that had ever existed in the long history of Peru.
Citadel of Viracocha
A few days after leaving Nazca, Santha and I arrived in Cuzco and made our way to the site of the Coricancha, the great temple dedicated to Viracocha in the pre-Colombian era. The Coricancha was of course long gone. Or, to be more exact, it was not so much gone as buried beneath layers of later architecture. The Spanish had kept its superb Inca foundations, and the lower parts of its fabulously strong walls, and had erected their own grandiose colonial cathedral on top.
Walking towards the front entrance of this cathedral, I remembered that the Inca temple that had once stood here had been covered with more than 700 sheets of pure gold (each weighing around two kilograms) and that its spacious courtyard had been planted with ‘fields’ of replica corn also fashioned out of gold.7 I could not help but be reminded of Solomon’s temple in far-off Jerusalem, also reputed to have been adorned with sheets of gold and a marvellous orchard of golden trees.8
Earthquakes in 1650 and again in 1950 had largely demolished the Spanish cathedral of Santo Domingo which stood on the site of the temple of Viracocha, and it had been necessary to rebuild it on both occasions. Its Inca foundations and lower walls survived these natural disasters intact, thanks to their characteristic design which made use of an elegant system of interlocking polygonal blocks. These blocks, and the general layout of the place, were almost all that was now left of the original structure, apart from an octagonal grey stone platform at the centre of the vast rectangular courtyard which had once been covered with 55 kilograms of solid gold.9 On either side of the courtyard were ante-chambers, also from the Inca temple, with refined architectural features such as walls that tapered upwards and beautifully-carved niches hewn out of single pieces of granite.
We took a walk through the narrow, cobbled streets of Cuzco. Looking around, I realized it was not just the cathedral that reflected Spanish imposition on top of an earlier culture: the whole town was slightly schizophrenic. Spacious, balconied, pastel-shaded colonial homes and palaces towered above me but almost all of them stood on Inca foundations or incorporated complete Inca structures of the same beautiful polygonal architecture used in the Coricancha. In one alleyway, known as Hatunrumiyoc, I paused to examine an intricate jigsaw puzzle of a wall made of countless drystone blocks all perfectly fitted together, all of different sizes and shapes, interlocking in a bewildering array of angles. The carving of the individual blocks, and their arrangement into so complicated a structure could only have been achieved by master craftsmen possessed of very high levels of skill, with untold centuries of architectural experimentation behind them. On one block I counted twelve angles and sides in a single plane, and I could not slip even the edge of a piece of thin paper into the joints that connected it to the surrounding blocks.
The bearded stranger
It seemed that in the early sixteenth century, before the Spanish began to demolish Peruvian culture in earnest, an idol of Viracocha had stood in the Holy of Holies of the Coricancha. According to a contemporary text, the Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiquos de los naturales del Piru, this idol took the form of a marble statue of the god – a statue described ‘as to the hair, complexion, features, raiment and sandals, just as painters represent the apostle Saint Bartholomew’.10 Other accounts of Viracocha likened his appearance to that of the Saint Thomas.11 I examined a number of illustrated ecclesiastical manuscripts in which these two saints appeared; both were routinely depicted as lean, bearded white men, past middle age, wearing sandals and dressed in long, flowing cloaks. As we shall see, the records confirmed this was exactly the appearance ascribed to Viracocha by those who worshipped him. Whoever he was, therefore, he could not have been an American Indian: they are relatively dark-skinned people with sparse facial hair.12 Viracocha’s bushy beard and pale complexion made him sound like a Caucasian.
Back in the sixteenth century the Incas had thought so too. Indeed their legends and religious beliefs made them so certain of his physical type that they initially mistook the white and bearded Spaniards who arrived on their shores for the returning Viracocha and his demi-gods,13 an event long prophesied and which Viracocha was said in all the legends to have promised. This happy coincidence gave Pizarro’s conquistadores the decisive strategic and psychological edge that they needed to overcome the numerically superior Inca forces in the battles that followed.
Who had provided the model for the Viracochas?