Viracocha

Attestation

The fullest early account is Juan de Betanzos's Suma y narración de los Incas (1551), which opens with Con Tici Viracocha emerging from Lake Titicaca into a world without light. He makes a first people who displease him and turns them to stone; he then goes to Tiwanaku, makes the sun, moon, and stars, and shapes the nations of the Andes in stone, painting on each its dress and giving it a language, before sending them underground to emerge from their own springs, caves, and hills. Cristóbal de Molina (c. 1575) and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572) tell related versions; Sarmiento adds that the Creator destroyed an earlier world by a flood.

The departing maker

Viracocha then travels northwest through the highlands with two helpers who take the coast and the forest edge. At Cacha, where the Incas later built the great temple now called Raqchi, people attack him and he calls fire down on a hill before relenting. He passes through Cusco and at the coast near Puerto Viejo (Manta, in modern Ecuador) walks away over the sea.

A god seen through Spanish eyes

Viracocha's image in the chronicles is especially exposed to colonial reshaping. Betanzos describes him as a tall man in a long white robe carrying a staff, details that invited comparison with Christian apostles; Andeans also called the Spaniards viracochas, a usage Francisco de Ávila notes and that later writers sometimes misread as proof that the invaders were taken for gods. Garcilaso, keen to present an Andean monotheism, gives the role of invisible supreme god to Pachacamac instead. Scholars continue to debate how far the Creator's pre-eminence reflects Inca state theology and how far it reflects Spanish expectations.