Encyclopaedia, Funk and Wagnell, New York, 1925, vol. II, p. 105.
9 Peru, p. 182.
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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 demigods,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?
10 The Facts on File Encyclopaedia ..., p. 658.
11 See, for example, H. Osborne, South American Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1968,
p. 81.
12 For further evidence and argument in this regard, see Constance Irwin, Fair Gods and
Stone Faces, W. H. Allen, London, 1964, pp. 31-2.
13 J. Alden Mason, The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, Penguin Books, London, 1991, p.
135. See also Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Orion Press,
New York, 1961, pp. 132-3, 147-8.
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Chapter 6
He Came in a Time of Chaos
Through all the ancient legends of the peoples of the Andes stalked a tall,
bearded, pale-skinned figure wrapped in a cloak of secrecy. And though
he was known by many different names in many different places he was
always recognizably the same figure: Viracocha, Foam of the Sea, a
master of science and magic who wielded terrible weapons and who came
in a time of chaos to set the world to rights.
The same basic story was shared in many variants by all the peoples of
the Andean region. It began with a vivid description of a terrifying period
when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into
darkness by the disappearance of the sun. Society had fallen into
disorder, and the people suffered much hardship. Then
there suddenly appeared, coming from the south, a white man of large stature and
authoritative demeanour. This man had such great power that he changed the hills
into valleys and from the valleys made great hills, causing streams to flow from
the living stone ...1
The early Spanish chronicler who recorded this tradition explained that it
had been told to him by the Indians he had travelled among on his
journeys in the Andes:
And they heard it from their fathers, who in their turn had it from the old songs
which were handed down from very ancient times ... They say that this man
travelled along the highland route to the north, working marvels as he went and
that they never saw him again. They say that in many places he gave men
instructions how they should live, speaking to them with great love and kindness
and admonishing them to be good and to do no damage or injury one to another,
but to love one another and show charity to all. In most places they name him
Ticci Viracocha ...2
Other names applied to the same figure included Huaracocha, Con, Con
Ticci or Kon Tiki, Thunupa, Taapac, Tupaca and Illa.3 He was a scientist,
an architect of surpassing skills, a sculptor and an engineer: ‘He caused
terraces and fields to be formed on the steep sides of ravines, and
sustaining walls to rise up and support them. He also made irrigating
channels to flow ... and he went in various directions, arranging many
things.’4
1 South American Mythology, p. 74.
2 Ibid.
3 Arthur Cotterell, The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends, Guild Publishing,
London, 1989, p. 174. See also South American Mythology, p. 69-88.
4 Francisco de Avila, 'A Narrative of the Errors, False Gods, and Other Superstitions and
Diabolical Rites in Which the Indians of the Province of Huarochiri Lived in Ancient
Times', in Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas (trans, and ed. Clemens R.
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Viracocha was also a teacher and a healer and made himself helpful to
people in need. It was said that ‘wherever he passed, he healed all that
were sick and restored sight to the blind.’5
This gentle, civilizing, ‘superhuman’, Samaritan had another side to his
nature, however. If his life were threatened, as it seems to have been on
several occasions, he had the weapon of heavenly fire at his disposal:
Working great miracles by his words, he came to the district of the Canas and
there, near a village called Cacha ... the people rose up against him and
threatened to stone him. They saw him sink to his knees and raise his hands to
heaven as if beseeching aid in the peril which beset him. The Indians declare that
thereupon they saw fire in the sky which seemed all around them. Full of fear, they
approached him whom they had intended to kill and besought him to forgive them
... Presently they saw that the fire was extinguished at his command, though
stones were consumed by fire in such wise that large blocks could be lifted by
hand as if they were cork. They narrate further that, leaving the place where this
occurred, he came to the coast and there, holding his mantle, he went forth
amidst the waves and was seen no more. And as he went they gave him the name
Viracocha, which means ‘Foam of the Sea’.’6
The legends were unanimous in their physical description of Viracocha. In
his Suma y Narracion de los Incas, for example, Juan de Betanzos, a
sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler, stated that according to the Indians,
he had been ‘a bearded man of tall stature clothed in a white robe which
came down to his feet and which he wore belted at the waist’.7
Other descriptions, collected from many different and widely separated
Andean peoples, all seemed to identify the same enigmatic individual.
According to one he was:
A bearded man of medium height dressed in a rather long cloak ... He was past his
prime, with grey hair, and lean. He walked with a staff and addressed the natives
with love, calling them his sons and daughters. As he traversed all the land he
worked miracles. He healed the sick by touch. He spoke every tongue even better
than the natives. They called him Thunupa or Tarpaca, Viracocha-rapacha o
r
Pachaccan ...8
In one legend Thunupa-Viracocha was said to have been a ‘white man of
large stature, whose air and person aroused great respect and
veneration’.9 In another he was described as ‘a white man of august
appearance, blue-eyed, bearded, without headgear and wearing a cusma,
a jerkin or sleeveless shirt reaching to the knees’. In yet another, which
seemed to refer to a later phase of his life, he was revered as ‘a wise
counsellor in matters of state’ and depicted as ‘an old man with a beard
and long hair wearing a long tunic’.10
Markhem), Hakluyt Society, London, 1873, vol. XLVIII, p. 124.
5 South American Mythology, p. 74.
6 Ibid., p. 74-6.
7 Ibid., p. 78.
8 Ibid., p. 81.
9 John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Macmillan, London, 1993, p. 97.
10 South American Mythology, p. 87.
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Civilizing mission
Above all else, Viracocha was remembered in the legends as a teacher.
Before his coming, it was said, ‘men lived in a condition of disorder,
many went naked like savages; they had no houses or other dwellings
than caves, and from these they went forth to gather whatever they could
find to eat in the countryside.’11
Viracocha was credited with changing all this and with initiating the
long-lost golden age which later generations looked back on with
nostalgia. All the legends agreed, furthermore, that he had carried out his
civilizing mission with great kindness and as far as possible had abjured
the use of force: careful instruction and personal example had been the
main methods used to equip the people with the techniques and
knowledge necessary for a cultured and productive life. In particular, he
was remembered for bringing to Peru such varied skills as medicine,
metallurgy, farming, animal husbandry, the art of writing (said by the
Incas to have been introduced by Viracocha but later forgotten), and a
sophisticated understanding of the principles of engineering and
architecture.
I had already been impressed by the quality of Inca stonework in Cuzco.
As my research in the old town continued, however, I was surprised to
discover that by no means all the so-called Inca masonry could be
attributed with any degree of archaeological certainty to the Incas. It was
true that they had been masters in the manipulation of stone, and many
monuments in the Cuzco area were indisputably their work. It seemed,
however, that some of the more remarkable structures routinely
attributed to them could have been erected by earlier civilizations; the
evidence suggested that the Incas had often functioned as the restorers
of these structures rather than their original builders.
The same appeared to be true of the highly developed system of roads
connecting the far-flung parts of the Inca empire. The reader will recall
that these roads took the form of parallel highways running north to
south, one along the coast and the other through the Andes. All in all
more than 15,000 miles of surfaced tracks had been in regular and
efficient use before the time of the Spanish conquest, and I had assumed
that the Incas had been responsible for all of them. I now learned that it
was much more likely that they had inherited the system. Their role had
been to restore, maintain and unify a pre-existing network. Indeed,
though it was not often admitted, no expert could safely estimate how
old these incredible highways were or who had built them.12
The mystery was deepened by local traditions which stated not only
that the road system and the sophisticated architecture had been ‘ancient
in the time of the Incas’, but that both ‘were the work of white, auburn
11 Ibid., p. 72.
12 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 26:42.
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haired men’ who had lived thousands of years earlier.13
One legend described Viracocha as being accompanied by ‘messengers’
of two kinds, ‘faithful soldiers’ ( huaminca) and ‘shining ones’ ( hayhuay-
panti). Their role was to carry their lord’s message ‘to every part of the
world’.14
Elsewhere there were phrases such as: ‘Con Ticci returned ... with a
number of attendants’; ‘Con Ticci then summoned his followers, who
were called viracocha’; ‘Con Ticci commanded all but two of the viracocha
to go east ...’15; ‘There came forth from a lake a Lord named Con Ticci
Viracocha bringing with him a certain number of people ...’16; ‘Thus those
viracochas went off to the various districts which Viracocha had indicated
for them ...’.17
The work of demons?
The ancient citadel of Sacsayhuaman lies just north of Cuzco. We reached
it late one afternoon under a sky almost occluded by heavy clouds of
tarnished silver. A cold grey breeze was blowing across the high-altitude
tundra as I clambered up stairways, through lintelled stone gates built for
giants, and walked along the mammoth rows of zig-zag walls.
I craned my neck and looked up at a big granite boulder that my route
now passed under. Twelve feet high, seven feet across, and weighing
considerably more than 100 tons, it was a work of man, not nature. It had
been cut and shaped into a symphonic harmony of angles, manipulated
with apparent ease (as though it were made of wax or putty) and stood
on its end in a wall of other huge and problematic polygonal blocks,
some of them positioned above it, some below it, some to each side, and
all in perfectly balanced and well-ordered juxtaposition.
Since one of these astonishing pieces of carefully hewn stone had a
height of twenty-eight feet and was calculated to weigh 361 tons18
(roughly the equivalent of five hundred family-sized automobiles), it
seemed to me that a number of fundamental questions were crying out
for answers.
How had the Incas, or their predecessors, been able to work stone on
such a gargantuan scale? How had they cut and shaped these Cyclopean
boulders so precisely? How had they transported them tens of miles from
13 Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Harper & Brothers, New York,
1882, p. 394.
14 From the 'Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del Piru',
reported in The Facts on File Encyclopaedia .. ., p. 657.
15 Pears Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends: Oceania, Australia and the Americas, (ed.
Sheila Savill), Pelham Books, London, 1978, pp. 179-80.
16 South American Mythology, p. 76.
17 Ibid.
18 The Conquest of the Incas, p. 191.
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distant quarries? By what means had they made walls of them, shuffling
the individual blocks around and raising them high above the ground
with such apparent ease? These people weren’t even supposed to have
had the wheel, let alone machinery capable of lifting and manipulating
dozens of irregularly shaped 100-ton blocks, and sorting them into threedimen
sional jigsaw puzzles.
I knew that the chroniclers of the early colonial period had been as
perplexed as I was by what they had seen. The respected Garcilaso de la
Vega, for example, who came here in the sixteenth century, had spoken
with awe about the fortress of Sacsayhuaman:
Its proportions are inconceivable when one has not actually seen it; and when one
has looked at it closely and examined it attentively, they appear to be so
extraordinary that it seems as though some magic had presided over its
construction; that it must be the work of demons instead of human beings. It is
made of such great stones, and in such great number, that one wonders
simultaneously how the Indians were able to quarry them, how they transported
them ... and how they hewed them and set them one on top of the other with such
precision. For they disposed of neither iron nor steel with which to penetrate the
rock and cut and polish the stones; they had neither wagon nor oxen to transport
them, and, in fact, there exist neither wagons nor oxen throughout the world that
would have sufficed for this task, so enormous are these stones and so rude the
mountain paths over which they were conveyed ...19
Garcilaso also reported something else interesting. In his Royal
Commentaries of the Incas he gave an account of how, in historical times,
an Inca king had tried to emulate the achievements of his predecessors
who had built Sacsayhuaman. The attempt had involved bringing just one
immense boulder from several miles away to add to the existing
fortifications: ‘This boulder was hauled across the mountain by more than
20,000 Indians, going up and down very steep hills ... At a certain spot, it
fell from their hands over a precipice crushing more than 3000 men.’20 In
all the histories I surveyed, this was the only report which described the
Incas actually building, or trying to build, with huge blocks like those
employed at Sacsayhuaman. The report suggested that they possessed no
experience of the techniques involved and that their attempt had ended
in disaster.
This, of course, proved nothing in itself. But Garcilaso’s story did
intensify my doubts about the great fortifications which towered above
me. As I looked at them I felt that they could, indeed, have been erected
before the age of the Incas and by some infinitely older and more
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