Pachacamac

“ It is easy to see how such a conception as Pachacamac, the spirit of animated nature, would become one with the idea of a universal or even a partial creator.
That there was a pre-existing conception of a creative agency can be proved from the existence of the Peruvian name Conticsi-viracocha (He who gives Origin, or Beginning) . This conception and that of Pachacamac must at some comparatively early period have clashed, and been amalgamated probably with ease when it was seen how nearly akin were the two ideas. ”

“ The temple pile glows against the blue sea in the midst of shimmering sand. Pachacamac lies in its magnificent ruin surrounded by acres of skeletons. For more than two thousand years it was the most famous burial place of the coast. Even mummies were brought from great distances to lie in the sacred ground.
Layers upon layers of succeeding generations have all yielded their excavated secrets, each throwing light on others. Time and treasure-seekers have laid bare the most recent. Histories of great peoples told by their graves! ”

“ In September, 1533, Don Francisco Pizarro arrived at Pachacamac, a large town belonging to the indians, where a magnificent temple had been built by Pachacutec, the tenth Inca of Peru, for the worship of Pachacamac, the creator and preserver of the world. This rich place of worship was plundered by Pizarro, and the virgins destined to the service of the Deity, though in every respect as sacred as the nuns of Pizarro's religion, were violated by his soldiers ”

“ In the latter once stood a great temple to Pachacamac, the ruins of which, alone, now remain. Pachacamac would seem to have borne the reputation of a great civiliser, and to some extent he usurped the claims of Viracocha to this honour. Viracocha, so runs the legend, was defeated by him in combat, and fled, whereupon the victor created a new world more to his liking by the simple expedient of transferring the race of men then upon earth into wild animals, and [51] creating a new and higher humanity. ”

“ Athwart all these lower myths, survivals from the savage stage, comes what Garcilasso regards as the philosophical Inca belief in Pachacamac. This deity, to Garcilasso's mind, was purely spiritual: he had no image and dwelt in no temple; in fact, he is that very God whom the Spanish missionaries proclaimed. This view, though the fact has been doubted, was very probably held by the Amautas, or philosophical class in Peru. (1) Cieza de Leon says "the name of this devil, Pachacamac, means creator of the world". Garcilasso urges that Pachacamac was the animus mundi ”

“ NÀ-PI. PACHACAMAC. TUI LAGA. TAA-ROA In this chapter it is my object to set certain American Creators beside the African beings whom we have been examining. We shall range from Hurons to Pawnees and Blackfeet, and end with Pachacamac, the supreme being of the old Inca civilisation, with Tui Laga and Taa-roa. It will be seen that the Hurons have been accidentally deprived of their benevolent Creator by a bibliographical accident, while that Creator corresponds very well with the Peruvian Pachucamac, often regarded as a mere philosophical abstraction. ”

“ This opposition to Viracocha, god of the waters, puts us on the traces of Pachacamac's original significance. He must have been a god of fire, and especially of the internal fire of the earth, which displays itself in the volcanos and warms the spirit of man. He was a kind of Peruvian Dionysus. There was something gloomy and violent about his worship. He demanded human victims. The valley of Rimac really means the valley of the Speaker, of him who answers when questioned. There was a kind of oracle inspired by the god of internal fire there. ”

“ Side by side, the two temples rose on the heights that overlooked the city of Pachacamac, and prospered in the offerings of their respective votaries. "It was a cunning arrangement," says an ancient writer, "by which the great enemy of man secured to himself a double harvest of souls." *3
[Footnote 3: "El demonio Pachacama alegre con este concierto, afirman que mostraua en sus respuestas gran contento: pues con lo vno y lo otro era el seruido, y quedauan las animas de los simples malauenturados presas en su poder." Cieza de Leon, Cronica, cap. 72.] ”

“ Later, however, the custom of having idols sprang up. As their attributes were the same, there can be but little doubt that Pachacamac and Viracocha were the same deity. Pachacamac's chief shrine was on the coast, at Pachacamac. Inca Pachacutec conquered Cuismancu, lord of Pachacamac, about 1410, and built a Sun Temple there. The chief temple to Viracocha was at Cacha south of Cuzco, and it was probably erected by the Inca Viracocha to celebrate his defeat of the Chanca confederacy. ”

“ Of course this legend was not officially received under the Incas. The latter, being unable or unwilling to abolish the worship of Viracocha and of Pachacamac, took up a far more conciliatory attitude than that of the legends I have given. The supreme god, the Sun, was admitted to have had three sons, Kon or Viracocha, Pachacamac and Manco Capac; but the latter was declared to have been quite specially designed by the common father to instruct and govern men. By this arrangement every one was satisfied,—and especially the Incas. ”

“ In some of the more isolated valleys of Peru we discover local creation-myths. For example, in the coastal valley of Irma Pachacamac was not considered to be the creator of the sun, but to be himself a descendant of it. The first human beings created by [259] him were speedily separated, as the man died of hunger, but the woman supported herself by living on roots. The sun took compassion upon her and gave her a son, whom Pachacamac slew and buried. But from his teeth there grew maize, from his ribs the long white roots of the manioc plant, and from his flesh various esculent plants. ”

“ The woman who bears a son to the Sun god is the year; from a needy but toil-free life in the wilderness, Pachacámac leads her to a life of care and toil, such as cultivation of the fields requires; still grieving over the death of her first son, she is given Wichama, the autumn and winter Sun, with whom Pachacámac enters into a struggle. The woman grows old as does the year; Pachacámac kills her—as the year ends with the harvest. After the ingathering of the harvest and the autumnal decrease of the rivers, Pachacámac is unable to resume the struggle ”

“ Little cloud islets surround far-off peaks, sunk beneath the horizon. Pyramids of ice twinkle, and fantastic stone needles stand in rows too precipitous for snow to cling to their bare sides. They are called early inhabitants, which Pachacamac in{149} his anger turned to stone. The air, though thin almost to disappearance, cuts like a razor-edge. ”

“ Nevertheless at some remote, pre-Inca period the ideas of the coast and those of the highlands met and interchanged: the art of Tiahuanaco is reflected in motive at Truxillo, while the vases of Nasca repeat the bizarre decoration of the monolith of Chavin de Huantar. The hoary sanctity of the great temple of Pachacamac was such that its Inca [Pg 216] conqueror adopted the god into his own pantheon; and it was just here, at the Yunca shrine of Pachacamac, that Uhle found evidence of a series of culture periods leading to a considerable antiquity. ”

“ At length, after some weeks of travel, severe even with all these appliances, Hernando Pizarro arrived before the city of Pachacamac. It was a place of considerable population, and the edifices were, many of them, substantially built. The temple of the tutelar deity consisted of a vast stone building, or rather pile of buildings, which, clustering around a conical hill, had the air of a fortress rather than a religious establishment. ”

“ FROM this temple of Pachacamac, where the temple is, the road leads to Chilca, and at that place there is a thing well worthy of note, for it is very strange. It is this,—that neither rain falls from heaven, nor does any river or spring flow through the land, and yet the greater part of the valley is full of crops of Indian corn, of roots, and of fruit trees. It is a marvellous thing to hear what the Indians do in this valley. In order to secure the necessary moisture, they make broad and very deep holes where they sow their crops, and God is served by their growing with the aid of dew alone ”

“ By the side of these examples we may place the prayers of Peru and Mexico, forms composed by the priests, written out, committed to memory, and repeated at certain seasons. They are not less authentic, having been collected and translated in the first generation after the conquest. One to Viracocha Pachacamac, was as follows:—
“O Pachacamac, thou who hast existed from the beginning and shalt exist unto the end, powerful and pitiful; who createdst man by saying, let man be; who defendest us from evil and preservest our life and health ”

“ Another view of the ruins at Pachacamac is given earlier in this chapter. As in the case of the ruins of Grand Chimu, the whole field of ruins was encompassed by a wall, portions of which Mr. Hutchinson observed on the north, stretching away from the sea inland. Explorers have found here true arches. They are said to exist in Northern Peru. We are at a loss to account for their appearance, for certainly the people generally were ignorant of their use.
The valley of the Canete, the next one we meet going south, is a very large and very fertile valley. ”

“ After this they say that great sacrifices were offered up in Pachacamac by Tupac Inca Yupanqui, and great festivals were celebrated. The Inca then returned to Cuzco by a road which he made, crossing the snowy range of Pariacaca, [221] and coming out in the valley of Xauxa. It is no small sight to behold the grandeur of that range, and what great terraces it has, and to this day men pass by that snow-covered region. ”

“ Later Peruvian mythology recognised only three gods of the first rank, the earth, the thunder, and the creative agency. Pachacamac, the great spirit of earth, derived his name from a word pacha which may be best translated as "things." In its sense of visible things it is equivalent to "world," applied to things which happen in succession it denotes "time," and to things connected with persons "property," especially clothes. The world of visible things is thus Mamapacha (Earth-Mother) , under which name the ancient Peruvians worshipped the earth. ”

“ In the absence of literature, one seeks in the mythology of a race a test of its imaginative quality; and in its religion, an indication of its power of abstract thinking. In both respects, the Peruvians seem to have stood as much below the primitive Celts and Teutons, as they stood above the negro races, with their naïve animism and childish though often humorous fables. Whether the Spanish ecclesiastics were right in finding in the worship of the earth god Pachacamac a belief in a supreme deity, creator of the world, may be doubted. ”

“ Pizarro held him responsible also for delays in the arrival of the royal treasure, until the Inca, to prove his good faith, offered to provide safe-conduct to any officers the Spaniards might send to superintend its collection and transport. Emissaries of Pizarro were despatched to Pachacámac and Cuzco, which Atahuallpa indicated as the chief repositories of wealth, though the messenger found Pachacámac already dismantled of its treasures when he arrived; what became of its gold has never been learned. ”

“ Also that of Pachacamac, which is in the country of the Yuncas, and many others, as well in the provinces of Anti-suyu, as in Chincha-suyu, Omasayu, and other parts of this empire, of which I might say somewhat more. As in the first part of my work I treat of the founding of temples, I shall now only dwell upon the oracles. To those which the Incas and other nations held in most veneration, they sacrificed some men and women, with many sheep. But before those which were not so much respected, they did not shed human blood nor kill men, only offering up gold and silver. ”

“ Spruce last year from the mouth of an old woman at Piura. But nearly all the Indians now speak Spanish, and the ancient language is, as nearly as possible, extinct. Quichua appears never to have been generally spoken on the coast. Yet the Ynca conquerors gave names to some of the principal places, such as Caxamarquilla, Rimac, Pachacamac, Nanasca, etc. In the case of Pachacamac, the reasons of the Ynca for sanctioning the reverential worship of the natives at that great temple, is given by Cieza de Leon at page 252. ”

“ Two days after the arrival of Giron in the valley of Pachacamac, a party of his army went out to skirmish with the enemy, on which occasion Diego de Selva and four others of considerable reputation deserted to the judges. ”

“ Pachacamac means, in Quichua, “world-animator.”9 The “philosophers” of Peru declared that he desired no temples or sacrifices, no worship but that of the heart. This is conceivable; Maui, too, in New Zealand had no temple or priests. But most probably this deity had another less abstract name, and the horrible worship offered in the one temple which he really had under the Incas, accorded with his true cosmic significance as the god of the subterranean fire. ”

“ In Garcilasso's theory the original people of Peru, Totemists and worshippers of hills and streams, Earth and Sea, were converted to Sun worship by the first Inca, a child of the Sun. Even the new religion included ancestor-worship and other superstitions. But behind Sun worship was the faith in a Being who 'advanced the Sun so far above all the stars of heaven.' [13] This Being was Pachacamac, 'the sustainer of the world.' The question then arises, Is Pachacamac a form of the same creative being whom we find among the lowest savages ”