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The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
How the huacas Were: The Language of Substance and Transformation in the HuarochiríQuechua ManuscriptAuthor(s): Frank SalomonReviewed work(s):Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 33, Pre-Columbian States of Being (Spring,1998), pp. 7-17Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum ofArchaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20166998 .Accessed: 31/10/2012 14:39
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How the huacas were
The language of substance and transformation in the Huarochiri Quechua manuscript
FRANK SALOMON
Two of the most important verbs relevant to Andean
concepts of being have already been well dealt with by researchers: camay, or roughly "to animate, to impart
specific form and force" in G. Taylor's article
(1974-1976); and hua?uy, or "to die" in Urioste's article
(1981).1 Other clues to assumptions about existence
appear in Duviols's (1978) and Taylor's (1980) clarifications of upani, or roughly "shade," which seems
related to colonial Quechua supay, or "demon." This
essay sketches further usages and implications of the
lexicon about being and substance and transformation
of beings as we know them from the one and only available early text that presents an Andean belief
system in an Andean language, namely the anonymous
Quechua manuscript of Huarochiri (circa 1608; for
translations, see Taylor 1987; Salomon and Urioste
1991). It is important to understand at the start that, while the Huarochiri book contains origin myths,
legends, and priestly lore of clearly pre-Hispanic derivation, the colonial Quechua language and the
writing practices in which they are expressed by 1608
had been much influenced by the Church's labors
toward making the former "Language of the Inca" into an evangelical interlingua (Mannheim 1991, Duviols
and Itier 1993). Thus the concepts of being implicit in
colonial Quechua language and writing practices are
not necessarily disconnected from the largely Aristotelian and Augustinian philosophic discussion that
lies in the background of Peruvian evangelization. The source for the Quechua manuscript is a
multilayered compendium containing testimonies by
villagers from a group of agropastoral settlements on the
western Andean heights overlooking Lima and also
containing editorial material by the native researcher
who gathered the stories. In the paragraphs that follow, most examples come from passages of the former sort, but a few (such as chapter titles, and so on) come from
1. The orthography is colonial. Throughout the present essay
Quechua lexicon is quoted as found in sources rather than
rephonologized.
the latter. The master argument of the manuscript concerns how a group of formerly marginal herding
lineages rooted in the high tundra advanced under the
patronage of the mountain deity Paria Caca into the
richer middle and then lower valleys, conquering the
aboriginal Yunca peoples, and at the same time welding themselves into the complex ritual regimen the Yuncas
had possessed. It accords great importance to the
aboriginal female deity Chaupi ?amca, who is in some
ways Paria Caca's down-valley counterpart. If we curb assumptions that "verbs of being" in the
Quechua manuscript correspond to familiar notions of
being and becoming, regularities in their semantic
domains and usages emerge and become useful for
interpreting the manuscript's implicit world view.
In this discussion I will occasionally use the word
ontology, not with any claim to discovering ontological
categories in Andean thought, but rather using familiar western ontological categories as an aid to textual
exegesis by making explicit the attributes we think we
recognize in Andean assertions about being, substance, and change. Panayot Butchvarov (1995:490) reviews
ontology in its Aristotelian sense of "first philosophy," that is, "the study of being qua being, i.e., of the most
general and necessary characteristics that anything must
have in order to count as a being, an entity (ens).,f The
root problem in ontology is that (at least in languages known to European philosophers) the range of "things" that can be subjects of the verb "to be"?that is, the
range of percepts that can be recognized as discrete
features on a common spaciotemporal grounding?is in
most respects a non-set: not apples and oranges, but
apples, events, and abstractions. The common
ontological categories are, in Butchvarov's summary:
individual things (Socrates, a book)
properties (Socrates' baldness, a book's rectangularity) relations (marriage, the priority of one book to another) events (Socrates' death, a book's publication) states of affairs (Socrates' having died, the fact that a book
is in print) sets (the set of Greek philosophers or books)
8 RES 33 SPRING 1998
Concerns of western ontological philosophy include, for
example, asking whether some individual things are
"substances in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., enduring
through time and changes in their properties and
relations, or whether all individual things are
momentary"; "whether any entity has essential
properties, i.e., properties without which it would not
exist/' and "whether properties and relations are
particulars or universals" (Butchvarov 1995:490). Do the implicitudes of a nonwestern source, the
Quechua manuscript of Huarochiri, allow us to glimpse any Andean assumptions about problems of this order? It
may be worth trying out the following suggestions.2
1 : Cay and tiay are in complementary contrast as
qualitative and dynamic being versus situated being
We can start considering the lexicon of being by
noting that the language of the Huarochiri writer tends
to place two verbs of being in contrasting opposition, as
if suggesting that the two between them name the
attributes that make anything or anybody ontologically present. The first substantive chapter (Ch. 1) of the
Huarochiri manuscript is one of the six that have
Spanish-language headings:
Como fue anteguam[en]te los ydolos . . .
y como auia en
aquel tiempo los naturales, or "How the Idols of Old Were . . . and How the Natives Existed"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 3
The revealing point here is the Quechua interference in
Spanish?not the "incorrect" non-pluralization, which
simply reflects Quechua's optional pluralizing rules (for both nouns and verbs), but the fact that the author
contrasted "ser" with "haber" in a fashion imparallel to
their usual Spanish senses. He did so because he was in
need of a way to translate a distinction between two verbs
that posit ontological presence?both necessary to the task
of introducing huacas, that is, superhuman beings, but
neither one semantical ly congruent to "ser" or "haber" (or
"estar"). We learn what these verbs are in a later chapter's
heading, which similarly offers an introduction to a huaca.
This instance is not forced into Spanish:
ymanam chaupi ?amca carean maypim t?an, or "How
Chaupi ?amca was and where she is [situated]'' Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 141
Here cascan and tiascan stand in complementary contrast; the former concerns what and how she was, that is, acted, and the latter concerns where she was, that is, situated. The distinction concerns being as
activity versus being as situated existence. This particular
quotation highlights the separability of the concepts by
using different tenses; the great female power Chaupi ?amca "was," "acted" (carcan) in a past-tense form, because prior to the time of writing Christians had
already desecrated and ritual ly deactivated her, but she
"is" at the time of writing still "situated" (tian), because
her stone embodiment "is" still hidden where she was
buried (at a specified site, Tumna Plaza). Similar contrasts
occur in sections 14 and 126 of the manuscript. A being may have either or both of these attributes,
with somewhat different ontological implications. We
will therefore examine each one separately.
Point 1a: Cay denotes qualitative being manifested
in action
There does not appear to be any such semantic
isolate as mere existence, certainly no verb exclusively
glossed by "to exist" as opposed to nonexistence. The
best colonial lexicographer, Gonc?lez Holgu?n, understood cay as meaning "ser de essencia o de
existencia" ("to be, in the sense of essence or of
existence," Gonc?lez Holgu?n 1952 [1608]:668). Like similar verbs in many languages, cay can function
as a simple copula (for example, pirn canqui, or "who are
you" [Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991: sec. 238]). As an
auxiliary verb combined with an agentive form it signifies habitual action (muchac carcan, or "they used to
worship" [Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 7]).
Beyond that, cay brackets together cases of being as
specificity (of condition, attribute, identity) manifested
via action through time. In usages like:
. . . ymanam casac ?ispa tapuspam, or ". . .
asking, saying 'how shall I [or we] be?'"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 472
2. In the examples, references are made to chapters of the original with the abbreviation "Ch." and references to passages are made by section number, for example, (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 3)
meaning section (not page) 3 of the Salomon-Urioste translation. This
citation form facilitates comparison with the Quechua original, which
is section-numbered in parallel.
Salomon: How the huacas were 9
the petitioner merely wants to know a future qualitative state of welfare (similar usages occur in sections 31,
131, and 286). What is distinctive about cay in the texts is a
tendency to include senses translatable as "to act" or "to
happen." The nominalized perfect form of the verb cay, or "to be"(casca) means "events" not "entities"?that
which somebody or something did. Casca can refer to
the sum of a being's activities or its characteristic
activities. One might accept a remote gloss like the "nature"
of that entity, but "deeds" is also often appropriate:
cay cunirayap cascanracmi ?ahca vira cochap cascanman
tincon, or "this Cuni Raya's deeds ('nature'? Identity'?) almost match Vira Cocha's deeds"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 7; see also sees. 1, 126
Gerald Taylor, a careful semantic analyst, also includes
culto, or "the religious interaction of people and
superhumans," among his glosses for casca (1987:50-51). In the latter sense its semantic component "activity" seems far broader than that implicit in the English verb "be."
In the two chapter headings cited above, each
heading asks an implicit question as to '"how [the
huaca] was." The answers to the question "how was
s/he?" is not a statement about either momentary condition or about unchangingly predicated attribute, but the whole story of the person's action?that is, the
whole chapter (Chs. 1, 10 for the cited examples). All
told, casca, the "being" of a Huarochiri actor, seemingly accentuates the notion of event as constitutive of entity. The huacas have, in some contexts, individuality and
properties, but in others they are seemingly imagined as
long-term overarching sequences of phenomena or deeds.
Point 1b: T/ay denotes situated being
Tiay in Gonc?lez Holgu?n's dictionary meant
"sentarse estar sentado, estar en alg?n lugar morar
habitar" (1952 [1608]:340), or "to sit down, to be
seated, to be in some place, to dwell, to inhabit." He
then gives many derived terms, all implying decreasingly kinetic states. For example, he gives a Quechua phrase
comparable to the English transitive usage "to still
(something)." Tiaycuchini sonconta (with forced
literalism one could gloss this as "I make her/his heart
sit") meant "to calm someone's anger." Derivatives
meant "to be in an available, motionless state," for
example, of merchandise on sale. With the "dynamic modifier" (Urioste 1973:174) -ku, it yields tiacoy, or "to
dwell" or "stay." In the Huarochiri text:
cananpas sutilla escay runi runahina tiacon, or "two stones
just like people are [located] there even now" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 18;
see also sees. 14, 32, 34, 50, etc.
Tiay is the verb that seems to emphasize individuality as
substance: that singularity of a huaca that endures
throughout its changes and relationships. Tiay often
expresses the idea of existence in a permanent location
and endurance in the form of hard materials, like rock, or in the form of permanent corporations, like villages or
priesthoods. Chaupi ?amca, whose casca is spoken of
in a perfect nominalized form, is the subject of active verb
tian long after her "happening" seems to have ended.
2: Accumulating action and changing situation modify
ontological accent
Various researchers mentioned below have suggested that in Andean speculation, the trajectory of all being
through time is basically uniform. Huacas, like people,
plants, and animals, pass through a gradient from
kinetic, fleshly, fast-changing being toward static, hard,
slow-changing being. The more energetic and fateful
their actions, the farther they move from soft biotic states, full of potential, to the hard states, full of permanence, seen in deified mountains and other land features. This
point has already been well explored by Allen and other
researchers whose work is summarized below. It is useful to notice, however, that though the myths speak of
purportedly continuous entities?substantial beings, in the
Aristotelian sense of entities that survive changes of
property and relations?to refer to them in their successive states entails emphasizing different categorical sorts of
being, by which I mean the sorts of being summarized
above by Butchvarov. This shifting emphasis might be
called change of ontological accent. For example, the
being Paria Caca is spoken of as the following:
5 eggs 5 falcons 5 heroic "men," collectively called "the five of him"
(pichcantin) a
snowcapped, double-peaked mountain
storm, red rain and yellow rain, flood and earthslide a person and voice [that is, oracle]
10 RES 33 SPRING 1998
What, then, is Caca the eponym of? The first three
instances refer to his theophany, in the form of five eggs that hatched five falcons who became five men, each
the founder of one of the five large putative descent
groups understood as belonging to a single maximal
ethnic entity. In the first three instances then, the
ontological category "set" is salient (the ideological
implication being the "reality" of the set formed by five
ethnically related political units). In the first and third, the category "relation" is salient; the metaphorical tension between human sibling bonds (which have birth
order) and the simultaneity of a clutch of eggs (which lack it) is the main implication. Like hatchlings, the five
groups are equals by birth, yet like brothers they are not.
The fourth, Paria Caca's final form (and his tiascan or
located being) accentuates individuality and
substantiality. The fifth accentuates the category "event," insofar as Paria Caca was the event, a storm of red and
yellow rain. The sixth does as well, but also emphasizes "state of affairs/' namely the state of Paria Caca's having ordained a social order.
The thinking expressed here embraces the perception of experience as ontological ly heterogeneous, as
Aristotle taught. But it deals with this not in the
Aristotelian fashion noted above, that is, by sorting out
percepts according to different sorts of realness we can
accord them, but rather by organizing ontological
heterogeneity in terms of single beings that unite
multiple sorts of realness and demonstrate them through varied manifestations.
Thus the accumulation of eventful being is treated as
altering ontological status itself. The conveners of the
meeting from which this essay derives called attention to
the concept of a continuum from transitory to durable
modes of being. This idea derives from insights by Catherine Allen (1982) and George Urioste. Urioste's
1981 essay on the death gradient is itself an exegesis of
the Huarochiri manuscript. His conclusion has since the
date of writing been confirmed by ethnographic findings
(Paerregaard 1987, Valderrama 1980, Salomon 1995). His
point is that unlike Euro-American models of death, which treat death as a durationless moment of division
between the "live" status before expiration and "death"
after it, Quechua hua?oc ("die-er") brackets those soon
to expire with those recently expired. The moribund and
the recently deceased form a single class of beings, whose duration extends between the "living" (causad) and the enshrined ancestor (aya) phases of being. This
L -w , *;V'^' i .^IWHIIIBiii^iiBHBKM^^M^^B mk ^*.-j&?. '-.? -
.c^4ii^SiHBB9III^Hfi^H^^^HH^^^^^^^^^HMHHi^^l
^H^BkI^^^HE^^ "^sr /^^^: --> ̂^^QIBHHHI^S^I^^^HIB^seP'C^JSv
Figure 1. The snowcap Rariacaca, in the western Andean cordillera south of Lima, is a permanent manifestation of the multiply realized deity who dominates the Huarochiri Quechua text. This photograph shows the south peak of the double
peaked snowcap, which is probably adjacent to Paria Caca's ancient shrine. Photo: Frank Salomon.
Salomon: How the huacas were 11
transition can be seen as one segment of a more
inclusive view of life and death in continuum. Duviols
(1978) and Allen (1982) have each independently emphasized a pervasive "vegetative metaphor," which
connects the tender, juicy, wet character of young beings (new plants, babies) with the ever more firm and
resistant, but also dryer and more rigid character of older
ones (adults, mature plants) and finally, with the
desiccated but enduring remains of beings who have left
life and been preserved (preserved crops like freeze-dried
potatoes or ch'u?u [mummies]). The most permanent of
all beings are geological features such as mountains
(Rubina 1992). The dynamizing feature of this cosmology is the circulating and ever re-fecundating relationship
among beings differently located in action and time. The
"soul" (which in the Huarochiri source is often called by the Spanish word anima, or "spirit") is visualized as a
small flying creature that departs from the dead person, much as a seed departs from a dying plant, and
conserves its vitality in a sacred space, Uma Pacha. In
idolatry trials, some defendants gave voice to an image of
Uma Pacha as being a farm where spirits, like seeds, could flourish back toward fleshly life. The destination of
souls is sometimes also identified with the origin shrines
of ego's group, again emphasizing a circulating principle. At the highest extreme of permanence, beings of
prototypical importance?those whose actions actually
shaped the conditions of existence?are spoken of as
having hardened into everlasting material, namely stone
or other land features. These most durable beings
provide, indeed literally become, the ground on which new transient beings emerge. The overall direction is to
map general structures of congruence among living human collectivities, ancestral or legendary society (whose material substance is shrines and the consecrated
dead), landscape forms (mountains and waterways), and
cosmological facts (cosmological bodies, the climate). However this is not to assert that the world of huaca
devotees was of the sort that Bellah (1964) recognized in speaking of societies where divinity is so close as to
be ontological ly merged with society. Although people, mummies, huacas, and the cosmos are kindred beings,
they relate to temporality and the laws of nature in
dissimilar ways. The individual being passing through eventful time actually changes in ontological accent or
association. The mode of life described as characteristic
of huaca devotees is characterized by a complex
regimen of ritual behaviors governing relationships between beings of unlike standing.
3: Communication among beings of unequal
metaphysical or ontological standing occurs through "slides" along the vital gradient
Since ritual consisted of reciprocity among beings of
all classes, human and nonhuman, it implied communication among beings of unlike ontological
standing. The rituals described in the Quechua source, as well as some ethnographical ly observed rites, which
embody continuities with them, have a common
metaprogram or genre scenario for achieving this.
As was suggested in the example of Paria Caca, huacas were cultural postulates whose interest was
rooted precisely in the fact that they united in
"persons" heterogeneous perceptions of reality as
substance, event, category, and so on. The attributes of
beings in different parts of the vital continuum with
their differing ontological accents, appealed to
differing ritual needs, with the predominant mode
being approach to more exalted, permanent, and
empowered beings by lower, softer, more mutable ones. These approaches tend to be governed by a fairly
regular program. The actors are: (1) at least one sacred
being; (2) a person, generally acting as part of a
collectivity, transacting a reciprocal gift; and (3) at least one person who acts as mediator. The collectivity and
the mediator engage in divergent actions. The
collectivity enters ritual states of heightened vitality and solidarity, in which they display themselves as
themselves only more so; alcohol (Saignes 1987) serves
to liberate huge discharges of social and physical energy and appetite. Invocations to deity are made in
first person plural?interestingly, in the inclusive voice,
implying that the deity addressed partakes of the
condition or action of the collectivity. The role of the mediator is more complex. I would
describe mediating roles as "slides" along the
continuum of being, in which humans assume statuses
closer to those of the superhuman person addressed.
These "slides" often have an aspect of transient death, or transient return from death:
Abstention (sa?iyj from "lively" behavior. The mildest
degree of distancing from daily life is the preparation required of persons about to perform duties to huacas or
recently in contact with them. Persons returning from a visit to the female power Urpay Huachac had to abstain from sex and seasoned food for a year (Salomon and
Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 183), because this huaca unlike
others had no priest and demanded personal contact. Parents who had to ritual ly avert the bad consequences of
12 RES 33 SPRING 1998
a twin birth?namely, a death to make up for the anomaly of an extra life?likewise accompanied their sacrificial gifts with a year of abstention. These were conditions for
dialogue with Paria Caca. The common denominator of ritual abstentions seems to be avoidance of intense bodily sensations.
5/eep (po?oyj and dreaming (muscoyj: The human sleeper, a person temporarily removed from daily vitality, is
brought into contact with nonhuman beings and
knowledge. In chapter 5 (Salomon and Urioste, eds.
1991:sec. 42), Huatya Curi, while sleeping and
presumably dreaming, learns from two talking foxes the secret of the illness that afflicted the fraudulent lord Tamta ?amca. This supernatural knowledge would prove the seed of their reciprocal role reversal. The crucial example is
chapter 21, entirely concerned with a dream, in which the
protagonist Don Crist?bal Choque Casa, comes into
apparent contact with his deceased (hua?uc) father and into dialogue with the huaca whom that "die-er," that is,
recently dead man, worshiped (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 248).
Assumption of a deathlike aspect or wearing dead skins:
Repeatedly, humans achieve crucial dialogue with
superhuman powers by placing on themselves the skins, that is, outer appearances, of dead animals or
people.
Huatya Curi acquired the magical power to beat his
challenger by turning into (tucoy) a dead guanaco and
thereby stealing power from a rival huaca (Salomon and
Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 60). The most dramatic acting of
wearing death is the donning of the huayo or flayed-face mask, made from a sacrificed captive, which imbues the
wearer with the power of Uma Pacha, the mythical high farm wherein the departing anima of the dead were
replanted and regenerated (Salomon and Urioste, eds.
1991 :secs. 322-324, 404). The skin of a dead animal also
empowered a person to approach the sacred patron or
owner of the animal and was among the most common
ritual gestures (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:secs. 21, 64, 150, 455-458); it is still practiced in at least one of Huarochiri's communities today. Paria Caca consoled his
people for the loss of a treasured headdress by giving them a wildcat skin:
And as he'd foretold, on Chaupi ?amca's festival, in the
courtyard called Yauri Cal I inca, on top of the wall, a very beautifully spotted wildcat appeared. When they saw it
they exclaimed joyfully, "This is what Paria Caca meant!" and they held up its skin as they danced and sang with it.
(Hernando Cancho Uillca, who used to live in Tumna, was in charge of it. But by now it's probably gone all rotten.)
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991: sec. 314
4: Passage between states accenting dissimilar
ontological statuses are expressed with tucoy
In passages concerning the assumption of a magical disguise, as with Huatya Curi "turning into a dead
guanaco," the verb employed is tucoy. This is among the most important words signifying transformation. It may
usefully be contrasted with cay, or "to be." It has a
usage as an auxiliary verb comparable to that of cay, but
emphasizing process, like English "get":
ynataccho pincay casac, or "shall I be shamed so?"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 313
and man carcoy tucorcan, or "they got swept away into the
jungle" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 9;
see also 228 and 100, an ambiguous instance
As a freestanding verb, tucoy covers processes in which a being assumes a new outer aspect. Some of these could well be translated as "become":
?a paria caca ru ?aman tucuspas, or "Paria Caca, becoming human"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991: sec. 74
tuylla pachampitac rumi tucorcan, or "right then and there she turned to stone"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 69
But tucoy is more inclusive, covering as it does the sense "to feign, pretend to be":
cay cuni raya vira cochas ancha ?aupa hue runa ancha
huaccha tucospalla purircan, or "In very ancient times this
Cuni Raya Vira Cocha used to go around posing as a
miserably poor man"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 9
ancha yachac tucospa pissi yachascanhuan, or "pretending
to be very wise with the little that he knew" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 40
chaypim huanaco tucospa hua?usca siriconqui, or "there
pretending to be a guanaco you'll lie dead" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 58
These instances show that the semantic scope of tucoy includes change of aspect without any premise about
whether a change of what Gonc?lez Holgu?n called "essence" is entailed.
Because this noncongruence occurred close to the core meanings of conversion, which Christianity taught
Salomon: How the huacas were 13
Figure 2. Today, inhabitants of Tupicocha, Huarochiri, still don animal skins?most
importantly, the puma?to perform festival dances. This puma skin, used by dancers of the Sibimol Society in the Pascua Reyes cycle, is reminiscent of the
spotted wildcat skin mentioned in the Quechua Manuscript's chapter 24. Photo: Frank Salomon.
14 RES 33 SPRING 1998
people like the editor/compiler to think of as a change of essence, the language of "becoming Christian" is
itself ambiguous when it talks about religious change.
huaquin runacunaca christiano tucospapas manchaspallam
pactach padrepas pipas yachahuanman mana alii cascayta,
or "some people becoming/feigning to be Christians [said] 'Watch out, the padre might find out how bad we've been'"
Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 134
Knowing that in at least one of the languages they used, Andean converts employed a semantic isolate that
classed together changes of form regardless of
"authenticity" of motive, helps one understand why the
period in question saw so many attacks on the sincerity of "Indian" Christianity. Spanish Catholics thought the
Andean powers' way of influencing native people was
by "lying" (llollaycuy) to them, and this may be
influenced by the notion that Andean metamorphoses
(tucoy) were deceptions, the typical practice of
European demons. Converts, on the other hand, may have understood the requirements of Christianity as a
matter of changing appearance appropriately (much as
one did in huaca devotions) in order to partake of
connected ontological accents, rather than a matter of
changing "essence"?a concept perhaps unavailable to
them. The assertion that Andean people engage in a
"double" religious life has been a longstanding one; it is
still prevalent in middlebrow media representations of
Andean Christianity as a "veneer" hiding an authentic
"core" of Amerindian culture. This representation, with
its subtextual imputation of intentional deception, arises
from (among other things) a failure to grasp local
notions about appearance and reality. It is perhaps the
saddest of many misunderstandings?because it is the
most damaging?that went into the making of colonial
relations between the Church and rural society. This exegesis illustrates why, within the sphere of the
huacas, one made transits toward beings of more
durable standing by taking on a second skin, an
appearance, closer to their standing as durable, dry, "dead" beings. One might communicate across diverse
states of being by process of tucoy, changing outer
appearance, for example, by costuming oneself as a
huaca's animal to commune with it or by putting on the
flayed face of a dead man to communicate with the
place of the dead.
From the huaca devotees' point of view, in which the
"ontological categories" appear as attributes or
evidences of single beings in different instances of their
existences, no such problem arose. The human who
"becomes/pretends to be" a dead guanaco is not
substituting an unreal for a real identity because his
humanity is not imputed to him as an unchanging essence in the first place.
5: The hierarchy of durability versus transience often
represents received ideas about social rank
Up to this point the argument has concentrated on
the emic viewpoint, sketching implicit ideas expressed in ritual and myth. But these beliefs, of course,
expressed an orientation toward a particular observed
social system as its members understood it. (The oral
authors of the stories, and the Quechua compiler/editor themselves had different viewpoints about this system, the latter being apparently a strong Christian convert
alienated from the world view of the tellers.) In discourse that refers to the upper brackets of
social/superhuman/cosmological hierarchy, the salience
of the category "set" (as opposed to "thing," "person") is
high. Ancestor-focused imagery, which places durable
beings at apical positions in the natural-social world,
expresses an ideology that reifies the real-life processes of social reproduction into segmented kinship
corporations. A common example of this is the usage of inca or sapa inca to identify the person who stands
highest in the set containing all incacuna (persons affiliated to Inka descent groups). In effect the
eponymous use of the term Inca as the name of a
supreme god-king denotes the entire "set" of Inkas. The same structure is pervasive at lower levels, for example, in the various Huarochiri instances where the firstborn
of a sib bears a name that is also that of the sib, so that
his name is the name of a category. When the tellers assigned Paria Caca supremacy
among the deified mountains, and attributed to him a
fivefold essence manifested through five heroic
anthropomorphic selves and their respective "children," each "child" being the ancestor-hero of a major branch
of the dominant population, the tellers appear to have
been recognizing and explaining a taxonomic likeness
(perhaps of language as well as cultic practice) among
disparate and politically separate, but mutually known
and sometimes allied invading populations. (Of course
in doing so, they may have been appropriating a Paria
Caca cult older and more multiethnic than the
Salomon: How the huacas were 15
manuscript allows; Guarnan Poma 1980 [1615]:113,
185, 264, 268, 269, 329, 335, 884, 915). These apical
beings themselves, including Paria Caca once he
"ascended" to expel older deities, existed in the form of
completely hardened and durable geological matter?
social practices "reified" in the strictest sense.
Beings embodying medial and lower nodes of
segmentation are imagined as former humans or
humanlike, typically "hardened" by mummification and
enshrinement, Tutay Quiri of the Checa being the most
elaborated example, and ?an Sapa apparently another
such. The historical origins of mallkis taken to embody the heads of medial taxa are unknown. But to allow for
their relative exaltation thousands of other bodies must
have received relative neglect. The passion for protecting
important mummified "mothers" and "fathers" of
corporate collectivities (which so fascinated the
"extirpators of idolatry") was a part of political symbolic
process, in which kurakas attributed to ancestors of
leading (putatively senior) descent lines whatever
prosperity the community achieved and voiced the
community's needs to them. We know from extirpation
inquiries into the funerals of Huarochiri lords who died
in the era of the manuscript that the aggrandizement of
political leaders to primacy among ancestors continued
after Spanish conquest (Salomon 1995, Marzal 1988,
Saignes 1998). The passage to durable being was accordingly
distributed unequally though society in favor of persons
through whom the interests of kinship corporations were
effectively transmitted. And the landscape over which ancestor shrines, huacas, and deified land features were
spread could be taken as an integrally naturalized map of social hierarchy, so that one lived enclosed by an all
encompassing correspondence structure across
ontological levels.
The idiom of ancestor cult, as opposed to that of
apical deities, did concretize taxa in focalized persons, but their names never stood for whole sets as do the
highest names. Rather their ontological accent seems to
fall on the category "relation." They were like milestones
for measuring the spaces of relatedness. A milestone is a
thing, but a thing whose significance is to express the
relation between it and other points in space, and the
relation called "mile" has no meaning except the space between such points. So major ancestors became not
just markers of relation but were accented to relational
concepts of genealogy and political affiliation.
6: Notwithstanding this schema, mythology centrally includes a trickster principle, which upsets and
relativizes hierarchies of being
One of the most interesting properties of the
manuscript is that although it idealizes a priestly order, it
also contains, as Fioravanti-Molini? (1987) has shown, a
principle relativizing that order, namely the principle of
the trickster-demiurge. His name in the Huarochiri source is Cuni Raya Vira Cocha.
Half of his name?Cuni Raya?is, as Rostworowski
(1989) ascertained, the name of a far-flung coastal deity associated with the transformation of landforms by water.
In the desiccated Andean landscape, water signifies two
things: longed-for fertility (via rain or irrigation) and
dreaded danger (because rain often takes the form of
devastating earthslides and flash floods). Thus the mythic persona of water tends to be a life-giving but tricky, uncontrollable, and dangerous one. In the Huarochiri
manuscript, Cuni Raya's tricks generally take the form of
seduction or sexual provocation by magical means,
resulting in unwanted pregnancy (Ch. 2) or elopement (Ch. 31), that is, unpredictable and irregular unions that
produce fertility but do so in ways that upset the normal
social and productive arrangements?as water does
when it gets out of control.
The compiler, like many Europeans, was influenced
by the misleading but already popularized equation between Vira Cocha and the God of contemporary Catholicism. Cuni Raya's ability to create whole
landscapes by fiat?probably an allusion to the way water can transform land dramatically?led the compiler to think of Cuni Raya as a creator deity, like Dios, the
Christians' God. He was therefore puzzled by his
inability to verify from oral testimony that Cuni Raya had
the expected divine attribute of priority to all other
superhumans (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 7,
189, ch. 15). Cuni Raya Vira Cocha is the exception to every rule
about huacas. Although at one point he (like most
huacas) is said to have lithified in a determinate place (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 90), a
transformation that usually marks the passage from
humanlike action to permanence, he is present at all
ages and places, popping up in primordial, mythic,
legendary, and Inka times. The invasion of the Spaniards in chapter 14 is explained as yet another of his tricks. In
all his interventions, he brings people to act by their
16 RES 33 SPRING 1998
normal desires and expectations, yet in such a way as to
bring about disruptive and transformative results. Many of these actions include his "becoming/feigning"
beguiling appearances of various kinds.
On one level, one might guess that Cuni Raya
personifies the paradoxes inherent in irrigation
technology; the "normal" control of water brings into
the landscape the very force that frequently breaks
through and reshapes things catastrophically. On a more
general level, one could think of him as the anW-huaca, the joker in the deck, who made it possible for the
huaca outlook to include a deep appreciation of
mutability and the unpredictable. Cuni Raya seems to
occupy a category all by himself. In the terminology of
Aristotelian ontology, the "thing" he points toward is a
permanent "state of affairs." This vivid deity personifies the fragility of all structures and categories and focalizes
paradox, even humor. The Andean person struggling to
learn appealed to his evasive wit as to the source of
amauta cay, which is sometimes glossed "wisdom" but
strongly implies "discernment" (Gonc?lez Holgu?n 1952
[1608]:148). In Huarochiri, weavers appealed to the
trickster-demiurge before trying to warp a complex
design: "Help me work it out, Cuni Raya Vira Cocha"
(Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 8). If the
Huarochiri manuscript suggests a concept of wisdom, it
is the deep appreciation of the attribute of being that
Cuni Raya, stood for.
To sum up: the Huarochiri manuscript's tellers seem
to have been habituated not to analytically separated
portions of reality?ontological categories like those
outlined at the start of this essay?but to a web of
socioritual connections with persons who each in their
complexity embodied and familiarized the multiple attributes of "being." Reasoning about such problems as
the relations between a set (for example, a corporate kin
group), which "exists" in one sense, and those of
persons, who "exist" in another, is not abstracted but
expressed in the interaction of beings who accentuate
different kinds of existence. Routine problems about
entities such as taxa, events, and persons were then
processed unselfconsciously through the idiom of
huacas. What the West troublingly experienced as the
fundamental incommensurability of experienced reality's
parts?and the need for a metaphysical ground on
which to place them together?found expression in
these myths as disparity but also connectedness among clusters of meaning personified as superhuman beings
but not limited to superhumanity in their manifestations.
The coherence of cosmos was, then, asserted not by a
unifying theory, but by social mediation on the part of
its inhabitants. They were the ones who brought all
sorts of beings into relationship. It was ritual that held
things together.
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