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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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