Isabel Yaya. History & Anthropology. Volume 26, Issue 5. December 2015.
The worship of dead Inca kings, because it aimed at preserving the deceased’s bodily integrity, reveals constituent aspects of royal personhood. Underpinning these practices was the conception that the dead’s agency was conveyed through corporeal substances, which therefore required constant acts of sustenance. This paper examines the bodily practices and material substances that shaped the king’s physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death. These data show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a series of ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king’s faculty to infuse vital force to all living creatures under his rule he thus stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologies of power” shaped a system of representations that legitimated the king’s appropriation of state resources.
History to the Sakalava, like genealogy, is not merely an intellectual tool. It confers power, authority, legitimacy; it substantiates other important symbols. It represents ideal politico-religious relations, even as it validates existing ones. Nor are the Sakalava unique in their views concerning the power of history. (Feeley-Harnik 1978, 403)
Introduction
Thus far, scholarship has primarily discussed the political and economic apparatus of the Inca state system through a functionalist approach that aimed, on one hand, to define the form of sovereignty it sustained and, on the other, to account for its viability. Along these lines, many works have emphasized judiciously the combined efficacy of the redistributive economy, the decimal administration, elite co-optation through the granting of prestige goods, and the flexibility of imperial control ranging from local autonomy to coercive politics. Such an infrastructural focus, however, has largely overlooked the issue of legitimacy, that is, the system of representations and material practices whereby the Inca state organization vindicated its supreme authority to appropriate resources for the benefit of its ruling elite. This question is all the more fundamental that the king was said to be the primary recipient of the imperial labour tribute and the central personage upon which rested the politico-religious ideology of Tawantinsuyu, the “empire of the four parts”. It was he who received one-third of the agrarian production extracted from alienated lands divided universally between royal service, state religion and local subsistence. It was he who took as secondary wives some of the most outstanding chosen women (aklla) and bestowed the others to allies and ancestors of his choosing; he who was the beneficiary of the qhapaq hucha ritual when grand offerings, including human victims, converged from all over the realm to the royal centre of Cuzco with the stated aim to renew the king’s health and fertility. So what exceptional qualities were imputed to the Inca sovereign that warranted his precedence over the empire’s goods and subjects?
In this paper, I propose an inquiry into the indigenous conceptions and practices that legitimized the king’s prerogative over state resources and that furthermore underpinned imperial expansion. In doing so, I elaborate on R. T. Zuidema’s and Peter Gose’s separate proposals that the model of sacred kingship most aptly describes the political regime of Tawantinsuyu. While the former highlighted the ruler’s ritual responsibility towards collective prosperity (Zuidema 1989), the later identified oracular possession and the control over water as technologies of power that upheld the ideological foundations of sacred kingship in which political authority rests upon the maintenance of culturally specific understandings of growth and fertility (Gose 1993, 1996). More recently, a remarkable contribution by Ramírez (2005) brought to the fore the question of Inca legitimacy through the comparative framework of locallevel lordship in the Andes. The author contends that political authority in Tawantinsuyu proceeded from an “ideological superstructure” investing divinity to the king, which entitled him to intercede with the gods on behalf of his people. Prosperity in the realm was the material evidence of his beneficial mediation in return of which his subjects supported his needs. I wish to expand on these arguments, but propose an alternative approach by investigating the Inca royal institution in its most pragmatic expressions. More specifically, I shall examine the material practices that imparted a concrete existence and thereby, a social efficacy, to the king’s extraordinary individuality.
The point of entry for this demonstration will be the study of the symbolic and ritual actions that made up the worship of dead Inca rulers. These post-mortem practices, because they aimed at preserving the kings’ bodily integrity through regenerative acts, everyday care and proscriptions, reveal constituent aspects of royal personhood. They involved a great number of attendants who nourished and entertained the deceased daily, occasionally escorting them to leisure resorts and public festivals. Dead kings also played an active role in current affairs by means of oracular consultations. Each had several embodiments of his person dispersed throughout the realm and a personal “double” composed of corporeal relics that benefited from its own retainers and land resources. This effigy, also called wawqe (brother), acted as the ruler’s stand-in on the battlefield and on diplomatic missions. In this way, the dead’s agency was necessarily conveyed through corporeal substances, which required constant acts of sustenance. Only monarchs and some of their most commendable kin received this treatment, and what set apart these exceptional individuals from ordinary people lay vested in their body. To understand how and why royal corporeality was unique, I will discuss the gestures, proscriptions, material substances and bodily practices that shaped the king’s physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death. These data reveal the successive techniques of ancestralization to which his body was subjected, starting at his installation and ending with his second funeral, one year after death. They show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a series of ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king’s faculty to infuse vital force to all living creatures under his rule and protection. Through this ongoing procedure, he stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologies of power” shaped a system of representations that legitimated the king’s appropriation of wealth, women and human offerings.
My study restricts its enquiry to the historically specific context of Inca Cuzco around the time of the Spanish invasion. The written sources alone cannot provide us with a diachronic perspective on mortuary practices or on the transformation of the kingship office, which call for a separate study. Throughout the argument, I mobilize a variety of historical sources: chronicles of Inca history compiled in Castellan from indigenous oral traditions and dynastic narratives, second-hand descriptions of festivals held in the royal centre of Cuzco, and first-hand testimonies of conquistadors who interacted with Atahualpa—the victorious contender to Inca kingship at the time of the Iberian invasion. It has long been emphasized that these colonial reports pose multiple historiographic problems not least because their respective renderings of royal succession differ, sometimes extensively, from one another. These disparities, however, were not exclusively outcomes of post-Conquest accommodations. Prior to being transcribed, Andean historical traditions had not been so much fixed records of past events as products of the sociological framework in which they circulated. As such, they had been liable to different variables including politics, speech format, audience composition, individual memory or narrative skills, which permeated written sources to varying degrees. The comparative textual analyses of their formal structures reveal evidence of competing interests, discreet narrative genres and divergent modes of temporality that predated colonization (Niles 1999; Julien 2000; Yaya 2013). My argument sets in opposition the depiction of Inca rulers in dynastic narratives with the descriptive data that Spaniards collected on the kingship office and its ritual obligations. This examination reveals conflicting pictures of royal praxis. In the first, the king is an active field agent of state prosperity, whereas in the second, he is a reclusive and passive object of ritual actions. As we shall see, neither of these descriptions is a misreport. They reflect separate aspects of the ancestralization process that affected the king’s body.
The Ayllu: A Politico-Religious System
By the time Cuzco fell into Spanish hands in 1533, Andean society was organized into ancestor-focused corporate groups called ayllu whose members shared economic and ritual obligations. Although historical records occasionally describe these groupings as unilineal units, evidence indicates that ayllu affiliation was not strictly predicted on descent. Social conduct, including political support and cultic practice, would have equally determined membership (Spalding 1984, 28–30; Salomon 1991, 21–23). For its constituents, ancestry reckoning provided commonly held resources, usually land and water supply attributed to the forebear, as well as a frame of reference for ranking according to distance from the apical founder (Isbell 1997, 98–99; Yaya 2013). This stratification organized the subdivision of resources into nested clusters of varying sizes, also called ayllus, which formed a system of recursive segmentary units (Gose 1993) with a theoretical capacity for further inclusion and thus expansion. To this hierarchy of resource units corresponded a class structure of officials exempt from tribute who oversaw communal work, access to resources and ritual duties in their respective section. Heading this executive elite was a paramount lord (kuraka) who assumed this position either by virtue of having descended from the ayllu forebear or by means of ancestral nomination involving ritual observance and divination. Owing to this supreme title, he enjoyed a number of privileges, including polygyny, ownership of insignia of power and cult attendance of the founding ancestor (Gose 2008, 15–16). At the time of the European invasion, sovereignty in the Andes derived from this politico-religious system focused on ancestor worship of which the cult of mummified forebears was one, pervasive, manifestation.
The abiding bound that connected ayllu founders with their human congregation was encapsulated in the notion of kamay, the act of infusing living creatures with vital energy (Salomon 1991, 16). In the Quechua traditions of the early colonial period, the lexeme kama- and its derivatives characterized the transfer of a vivifying energy from a powerful entity to a recipient that became animated by this lifesustaining strength (Taylor 1974). Each local category of animals and plants had its own source of vital force in the form of a prototype, often a constellation (Polo de Ondegardo [1559] 1916, 3–5; Cobo [1653] 1964, 159–160). In this universe, ayllu founders were the particular animating essence, or kamaq, of their self-defined descent. Following the ayllu’s recursive principles, these extraordinary entities could also be kamaq to a broader array of living creatures. The most powerful among them could theoretically incorporate multiple prototypes and instil their vital force to every being under their rule, animals as well as plants, so they may thrive and keep free from ailment. In this way, they guaranteed the prosperity and health of their human progeny as well as the maturation of crops and the fertility of animals that were united together by a common link to the same paramount kamaq. This animating capacity was also a fluctuating vital principle that could wither at its source and therefore imperil the vigour of all living beings associated with it. Critical to ensuring its continuous flow was the human responsibility of feeding ancestors, for commensality and co-residence were, and are still, constitutive of kin relations in the Andes (Mannheim and Salas Carreño 2015, 60–64). Misfortunes and diseases were seen as consequences of neglecting to feed ancestors who became weakened and upset by this carelessness. Conversely, an ayllu’s prosperity was the ostentatious sign of its life-sustaining kamaq’s vitality, which is why the semantic field of kama- extends to notions of authority and commandment.
Historical sources describe two major forms of ancestral embodiments in the Andes. First, kamaq forebears manifested themselves in the natural features of the landscape, most notably in rock formations and carved stones that oral traditions often identified with petrified beings (Duviols 1978, 1979; Salomon 1998; Dean 2010). A fundamental correlate of this form of ancestral materiality was that kamaq beings owned as well a divisible corporeality whose embodiments hosted their animating energy, which is why they manifested themselves in landscape features that had been in contact with their body. Oral traditions associated these locations, designated as wak’a in colonial documents, with the deeds and significant events in the life story of ancestors, such as the site of their emergence on earth, the scene of their victory against a potent rival, or their ultimate petrifaction into a peculiar landform. This multiplicity of ancestral manifestations in the landscape was also united through bonds of affinity and consanguinity relayed in oral traditions. As Frank Salomon wrote:
There existed a tendency to interpret the focalized members of ego’s own social structure, and sacralized features of landscape or even cosmos, as nodes in a nested set of genealogically patterned and sometimes more broadly kin-like relationships extending in principle to the whole of the known world. (1995, 323)
In this way, memory and topography were interconnected and formed the shared history of local ayllus (Dean 2010, 35–40). Such a process of embedding history in space, akin to the Art of Memory, remains in various ways a current practice of many Andean communities (Molinié 1985; Allen 1993–94; Abercrombie 1998).
Mummified corpses of ayllu founders were a second form of ancestral substantiality in the Andes, but while topographical embodiments of kamaq entities were locally anchored and fixed, preserved bodies were less stable forms of ancestral materiality. Drawing on the separate works of Duviols (1978) and Allen (1982), Salomon (1998) reminds us that Andean conceptions of personhood have long borrowed a vegetative metaphor stressing corporeal changes from soft, wet, fleshy and dynamic beings to dry, slow-changing and static ones. Post-mortem desiccation was only one aspect of this continuum, the most permanent embodiment being landmarks. Arguably, what Spanish conquerors identified as a “universal” cult of the dead in the Andes was a single facet of a transformational scheme towards perennial, life-sustaining ancestrality. As we shall now see, analysis of the material practices whereby the Inca royal body was produced substantiates this claim. It reveals that the processual operation through which kings acquired life-sustaining force began well before his biological death. For the sake of the argument, I shall begin by discussing the cult of dead rulers.
Corpse Politics
Chronicler Bernabé Cobo indicates that kin only were involved in the cult maintenance of dead kings:
Not all of the living generally worshipped all of the dead bodies. Not even all of their relatives worshiped them. The dead were worshiped only by those who descended from them in a direct line. Therefore, they took great care to worship their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and so on as far back as their information reached. But they were not concerned with the brother of their father, nor with the brother of their grandfather, nor with anyone who had died without leaving descendants. ([1653] 1990, 42)
Hence, the number of mummified Inca kings equalled that of the noble ayllus estimated to have been between ten and twelve, their exact number being still debated. Each noble ayllu considered itself as descending from one of the kings who had ruled since the foundation of the dynasty by Manco Capac. It was he who, according to royal narratives, settled more or less belligerently among the natives of the Cuzco Valley following a long migration in search of fertile lands. He and his successors claimed to be sons of the Sun under whose aegis they gradually subdued rival nations. Altogether, the different descent groups they initiated formed the royal clan or qhapaq ayllu (rich/potent ayllu), which had the Sun as its apical ancestor. Open strife and armed conflicts were legion between these royal houses whose members routinely competed against each other to access positions of authority. The death of a ruler in particular and the subsequent opening of the royal succession brought about troubled times during which the noble ayllus secured or undid alliances in attempts to have their favourite invested with the highest authority. The stakes were high since the newly appointed king had the prerogative to redistribute land resources for the sustenance of every ayllu founders and their respective descent. Indeed, dead kings enjoyed a number of individual resting places in the Inca heartland. Each owned a palace in Cuzco, occupied an individual sanctuary in the temple of the Sun (Qurikancha) and benefited from separate retreats in estates located for the most part in the Vilcanota-Urubamba Valley. Studies of the legal documents relative to these land resources reveal that they were mainly exploited for farming (maize, tubers, ají), herding, and the extraction of raw materials used in construction and manufacturing (Rostworowski 1962; Niles 1993; Rowe 1997). The commodities generated from royal estates fed the dead and members of his ayllu, provided the materials for his attire and insignias, but also supplied the generous feasts that his descendants organized in his name. Such a display of opulence and exertion of care prompted an early Spanish observer, Pedro Pizarro, to write that “the greater part of the people, treasures, expenses and vices were under the control of the dead” ([1571] 1921, 203).
On royal estates, stratified groups of retainers carried out domestic services, which included administrative duties, daily care of the dead, farming, weaving, brewing of maize beer (aqha), as well as food preparation. The noblest responsibilities lay in the hands of yanakuna (foreign auxiliaries exempt from tribute) and mamakuna (highstatus chosen women) while labour tasks were left primarily to the mitmaq (resettled communities). Niles (1993, 152–153) has put forward ample historical evidence that yanakuna and mitmaq estate groups originated from the nations annexed by the king in his lifetime. Like the dead’s kin, they were exclusively attached to a specific house. Moreover, contrary to what the Spaniards claimed, yanakuna were not servile groups per se. Some were attested sons of provincial headmen (kurakas) while many held central positions in the imperial administration. They were rewarded for their good services with aklla wives that the king only could grant and exceptionally received the status of “Incas by privilege” (Villar Córdova 1966; Rostworowski 1973, 260–263). In sum, the production unit and cult attendants that busied themselves around the dead king consisted of his direct descent and of outsiders to the royal clan with whom he had contracted various degrees of alliance. To complete this localized replica of the deceased’s political network, the ancestral effigies of the nations he had subjugated were held permanently beside the royal mummy (Polo de Ondegardo 1990, 85–86). In this way, the social geography of the Cuzco region was composed of dispatched stratified political entities, spatially anchored around individual ancestors and functioning as economic units. They surrounded the royal centre where the ruling king resided for the duration of his reign.
Aside from providing for the dead and his descendants’ private maintenance, the commodities produced on royal estates also sustained both the lavish festivities the royal mummy was expected to put on for his guests and the rituals his noble ayllu officiated regularly. Kings, dead or alive, hosted Inca and foreign lords—who may equally be deceased—with their retinue of officials and attendants. These visitors came to discuss politics, to request armed support or to strengthen their alliance through marriage. While in audience, an officiant posted at the dead’s side would interpret and expose his decisions (Pizarro [1571] 1978, 52–54).
Besides these private activities, dead kings participated collectively in a number of yearly rituals. Pedro Pizarro witnessed one such occasion. He recounts that royal corpses were first housed in their respective altars in Qurikancha where they were cared for by their own attendants and flanked with the ancestral effigies of the nations they had subdued. They were then transported for several consecutive days from Qurikancha to the main plaza where they were placed “in line, each one according to his degree of seniority” to be fed (Pizarro [1571] 1978, 89). Dead kings also invariably attended the opening festival of harvest and the purification ritual of Sitwa. The former took place in April when, every morning for eight days, the royal mummies, several other ancestral effigies and the living ruler were placed beneath separate feather canopies in the open square of Limaqpampa outside Cuzco. From dawn to dusk, the living sang and burnt offerings to the gods on a large pyre, before the earth was finally broken to initiate the harvest (Segovia [1553] 1916, 81–83). As for Sitwa, it was celebrated at a most dangerous time of the year for the vitality of all living beings. It took place between August and September, when the food reserves were draining away, altitude pasturelands were depleted and illnesses threatened to spread (Guaman Poma de Ayala [1613] 1980, 227). To evict the lurking evils, armed squadrons ran out of the city towards exhorting illnesses and misfortunes to depart from the land before the residents went bathing and everyone including the king, his principal spouse, the mummified ancestors and main gods were “warmed” with a maize mush (sanku) that was rubbed against their face. This procedure insured that their vitality continued to flow, keeping them safe from illnesses (Molina [1575] 1989, 48–49).
Finally, dead kings attended the celebrations in honour of the perpetuation of kingship, which included the initiation ritual of young males (warachiku), royal investiture and second funerals (purukaya) (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 29; Molina [1575] 1989, 100). On these occasions, specialists affiliated to each noble ayllu recited consecutively the epic chants recounting the deceased’s individual deeds. The novices and the newly appointed king were then summoned to follow their ancestors’ exemplary lives. Altogether, these illustrious narratives promulgated the image of a prosperous and perennial dynasty in which ongoing sovereignty was innately linked to the ritual commemoration of past achievements. In the other ritual contexts, dead kings appeared as resources for the vital energy of their living descent and were associated with the maintenance of their productivity. It was by virtue of their animating power upon men, their yields and livestock that they were reinvigorated periodically and called upon to infuse their life-sustaining force. This relationship uniting founding ancestors with bountiful fertility and agriculture is extensively documented in the Andes. Ayllu forebears, in the form of either mummy bundles or stone relics, widely received propitiatory offerings when planting and harvesting because they were believed to regulate the agrarian cycle, to protect cultivated lands and to rule over water supplies. They were the mallki of their descent, a term which otherwise referred to a seedling, a sapling for planting or fruit trees (Duviols 1978; Gose 1996, 404–408). In a classic relationship that Bloch and Parry (1982, 7–9) defined in anthropological terms, the dead’s regenerative power in the Andes was formulated and displayed through a vegetative metaphor.
The Inca Sacred Kingship
But death was not the defining event that invested the king with this life-sustaining faculty. I argue that the proscriptions, bodily practices and ritual actions that made up the Inca royal protocol were devised to establish that the living ruler was the kamaq and ultimate source of the life force sustaining his people. The acquisition of this kamaq power and the physical transformation it operated on the monarch’s body began at the time of investiture. In accordance with the pervasive principle of legitimacy in the Andes, the Inca king ruled by virtue of having descended from the founder of the dynasty through either filiation or divine sanction. Following a strict fast and the successful completion of a sacrifice to the divine ancestor of the qhapaq ayllu, the new ruler received the official title of “unique son of the Sun” (sapa intip churin) (Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 116–118, 148–149). Divine endorsement consecrated the newly appointed ruler as the individual who was genealogically closest to the royal ayllu’s kamaq and the direct heir of his vital force as Manco Capac had been. In other words, the successor became the source of prosperity of his metaphorical descent and the supreme authority at the head of all royal ayllus. From thereon, his newly acquired ancestor status affected concretely his body, which became divisible into an infinity of replicas.
First, a double of his person was fashioned from his nail clippings and hair mixed with earthly matter. This aggregate was the receptacle of the king’s vital energy and was known as his “brother” (wawqi). It was sheltered from view and ministered by designated retainers that fed him from the yields of croplands allocated to its personal sustenance (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 220; Polo de Ondegardo [1559] 1916, 2, 8; Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 63, 65, 127; Cobo [1653] 1964, 162–163). Carried on a litter, the wawqi supplanted the king on diplomatic visits and on the battlefields. Atahualpa is said to have sent this effigy to his captains on campaign two months after his investiture,
so that the peoples of the subjugated provinces could render obedience to that statue in place of his person. Thus this statue was carried and given to the captains, who received it and were very pleased with it. They performed many great sacrifices and served and respected this statue as if the very person of Atahualpa were there. (Betanzos [1551] 1996, 205)
This practice was commonplace among the Incas. The visitador Cristóbal de Albornoz, who claimed to have discovered many royal effigies in the Huamanga province, wrote that “when the Incas conquered new territories they left certain nail clippings of theirs, or a piece of their clothing or weapon, or a falcon wing” ([1582] 1989, 165). Huayna Capac is said to have had many bultos in different towns (Jerez [1534] 1853, 334). Late chroniclers also describe other kingly embodiments in the shapes of “statues”, “images” and “portraits” made of different materials (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 29; Polo [1559] 1916, 10; Acosta [1590] 1940, 363, 375). As Dean (2006) points out, these objects were not figurative representations of the ruler, but rather “presentational forms” of his life force and substance. Likewise, a particular manifestation of the solar deity had enclosed within it the personal sheddings of all deceased kings (Mateos [c. 1600] 1944, 8; Cobo [1653] 1964, 106). Being an incarnation of the royal clan’s apical ancestor, it embodied their accumulated kamaq through their body fragments.
Moreover, access to the living king’s physical self was restricted in the same way mummified ancestors and other wak’as were out of bounds to commoners. Hence, he rarely granted an audience in person except to distinguished guests. If a visitor was conceded a meeting, he was introduced barefooted to the Inca and was made to carry a burden on his shoulders that ensured that he remained bent over (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 35–36; Pizarro [1571] 1978, 37). With his back turned to the king, he began by paying his respects with a gesture of reverence called mucha traditionally directed to ancestors. During the consultation that ensued, the king was concealed behind a veil held by mamakuna and remained mute, his head lowered, while a mouthpiece expounded his words (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 34–36). This protocol is unequivocally described, without being identified per se, in the records of the first interactions between Atahualpa and the conquistadors, which Lamana (2008, 49–53) cleverly discussed (Jerez [1534] 1853, 331; Mena [1534] 1937, 84; Estete [1535] 1924, 292; Pizarro [1571] 1978, 32–33).
In addition to the protocol that applied to visitors, the king’s body was attended as that of an ancestral-like entity. He never set foot on the ground and was transported everywhere on a litter concealed behind a veil (Pizarro [1571] 1978, 67). Only the virginal chosen women could attend his needs as “no men (indios) dared standing close to him” (Mena [1534] 1937, 83). The sight of and the contact with his body were indeed believed to affect the orderly course of nature, causing earthquakes if it touched ground and disconcerting the masses that happened to catch a glimpse of him. Cieza provides an extravagant illustration of these effects, telling that the slightest glance at the king parading on an open litter prompted commoners to “raise such a great roar that it made the birds fall down from above” ([1554] 1996, 34). Likewise, everything that came into contact with the king’s body—his clothes, the mats on which he ate, the leftovers of his meals—were stored away to be ritually burnt for they would have been affected by his vital force. “All that was touched by the lords, who were sons of the Sun, must be burnt, made into ashes and thrown into the air, for no one must be allowed to touch it” (Pizarro [1571] 1921, 225). For this reason, Atahualpa had been infuriated to learn that the conquistadors had touched the mats on which his father had slept and threatened to punish them for the affront (Pizarro [1571] 1921, 33).
Pedro Pizarro also reports an anecdote about Huayna Capac suggesting that the food Inca kings ingested fed all the living beings they animated, which is why Huayna Capac could eat without ever being replete and drink without ever being inebriated.
They say that he was wont to drink more than three Indians together, but that they never saw him drunk, and that, when his captains and chiefs Indians asked him how, though drinking so much, he never got intoxicated, they said that he replied that he drank for the poor of whom he supported many. (Pizarro [1571] 1921, 198–99)
Finally, there is evidence that the important ritual of qhapaq hucha was dedicated primarily to the invigoration of the king’s life-sustaining force, which required to be regularly revitalized like that of any ancestral-like entity. The name for this imperial-scale celebration broadly meant “ritual obligation of qhapaq significance” (Taylor 1999, xxvi–xxvii, 283 n. 11). Harrison (1993) points out that early colonial sources employ hucha to describe the liability resulting from individual wrong against the social order. The word assumed an initial transgression or a discord that required atonement. Accordingly, qhapaq hucha was performed periodically as well as in times of crisis, and more specifically, when the ruler’s kamaq faculty required consecration or was depleting, that is, at his investiture, if he was sick, had died, following a great victory, or when natural disasters and pestilences had struck (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 141–143; Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 87–89; Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 59; Molina [1575] 1989, 116–126; Guaman Poma de Ayala [1613] 1980, 247 [249], 262 [264]; Hernández Príncipe [1621] 1923). The offerings and human sacrifices carried out throughout Tawantinsuyu on qhapaq hucha (re)established the reciprocal obligations between the king and the nations under his lordship in order to restore the integrity of the monarch’s body and avoid peril upon the kingdom. It consisted first in the extraordinary confluence to Cuzco of imperial goods and ritual victims, among which were young children selected from the local elite for their physical perfection. After several days of drinking and feasting, the libations were redistributed according to the Inca’s will to the local ancestors. High-status wak’as and those that had provided the ruling power with outstanding support received the most prestigious offerings in the form of unblemished children. The king both received libations as tokens of allegiance, which revitalized his kamaq potency, and dispensed through them his renewed life-sustaining force to his extended relations. By means of this reciprocal exchange, qhapaq hucha clearly manifested the assimilation of the king’s wellness with the prosperity of his people. In this regard, it is significant that it was the only Inca ritual involving the sacrifices of human victims whose vitality and purity were reckoned to restore the ruler’s strength and, as a result of redistribution to the empire’s wak’as, the welfare of the entire kingdom.
The Inca king’s ritual responsibility towards his subjects proceeded from pre-existing conceptions of rulership in the Andes that invested ayllu paramount lords with kamaq ancestral qualities. Like him, kurakas guaranteed the prosperity of their ayllu by means of ritual observances and received in return acts of devotion such as the mucha reverence, transportation on litters and ancestral insignia (Martínez Cereceda 1995, 198–201, 204–205; Ramírez 2005, 135–137). Accordingly, the worship of dead Inca rulers was not qualitatively different from the post-mortem treatment of local headmen whose corpses were preserved and venerated, nor was the protocol that applied to their living person. The difference was merely in degree. As the empire grew, the symbolic and ritual practices directed to the Inca kings’ bodies would have assumed ostentatious demonstrations proportionate to the extent of their domain. Similarly, their treatment as apical kamaq of Tawantinsuyu did not exclude the worship of other ancestralized figures throughout the realm. Historical sources report that the central power often allowed and sometimes participated in the perpetuation of local cults provided that the Sun—the Inca divine ancestor— and the king received the ritual considerations of paramount entities. Certain mothers and wives of Inca rulers, as well as the eldest son of King Pachacuti Yupanqui, also had their corpses preserved and ministered, but their involvement in cuzqueñan ritual life was more restricted (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 189; Molina [1575] 1989, 118; Murúa [1590–1602] 2001, 114; Garcilaso [1609] 1959, 273; Cobo [1653] 1964, 170). These ancestral figures coexisted as kamaq of their descent group, their life stories were perpetuated and they retained important political authority. The Inca king, however, as the supreme embodiment of the vital energy animating all ayllus under his rule, supervised them all. The protocol applying to the public treatment of his person consecrated him conspicuously as the living kamaq ancestor of his ayllu, apathetic to the human eye but vector of life-sustaining energy. He held a divisible, transportable body that contained the entirety of the relations composing the descent he animated. Following the ayllu’s recursive principles of organization, he was the paramount kamaq being of all ayllu units under his rule, composed as much of the royal clan as of “the poor” he nourished when feeding himself. The Inca’s ancestralization during lifetime therefore required that his subjects, conceived as his descent, maintained reciprocal relations of sustenance with him by providing his food and by visiting regularly the royal centre to establish co-presence with the source of their vital energy. Moreover, the integrity of the king’s body was preserved through periodic acts of purification and protection from physical corruption such as war injury or contact with ordinary men and women. For these reasons, his wawqe was usually his stand-in at war and virginal akllas exclusively attended his needs. Arguably, these provisions for the bodily preservation of kings were an ideal protocol that individual actors may have chosen to accommodate, especially with respect to involvement on the battlefields. Character and particular views on leadership would have variously shaped the rulers’ actions within this general framework of practice. It nevertheless remained that the king’s body was the ritual object upon which rested the foundation of the Inca politico-religious authority. A comparative survey of the anthropological literature reveals that this quality is a defining characteristic of sacred kingships in which the monarch, by virtue of embodying divinity, is expected to sustain collective prosperity and world order through the observance of ritual prescriptions. In these institutions, governance does not necessarily entail executive power. Frazer (1890–1915) was the first to elaborate on the mutual dependence tying the physical health of sacred kings to their kingdom’s well-being. These rulers, he argues, could not show any signs of affliction or decline that would otherwise imperil society. At once set apart from the mundane world and protected from the effects of mortal depletion, they are symbolically and ritually held in a consubstantial relationship with their subjects: what kings suffer in the flesh impacts on their domain because the realm appears as an extension of the royal body. Sacred kings are therefore held responsible as much for their people’s good fortune and health as for the disasters and illnesses affecting their realm. In these politico-religious systems, ritual actions and symbolic practices are directed to the maintenance of the king’s physical integrity and thereby ensure plenitude in the kingdom (Hocart 1936; Feeley-Harnik 1985; Adler 2000).
The Fabric of History
If the Inca ruler was ancestralized in his lifetime, his biological death and the ensuing decomposition of his corporeal substance put in peril the vital force he supplied to his descent and extended relations. Corpse preservation appeared naturally as the most ingenious solution to avert the critical consequences of his mortal depletion. The king’s death thus initiated a long transition period during which the transformation of his body into a perennial receptacle and, ultimately, his second funeral (purukaya) ensured dynastic continuity on the one hand, and the political prestige of his royal ayllu on the other. The crux of this transformational apparatus lay in the elaboration of the king’s life story and in the ritual objectification of this memory in the loci of history that shaped Cuzco’s landscape. Hence, he became an integrated part of the local ancestral and mnemonic network, thereby pursuing his processual ancestralization towards perennial and static kamaq embodiment. And this was when the making of history comes into play. Indeed, a crucial attribute distinguished the ruling king from other ancestrallike entities: alive, he had not yet entered the realm of history. More specifically, it was formally forbidden to recount the Inca’s doings during his lifetime. The events of his reign remained untold and no one dared uttering his name except in profound awe because it was considered “sacred” (Garcilaso [1609] 1959, 53). It was during his first funeral, immediately after his death, that members of his noble ayllu gathered to decide of his fate:
If he had been valiant and a good governor of the realm, without having lost any provinces among those his father had left him, without committing himself to vile deeds or smallness or other inanities that demented princes have the insolence to carry out in their kingdom, it was allowed and ordered that chants in honour of these same kings be composed in which they were praised and extoled in such a way that all the people should be astonished to hear of deeds so mighty ( … ) and if among the kings, one had been negligent, cowardly, or vicious, or preferred pleasure to the labour of extending the bounds of the empire, it was ordered that such a king should receive little or no mention. (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 28, my translation)
If a king died a “bad death”, for example, violently and unexpectedly, he was also doomed to oblivion. Cieza provides one such example. He is the only chronicler to evoke the short reign of Inca Yupanqui, a king who was treacherously murdered shortly after taking office by a group of foreign captains of his own army. The offenders turned on him inside the royal precinct where the king was celebrating the launch of his first military campaign. On hearing of the attack, the women “tore their hair, horrified at the death of the Inca through bloodshed as if he had been a vile person” (my emphasis) (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 110–111). Cieza concludes: “it is said to be certain that Inca Yupanqui did not receive the same funerary honours as were done to his ancestors, nor was his bulto (mummy bundle) set up and he left no son” ([1554] 1996, 110–111). In a society that tightly regulated the announcement of a king’s death to ensure unbroken succession, regicide was a disruption of the perennial order of dynastic stability. But most crucially, this act exposed Inca Yupanqui as an ordinary mortal made of soft and mundane substances, a “vile person” whose body had no ancestral-like quality. This assassination was all the more ominous that the king had expired before proving his might or extending his domain, and before fathering a descent that would have guaranteed the perpetuation of his cult.
If the noble ayllu authorities decided that a king’s memory should be preserved, his life story was created out of a selective appraisal of his achievements. His body was therefore converted into a perennial object through natural dehydration and the aid of certain ointments (Garcilaso [1609] 1959, 274). During this phase, which would have lasted up to a year, his successor assembled the necessary goods to organize the dead’s purukaya. The newly appointed king provided the necessary food for this festivity, distributed new lands to the royal ancestors, and called on their residence to listen to their individual life stories (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 181–183, 189). The second funeral opened at the end of this period with a pilgrimage. For fifteen days, the Inca noble men and women walked in Cuzco and its surroundings, their face painted in black, and stopped amid the hills, plots, houses and streets that the dead had frequented in his lifetime. Betanzos claims that they visited “the lands where the Inca planted and harvested”, “the places where he stood and the ones where he sat down when he was alive and walked through there” ([1551] 1996, 134; Pizarro [1571] 1978, 70). The pilgrims carried with them the clothes, weapons and agrarian tools that had belonged to the deceased. Each time they halted, they brandished one of these objects and called out to him: “Look here at the garment you used to wear”, “See here your weapon with which you won and subjected such a province and so many caciques who were lords there” (Betanzos ([1551] 1996, 134). Once the pilgrimage was accomplished, a dance and a ritual battle signifying the king’s past victories were performed on the main plaza.
The famous report on the adoratorios of the Cuzco region describes a great number of these sites or wak’as attached to significant events in the life story of Inca kings. It lists the houses in which some of them had been born, had slept, lived, or died. It includes a hill pass where Viracocha Inca ordinarily rested on his ascent to the summit, a spring where “the Inca customarily bathed”, the site where Huayna Capac had dreamt of an upcoming battle, a hunting lodge where Inca Yupanqui often spent leisure time, or the place where Mayta Capac had devised a battle plan to crush a rival ayllu. The report indicates that each ancestor-king received periodic sacrifices for his individual health and strength on the sites associated to his personal history (Cobo ([1653] 1964, 169–186). Along with these wak’as were other shrines that were the embodiments of local ancestors and the abundant source of their life-sustaining essence. They too received propitiatory offerings while the most prominent ones dispensed their will through oracular officiants. Altogether, the wak’as of Cuzco formed an interconnected network of shrines subdivided into several segments called seqe, each of which was the ritual responsibility of a noble or common ayllu (Cobo ([1653] 1964, 169–186). It formed not only a landscape of remembrance but also a cartography of current affairs in which ayllus displayed their alliance networks in a spatial and temporal continuum actualized by periodic offerings and the recitation of their ancestors’ associations. It was during purukaya that the deeds of the last ruling king were first integrated into this landscape through the mediation of historical speech and the objects the dead had infused with his vital strength.
These funerary practices and the life story elaborated on this occasion describe the dead sovereign as an individual in action who fought in person and busied himself with agrarian works. Although his time as a ruler had been one of physical inertia, it is claimed that he moved around freely, walking, stopping by and sitting down. The participants appealed to him directly, thus defying the protocol for addressing his living person. This reversal of the established codes manifested a change of status activated by the recitation of his life story on the actual sites permeated with his vital force. In the process, the narrative objectified the king’s kamaq ability by reporting the military successes of his armies as his own and by crediting the productivity of the lands to his life-sustaining energy. His reign thereby followed suit with the triumphant models set by his predecessors. This posthumous glory, however, was not systematic. Royal epics therefore presented a selective appraisal of the political accomplishments attributed to individual kings so that altogether these narratives embodied a repetitive programme for dynastic success that legitimized Inca rule through the representation of its enduring prosperity. This form of historicity was no less a reflexive discourse on past events. Its particularity was to impute causality not to the concrete actions of field actors, but to the king’s individual agency through his scattered effigies whether or not he had taken part personally in the actions described.
Finally, in addition to ensuring the historical continuity of the dynasty, second funerals re-established the political authority of the late king’s ayllu imperilled by their leader’s death. Demise threatened his descent because the royal successor arrogated for himself the title of “unique son of the Sun”, thus depositing the deceased as head of the royal clan. The inauguration of the new Inca living ancestor inevitably brought about the reorganization of all relations between members of the qhapaq ayllu, which particularly impacted on the status of the former ruler’s ayllu. The dead’s statutory loss therefore required that his descent positioned itself anew in the political arena. It was once again the elaboration of the dead’s life story that achieved this manoeuvre because it did not simply consist of a record of individual deeds. This epic narrative also, if not above all, detailed the innumerable political alliances that had united the king with foreign lords and other Inca ayllus. This historical genre proclaimed that the success of royal endeavours rested upon political rapprochements. It showcased the king’s ability to assemble powerful allies and to maintain these unions through bridal exchanges, the magnanimous granting of prestige titles and sumptuous feasts. In this way, the royal ayllus displayed their political viability in ritual contexts as much during the recitation of their ancestor’s past grandeur, as in the reproduction of their alliance network with the different wak’as of the cuzqueñan landscape that they periodically fed with offerings.
Inca history was an implement of politico-religious authority. Similar to that of the Sakalava kingship (Western Madagascar), it was “a powerful embodiment of the royal ancestors” that not everyone shared equally (Feeley-Harnik 1978, 402). Owing to its exclusive association with the realm of life-sustaining ancestors, it was a record of the individual achievements carried out only by those who made up the success of the royal dynasty. But historical speech among the Incas was more than a discursive medium. It was necessarily delivered in the presence of the relics of those who were being remembered, either their corpse, their personal effects or the sites of their deeds, which were all repositories of ancestral life-sustaining force. Enunciation, therefore, was necessarily bound to materiality, which explains why the mummified bodies of dead rulers were concrete targets of sabotages and political adjustments. Illustrating this point is the tragic fate that fell upon the body of king Tupa Yupanqui after his ayllu allied with Huascar against Atahualpa in the succession war that opposed the two halfbrothers. Atahualpa’s generals had won key battles and taken hold of Cuzco when their leader ordered them to punish Tupa Yupanqui’s house for siding with his opponent. Following orders, they slaughtered the leading members of this noble ayllu, burnt its founder’s mummy, executed all the specialists who owned the deceased’s life story (khipukamayuq) and destroyed their records (Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 162–64). This assault on memory, aside from the harrowing effect of its human cost, was designed to put an effective end to his enemies’ political influence and annihilate their source of life-sustaining energy.
Conclusion
In Tawantinsuyu, sacredness—understood as a generic term to qualify supernatural agency and power—belonged to the realm of founding ancestors. These entities were as much prototypes of living species as enduring sources of vital energy that animated their descent, thus ensuring their health and fertility. In this respect, the Inca politicoreligious system of governance was a sacred kingship whose foundations lay in the recursive principles of the ayllu organization. Its living monarch was paramount lord of an empire conceived as an encompassing maximal ayllu that contained a succession of nested communities, each one descending from a separate forebear and ruled by its respective kuraka. The Inca king, as the living kamaq being of this organization, was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance with its members. He guaranteed their prosperity by providing for their ancestors’ vital strength, in return of which he was nourished in quantities commensurate with the breadth of his realm. As Huayna Capac’s legendary ability to remain sober suggests, Inca kings drank and ate for all the poor they supported. This ideology legitimized the alienation of resources by the central power and their partial redistribution during sumptuous state festivities. On these occasions, the king, or his executive official in the provinces, was seen to ritually bestow wealth on his subjects.
This politico-religious system rested upon the evidence of the king’s sacredness. To render this quality conspicuous, the ruler’s body was affected via corporeal techniques and a protocol that concretely set off his individuality against that of ordinary humans. The Incas were not unique in implementing these embodied technologies. As Heusch (1997) indicates, the king-to-be in a remarkable number of African kingdoms is expected to carry out a dramatic gesture, often a kinship transgression or an immoral act (incest, murder of a consanguine) that separates him from society. His investiture ceremony turns him into a “body-fetish” repository of magico-religious power that is at once a potentially destructive and beneficial force. Similarly, in ancient Egypt, the ceremonial journey that a new pharaoh undertook across the country during interregnum aimed at displaying the transformation of his physical self. On this occasion, the masses glanced at him from far afield as he sat in stillness on the royal barge. His impassive person was profusely censed like a cult statue “until it seemed that the scent exuded from the king’s very own pores like the pores of a god” (Morris 2010, 206). The ceremonial exhibited to the audience’s olfactory and visual senses his transformation into a living deity. For Sahlins (2008), the elementary form of estrangement in sacred kingships is foreignness whereby the ruler claims to be stranger to the people he governs. This figure of alterity is endowed with superior and destructive might that is eventually tamed through marriage with the daughter of the indigenous lord. From thereon, he becomes the benefactor of the land. “Stranger-kings” are omnipresent in Andean founding narratives. The Incas themselves claimed to be belligerent migrants who brought about prosperity to the Cuzco region after wedding daughters of local lords. As in other sacred kingships, they also devised bodily practices whereby kings appeared alienated from human society. During their reign, they displayed all the material qualities of life-sustaining ancestors and acted as impassive effigies that required careful manipulation when exposed to the mundane world. Their bodies were painstakingly protected from physical corruption and regularly re-invigorated through acts of nurture and sacrifice. Yet, ancestralization in the pre-Hispanic Andes was not a one-time event. It followed a processual scheme predicted on the ongoing prosperity of the living. If misfortune struck on earth, kamaq beings faced deposition, but if welfare was preserved through time, they acquired a perennial stature. Thereupon, their corporeality, as the memory of their deeds, assumed a more permanent quality in the geological landmark. Second funerals marked an important stage in this process as it awakened Inca kings from inert figures to dynamic ancestors whose actions had brought about fertility and victory. This transformation not only impacted on their physical aspects from fleshy bodies to desiccated corpses, it also effected their entry into history for it was the elaboration of the kings’ memory that elevated them to perennial ancestors.
Dynastic history, though, was not merely a discursive instrument. It was imprinted in the community of individuals that perpetuated the cult of dead rulers on royal estates, in the effigies of foreign ancestors that escorted the royal mummies, and in the fabric of Cuzco’s landscape where former kings ultimately turned into permanent features. These repositories were not only tangible manifestations of the rulers’ kamaq ability, they were literally the scattered corporeal substances of their ancestral power that, entangled together, shaped the dynamic contours of the Inca memorial topography. On the one hand, their revitalization through nurture and public narration supported the reproduction of collective individuals—the royal ayllus—and, on the other, it ensured dynastic continuity. But whereas individual memory was built upon affinity and dispersed in a space outside Cuzco, dynastic memory upheld an ideology of linear descent. It found its objectification in the punctual regrouping of dead kings in the heart of the city, inside the temple dedicated to the royal clan’s divine ancestor, which stood for the occasion as a collective memorial to the stability and longevity of the Inca descent line. The same ideology presided over the public congregation of royal mummies at certain celebrations, when they were placed in genealogical order on the main plaza and stood as the qhapaq ayllu’s enduring source of fertility.
These two kinds of collective memory also conformed to separate historical formats. As Julien (2000) was the first to identify, the Inca elite not only elaborated epic stories of individual rulers, they also held a genealogical account of Manco Capac’s descendants, which together perpetuated alternative representations of the past. The latter described royal descent as an undisrupted succession of firstborns that had married their biological sisters and had ruled to preserve the established order. It emphasized continuity and internal cohesion. On the contrary, the epic life stories celebrated personal ability, political alliances with outsiders, marriage outside the royal clan and the disruption of prescribed rules as the strong poles of kingship success (Yaya 2013). The articulation of these two forms of collective memory allowed the Incas to conciliate an expansionist agenda relying on individual initiatives and outward alliances with the inwardlooking representation of a stable and durable monarchy. Together, they formed a mechanism of collective reproduction whose purpose was to legitimate the ongoing power structure in reference to the past. It is then hardly coincidental that local kurakas were those most commonly liable for the maintenance and re-activation of ancestor worship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Itier 2004). Among Andean communities where memory was ingrained in the topography, not merely as evidence of things past but as an enduring agent of stability and prosperity, the preservation of ancestors’ bodily integrity and the continuing regulation of their life-sustaining force were evidential sources of authority.