A Creator Whose Worship We Know Only Secondhand

This prayer addresses Viracocha with elevated titles emphasizing his role as maker of the world and of humankind, reflecting his position within Inca state religion as a creator deity of considerable theological importance, though the prayer survives only through colonial-era Spanish and Quechua-Spanish records compiled by chroniclers writing sometimes decades after the conquest, a transmission history discussed in general terms elsewhere in this atlas's treatment of Inca religion as a whole, meaning no version of this prayer can be treated as an unmediated pre-conquest Inca text in the way, for instance, the Madrid Codex represents unmediated pre-conquest Maya material. The specific relationship between Viracocha and Inti, the sun deity discussed in a separate entry in this atlas, within actual pre-conquest Inca religious practice remains genuinely debated among scholars of Andean religion, since colonial sources vary in how they present the relative importance of the two deities, some emphasizing Viracocha's primacy as ultimate creator and others emphasizing Inti's more immediate importance to Inca state ideology and imperial legitimacy through the ruling dynasty's claimed solar descent.