A Prophet Known Only Through the Man Who Stopped Him

Practically everything recorded about Chocne comes from Cristóbal de Albornoz, the ecclesiastical visitor who suppressed Taki Onqoy and who afterwards produced accounts of his own success in support of claims for reward. Albornoz had every reason to describe a large, coordinated and dangerous heresy, and a small local disturbance would have earned him nothing. That single fact governs the historiography. One influential reading, associated with Luis Millones and with Nathan Wachtel, treats Taki Onqoy as a genuine pan-Andean nativist movement and a major episode of religious resistance.

A second, developed by later historians working directly through the visitation papers, holds that the movement was smaller and more local than the sources claim and that its coherence was largely manufactured by the men who investigated it, in the way inquisitions habitually manufacture the conspiracies they look for. A third position accepts a real movement while treating the reported doctrines as filtered through what the interrogators expected to hear.

Chocne himself was taken to Cuzco and made to renounce his teaching. After that the record on him effectively stops. What survives of him is therefore a shape cut out of a prosecution file. The honest description of the record is that it tells a reader more about Albornoz and his ambitions than it does about Chocne and his.