Yacana

Yacana is the largest of the Andean dark cloud constellations, a llama-shaped absence lying along the Milky Way with two bright stars in Centaurus, Alpha and Beta, as its eyes. A smaller dark form beside it is read as its offspring, and it is nursing.

The Huarochiri manuscript is the reason so much of this is recoverable. Compiled around 1600 at the direction of a priest engaged in extirpating idolatry, it is the only substantial account of Andean religion written in Quechua, and it preserves what its informants said rather than what its compiler thought of it. It reports that Yacana comes down at midnight, when nobody sees, and drinks from a spring, and that the water would otherwise flood the world. It adds that a man on whom Yacana descends will be fortunate, and that when it appears black it is a good sign.

The animal in the sky and the animal on the ground are the same subject. The llama was the only large domestic animal the Andes had, the principal sacrifice, the pack animal and the source of wool, and its position at the centre of the sky is proportionate to its position at the centre of everything else.

The order in which Yacana and the other dark animals rise through the year is the herding and planting calendar.

Colonial observers did record the dark constellations. Cobo, Polo de Ondegardo and others noted that the native people saw figures in the black patches of the Milky Way and named them, and some listed the animals. What none of them recorded was that this was a system.

That is the difference between an observation and an understanding. The chroniclers treated the black shapes as one more superstition to be catalogued alongside the worship of stones, and having noted it they moved on. Nobody asked what order the animals rose in, or what the order was for, and so the calendrical function went unrecorded for three and a half centuries.

It was recovered by fieldwork rather than from documents. Gary Urton's work in the community of Misminay, near Cusco, in the 1970s established that the dark constellations were still recognised, still named, still ordered in a fixed sequence, and still used, and that the sequence corresponded to the agricultural and herding year. The Huarochiri material could then be read as describing a working system rather than an isolated belief.

This is a general lesson about the colonial record and it applies well beyond the Andes. A source can be accurate and still useless, if the person writing it did not know what question to ask. The gap here was not the facts but the structure holding them together.