Mama Killa

Mama Killa, Mother Moon, is the Inca goddess of the moon, wife and sister of the sun Inti, and the keeper of the calendar: the Inca year was reckoned by her months, and the great state festivals were timed by her. Women, marriage and childbirth were her concern, and priestesses served her. The Spanish chroniclers report that her image in the Coricancha, the golden temple at Cusco, was made of silver as Inti's was of gold, and that the mummified bodies of dead Inca queens were kept in her precinct.

A lunar eclipse was understood as a mountain lion or a great serpent attacking the moon-goddess, and people responded by making as much noise as they could, shouting, sounding instruments, and making dogs howl, to frighten the animal away and save her. Her marks are still read in the face of the moon in some Andean communities, where the moon keeps her feminine and calendrical associations, a strand of belief that persisted through and beneath Christianization.

Mama Killa's temple household at the Coricancha was staffed and maintained by an elaborate state institution of consecrated women, the aclla, chosen as girls from across the empire for exceptional beauty, skill or lineage and raised from a young age in dedicated residences called acllahuasi under the supervision of senior women known as mamacona.

While service to the sun god Inti absorbed a significant share of these women's textile and ceremonial labour, chroniclers describe distinct groups and grades of aclla whose service and eventual disposition, some became attendants dedicated permanently to temple service, others were given by the Sapa Inca in marriage to reward loyal nobles or allied local lords, and some were selected for sacrifice in state ceremonies, were organized by rank and by the deity or purpose to which they were assigned, with the moon goddess's own household representing one distinct strand of this larger system alongside Inti's. The mamacona who supervised the younger aclla held real institutional authority within this female religious hierarchy, training the chosen women in weaving fine cloth, brewing chicha for state ceremonial use, and maintaining ritual purity, functions that placed genuine administrative and religious responsibility for a substantial share of state ceremonial life in the hands of a structured corps of women operating largely apart from, though ultimately subordinate to, the male priesthood and the Sapa Inca himself. This institution gives concrete social and political shape to Mama Killa's own association with women, marriage and childbirth, since the very apparatus that served her cult was itself an entire specialized female hierarchy embedded in the administrative structure of the Inca state.