Cristóbal de Molina

The Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los Incas exists because a bishop wanted an operational description of what his clergy were up against. Written around 1575 for Sebastián de Lartaún, it is the closest thing there is to a systematic account of the Inca ceremonial year: the great festivals in their months, the Situa purification with its running of torches and its washing in the rivers, the Capac Raymi initiation of young men of the ruling lineages, the offerings sent out along the shrine lines from Cuzco, and the capacocha, in which children were taken from the provinces to the capital and then returned to high places to be given.

Molina had been in Cuzco a long time, preached in Quechua, and questioned men old enough to have taken part before 1532. He records prayers in Quechua rather than only in Spanish paraphrase, which is unusual and valuable, because the Spanish paraphrases of the period habitually reshape the theology. The purpose was suppression. Nothing in the text pretends otherwise. But a hostile witness who takes the trouble to get the details right is more use than a sympathetic one who does not, and the archaeological work on the shrine lines around Cuzco has repeatedly found his descriptions to be usable.

What sets the Relación apart from most of its contemporaries is that Molina wrote down Quechua. The prayers he records were spoken at the great festivals, and having them in the language they were said in lets modern scholars examine their form, their address to the creator and the ancestors, and their vocabulary, rather than reading a Spanish priest's summary of what he thought they meant. Comparison with the Huarochirí Manuscript, the other major early Quechua religious text, is possible only because both exist. It also lets the reader see where Molina's Spanish gloss quietly does theological work on the Quechua next to it.

The survival of the text is precarious. There is one manuscript copy, in Madrid, made after his death; his other writings, including what appears to have been a longer historical work, are lost. So the Andean ceremonial year rests on a single copy of one report by one priest, which is worth remembering whenever an account of Inca religion presents the calendar with confidence. Molina's value is not that he was neutral, because he was not, but that he was close, competent in the language, and interested in accuracy for reasons of his own. A reader meeting Inca religion for the first time should know that its ceremonial year is largely one man's report, and that the confidence with which the calendar is usually presented is borrowed from him rather than independently established.