The Andes

The Andes, the high mountain spine of South America and its adjacent coast, running through Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, developed a religious culture shaped, more than almost any other, by altitude and landscape. Long before the Inca, Andean peoples venerated the mountains themselves: the great peaks were apus, powerful living deities and ancestors who controlled weather, water, and fertility, and to whom offerings, including, at the highest and most sacred summits, human sacrifices, the capacocha, whose frozen remains have been recovered by archaeologists, were made. The whole landscape was sacred and alive, its springs, caves, rocks, and shrines (huacas) linked in ritual lines (ceques) radiating from the Inca capital of Cusco.

Over this ancient substratum the Inca built an imperial state religion centred on the sun god Inti, from whom the ruling Sapa Inca claimed descent, and on the creator Viracocha and the earth mother Pachamama, the last of whom, along with the mountain apus, is still honoured across the Andes today. Andean religion had no writing (records were kept on the knotted-cord quipu) and centred on reciprocity between humans, the ancestors, the earth, and the mountains. Though the Spanish conquest imposed Catholicism, the old worship persisted in fused form, and the veneration of Pachamama and the sacred mountains remains a living current of Andean spirituality.

Andean religion is known in unusual detail, and the detail exists because the colonial church set out to eradicate it and kept notes.

The extirpation of idolatry campaigns in the Peruvian viceroyalty sent inspectors through the highlands to identify shrines, mummified ancestors and the specialists who served them, and to record what was found before destroying it. The resulting files describe the huacas of particular valleys, the offerings made to them and the calendar they were made on, at a level of local specificity that no devotional literature would have produced.

Alongside them sit the chroniclers. Spanish accounts of Inca religion were written by soldiers, officials and clergy; Garcilaso de la Vega, of Inca and Spanish parentage, wrote to defend the dignity of his mother's people; Guaman Poma produced a long illustrated letter to the Spanish king denouncing colonial rule from an Andean point of view. The ceque system of ritual lines radiating from Cusco is known chiefly through a seventeenth-century Jesuit account.

Every one of these witnesses is writing after the conquest and inside its arguments.

The Inca administration's own records are the missing piece. Khipu, the knotted cord device used for accounting and possibly for more, is not read. Whether any khipu encodes narrative rather than number is an open question, and if it does, the Andes hold the only unread archive of a state religion in this atlas.