Encyclopedia of the Incas

right hand and a war club in his left one. His shining garments discharged
lightning when he prepared to hurl his sling, and the cracking of his sling created
claps of thunder. Rain was believed to be the water he drew from the heavenly
river or Milky Way. Cobo also says that Inca Pachacuti was devoted to Inti
Illapa, and had a shrine built in his honor in the Cuzco precinct of Totocachi.
There he placed a golden statue of the god atop a litter also made out of gold,
and he always carried it with him during military campaigns as his protective
deity. The Inca frequently made human sacrifices to this image, so that the god
would keep the king strong and ensure the power of the empire.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources give varying accounts of Inca oral
traditions, in which the same mythical deed is indistinctly ascribed to either the
Sun or Viracocha. Such is the case of the famed vision that prince Inca
Yupanqui, the future ruler Pachacuti, had at the spring of Susurpuquio, prior to
the decisive victory over the Chancas, which marked the beginning of Inca
imperial expansion (see Chronology, Inca; Conquests). In the accounts of
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Cristóbal de Molina, the god that appeared
before Pachacuti is the Sun, whereas Juan de Betanzos notes it was Viracocha.
Betanzos himself pointed out this (apparent) contradiction, remarking that the
Inca indistinctly ascribed the nature of Creator sometimes to the Sun and
sometimes to Viracocha.
One possible explanation is found in the 1608 Quechua dictionary of the Jesuit
priest Diego González Holguín that defines Viracocha, as an epithet of the Sun
god, suggesting that Inti and Viracocha were a single deity. This, along with the
fact that the Thunder god was often called Inti Illapa (i.e., Thunder of the Sun),
leads to the conclusion that the Incas in fact conceived of Inti, Viracocha, and
Illapa not as three different entities, but as different aspects of a single solar deity
that through its various manifestations ensured the existence of humanity.
Indeed, many prayers in the state religion began precisely with a joint invocation
to the Sun-Viracocha-Thunder triad, which the faithful addressed with a specific
ritual veneration not used with any other deity.
Thus, the evidence suggests that the great religious reformation begun by
Pachacuti and continued by his son Topa Inca Yupanqui consisted of the
establishment of a highly institutionalized and theologically complex religion
that focused on a multifaceted Sun god. To enhance the Sun’s glory, prestige,
and acceptance by conquered peoples, Inti assumed the powers and attributes of
a series of ancient regional Andean deities—Huari, Tunupa, Llibiac, and
Catequil—related to agriculture, water, and meteorological phenomena.