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■MICHAEL A. MALPASS
ISLANDS OF THE SUN AND THE MOON
According to an Inca origin myth, the Sun emerged from a sacred rock on the
Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca to illuminate the world. The nearby Island of
the Moon housed a shrine to Quilla, the Moon goddess. On the Islands of the
Sun and Moon the Incas embarked on one of the most ambitious building
schemes and reorganizations of sacred geography ever undertaken in
Tahuantinsuyu, the Inca Empire—converting a mythical place of origin into a
pilgrimage shrine. So revered was the shrine that it ranked among the empire’s
most sacred, after Cuzco’s holy of holies, the Coricancha Sun temple and the
pilgrimage center and oracle of Pachacamac, on Peru’s central coast.
The sacred rock is a sandstone outcrop measuring 5.5 meters (18 feet) in
height and 80 meters (260 feet) in length. The rock, according to chroniclers,
was once covered in gold sheet on the plaza-facing side and fine cloth on the
side overlooking the lake. Excavations revealed the remains of a stone-lined
canal leading from the sacred rock across the plaza, probably to drain the
libations that the chronicler Bernabé Cobo says were poured into a basin in
front of the rock. Constructions on the Island of the Sun included a Sun temple,
an Acllahuasi, and storerooms. The temple of Iñak Uyu on the Island of the
Moon apparently housed the statue of Quilla, the Moon goddess that Cobo
described as made of “gold from the waist up and silver from the waist down.”