In major ceremonies, the mummies of the deceased rulers and their wives were
brought forth on litters and arrayed by rank in Cuzco’s main plaza. According to
an eyewitness, Pedro Sancho, Francisco Pizarro’s secretary, if no mummy had
been preserved (e.g., Manco Capac), a clay, plaster, or stone persona stood in,
which could incorporate their hair and nail clippings. The conquistador Pedro
Pizarro, a relation of Francisco Pizarro, noted that the mummies were carefully
tended by pairs of male and female attendants, who served as their voices for
public pronouncements. The mummies were typically kept in state in one of
their several manors. Spanish eyewitnesses reported, for example, that Huayna
Capac was comfortably seated in his urban residence facing the main plaza in
Cuzco. When two royal mummies were burned by the Spaniards (Viracocha)
and Incas (Topa Inca Yupanqui), their followers gathered the ashes in jars and
venerated them as if they were still living.
Further Reading
Cobo, Bernabé. Inca Religion and Customs, Translated and edited by Roland Hamilton. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1990 [1653].
MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Molina, Cristóbal de. Account of the Fables and Rites of the Incas. Translated and edited by Brian S. Bauer,
Vania Smith-Oka, and Gabriel E. Cantarutti. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011 [1575].
■TERENCE N. D’ALTROY