B
BATTLES, RITUAL
While all-out warfare seems to have been a fact of life in pre-Inca and Inca
times throughout the Andes, there were also occasions when it was deemed
appropriate for groups to engage in what are commonly referred to as ritual
battles. The term used for such affairs in Colonial sources is tinkuy, which may
be glossed as “coming together,” such as the confluences of rivers, although it
usually connotes unions that occur in the form of clashes or violent encounters.
Tinkuys are normally thought to lead to a synthesis—the integration, or mixing
of substances or essences of the converging entities. Such encounters might
include, for example, two armies meeting in battle (and thereby mixing their
blood), two rivers meeting and joining their waters, or a man and a woman
coming together in intimate, sexual contact, leading to the mixing of the
essences of the two individuals in reproduction. Thus, tinkuy referred not only to
two entities coming together but, in the act of doing so, of creating a unity of the
beings or essences of the two parties so joined.