lavishly decorated with gold. In the main square, the Inca
emperor himself was enthroned during festivals. From that
square it was possible to see the sun columns on the hills east
and west, markers of the solstices. The mummified figures
of past emperors were seated, robed in gold, around the tem-
ple of the Sun, with their wives between them. The temple
was called the Place of Gold and was so arranged that sunrise
fell on a gold-sheathed solar disk and filled the whole temple
with reflected light. On festival days the mummies were pa-
raded around the city, preceded by the emperor on a palan-
quin, honored as if he were a god. Tradition held that the
emperor married his sister, who represented the moon, but
a large number of “virgins of the Sun” were available to him,
so that he had many descendants. These were the “children
of the Sun,” the rulers of the bureaucracy, who paid no taxes.
Others of the virgins were used for sacrifice or kept in seclu-
sion, weaving or making brew.
The temple also housed the gods of conquered peoples,
who were allowed to visit their gods and pay homage to
them, although there was a strong missionary pressure on
them to honor the sun god. By practicing efficiency and
good military discipline, the Inca established an empire that
stretched from Ecuador to northern Chile and that had just
reached its height at the time of the Spanish conquest.
In the last century of the empire one of the Inca, by the
name of Pachacuti, introduced a new high god, Viracocha,
as creator. The legend relates that Pachacuti had a vision that
prompted this religious revolution. He came to believe that
the sun worked too hard on his daily journey to have created
the universe. Viracocha may have been a local god from an-
other tribe. Another possibility is that the new god was more
acceptable to some of the conquered people, such as the
Chimú of the coast, who worshiped the moon and the sea.
It is recorded that they complained, “The sun is dangerous
to us.” A gold statue of the new deity was placed in the Sun’s
temple as an addition to its other resplendent embellish-
ments.
Great Inca festivals consisted of dances, processions,
prayers, and sacrifices, usually of llamas and guinea pigs but
sometimes of human beings. The four chief festivals were
those of the solstices and the equinoxes, the most important
of which was the winter solstice. On this day, considered
New Year’s Day, all fires were relit by a piece of cotton kin-
dled by the sun’s rays. The relit fire was used for the sacrifices
and then handed over to the Virgins of the Sun to be guarded
until the next year. If the day was cloudy, the fire had to be
kindled by friction and there was great anxiety among the
people. At the summer solstice, the population gathered in
the central square clothed in feathers and golden robes to
watch the Inca emperor pour a libation to the Sun from a
golden vase.
The priesthood, like all the other members of Inca soci-
ety, were organized in a strict hierarchy. Many were engaged
in divination and in curing the sick. They divined by reading
the intestines of llamas and the flight of birds. To cure the
sick, they engaged in rites of exorcism. Public confessions
were an important part of religious life. Anyone who was
malformed or had lost children was considered to have
sinned against the Sun and to have disobeyed the Inca em-
peror. It was necessary for the sinner to confess; he would
then be given a penance by the priest and be purified in run-
ning water. Anyone who did not confess was believed to be
destined for a place deep in the earth where there were only
stones for food. Those who confessed, as well as those who
had led blameless lives, were promised a happy afterlife in
the Sun’s heaven. The Children of the Sun and the Inca em-
peror himself were, as a matter of course, believed to live with
the Sun forever.SEE ALSO Amaterasu O ̄mikami; Avesta; Light and Darkness;
Mithraism; Saura Hinduism; Sol Invictus; Winter Solstice
Songs.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Since there are few books devoted entirely to the religious and
mythological aspects of the sun, most of the material must
be extracted from religious writings, encyclopedias, and his-
tories of the religion of the different regions. A highly re-
spected source for ancient Rome is Franz Altheim’s History
of Roman Religion (New York, 1938). Of the many works on
Egyptian religion, a good summary is Ann Rosalie David’s
The Ancient Egyptians (London, 1982). The Dictionnaire des
antiquités grecques et romaines, vol. 4, edited by Charles
Daremberg and Edmond Saglio (Paris, 1911) contains an ar-
ticle “Sol” by Franz Cumont, which treats both Greek and
Roman sun worship with a wealth of detail. A comprehensive
picture of the religion of Britain and Ireland can be found
in Jan de Vries’s Keltische Religion (Stuttgart, 1961). An essay
called “The Sun and Sun Worship,” in Patterns in Compara-
tive Religion by Mircea Eliade (New York, 1958), provides
many insights into various aspects of the subject. The article
“Christmas,” in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed-
ited by James Hastings, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1910), details the
many theories on the origin of the solstice festivals. A very
lengthy chapter on the sun in James G. Frazer’s The Worship
of Nature (London, 1926) is packed with data from primitive
sources and makes a point of criticizing the pansolism of the
nineteenth century. In The Chariot of the Sun (New York,
1969) Peter Gelling and Hilda R. Ellis Davidson have pro-
duced a useful account of sun worship in the Bronze Age in
northern Europe. Man and the Sun (New York, 1962) by the
archaeologist and historian Jacquetta Hawkes is an accurate
and sensitive treatment of sun worship in the ancient world
and the Americas. Unfortunately, it does not contain a bibli-
ography or notes. Jean Herbert, in Shinto ̄ (London, 1967),
presents a worthy effort to make the Japanese cult available
to the Western world. It contains many translations of an-
cient literature and more recent Japanese commentaries. In
The Religions of the American Indians (Berkeley, 1979), A ̊ke
Hultkrantz gives a concise but thorough summary of the be-
liefs of the American Indians, both north and south. A work
on astroarchaeology, In Search of Ancient Astronomies, edited
by Edwin C. Krupp (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), treats,
among others, the work of Atkinson, Hawkins, and Thom
on the megaliths of the British Isles. The most recent and ful-SUN 8843