and space. Evidence of this prolific quality struck and clearly
troubled Hernando de Santillán. He explained it to himself
and his imagined readership in the following way: “The
Devil, who speaks through them [the huacas], makes them
believe that they [the huacas] have children,” Santillán wrote.
“And thus,” he continued,
they [native Andeans] built new houses for them, con-
ceived of new forms of worship to the huacas from
whom they believed themselves descended, and under-
stood them all to be gods. Some they worshipped as
men, others as women, and they assigned devotions to
each one according to a kind of need: they went to some
in order to make it rain, to others so that their crops
would grow and mature, and to [still] others to ensure
that women could become pregnant; and so it went for
all other things. What happened with so much multi-
plication is that soon almost every thing had its huaca.
And through the huacas the Devil had them [the Indi-
ans] so thoroughly deceived that herein lies the chief
obstacle in that land to lodging the faith firmly among
native peoples... to make them understand the de-
ception and vanity of it all [reverence for these huacas].
(Santillán, [1563] 1968, pp. 111–112)Other Spanish commentators reported similarly upon the
Andean huacas’ ability to enjoy multiple selves, propagate be-
yond original territories, take over new specializations, and
win local loyalties by making themselves indispensable. San-
tillán himself noted the findings of his contemporary and fel-
low lawyer Juan Polo de Ondegardo, who claimed in 1561
to know of more than four hundred temples [adoratorios]
within one and a half leagues of Cuzco at which offerings
were actively made (Santillán, [1563] 1968, p. 112 and n.
1). Expressions of alarm were often followed by attributions
of diabolic authorship seen in Santillán’s account. More than
a decade later, for instance, the Jesuit José de Acosta claimed
to have received a priest’s report in Chuquisaca (today Sucre,
Bolivia) about a huaca named Tangatanga, whom that re-
gion’s Indians believed represented three divine identities in
one and one in three, like the Christian holy Trinity. “When
the priest shared his astonishment at this,” Acosta wrote,
I believe I told him that the Devil always stole as much
he could from the Truth to fuel his lies and deceits, and
that he did so with that infernal and obstinate pride
with which he always yearns to be like God (Acosta,
[1590] 1962, p. 268).
Writing almost two decades later, El Inca Garcilaso de
la Vega went to some trouble to point out the fragility of the
evidence upon which Acosta relied. But what stands out in-
stead is his conviction that this understanding of an Andean
divinity was a “new invention” of the Indians of Chuquisaca
in colonial times, “constructed after they had heard of the
Trinity and of the unity of Our Lord God” (Garcilaso de la
Vega, [1609] 1985, p. 54). While Garcilaso disapproves of
what he depicts as a blatant effort to impress Spaniards and
gain from a supposed resemblance, he raises the distinct pos-
sibility that such colonial “inventions” were commonplace
among native Andeans, and without the cunning he implies.
Quite convinced of the devil’s wiles, but much closer to
the ground of an early colonial local religiosity than either
Acosta or Garcilaso, were the Augustinian friars stationed in
Huamachuco in the northern Andes in the 1550s. They met
and attempted to destroy a number of provincial huacas in
what had clearly been a bustling pre-Hispanic religious land-
scape but found themselves particularly embedded within
the realm of a divinity named Catequil. As with Pachacámac
on the central coast, the oracular fame of Catequil had been
fanned by close association with the Inca dynasty and, in his
case, with Huayna Capac. Despite the fact that this Inca’s
son, Atahuallpa, had turned against this huaca after unfavor-
able news and attempted his destruction, Catequil’s essence
in a large hill and high rocky cliffs proved impossible to ex-
tinguish. Because the children or expressions of Catequil had
already begun to spread, sometimes with resettled people and
as part of Incan political policy in the time of Huayna Capac,
he had other ways to endure (Topic et al., 2002, p. 326).
What is more, his pattern of cultic diffusion appears only to
have continued as Catequil’s tangible “pieces,” or children,
were spread by mobilizing devotees. A perplexed Fray Juan
de San Pedro, writing on behalf of the divinity’s newest ene-
mies, the Augustinians, claimed to have discovered some
three hundred of Catequil’s “sons” arrayed through various
towns and smaller settlements in the region. Most were par-
ticularly beautiful stones that seemed easy enough to confis-
cate and grind into dust, but in other ways Catequil seemed
to be everywhere at once. San Pedro believed that this multi-
plication of “idols” had continued “after the arrival of
the Spaniards in the land” (San Pedro, [1560] 1992,
pp. 179–180).
As the words of these post-Pizarran commentators ac-
knowledged, in one way or another huacas’ cults were various
and overlapping. While one divine being might remain root-
ed in a precise physical landscape and connected to a certain
association and responsibility (often as a founding ancestor),
others developed multiple roles and personalities that al-
lowed them to transcend local beginnings and associations.
In the cases of Pachacámac and Catequil, translocal signifi-
cance and power were augmented by their association with
members of the Inca line. Yet as the unparalleled narrative
evidence collected in the late sixteenth- and early seven-
teenth-century province of Huarochirí would prove in the
case of the cult of Pariacaca, not every important regional
huaca with multiple identities and a vibrant supporting cast
of mythohistoric “relatives” who had been important in the
times of Tawantinsuyu was so actively promoted by the Incas
(Taylor, ed., 1987; Salomon and Urioste, eds., 1991). In
fact, Pariacaca can stand as a most famous representative for
legions of other huacas not only in his region but across the
Andes. While regionally powerful, these ancestral divinities
were not so completely adopted (or rejected) by the Incas.
Their intricate regional networks and transforming roles and
significance for indigenous people continued deep into colo-
nial times, especially in rural areas, where they were investi-
gated and harassed sporadically by inspectors of native Ande-8608 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE COLONIAL ANDES