Encyclopedia of the Incas

Therefore, by subsuming all of the major powers of nature, Inti and his two alter
egos, Viracocha and Illapa, embodied and expressed the power of Tahuantinsuyu
and provided the ideological support required by the divine monarchy.
Other celestial deities in the state religious pantheon with significant political
connotations were Mama Quilla (Mother Moon) and Chascaquyllor (Shaggy
Star). Mama Quilla, the sister-wife of Inti and patroness of the Coya, the main
wife of the Inca king, presided over the female universe. The Incas had a special
regard for Mama Quilla because Cuzco’s ceremonial calendar was essentially
based on lunar months. Indeed, both the Coricancha and a Moon temple on the
Island of Coati, part of the great Titicaca oracle (see Oracles), boasted two large
gold and silver anthropomorphic images of the Moon. Chascaquyllor, the planet
Venus in its manifestation as Morning Star, which fades at dawn when the Sun
rises, was associated with the curacas or ethnic lords. According to a myth
related to the shrine of Titicaca, when the Sun rose for the first time from the
sacred rock of Titicala it defeated and overshadowed the Morning Star, whose
light had until then lit the world. It is not hard to see in this account a metaphor
of the supremacy the Inca, the son of the Sun, had over the ethnic lords, and a
eulogy of the civilizing mission of Tahuantinsuyu. The Incas also worshipped
the Pleiades, which were known as Collca (storehouse) and believed to be
protectors of the crops, as well as a group of stars in the Lyra constellation called
Urcuchillay, envisaged as a multicolored llama and master of the herds (see
Astronomy).
But beyond the official cult of the major celestial and marine gods of the state
religion, the daily social and religious life of Incas and other contemporary
Andean peoples focused on the worship of sacred entities related to terrestrial
landscape features, called huacas. Every family, social group, community, and
ethnic group had a direct and privileged relationship with a specific huaca,
which was considered their tutelary and ancestral divinity. A huaca could be a
specific landscape feature, such as a rock, a spring, a mountaintop, or a cave, or
an object such as an upright stone, statue, or mummy, believed to be infused
with a life force known as camaquen. The possession of this force manifested
itself through the capacity these supernatural entities had to communicate with
humans. In fact, in order to be a huaca, these entities had to have the power of
“speech,” which materialized essentially in the sounds made by animals, music,
or nature, such as thunder, bubbling water, or the cracking of ice. These sounds
were conceived as a supernatural language that only certain specialists, in altered