Encyclopedia of the Incas

Textiles enjoyed special stature in Inca society. The acquisition of cloth, along
with its distribution by the Inca elite, reinforced and catalyzed the empire’s
political institutions. Weavings also communicated Andean histories. The
designs woven in belts, tunics, and shawls not only represented incidents in
household life, but they also recorded political status and duties, provided
descriptions of a year’s critical events, and chronicled significant episodes of
community and imperial pasts. Noblewomen and commoners inscribed
perspectives on history as they wove garments for household and empire.
Women were also actively engaged in agriculture. They classified seeds,
tubers, and grains, and then selected which to set aside for immediate
consumption and which to plant. The affinity between women and agrarian labor
was expressed in the gendered alignment of the cosmos: a sacred bond joined
women with the divine forces of fertility— Pachamama (Mother Earth) and her
daughters, Maize, Potatoes, and other Andean crops. Women prayed and sang to
Pachamama when they first planted seeds in the earth; at harvest time, women
ceremonially lauded the “mothers” of crops for their powers to create foods in
abundance.
Sacred practices, framed in the language of gender parallelism, heightened the
experience of living in gender-specific, but mutually enhancing, worlds.
Community-wide, religious institutions, devoted to like-gendered divinities,
anchored parallelism in the heavens and in the earth. In some ayllus, women’s
organizations were dedicated to “corn mothers,” here designated the “sisters” of
male deities; other religious groups paid homage to the moon or to bodies of
water, also female in character and structure. Mothers passed down ritual
clothing and instruments of worship to their daughters. In addition, some deities
were venerated by women from neighboring communities, building alliances
that spanned ayllu borders.
Sexual parallelism, which ordered relations both within and among
communities, also grounded imperial political/religious structures. The Inca
cosmos was one of parallel hierarchies, with Inca divinities—Sun and Moon—
standing above representatives of lower social orders. Like Inca kings, Inca
queens (Coyas), as “daughters “of the Moon, were imbued with holiness; like
Inca kings, Inca queens remained the objects of religious devotion after death.
Under the queen’s dominion, women’s religious groups were transformed into
institutions of an imperial state. The Coya, with independent rights to land and
tribute, could bind other women to her debt in a web of political obligation and