I have just woken after another cold night in the van. I could have stayed in a warm hotel in the nearby city of Cuzco but I wanted to watch the pre-dawn skies and then the sunrise from the ancient power place of Sacsayhuaman. Sitting shivering in the van, I feel a warming sense of brotherhood with the groups of archaic astronomers who must have come to this same place over thousands of years. Astronomy, whether ancient or modern, is mostly a night-time occupation. And pre-dawn is the time to observe what astronomers call the heliacal rise of stars.

The archaeoastronomer, William Sullivan, defines this term: "At most latitudes, including the southern Andes, there are stars that, because they are too close to the sun (as viewed from the earth), are not visible at night for a certain portion of the year. After clearing the reach of the sun’s brilliance, each star will make its first appearance for a brief instant before sunrise just as the gathering light of dawn extinguishes its visibility. On successive mornings such a star will rise earlier, and linger longer in the predawn sky. The first day of reappearance of such a star is called its date of heliacal rise."

Unlike Sullivan, I am not an expert regarding the skies above the Andes. I would not be observing any particular stars nor making complex calculations of celestial motions. My reason for coming to the hill-top of Sacsayhuaman was to engage in my personal practice of aligning myself with the spirit of a place and a culture that I would soon write about. The hill of Sacsayhuaman, rising directly from the Inca town of Cuzco, seemed a good place to contemplate the stunning pageant that had been the Inca civilization.

At the time of Columbus’ landfall on the New World, the greatest empire on earth was that of the Inca. Called Tawantinsuyu or ‘Land of the Four Quarters,’ it spanned more than 4300 miles along the mountains and coastal deserts of central South America. The vast empire stretched from central Chile to present Ecuador-Colombia border and included most of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina (this is a land area equal to the entire portion of the United States from Maine to Florida east of the Appalachians). It exceeded in size any medieval or contemporary European nation and equaled the longitudinal expanse of the Roman empire. Yet for all its greatness, Tawantinsuyu existed for barely a century.

Road from Aguas Calientes up to Machu Picchu, Peru

The origins of the Inca are shrouded in mystery and mythology. According to their own mythology, the Inca began when Manco Capac and his sister, Mama Occlo, rose out of Lake Titicaca, having been created by the Sun and the Moon as divine founders of a chosen people. Manco Capac and his sister then went off with a golden rod to find a suitable location to found a great city. Through a series of adventures, geomantic resonances, and astronomical correspondences, the site of Cuzco was chosen.

Archaeological research, on the other hand, indicates that the pre-imperial Inca were simply one of a number of petty tribes in the south central region of Peru. From roughly 1200 AD to the early 1400’s, the Inca engaged in numerous battles with local rivals, but never achieved supremacy over any of them. Around 1438, however, the Inca emperor Viracocha and his son, Pachakuti, defeated a powerful rival, the Chankas. From this time the empire building era of the Inca began. Other rival tribes around the Cuzco area were soon united and campaigns were launched into the Titicaca basin and beyond. During the ensuing reigns of the emperors Pachakuti, and Topa Inca the Inca armies expanded the frontiers of Tawantinsuyu from southern Columbia to central Chile.

In the few short years before their overthrow by the Spanish in 1532, the Inca developed one of the largest and most sophisticated empires in the entire preindustrial world. (In discussing Inca achievements, however, it is important to state that they were not the singular invention of a few inspired emperors but rather the ultimate elaboration of numerous pan-Andean institutions.) The Inca accomplished their phenomenal growth through a mixture of diplomacy and warfare, and a sociopolitical management system based on highly effective taxation and the dependable provision of goods and services to the peoples of their realm.

Machu Picchu

As the Inca began to expand their territories, the first step was to seek alliances with tribes upon the frontiers. Copious gifts of textiles, exotic products from distant regions, and wives to add blood ties to the alliances were offered to the chiefs of these tribes. Quite frequently these gifts were readily accepted (certainly the intimidating specter of the powerful Inca armies assisted in this process), but if certain tribes proved recalcitrant, the Inca simply overwhelmed them with superior military power.

In either case, the tribes were then incorporated into larger administrative units and political provinces. This strategy left Tawantinsuyu with more than 80 political provinces, each with different ethnic and linguistic characteristics. To address these regional differences the Inca imposed there own tongue, Quechua, as the language of the realm and the medium of governmental communication. Additionally, the Inca frequently moved entire populations around their realm, putting loyal groups into troublesome areas, and transferring recalcitrant tribes to loyal areas. These wholesale transfers of people were also used to introduce weavers and farmers, stone workers and artisans into areas where these skills were needed.

Inca statecraft, a system of truly extraordinary efficiency, was founded upon the ancient, panAndean concept of reciprocity. Goods and services moved from the local area to regional and state warehouses and were then redistributed back to the populace in several important ways. The state economy was based, not on currency systems, but on extracting taxes in the form of labor. There were three primary forms to this taxation: agricultural levies on local community-managed lands; a labor service required of able-bodied males that provided for monumental construction projects and military campaigns; and the textile production required of women, children and older men. The goods and services gathered in these ways were then divided into three shares. The first third went to support Inti (the Sun god), other gods in the state pantheon, and a wide variety of ceremonial activities. The second portion went to support the Inca emperor and the construction and military projects he initiated. The third portion was redistributed to the common people in the form of food, textiles, lavish festivals, and military protection.

Machu Picchu

Detail of stone work at Machu Picchu

The most visible, and remaining, examples of Inca genius are to be found in their monumental construction projects: in the form of roads, agricultural terraces, and administrative and ceremonial structures. The vast empire was united by an extensive and superbly efficient highway system. Two parallel highways, one along the coast and the other in the high mountains, ran north-south from one end of the empire to the other. Between these two major highways ran dozens of east-west roads linking the coasts, mountains, and jungles. Altogether there were more than 30,000 kilometers of these roads, the majority of which were beautifully paved, well drained, and equipped with storage houses, travelers lodges, and military posts. The produce of the empire moved efficiently along these roads, transported by hardy llamas strung together in caravans of a thousand or more animals. Furthermore, along the roads sped the most rapid communication system ever developed in the preindustrial world; in the form of a constant movement of fleet-footed runners.

To feed the people in their swiftly growing empire, the Inca terraced great areas of mountain land, transported rich soils to the terraces, employed highly sophisticated irrigation systems, and experimented with a variety of crops. These monumental landscaping projects, called andenes in the Quechua language, so impressed the colonial Spanish that they named the Andes mountains after them (recent satellite photography has shown that these Inca terraces covered more land than is currently cultivated in the central Andean nations).

Inca terraces at pre-Inca site of Ollantaytambo

In their administrative and even more so, their ceremonial centers, the Inca most clearly displayed their brilliance with design and construction. Great surviving centers such as Pisac, Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu, and Cuzco, the Inca capital, are well known examples. In these places the Inca fashioned monumental architecture equal in beauty to any culture of the old world. Massive, multi-sided blocks were precisely fitted together in interlocking patterns in order to withstand the disastrous effects of earth quakes (in an earthquake, the stones on Inca terrace walls lock together, allowing the entire wall to simultaneously flex and cohere). Both secular and sacred architecture had spacious windows, niches for idols, and other purely artistic sculptural elaborations. Splashing fountains abounded and masterpieces of hydraulic engineering brought fresh water into buildings, while other channels removed wastes.

The imperial city Cuzco, meaning ‘navel of the earth,’ was laid out in the form of a puma, the animal that symbolized the Inca dynasty. The belly of the puma was the main plaza, the river Tullumayo formed its spine, and the hill of Sacsayhuaman its head. According to one early Spanish chronicler, the Inca emperor Pachakuti, who had made a pilgrimage to the ancient holy city of Tiahuanaco, sought to emulate the building perfection he had seen there in the construction of Cuzco’s temples. Cuzco, however, was not really a city in the European sense of the word. Rather it was an enormous sacred artifact, the dwelling place of the families of the Inca nobility (common people were not allowed entrance to the ceremonial nexus), and the center of the Inca cosmos.

In Cuzco too, was the most important temple in the Inca empire, the Coricancha (meaning literally, "the corral of gold"). Dedicated primarily to Viracocha, the creator god, and Inti, the Sun god, the Coricancha also had subsidiary shrines to the Moon, Venus, the Pleiades, and various weather deities. Additionally there were a large number of religious icons of conquered peoples which had been brought to Cuzco, partly in homage and partly as hostage. Reports by the first Spanish who entered Cuzco tell that ceremonies were conducted around the clock at the Coricancha and that its opulence was fabulous beyond belief. The wonderfully carved granite walls of the temple were covered with more than 700 sheets of pure gold, weighing around two kilograms each; the spacious courtyard was filled with life-size sculptures of animals and a field of corn, all fashioned from pure gold; the floors of the temple were themselves covered in solid gold; and facing the rising sun was a massive golden image of the sun encrusted with emeralds and other precious stones. (All of this golden artwork was quickly stolen and melted down by the Spaniards, who then built a church of Santo Domingo atop the temple.)

Church of Santo Domingo on foundations
of Inca Coricancha temple

The Coricancha (sometimes spelled Qoricancha) was also the centerpiece of a vast astronomical observatory and calendrical device for precisely calculating precessional movement. Emanating from the temple were forty lines called seques, running arrow-straight for hundreds of miles to significant celestial points on the horizon. Four of these seques represented the four intercardinal roads to the four quarters of Tawantinsuyu, others pointed to the equinox and solstice points, and still others to the heliacal rise positions of different stars and constellations highly important to the Inca.

Given the above discussed achievements of the Inca - in conquest, empire building, architecture, agriculture, and astronomy - three vitally important questions arise. What motivated the Inca to such stupendous outpourings of human labor? Why did they begin when they did? And what were they seeking to accomplish?

In the more than four centuries since the era of the Inca, several hundred books have been written about them. While (more or less) admirably cataloguing historical and archaeological studies of the Inca, nearly all these books suffer from one basic limitation. This is their authors’ lack of recognition of the vital importance of myth in understanding Inca culture. The first question we must answer then, before we attend to the three in the previous paragraph, is why is myth so important to the study and understanding of the Inca?

The reason is because the Inca left us no written records. Like all other known preColumbian, Andean cultures, the Inca had no form of written language. They did have an amazingly accurate system of recording numerical information; called quipus, these were intricately knotted cords used for counting. But they had no sacred texts, no written histories, no literature that was set to paper or papyrus, or carved in stone (this is not the same situation with the Maya, however, who did have extensive written materials, but which were nearly all destroyed by the Spanish). Because of this fact, many "scholars" of the Inca have lamented that we have no way of peering deeply into Inca culture other than through the archaeological method. Yet, this is not true. We have a wonderfully penetrating method of studying the Inca, both through the numerous recordings of Inca myth left to us by early Spanish chroniclers and through the researches of ethnohistorians and anthropologists studying contemporary Andean peoples (who are the inheritors of a great body of Inca myths).

But, there is a problem here. One must be able to decipher, or decode the myths in question. Very few people can do this, especially - and ironically - the anthropologists and prehistorians who have recorded the myths. The reason for the near total lack of ability to decode myths on the part of the academic and scientific community is that the word myth has become a synonym for misconception. Myths are assumed to be no more than fanciful stories invented by preliterate and, therefore ignorant, people. They are assumed to be unquantifiable and unable to be subjected to carbon 14 measurement or other verifying tests. As such, overly rational minds necessarily discount and dismiss them. And furthermore, many myths do indeed sound fantastic beyond belief. They are filled with astounding pictures and seemingly impossible events. But the absolutely crucial thing to understand here - is that the fantastic facets of myth are metaphors for other things. Hidden within the improbable tales are bits of information of astounding accuracy. But one must have the key to unlock the tales.

In the context of Andean myths this has become richly apparent in the past thirty years through the pioneering studies of Gary Urton, Tom Zuidema, and William Sullivan. By incorporating extensive academic knowledge with a comprehensive experience of indigenous Peruvian culture that comes from prolonged field research, these researchers have cracked the code of Andean myth. What they have shown is that the Inca had a wonderfully developed mythic lore that is both a text book of their culture and a precise recording of nearly two millennia of highly accurate astronomical observations. And, it is these myth-encoded astronomical matters that are the key to answering the three questions posed above: What motivated the Inca to such stupendous outpourings of human labor? Why did they begin when they did? And what were they seeking to accomplish?

The answers to each of these questions are revealed in the landmark book, The Secret of the Inca; Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan. Published in 1966, after nearly twenty years of painstaking research, it offers remarkable insights into the cosmological and spiritual concerns that motivated the brief but brilliant phenomena of Inca culture. During my four months of travel, criss-crossing the Inca realm in modern day Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, I read Sullivan’s book two complete times, underlining nearly half the text. In the paragraphs that follow, I present a short synopsis of Sullivan’s masterful work interspersed with quoted material from his eloquent writings.

In a nutshell, the Inca and other Andean cultures before them strove for millennia to base their social reality on specific celestial models. Summing up the matter, Sullivan explains that, "At the very core of Andean social, intellectual, political, and religious sensibility, we find the influence of a complex astronomical cosmology...Andean myth records transformations that occurred in the social and celestial spheres simultaneously, and whose synchronous occurrence can be verified by recourse to the archaeological record on one hand, and planetarium and archaeoastronomical computer data on the other. This system of thought, already ancient when the Incas appeared on the stage of history in the early 1400s, became, in the hands of the Incas, a separate reality in its own right, the foremost justification and defining force in the unfolding of the Inca Empire."

Machu Picchu

Intihuatana astronomical observation device, Machu Picchu

The Inca and the Andean cultures that preceded them were astute observers of the heavens. They were interested in the sun and moon, the planets and various constellations, and they had precisely calculated the rate of precessional change. But it was the Milky Way and its motion at the times of the solstices that was most important to them. The reason for this is that certain regions of the Milky Way were believed to be bridges from the human world to the land of the gods and to the ultimate abode of the dead. (The idea that the Milky Way functioned as a frontier between worlds was a notion widespread among nearly all the ancient peoples of the earth.) Through his astronomical decoding of numerous Andean myths, Sullivan has shown that the beginning of the three major epochs in Andean history coincided with a rare conjunction of stellar, solar, and planetary events. These events were the heliacal rise of the Milky Way at the time of the solstices when there was simultaneously a particular conjunction of the planets Saturn and Jupiter that occurs only once every 794 years.

At this potent time, in 200 BC, the god Viracocha had created the stars, the Andean peoples, and two solstice bridges in the Milky Way whereby the gods and human souls could travel between terrestrial and celestial realms. Civilization blossomed on the high Andean altiplano, art flourished, and a golden era of peace was everywhere upon the land.

But seven hundred and ninety-four years later, in 650 AD, disaster struck. The June-solstice bridge to land of the gods was destroyed (because of precessional movement the Milky Way no longer heliacally rose at this important solar marker), the god Viracocha left the Earth, and a time of great suffering began. During this period, the first institutionalized warfare erupted with the advent of the Wari empire, and drought, famine, and increasing ecological devastation plagued the people. With the passage of another 794 years, in 1444, disaster loomed once again. The December-solstice bridge connecting people to their ancestors and the abode of the dead began to disappear (again due to the relentless movement of precessional time). For the astronomer-priests of the Andean tribes, this ominous event was interpreted to mean the inevitable decline and fall of all Andean civilization.

But the Inca, at this juncture in time, simply one of the many tribes of the Andes, decided to embark upon a sacred mission. They would rescue Andean civilization from the brink of disaster by waging war on time itself. This then, is our answer to what the motivated the Inca to the stupendous outpourings of human labor discussed in previous paragraphs. This is what they were seeking to accomplish. Through an extraordinary set of undertakings they attempted to change the course of the stars and halt the movement of precessional time. In 1438, under the leadership of the great warrior king, Pachakuti Inca (whose name meant the ‘Overturner of Space and Time), the Inca began what Sullivan calls a grand "experiment in sympathetic magic." Through the rapid expansion of their empire and its ensuing organization according to a comprehensive astronomical and religious scheme, the Inca were making prayers to Viracocha, the creator god, and Inti, the Sun god, that they might alter the movement of the heavens and thereby preserve the flow of life.

In the final chapter of his book, Sullivan discusses one of the forms that this sympathetic magic, this awesome prayer of the Incas took. It concerned a great ritual, called the capacocha, that the emperor Pachakuti Inca created to be performed at the December solstice. Sullivan writes that, "The capacocha was a rite of staggering inclusiveness. It began with ritual caravans of tribute pouring into Cuzco from every corner of the Empire - gold, silver, textiles, llamas and, from each lineage or tribe, or two male and female children aged about ten years...All the emissaries and tribute were then gathered in the Aucaypata, the great square of Cuzco...Priests surrounded the assembly with a gigantic chain of gold - which encompassed the entire plaza...Next the priests divided the enormous tribute in four, one portion for each of the four suyus of the Empire. At this point the priests sacrificed a number of children...Inca priests strangled some of the children, and removed the hearts of others while still alive...A solemn procession then made its way to the top of a hill called Chuquicancha, where the remains of the children were buried...Sacrifices of gold, silver, and textiles were offered to the 328 wakas, or shrines, of the seque system, fanning out toward the horizon."

"Now the entire symbolism would be recreated on a scale as vast as the Empire itself. The legations (of priests) would set forth in return to their points of origin, to carry the capacocha to the farthest reaches of the known world, and to tie every people in it directly to the Sun...(the legations) did not follow the royal road, but traversed the ravines and hills in a straight line, until each reached the places where the sacrifices were to be made...In other words, the returning host fanned out on their homeward journey, following the lines of the seque system...As the priests walked, they paused every few hundred yards and repeated these words, words that represent the distillation of two millennia of Andean thought: ‘May the Sun remain a young man and the Moon a young woman; may the world not turn over; let there be peace’."

"The legations contained children yet to be sacrificed...They stopped at every provincial center on the way, there to sacrifice the preselected local child. Meanwhile, every minor shrine was given its share of the other tribute, and the blood of the llamas sanctified in Cuzco...And in this way they traveled throughout the territories which the Inca had conquered, to the four quarters of the Empire...Here, the last of the children reached the end of the line...These children were sacrificed in the name of their tribal wakas, whose identity and ultimate abode lay in the stars. These children were going home."

With this grand ritual, "far from the battlefield and the blare of martial music, lay the most critical front in the Incas War against Time. And herein lay all the keys to both the tragic splendor and the inconceivable vulnerability of the Inca Empire. In the last analysis, the Inca Emperors understood that no heroic measures could ever redeem them. In the end, only a "plea" might prevail...The Inca did not, like the Aztecs, sacrifice human lives to "feed" the Sun; instead they dispatched emissaries to the stars, emissaries bearing a desperate message...before Time ran out."

These rituals and prayers of the Inca, at once magnificent and barbaric, were ultimately unsuccessful. Time did run out. Less than a century after Pachakuti had begun his conquests, the explosive growth of the Inca empire was terminated by disease and conquerors from across the Atlantic. In 1525, half a decade before the Inca first sighted white men, Europeans brought small pox to the Caribbean and the Columbia coast where it rapidly spread southward through nonimmune native populations. The epidemic took the lives of Huayna Capac, the last Inca emperor, more than 40% of his court bureaucracy, and millions of peasants throughout the realm. Rapidly the political, administrative, and agricultural systems collapsed, to be followed by a terrible civil war between the rival armies of Huascar and Atahuallpa - half brothers and sons of Huayna Capac. Into the midst of this once mighty, now dying empire, an expedition of 170 Spanish mercenaries and adventurers forced their way late in 1532. Through an equal measure of bravado and brutality, brilliance and treachery (and outnumbered 25,000 to 1) they rapidly succeeded in toppling the remains of the greatest civilization ever to arise in the new world. Within fifty years of the Conquest, more than four and a half million of six million Inca lay dead.

(For more information on the sites of Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo, refer to these specific places in the photograph section of this web site.)