Empire of the Inca
by
by
Savage Aesthetics
Religion was not an option in the Incan Empire. Nor was mere ritual participation adequate to ensure membership among the elite. Some more or less continuous expression of fealty (one hesitates to say faith) to an originary divine event was essential. What is most remarkable about this is that it is part of an entirely illiterate culture. There was no sacred scripture recording this event. So it had to be passed on orally. Perhaps this is both its strength and its weakness as a coherent social force.
Incan culture was established around a very specific divine revelation - as significant as that of the Israelites, as self-serving as that of the Mormons, as violently expansive as that of Islam, as tightly organised into a theocratic state as the medieval Catholic Church, as racially sensitive as the Dutch Reformed in South Africa, and as rigidly orthodox as any American fundamentalist. Religion constituted the Incan Empire at least as thoroughly as Confucianism was the cultural glue that maintained the Chinese imperial state or Enlightenment ideology allowed the United States to emerge as a coherent polity.
The site of the birth of the Incan Empire, Cuzco in a high valley of the Andes, was granted to the empire’s founders by the Sun God, Inti, through a proclamation by one of his sons. This proclamation authorised the clearance of the locals and established the ultimate mission of the Incas: to conquer the world. This is the sacred legend that justified an imperial royal line that began in the early 13th century (just about the same time as the Aztec entry into the Valley of Mexico). The mythical origins of Rome or Carthage were no more elaborate or outrageously aggrandising. The Incan rulers were quite literally sons of god and kin to the great pantheon of gods recognised by the various upland tribes they overran. The term ‘Inca’ itself means ‘Lord’ in Quechua. Genetics was their ace in the hole when confronted by any challenge to legitimacy.
The central concept in Incan religion appears to have been huaca, that is power or force. Huaca emanates from many sources - the earth and its constituent parts of soil, rock, and flowing water; the sky in both its stars and its fearsome weather; animals like the Jaguar, condor, and the mythical thunder-cat; shamans, sorcerers and oracles who shared an intimacy with the gods; but, most of all, the descendants of the gods themselves, the rulers who were near the top of the hierarchy of power distribution throughout creation. Rulers radiate holy influences throughout the land. Such power cannot be resisted. It maintained the natural, divinely fixed, state of things. Any attempt to alter this situation was both heresy and treason.*
Among native Peruvians, sin had a community connotation just as it had had for the Israelites. Sin could blight the lives of one’s family, one’s village, and even the mighty state. Sin disturbed the pattern and distribution of huaca thus promoting chaos. To prevent such disaster, confession, both individual and en masse, was an Incan institution. Confession was nominally secret but if the confessor wasn’t satisfied with its completeness or veracity he could essentially take the matter to a public inquiry. Sin, therefore, was a mechanism through which local officials became highly effective commissars, responsible for the religious orthodoxy and political correctness of every Incan community. But the political downside of this integration of church and state was as real for the Incas as it was for contemporary European states. The shamanic/priestly guild which held the power of forgiveness also became a rival centre of power in an increasingly complex religiously political society.
While divine lineage and confessional obedience might provide a cultural defence against outsiders, it creates immense tensions among the divine progeny and the clerical classes - a tension not unknown in medieval Europe. The Incan Empire was essentially a community of religious fanatics. And religious fanaticism is always vulnerable to rival fanatics within its own ranks. All stories, especially religious ones, are subject to contrary interpretations. Ultimately this means either politics or war, or, more likely a constant oscillation between the two. Combine religious conviction with personal ambition by the rulers and rival oracles, and the result is a society permanently on the edge of self-destruction. As Brundage dryly puts it, “Cuzco had become the center of a turbulent and aggressive politique”
Imperial succession quickly became the locus of the issue of the proper holder and grantor of huaca. As in the post Augustan Roman Empire, family intrigue seems to have become the primary recreation of all potential heirs. Apparently, different gods provide different revelations, which are curiously adhered to by members of the elite in line with their own interests. And so it goes repeatedly until the Spanish turn up with their revelation and upset the whole religious/political/military dance that had gone on for about a century. The conquistador Pizarro played opposing brothers who claimed legitimate succession against each other brilliantly and took the entire empire for Spain with an insignificant force.
In the mid-century before Pizzaro’s coup, Pachacuti, the greatest ruler of the empire, had pretensions to immortality when he remodelled the temple of Inti at Cuzco in stone and precious materials. He intended that the whole city become the logos, the Word carved in stone of the new and supreme Inca dispensation. But it is for his public works projects rather than his architecture or art that he is known for in history. Immense hydraulic projects, the draining of swamps, warehouses for grain storage, the giant terraces for farming and gardens, indoor plumbing, and, of course, the enormous long road network along the Andes. Because the Incas had no system of writing, however, the details of their organisational and bureaucratic achievements, their system of long distance oral messaging, and their periodic ‘humanitarian’ distribution of food during famine have been lost entirely.
The self-proclaimed grandiosity of the Incas is progressively depressing as one delves further into their activities (recorded mostly from verbal statements, and mostly accurately, by the friars accompanying the conquerors). If there was ever an entire culture (or rather its elite) which believed its own press, it was this one. In their religion, their projects, their accumulation of booty from military conquests, it is clear that they quite literally adored themselves. Their supposed ancestor, Inti, the supreme God of the Sun,** became little more than a “primordial mascot” according to Brundage. Their ideas of religion were adapted, sometimes radically, to their ideas of empire. Pachacuti, for example, sterilised the competitive huaca of the clerics through a kind of Stalinistic cull of suspected ‘deviationists’ by a secret police. “He wanted an archbishop not a pope,” as Brundage puts it. Since Inca history was oral, and since the emperor controlled the language and official stories of history, Pachacuti could conceive of himself as absolute truth - whereas even the pope was constrained by sacred scripture!
Pachacuti’s ultimate achievement, if one dare call it that, was his round-up of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the best and brightest children from the families of his fellow-Incans for sacrifice at his new temple in Cuzco or sent out in pitiable lines to the provinces to have their hearts similarly gouged from their bodies. This tremendous brutality - in order to ensure the emperor’s recovery from illness, the proper festivity during a royal celebration, or the success of a forthcoming military campaign - was apparently routine, a real tradition of death. Brundage, one supposes because of professional conventions, reports these sorts of atrocities with an extraordinary sang froid. Perhaps such a noncommittal, measured description in fact emphasises just how unlikeable and un-admirable these people were. It is arguably the world’s good fortune that fraternal animosity stopped the spread of this culture in its tracks.
* This idea of power flowing downward from an omnipotent God is one shared by European culture. The entire world-view of the ancient Peruvians was very similar to that of the Judaea-Christian culture. Brundage summarises the congruences:
** This is not quite true. Pachacuti, for reasons of state and personal whim, had the clerics declare that there was a god ‘beyond’ Inti who had actually created the universe through his Word. This was not the Inca god of tradition but almost a pet of the emperor himself. As with Constantine in the later Roman Empire, the religious officials dutifully confirmed the imperial insight.
Religion was not an option in the Incan Empire. Nor was mere ritual participation adequate to ensure membership among the elite. Some more or less continuous expression of fealty (one hesitates to say faith) to an originary divine event was essential. What is most remarkable about this is that it is part of an entirely illiterate culture. There was no sacred scripture recording this event. So it had to be passed on orally. Perhaps this is both its strength and its weakness as a coherent social force.
Incan culture was established around a very specific divine revelation - as significant as that of the Israelites, as self-serving as that of the Mormons, as violently expansive as that of Islam, as tightly organised into a theocratic state as the medieval Catholic Church, as racially sensitive as the Dutch Reformed in South Africa, and as rigidly orthodox as any American fundamentalist. Religion constituted the Incan Empire at least as thoroughly as Confucianism was the cultural glue that maintained the Chinese imperial state or Enlightenment ideology allowed the United States to emerge as a coherent polity.
The site of the birth of the Incan Empire, Cuzco in a high valley of the Andes, was granted to the empire’s founders by the Sun God, Inti, through a proclamation by one of his sons. This proclamation authorised the clearance of the locals and established the ultimate mission of the Incas: to conquer the world. This is the sacred legend that justified an imperial royal line that began in the early 13th century (just about the same time as the Aztec entry into the Valley of Mexico). The mythical origins of Rome or Carthage were no more elaborate or outrageously aggrandising. The Incan rulers were quite literally sons of god and kin to the great pantheon of gods recognised by the various upland tribes they overran. The term ‘Inca’ itself means ‘Lord’ in Quechua. Genetics was their ace in the hole when confronted by any challenge to legitimacy.
The central concept in Incan religion appears to have been huaca, that is power or force. Huaca emanates from many sources - the earth and its constituent parts of soil, rock, and flowing water; the sky in both its stars and its fearsome weather; animals like the Jaguar, condor, and the mythical thunder-cat; shamans, sorcerers and oracles who shared an intimacy with the gods; but, most of all, the descendants of the gods themselves, the rulers who were near the top of the hierarchy of power distribution throughout creation. Rulers radiate holy influences throughout the land. Such power cannot be resisted. It maintained the natural, divinely fixed, state of things. Any attempt to alter this situation was both heresy and treason.*
Among native Peruvians, sin had a community connotation just as it had had for the Israelites. Sin could blight the lives of one’s family, one’s village, and even the mighty state. Sin disturbed the pattern and distribution of huaca thus promoting chaos. To prevent such disaster, confession, both individual and en masse, was an Incan institution. Confession was nominally secret but if the confessor wasn’t satisfied with its completeness or veracity he could essentially take the matter to a public inquiry. Sin, therefore, was a mechanism through which local officials became highly effective commissars, responsible for the religious orthodoxy and political correctness of every Incan community. But the political downside of this integration of church and state was as real for the Incas as it was for contemporary European states. The shamanic/priestly guild which held the power of forgiveness also became a rival centre of power in an increasingly complex religiously political society.
While divine lineage and confessional obedience might provide a cultural defence against outsiders, it creates immense tensions among the divine progeny and the clerical classes - a tension not unknown in medieval Europe. The Incan Empire was essentially a community of religious fanatics. And religious fanaticism is always vulnerable to rival fanatics within its own ranks. All stories, especially religious ones, are subject to contrary interpretations. Ultimately this means either politics or war, or, more likely a constant oscillation between the two. Combine religious conviction with personal ambition by the rulers and rival oracles, and the result is a society permanently on the edge of self-destruction. As Brundage dryly puts it, “Cuzco had become the center of a turbulent and aggressive politique”
Imperial succession quickly became the locus of the issue of the proper holder and grantor of huaca. As in the post Augustan Roman Empire, family intrigue seems to have become the primary recreation of all potential heirs. Apparently, different gods provide different revelations, which are curiously adhered to by members of the elite in line with their own interests. And so it goes repeatedly until the Spanish turn up with their revelation and upset the whole religious/political/military dance that had gone on for about a century. The conquistador Pizarro played opposing brothers who claimed legitimate succession against each other brilliantly and took the entire empire for Spain with an insignificant force.
In the mid-century before Pizzaro’s coup, Pachacuti, the greatest ruler of the empire, had pretensions to immortality when he remodelled the temple of Inti at Cuzco in stone and precious materials. He intended that the whole city become the logos, the Word carved in stone of the new and supreme Inca dispensation. But it is for his public works projects rather than his architecture or art that he is known for in history. Immense hydraulic projects, the draining of swamps, warehouses for grain storage, the giant terraces for farming and gardens, indoor plumbing, and, of course, the enormous long road network along the Andes. Because the Incas had no system of writing, however, the details of their organisational and bureaucratic achievements, their system of long distance oral messaging, and their periodic ‘humanitarian’ distribution of food during famine have been lost entirely.
The self-proclaimed grandiosity of the Incas is progressively depressing as one delves further into their activities (recorded mostly from verbal statements, and mostly accurately, by the friars accompanying the conquerors). If there was ever an entire culture (or rather its elite) which believed its own press, it was this one. In their religion, their projects, their accumulation of booty from military conquests, it is clear that they quite literally adored themselves. Their supposed ancestor, Inti, the supreme God of the Sun,** became little more than a “primordial mascot” according to Brundage. Their ideas of religion were adapted, sometimes radically, to their ideas of empire. Pachacuti, for example, sterilised the competitive huaca of the clerics through a kind of Stalinistic cull of suspected ‘deviationists’ by a secret police. “He wanted an archbishop not a pope,” as Brundage puts it. Since Inca history was oral, and since the emperor controlled the language and official stories of history, Pachacuti could conceive of himself as absolute truth - whereas even the pope was constrained by sacred scripture!
Pachacuti’s ultimate achievement, if one dare call it that, was his round-up of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the best and brightest children from the families of his fellow-Incans for sacrifice at his new temple in Cuzco or sent out in pitiable lines to the provinces to have their hearts similarly gouged from their bodies. This tremendous brutality - in order to ensure the emperor’s recovery from illness, the proper festivity during a royal celebration, or the success of a forthcoming military campaign - was apparently routine, a real tradition of death. Brundage, one supposes because of professional conventions, reports these sorts of atrocities with an extraordinary sang froid. Perhaps such a noncommittal, measured description in fact emphasises just how unlikeable and un-admirable these people were. It is arguably the world’s good fortune that fraternal animosity stopped the spread of this culture in its tracks.
* This idea of power flowing downward from an omnipotent God is one shared by European culture. The entire world-view of the ancient Peruvians was very similar to that of the Judaea-Christian culture. Brundage summarises the congruences:
“Under this welter of myth we can descry a basic Peruvian story: creation, followed by the creator's destruction of mankind in a flood, and then their recreation or survival brought about by a bodily (and sometimes beggarly) son of the creator. The superficial resemblance to the Judaeo-Christian story is evident, and indeed one of the mysteries of the colonial period in Peru is why the friars did not make more of this.”
** This is not quite true. Pachacuti, for reasons of state and personal whim, had the clerics declare that there was a god ‘beyond’ Inti who had actually created the universe through his Word. This was not the Inca god of tradition but almost a pet of the emperor himself. As with Constantine in the later Roman Empire, the religious officials dutifully confirmed the imperial insight.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ October 10, 2021
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