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Disappeared Inca Empire Supremacy CUZCO part 2 September 19, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Cuzco, Encyclopedia, Geographic, Health Insurance, Lodges, Map, Science, Sightseeing, Travel Gear , trackback

If Cuzco was the centre of the empire, then the omphalos of Cuzco itself was the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun. In Inca myth, the spot for this was found by Manco Capac, the first Inca, who was sent to earth to bring civilization. He used a golden rod to test for the correct location, and he knew he had found the spot when the rod disappeared into the ground. Located on a flattened site between and overlooking the point at which two rivers meet, the Coricancha was oriented to the June solstice sunrise — midwinter in Cuzco. Today, only fragmentary ruins of the temple survive, with the church of Santo Domingo superimposed on them. Part of the extant walling, however, still contains the niche or ‘tabernacle’ that was struck by the rays of the rising solstitial sun. Sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers claimed that this niche was sheathed with gold plates and set with many precious stones. The emperor, the Inca, would sit in this recess as it glowed and glittered in the sun’s rays, a resplendent symbol of his solar lineage. A ceremonial fire would be ignited by a priest using a concave golden mirror on his wrist to focus the sun’s beams. (The Coricancha was eventually stripped of its rich, golden cladding and ornamentations by the Spanish conquerors.)

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The Spanish historians wrote that radiating out from this place were 41 lines or ceques. Three of the quarters, the suyus, each contained nine of these, conceptually grouped in three sets of three, but the fourth, the wider southwestern cuntisuyu quarter, had 14 ceques. It has taken the work of anthropoligist Gary Urton to find the likely explanation for the asymmetry in the Inca quartering system, which in turn appears to relate to the arrangements of the ceques. Living with the Andean Indians, Urton discovered that the Milky Way is a key image in their cosmology. This band of starlight, which in astronomical terms is caused by the apparent clustering of stars towards the heart of our galaxy, is a brilliant part of the Andean night sky. It arcs through the zenith, and effectively marks the intercardinal directions as its orientation appears to change over a regular period with regard to the Earth’s position in space, swinging from southeast—northwest to southwest—northeast. To the Indians, the zenith, overhead, point corresponds to the omphalos on the ground. One can visualize a pole — or, indeed, a golden rod — running vertically down from the heavens into the landscape: the image of the cosmic axis. A city or village crossroads, or an omphalos point on the ground of any kind, is directly associated with the ‘cross’ of the zenith. E. C. Krupp summarizes Urton’s findings:

In the Andes the Milky Way is a river. . . . Urton applied the present Andean concepts of the ‘cross’ at the zenith and the ‘river’ in the sky to explain the location of the Coricancha — Cuzco’s heart. Cuzco’s most sacred spot was the intersection of its two rivers. The Inca built the Coricancha at the confluence because that place represented terrestrially the organizing pivot of heaven. Urton believes the unsymmetric division of Cuzco’s southern quarters also can be understood in celestial terms. The southeast boundary is set by a ceque that could have been oriented on Alpha Crucis, the brightest star in the Southern Cross. Urton showed this was associated with the ‘center’ of the Milky Way. . . . Urton believes the Inca expanded the southwest quarter in order to keep the ceques that were aimed at the rising and setting points of Alpha Crucis in the same suyu .

Evan Hadingham observes that at the spot on which the Temple of the Sun was situated, the directions of the empire, the Milky Way and the sacred rivers were all drawn together in a single focus. Here was an orderly union between earth, sky and mankind.

Since it was believed to be the source of all cosmic forces, the Temple of the Sun was naturally regarded with awe and reverence by the inhabitants of Cuzco. (For instance, anyone approaching within about two hundred paces of the building had to remove his shoes.)

Every social group in the city was assigned its own particular relationship to this radiating source of power. The connection was made along a series of imaginary straight lines that were thought to fan out from the temple like the spokes of a wheel. . . . Krupp describes the conceptual framework of the ceque system in a similar way:

The Coricancha’s alignment with the solstice was an umbilical to the sky. Through this conduit the principles of cosmic order flowed into the Coricancha and circulated through the ceques to permeate all aspects of the highly organised life of the Inca.’

Each ceque was in the care of a specific social or kinship group.

What exactly were ceques? The simplest definition is that they were alignments of sacred places or huacas. A huaca could be a standing stone or a natural boulder or outcrop, a waterfall or spring, a temple or shrine, a holy hill or cave, a sacred tree, a topographical feature, or even a bridge or battlefield site. The well-known site of Tambo Machay, a ruined Inca shrine as well as a lodge for the Inca, a short distance out of Cuzco, was a huaca on a ceque, as was the temple of Pukamarka in the city itself, where now a cinema stands on the remains of the site’s Inca walling. A sacred rock can be found on Cuzco’s outskirts. And so on. There were apparently between three and 13 huacas along any one ceque, and the idea has been likened to that of the knots on the string of a quipu. The Spanish chroniclers identified 328 huacas along the ceques around Cuzco, stating that each represented a day of the year. It was in effect a huge terrestrial calendar, but the Spanish never seemed have bothered to understand it and in addition destroyed a number of the huacas. Dr Tom Zuidema of the University of Illinois suggested that the system was based on the sidereal lunar month of 27.3 days (the time it takes for the moon to pass from a given star in the background firmament back to that same star), for a division of 328 days by the 12 months of the Inca year gives a month of that length. (The 291/2-day period the moon takes to complete a full set of phases is the synodic lunar month.)

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