Korikancha

1625-1635

Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Juan de

Madrid, ESP, Biblioteca Nacional (current location)

This page, from a history of the Inkas written by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, depicts a wall that once stood in the Inka temple of Korikancha. The walls and its decorations were destroyed when Spanish conquistadores sacked Korikancha, long before Pachacuti Yamqui was born. Drawing on earlier accounts, he shows the wall as a cosmogram, in keeping with Andean ideas about the order of the universe.

Pachacuti Yamqui flanks his image of Korikancha with the male sun god, Inti, represented at left (marked as 4), and the female moon at right (5). This reflects an Andean conception of a universe of complementary opposites. Its right side (the viewer’s left) is male, its left side, female. Below, in the male and female figures (14), the same division is echoed in the human world. In the intermediary zone, between the sky and earth, are other divine forces, like lightning (illapa), rainbows (cuychi), and mountains (pachamama), seen to the left of the human figures (10). At the center of the Korikancha wall (3), in Pachacuti Yamqui’s version, was an oval disk made of gold, representing the Creator.

The writer of this Relación, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, was an elite Andean, who had a unique understanding of Andean history and religious beliefs. Although a Christian, he was sympathetic to Inka ideas. He argued that they, in worshipping a single creator, were monotheists, already on the path to Christianity, even before Christians arrived.

Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua drew this diagram on paper using ink, an illustration to hisRelación de las antiguedades deste Reyno del Pirú. Alphabetic writing was a technology introduced by Spaniards, but elite Andeans quickly learned it, and members of later generations like Pachacuti Yamqui were often literate Spanish speakers.

Pachacuti Yamqui’s manuscript remained unpublished until the 19th century. In the 20th century, it was of crucial interest to scholars who wanted to widen the sources they used, going beyond Spanish chroniclers to understand native Andean views of history and religion. The original is held at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Spain, cataloged as Ms. 3169, fol. 145.

Christian writers, like Pachacuti Yamqui, struggled to make sense of the Andean past and its connection to the present. Unwittingly, they practiced a cultural mestizaje by reconciling overlapping belief systems. In this diagram, Pachacuti Yamqui observes a universe bifurcated and balanced by gender, at the same time he presents a continuous practice of monotheism.

Laboratorio Fotográfico de la Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. All rights reserved.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

MacCormack, Sabine. 1991. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Juan de. 1995. Relación de las antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú. C. Araníbar, ed. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.