Visitors to Cusco today see colonial churches built on Inca walls of perfectly cut stone. What they cannot see is the invisible network that once organised the sacred space around the capital of the empire. For the Inca, the valley was dotted with hundreds of venerated places, the huacas, arranged along imaginary lines called ceques. It is one of the most complex systems of sacred geography known from the ancient world.
What a huaca is
The Quechua word huaca (or wak'a) refers to anything sacred or endowed with extraordinary power. It could be:
- a mountain, a lake, a spring, a cave;
- an unusually shaped rock, or a stone linked to a myth;
- a temple or an altar;
- the mummy of an ancestor or a ruler;
- a ritual object, a statue, even a human being or animal born with unusual features.
Huacas were not mere symbols: they were considered active presences, to be fed with offerings, consulted and asked for protection. Some great huacas, such as the sanctuary of Pachacamac on the coast, had oracles famous throughout the Andean world.
The ceque system
The most complete description of the organisation of the huacas of Cusco comes from the Spanish Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, who in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo, completed in 1653, set down a list based on older sources. According to this list, 41 lines, the ceques, radiated toward the horizon from the Coricancha, the great temple of the Sun at the centre of the city. Along these lines lay about 328 huacas.
The system was divided according to the four suyus, the four parts into which the Inca divided their empire, called Tawantinsuyu, «the four parts together». Each ceque was entrusted to the care of a family group or lineage, whose task was to make offerings to the huacas of its line on the appointed days.
Space, time and society
Scholars have suggested that the ceque system was much more than a list of shrines. In the twentieth century the anthropologist R. Tom Zuidema studied its structure in depth, proposing that the lines and huacas were linked:
- to the social organisation of Cusco, with its different lineages and their hierarchies;
- to the ritual calendar, since the number and sequence of huacas could mark the days of the year;
- to the observation of the sky, since some lines were aligned with points on the horizon where the sun rose or set on important dates;
- to the distribution of water for irrigation.
Not all these interpretations are equally accepted, but it is clear that for the Inca space, time, society and the sacred were intertwined.
The lines and the quipus
Some scholars have noted a resemblance between the ceque system and the quipus, the knotted cords the Inca used to record information. A quipu has a main cord from which many smaller cords hang; the ceque system has a centre from which many lines radiate. It is a fascinating analogy, showing how the same logic of order could apply to different things.
Destruction and survival
After the conquest, church authorities regarded huacas as idols. During the seventeenth century campaigns for the «extirpation of idolatries» were carried out: sacred objects were sought out and destroyed, ancestor mummies were burned, religious specialists were punished. One of the most valuable documents on Andean religion, the Huarochirí manuscript, written in Quechua in the early seventeenth century, is tied to the context of these very campaigns.
As early as the 1560s a movement called Taki Onqoy, «dancing sickness», had arisen: its followers announced that the huacas would rise up to defeat the Christian god and restore the Andean order. The movement was suppressed, but it shows how alive the huacas still were in the people's awareness.
Despite everything, many huacas were never forgotten. Rocks, springs and mountains still receive offerings, and respect for the sacred places of the landscape remains an essential feature of Andean life.
In short
- A huaca is any place, object or being considered sacred and powerful.
- Bernabé Cobo described 41 ceques radiating from the Coricancha, with about 328 huacas.
- Each line was entrusted to a family group responsible for the offerings.
- The system joined space, calendar, society, sky and water.
- The seventeenth-century extirpation campaigns destroyed much, but the cult of sacred places survives.
