chapter one

Dissolution and
Reconfiguration

Many of the Spanish missionaries who arrived in Peru in the early six-
teenth century came with a mentality of conquest. January of 1492 had
seen the fall of Granada, the last of the Muslim caliphates on the Iberian
Peninsula, and in March of the same year an edict was issued to expel all
Jews from the Spanish kingdoms. The last decade of the fifteenth century
not only initiated an age of exploration and conquest of the Americas but
also marked the culmination of Spain’s prolonged battle against Muslims
and Jews on its own soil. And by the mid-sixteenth century, Spain took up
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arms against the additional threat of Protestantism. Thus, it was implicitly

understood that for Christianity to triumph in the Andes, its bearers had to
first wage war against the false Andean religion—its theological content,
ritual practices, and artistic expressions.1 During the course of the six-
teenth century, this war became focused on destroying the visual imagery
related to Andean religion. It aimed to dissolve both the physical and men-
tal images associated with Andean religion and to reconfigure the reli-
gious imaginary in Christian terms. In order to fully understand this
process, we should first consider what is known about Inca and wider An-
dean understandings of the divine in relation to visual images, whether
mentally “imagined” pictures or those given material form. Then we can
take into account the destruction of these images and their accompanying
religious concepts. Only afterward can we consider the early steps toward
the reconfiguration of religion in the Andes, in its new Christian form.
These steps were taken not only by Spaniards but also by Andeans.

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 10 · Object and Apparition

Divine Images and Visions in Western Thought

The Spaniards who arrived in Peru and attempted to come to terms with
Andean religion thought at length about the role of the visual in both the
foreign religion and the one they would attempt to implant. Most basi-
cally, the Spaniards argued for major differences between Christian im-
ages and those of Andean religion. The first were representations of beings
existing in heaven, while the latter were “idols.” Although even the wider
populace in Europe might have disagreed,2 the Church held that Chris-
tian images represented the divine and were meant only to inspire devo-
tion to God. Idols, on the other hand, were physical objects (either natural
or humanly created) to which undue devotion was directly given. Chris-
tian images were seen as only representations of remote divinities, while
idols were presentations of false holiness in and of themselves. Though the
use of images of the Christian divine had long been a matter of debate in
the Christian world, Spaniards in sixteenth-century Peru sidestepped that
controversy by focusing on the idolatry they believed native Andeans prac-
ticed, and continued to practice, after being introduced to Christianity. In
reality, these Spaniards were probably well aware of the accusations by
Protestants that their own use of images was idolatrous. But they turned
instead to the situation at hand and focused on eradicating Andean idola-
try, while cautiously reserving a place for visual images of the Christian
divine.
As seen in the work of the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta (writing at
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the end of the sixteenth century), Spanish priests criticized the brute ma-
teriality of Andean sacred beings, or huacas, while only partly understand-
ing Andean beliefs in the sacrality of materials.3 The trilingual (Spanish,
Quechua, Aymara) catechism that was produced in Lima and published
in 1584 serves as a brief testimony of the main differences Spaniards wished
to articulate between Christian and Andean divine imagery. The cate-
chism, widely distributed throughout the Andes, was intended to clarify
and standardize points of Christian faith that had been wrongly or incon-
sistently articulated during the earlier period of colonization. It employed a
question-and-answer format, articulating questions that Andeans might ask
and answering in a priestly voice. Both the brief and extended catechisms
answered queries related to divine beings and their images, both Andean
and Christian. The long version first addresses Andean divinities:

question: Are not the sun, the moon, the stars, lightning, the peaks
of mountains, rivers, springs, fertile earth, and other things that
old Indians worship God?
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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 11

answer: Nothing of that is God, and whoever adores it angers God

and takes from his honor, committing a great sin and offense
against him.
question: Then what are the sun, the moon, and the rest?
answer: They are works of God that he formed to serve as he or-
dered. And that is what we confess, saying that our God is the
Creator of heaven and earth.4

It then poses a question that might be asked in regard to Christian images:

question: Why do Christians adore images of wood and metal if it

is wrong to adore idols?
answer: Christians do not adore wooden images, nor those of
metal, for themselves, like idolaters, nor do they think that in
them is there virtue and divinity, but looking at what they repre-
sent, they adore Jesus Christ on the cross, in his image, and they
revere our Lady the Virgin Mary, and the other saints, that are in
heaven, asking for their favor; and they revere the images them-
selves, not for what they are, but for what they represent.5

Spanish clerics were careful to avoid positive comparisons between their

use of images in favor of Christianity and the non- Christian images that
were used in the Andes. While by the end of the sixteenth century writers
proposed precursors to Christianity in the Inca gods,6 they denied that im-
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ages could have productively represented those deities. Then they strove to
teach their flocks the basics of semiotics, as if Andeans were unaware of
the concept of representation. For example, the Jesuit priest and anti-
idolatry campaigner Fernando de Avendaño preached in the early seven-
teenth century that the rainbow was not a god in itself but a sign from
God.7
In regard to the thornier realm of purely mental or perceptual images
(as opposed to material objects), Spaniards resorted to the foundations of
Western thought in order to compartmentalize Andean religious experi-
ence. As Sabine MacCormack ably showed, the Spanish understanding of
the vision’s role in Andean religion was conditioned primarily by the work
of the Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas, who in turn had been guided
by Aristotle.8 The Greek philosopher had distinguished between sensory
perceptions, which were phantasms produced in the mind based on these
perceptions, and the intellect, which drew conclusions and knowledge
from phantasms. While he saw phantasms, or mediating mental images,
as a precondition for thought, the intellect was the superior function.9
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 12 · Object and Apparition

Aquinas expanded on Aristotle’s theories to identify the Christian faith as

an object of intellect, as opposed to an object of imagination or sense per-
ception.10 Thus, according to the Thomist way of thinking, all of what we
might term “images,” whether artistic representations, apparitions, or men-
tal images, were epiphenomenal. Their distillations into ideas were more
important, since only ideas were registered by the intellect. Both guided
by and surpassing this rubric, Spaniards in Peru decided that all represen-
tations of non- Christian divine beings were perceptual tricks of the devil
and should be entirely dismissed.11 However simplistic Spaniards were in
their attribution of all religious art of the Andes to the Judeo- Christian
devil, implicit in this understanding was, nevertheless, a high regard for
the power of images.

Inca Visions of the Divine

According to the Western perspective on the relationship between images

and ideas, images were always secondary to ideas, even if images came
first. And Christian deities were understood to exist separate from their
images, except for those cases in which the divine was made flesh, as Jesus
Christ, Mary, or the saints. Was there a particularly Inca or Andean per-
spective on the relationship between idea and image, and were the two
dichotomized as in the West? There is certainly reason to suggest that the
Incas had thought about these questions, since like Christians they pic-
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tured their divinities in material form and had immaterial dreamlike vi-
sions of them, but also spoke of them and prayed to them without recourse
to any sensory image. It appears that the Incas probably had conceived of
some distinctions, but they were not articulated in the same hierarchical
manner as that which prevailed in Western thought. In fact, there may have
been a certain complementarity between idea and image, as one example
at the center of Inca state theology would suggest.12 For this we can con-
sult the “chronicle” of Juan Diez de Betanzos (?–1576), a Spaniard and
Quechua interpreter who lived in Cusco by the early 1540s and married
the Inca noblewoman Cuxirimay Ocllo.13 Diez de Betanzos is a trust-
worthy source because of the relatively early date of his account and the
fact that he consulted his wife’s relatives for information. Also, as a secular
Spaniard, his work is less concerned with presenting Inca religion either
as completely idolatrous or as an enlightened precursor to Christianity. He
explains it was believed that the Inca creator god, whose full name was
Contici Viracocha, had created “the sun and the day” at the same time.14

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 13

Later writers, both Andean and Spanish, continued the linguistic parallel-
ism, continually linking the two by saying “the sun and the day.”15 Thus, a
complementary relationship between them can be inferred, as if they were
two sides of the same coin. The sun, Inti, was a principal deity for the Inca
state, but we might think of “day” as the sun’s sensory counterpart, specifi-
cally its visual revelation.16 This point would seem to be confirmed in that,
according to several Spanish accounts, the sculptural image of the sun that
was held in the main temple complex in Cusco was referred to as Punchao,
or “day.”17 It was a golden sculpture in the form of a young boy, thus giving
visual form to the sun in a way that was very different from how it actu-
ally appeared in the sky. We may infer, then, that Inca thought either did
not provide for the hierarchical relationship between image and idea
that was articulated in Western thought, or did not suppose that the sen-
sory perception was only ephemeral and, by extension, less meaningful.
Nor do we see an analogue in Inca thought to the discomfort Christians
(and Jews and Muslims to an even greater extent) felt regarding represen-
tations of the divine, where they feared that viewers would worship the
object rather than the immaterial divinity. While in Europe these con-
cerns were directly addressed at the Council of Trent (1545– 63),18 held at
the same time the initial evangelization efforts were under way in Peru,
we can safely say that for Andeans the concept of idolatry as false wor-
ship did not exist. Rather, Andeans seem to have felt comfortable with
the notion that a visual demonstration of a deity was vital to the cogni-
tion of its essence.
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Inca state religion was centered on cults to atmospheric and telluric

deities, including the sun and his female counterpart, the moon, as well
as to deceased Inca rulers. There was also a more generalized creator
god, Viracocha, and multiple numina known as huacas understood as
embodied or residing in the landscape, especially in prodigious forma-
tions such as snow- capped mountain peaks. This latter pantheon was
standardized and permanently mapped by the Incas, and it included dei-
ties from all regions of the Andes, drawn from the durable substratum of
wider Andean religion. All of these deities were envisioned, either as pre-
existing elements of the natural world or as materially figured, man-made
objects, and some were envisioned in multiple ways. The ways in which dei-
ties were given optical presence were not always strictly representational,
however. That is, as Carolyn Dean stresses, these objects did not always
need to resemble the deities they signified. Rather, they stood as material
manifestations of those deities, which could take various forms.19 Some sort
of presence was usually required, however, whether simply material or also

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 14 · Object and Apparition

representational. For deities who spoke through oracles, as many did, their
physical (and thus optical) presence was crucial to their cults, providing a
focal point to which devotees could address their queries.
Most famous, not because it survives for us but because several Spanish
chroniclers wrote about it, was the image of the Sun or Day that we have
already mentioned. It was enshrined in the Coricancha, or Golden Enclo-
sure, the center of Inca religion in the heart of Cusco. The chronicle of
Diez de Betanzos is again a useful source. He explains that the celebrated
Inca ruler Pachacuti commissioned the statue so that “in place of the sun”
people would have something to revere and make sacrifices to.20 Report-
edly, Pachacuti had personally envisioned the shining image at least three
times before commissioning it: while praying to the sun, in a dream, and
the night before an important battle. He ordered smiths to create a hollow
golden statue with the form and proportions of a young boy.21 Surviving
Inca figurines, while created on a much smaller scale, suggest what the
statue might have looked like (Fig. 1.1). Similar figurines that have been
found archaeologically, either frozen or buried in dry environments, were
originally dressed in rich textiles.22 So was Punchao—when completed,
the statue was dressed in the manner of an Inca ruler, with a fine tunic
woven in golden and woolen threads, a headdress with a fringe of the type
worn by the Inca rulers, an ornament in the manner of a golden disk, and
golden sandals.23 It was then placed on a wooden bench that was covered
in iridescent colored feathers. A litter was also created on which the image
could ride through the city, blessing its inhabitants. Pachacuti not only
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commissioned the image and its accoutrements but also established lands
and permanent servants for the cult, as well as arranged for various sacri-
fices to occur as the cult was inaugurated. Foodstuffs were regularly burned
before the statue as offerings, symbolically feeding the childlike image. In
the patio of the Coricancha, a fictive garden was created in gold and silver,
and daily the image was taken out to bathe in the actual sun’s rays. Natu-
ralistic effigies of corn survive from other Inca sites, suggesting the appear-
ance of parts of the Coricancha’s garden and how the divine world of the
Inca sun was both materialized and visualized.24 A more abstract image
of the sun was also created in the form of a sugarloaf stone with a belt of
gold around it—this was placed in the main plaza of Cusco, and according
to Diez de Betanzos was intended for the commoners to adore and was a
recipient of their offerings.25
Pachacuti, who ruled in the early to mid-fifteenth century, is credited
with founding many other features of the Inca state, and his commission
of Punchao can be seen as a foundational moment for the cult to the sun

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 15
Copyright © 2013. University of Arizona Press. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.1. Anonymous, male figurine, 1400–1532. Lam-

bayeque Valley, Peru. Hammered gold alloy, 6.4 cm ×
2.3 cm × 1.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Cleveland
Museum of Art. Purchased from the J. H. Wade Fund,
1945.

itself. Here we are faced not with a reflection of some preformed idea of
what the sun should look like and how it should be worshiped, but rather
with a complex process of envisioning, where only thereafter was the
cult to the sun fully established, in the image of the Inca ruler himself.

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 16 · Object and Apparition

Punchao was also a reliquary, since its hollow interior housed the hearts
of the deceased Inca rulers.26 This brings us to the second facet of Inca reli-
gion, which was the mummies of the dead rulers and their principal wives.
The veneration of these objects was an elaboration of the long-standing
Andean tradition of ancestor worship, in which the dead were believed to
provide for the living.27 Many Andean communities kept the memories of
important founding ancestors alive through stones known as huancas
(wank’as), well after the bodies of those ancestors had disappeared.28 But
the Incas carefully preserved the body of each ruler after his death, main-
taining it in a seated position and dressing it in fine textiles. The bodies
were kept in their palaces or in a special structure next to the Corican-
cha29 and were regularly carried on litters to attend, and participate in,
state-sponsored religious events.
For an image of one of these mummies, we can turn to a drawing by
the native Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. This au-
thor, who was born around the time of the Conquest and spent his life
working as an indigenous intermediary for friars and secular Spanish offi-
cials, will be a useful source throughout this chapter. At the end of his life
he wrote a sweeping history of the Incas and a critique of colonial govern-
ment, which includes 398 full-page line drawings.30 While the drawings
are particularly useful in relation to colonial society, his illustrations of the
Inca world are also helpful and considered relatively accurate, despite his
not having lived under Inca rule.31
Guaman Poma provides a naturalistic depiction of an Inca mummy,
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which he shows carried on a litter in the month of November for the Inca
festival of the dead (Fig. 1.2). The mummy’s deathly aspect is visible in its
face, arms, and feet, but it is still richly dressed in the clothes of the living.
Guaman Poma’s orientation of the image frontally, and in the center of the
page, uses traditional Andean spatial hierarchies to express its importance
as a sacred object and divinity.32 The Inca mummies, which were assigned
living humans to speak for them as oracles, served an important consensual
function in Inca politics, helping to ease tensions by asserting their divine
authority. Their clear materiality also helped visualize the power of the
Inca state. The noble lineage could be pictured when all of the mummies
were placed together. And the mummies helped assert the living king’s di-
vine status, however paradoxically, as they also pointed to the king’s mortal-
ity. Inca rulers did not stop at mummified bodies as a way to visualize Inca
power, however. Both in life and after death, Inca rulers, and prominent
lords and ladies in general, had images of themselves created in stone or
precious metals, and perhaps painted in two dimensions.33

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Figure 1.2. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nobienbre, Aia Marcai Quilla
(November, the Festival of the Dead), ca. 1615. Ink on paper. Manuscript
property of the Royal Library of Copenhagen.

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 18 · Object and Apparition

Spaniards referred to both the Inca mummies and the three-dimensional

effigies of Inca rulers as bultos, the same word they would use to describe
Christian statues.34 In Inca terms, effigies of the Inca rulers were known as
their huauques, or brothers, and could act in their place, traveling around
the empire as needed. After an Inca ruler’s death, his hair and fingernail
cuttings were often made into yet another image using clay or plaster.35
Only some of these images appear to have been true portraits, in the sense
that they visually resembled the rulers they represented. In fact, it was
common for them to have separate identities of their own—for example,
according to the Spanish chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, the
ruler Sinchi Roca had a huauque made of stone in the form of a fish. The
“idol” even had its own name, Huanachiri Amaru.36 All of these images
can be seen as important factors in the establishment, by way of its materi-
alization and visualization, of Inca religion and state power.
We now to turn to the huacas, those deities that dotted the Andean
landscape and had long and varied mythohistories (Fig. 1.3). While hua-
cas were often understood to be embodied in natural features of the land-
scape, such as curiously shaped rock outcroppings, the deities also took the
form of smaller, more portable images, likely humanly created. Certainly
some were very abstract in form, like the sugarloaf stone that stood for the
sun in the main plaza in Cusco. The drawing by Guaman Poma, in which
an Inca ruler stands before several huacas arranged in a circle, depicts sev-
eral huacas as small sculptures with human heads or entire bodies, while
others appear as miniature mountains. It is not clear whether the Incas
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privileged naturalism over abstraction, as did Europeans, or vice versa—in

fact, the Incas seem to have enjoyed using both visual styles, perhaps, again,
seeing them as complementary. Portable versions of the huacas were made
necessary by the Inca hegemonic practice of calling all of the empire’s
huacas to Cusco once a year, probably for the agricultural festivals held
each August. In Guaman Poma’s drawing and accompanying text, the
ruler Topa Inca Yupanqui asks the huacas assembled in front of him
whether they have caused rains to cease, frost to come, or hail to fall. They
respond negatively. This type of direct interchange with the divine was
a distinctive feature of Andean religion37 and, despite Catholic assertions
of priestly prerogative, would become an important feature of Andean
Christianity.
The one huaca in the drawing that has not come down from his rocky
abode is Huanacaure, who can be seen as an anthropomorphic form
perching at the upper left. Perhaps since this was a particularly Inca
huaca, he did not need to be imposed upon. The Incas believed that the

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Figure 1.3. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Capítvlo de los Ídolos, Vaca Billca Incap
(Inca Divinities), ca. 1615. Ink on paper. Manuscript property of the Royal Library
of Copenhagen.

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 20 · Object and Apparition

mountain Huanacaure was the site of the petrified remains of Ayar Cache,
one of the siblings of the brother-sister pair that founded Cusco. According
to Diez de Betanzos, during the group’s wanderings before arriving in
Cusco, it was decided that Ayar Cache should become an idol so he could
speak to the sun and care for his people. He then developed large wings
and flew up to the mountaintop, where he turned into stone.38 Thus, a
mountain that was probably already a huaca, Huanacaure, was given Inca
mythohistorical meaning, and a new cult was visualized in the form of a
stone image of Ayar Cache. Dean argues in regard to another of Guaman
Poma’s drawings of Huanacaure that the stone statue on the mountaintop
betrays a European preference for both resemblant and anthropomorphic
images of the divine, and that the author may have included the small
humanlike figure to convey the essence of the deity as residing in the
mountain. But in this drawing the author also included a row of worked
stones behind the statue, as if some frame had been established for the
object of Huanacaure, whether resemblant or not. The Incas often framed
sacred stones with courses of finely worked ashlars, as a way to set them off
and indicate their numinosity.39 This Andean touch in Guaman Poma’s
drawing suggests that, at the very least, there was some physical object
located atop Huanacaure that was seen as proof of the presence of Ayar
Cache.40
Material manifestations of Andean and Inca deities were clearly very
important to the creation and maintenance of their cults. It appears that
all Andean deities were given some physical form. Most often this form was
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three-dimensional, whether in stone, clay, plaster, or wood or as human re-

mains. Though the forms were not always resemblant, even the most ab-
stract masses were often given more unique meaning by being carved,
framed, and contoured,41 and many were embellished with gold and fine
textiles.

Iconoclasm in the Andes

Unfortunately, not many Andean cult images survive today, mainly because
of their deliberate destruction. Since the Spanish conquerors and their reli-
gious counterparts understood all visual manifestations of non- Christian
religion as either the work of the devil or the objects of naive idolatry,
they also felt they should destroy those objects when possible. They were
also interested in collecting gold and silver objects for their personal en-
richment and that of the Crown and Church. Cult objects made of these

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 21

materials were reduced to bullion and repurposed, often to embellish

the Christian churches that would be built throughout the viceroyalty.
The silver cult image of the moon in the Coricancha, as well as similar
images enshrined on sacred islands in Lake Titicaca, was dissolved in
Spanish forges as early as the 1530s.42 Punchao, the image of the sun
from the Coricancha, was saved from the Spaniards’ first gold- collecting
efforts in Cusco. Resistant Incas kept the statue in their redoubt of Vilca-
bamba until the capture of the last Inca ruler, Tupac Amaru, in 1572.43
It was then sent to Spain and appears to have eventually been melted
down.44
Whereas the hearts of the deceased Incas were preserved inside
Punchao for some time until its capture, the mummified bodies of the
Inca rulers faced an even earlier campaign of disappearance and destruc-
tion. The mummy of Viracocha Inca, Pachacuti’s father, was perhaps the
first to be destroyed, since it was burned by Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco
Pizarro’s brother. The mummy of Topa Inca Yupanqui met a similar fate
in the Spanish civil war in Cusco. Then in 1558 the licentiate Juan Polo
de Ondegardo was appointed chief magistrate of Cusco and charged with
reporting on the history and ritual practices of the Incas.45 As part of this
process, he sought out and found all of the remaining Inca mummies. Ac-
counts suggest that he had several secretly buried near Cusco, and three
important mummies, including that of Pachacuti, as well as the ashes of
his father, Viracocha, were taken to Lima and displayed in the Hospital de
San Andrés, albeit only for Spanish viewers. The final resting place of
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those remains has yet to be found. It appears that Polo de Ondegardo also
destroyed any remaining huauques and secondary representations at this
time, in his drive to root out idolatrous beliefs.
The case of the Inca mummies is a relatively well-documented example
of the iconoclastic fervor that gripped many sixteenth-century Spaniards,
government officials and Christian friars alike. All over Peru, mummies
and huacas were sought out and destroyed in decisive ways by the so-
called extirpators of idolatry. Both Spaniards and Andeans seem to have
felt that a severe blow was dealt to a cult when its titular image was de-
stroyed. One case described by an anonymous Augustinian author (writ-
ing ca. 1561) suggests the Incas’ sentiments in this regard and points to
similarities between their iconoclastic practices and those of the Span-
iards. Before the arrival of the Spaniards but during the final two Inca
rulers’ battles for succession, the contestant to the throne Atahualpa con-
sulted a huaca named Catequil in the province of Huamachuco in north-
western Peru (see Map 1).46 Catequil’s oracle criticized Atahualpa for

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 22 · Object and Apparition

killing so many people in his conquest of the region and suggested that he
had angered the creator god, Viracocha. Atahualpa was angered in turn
and proceeded to carry out various acts of destruction.47 These included
beheading the huaca, which was a stone statue in the form of a man, and
his oracle, an elderly man. He then set them both on fire and ground
down the stone the image was made of, scattering its dust to the wind. Fi-
nally, he set Catequil’s entire mountain on fire. Catequil’s devotees were,
however, able to salvage the statue’s head and three fragments of his body
in a nearby river and thus revive the deity’s cult.48 The actions taken by
Atahualpa, including burning the statue, grinding it to dust, and throwing
it in a river, recall the Old Testament destruction of the golden calf and
thus reveal the literary paradigms of the Augustinian author.49 But the
salvaging of the statue’s remains and the successful reinstatement of the
cult to Catequil around these fragments recall Andean concepts of em-
bodiment, under which the deity’s essence was seen to reside in the stones
themselves.
Then came the Spanish iconoclastic gesture, dealt to the very same
huaca, Catequil. The Augustinian friars who had settled in Huamachuco
in 1552 sought out the fragments of Catequil’s statue, ground those to
powder, and threw them into a river. The economic support for Catequil’s
cult was then destroyed when his llama herds were distributed to the poor
and, amazingly, some of his fine textiles were made into Christian altar
frontals.50 While the author of the chronicle appears to have utilized Bibli-
cal typology to foreshadow and thus justify the friars’ iconoclastic actions,
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traces of Andean belief survive in the story. The cult to poor Catequil
would hardly seem to have survived both episodes of aggression, but the
chronicle claims that some of his visual power did survive in the local imagi-
nation. Natives of Huamachuco reported seeing Catequil’s sons revealed to
them in rocks and stones, which in turn became new focal points for the
cult.51
Other huacas were not so tenacious, however. As a result of the wide-
spread destruction of Andean cult images, a religious movement arose in
the mid-sixteenth century in which the huacas were understood to have
begun to wander the land feverishly. Starving and thirsty, they inhabited
the bodies of their erstwhile worshipers and threatened to destroy the
Spaniards. This movement was known as Taqui Onqoy, or “dance of dis-
ease,” a name based both on the agitated dancing exhibited by those the
huacas inhabited and on the pestilence that it was prophesied the huacas
would soon bring, as retribution for the diseases brought by Spaniards.52
This discourse was seemingly informed by Christian millennialism53 and

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 23

Spanish ideas of demonic possession, but it also suggests the sorrow and
anger felt by peoples whose material and visual links to the divine had
been shattered. The huacas were now unmoored, made both immaterial
and invisible, and they thus had to struggle to be honored. Adherents to
the movement were expected to reject all aspects of Spanish culture and
Christian ritual and, according to contemporary testimonies, ordered not
to adore Christian crosses or “images.”54

Early Christian Visions

Nevertheless, images of the Christian divine did step into the vacuum cre-
ated by the destroyed mummies and huacas. The most basic of these
was simply the Latin cross, perhaps the first Christian image that many
Andeans saw. The conquistadors built and erected crosses in the towns
they conquered and refounded in the Andes.55 But in the decades after the
Conquest, some Andeans refused to associate their first visions of the
cross with the Spaniards. Rather, stories were told about a large, three-
dimensional cross in the town of Carabuco on the eastern shores of
Lake Titicaca (Fig. 1.4). According to the tradition developed by Andean
authors such as Guaman Poma, who sought to place Christianity’s origin
in the Andes prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the cross had been
brought to Carabuco by either the Apostle Thomas or the Apostle Bar-
tholomew.56 The cleric Francisco de Avila included the story in a Que-
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chua sermon and indicated that the variant involving the Apostle Thomas
was very widespread, believed by elderly Indians “from Lima to Potosí.”57
In Guaman Poma’s drawing (Fig. 1.4), the cross appears implanted in
the ground, in the privileged center of the composition. The Apostle Bar-
tholomew appears to the left and makes a gesture of teaching to a man in
Andean dress who appears kneeling at the right. The man’s headdress,
which he has removed, indicates that he is a native of the Collasuyu re-
gion in which Carabuco was located.58 The man raises both hands, mak-
ing what, in the European language of gestures, is a sign of admiration
and amazement.59 His gesture can also be read within the Inca system of
gestures related to concourse with the divine. A Spanish witness to the
1572 judgment of the Inca ruler Tupac Amaru said that before turning to
address the noblemen before him, the ruler lifted both hands in the way
the Indians did to the apus, the deities residing in snowy mountaintops.60
Thus, Guaman Poma presents us with an early image of the conversion of a
native Andean (occurring in the year 40 CE!). The event involves a physical

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Figure 1.4. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Apostol S. Bartolome (Apostle

St. Bartholomew), ca. 1615. Ink on paper. Manuscript property of the Royal
Library of Copenhagen.

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 25

object and the man’s visual perception of it. This envisioning is set beyond
the purview of Spanish evangelizers, at the dawn of Christianity.
Other early visions of the Christian faith, especially its deities, were set
within the events of the Conquest. The conquistadors carried images of
Christian saints with them into battle, most likely emblazoned on ban-
ners, but also in the form of panel paintings or small statues.61 Few of these
works survive, but a thirty-centimeter-tall statue of the Virgin Mary surviv-
ing in the monastery of San Francisco in Santiago, Chile, is believed to
have been brought to Chile in 1540 on the saddle of the conquistador Pe-
dro de Valdivia. The tiny, much-restored statue is made of polychromed
wood and features open, raised hands, indicating that it was meant to de-
pict the Virgin of the Assumption. Its back is flat, thus supporting the idea
that it was somehow mounted on Valdivia’s saddle. When indigenous re-
sistance to the Conquest increased in 1542, Spaniards in Santiago di-
rected prayers to the image and renamed her the Virgin of Socorro after
reinforcements arrived in 1544.62
Images such as this appear to have paved the way for more ephemeral
sightings of Christian divinities during the conquest. Though the specific
works of art that may have been brought into Inca Cusco do not survive,
two key visions of saints were said to have occurred during the battle for
that important city. In 1535 the Inca army, led by its ruler Manco, laid
siege to the city of Cusco in an attempt to regain it and remove the Span-
iards. When the fighting reached the center of the city, the Spaniards saw
they were outnumbered and took refuge in a towerlike Inca structure lo-
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cated in the plaza. The Incas shot fiery arrows into the building’s thatched
roof and set it ablaze. Then, according to Diez de Betanzos, at that mo-
ment the Inca troops saw a lady from Castile dressed all in white. She was
seated above the church the Spaniards had established on the plaza a few
years before. The lady began to put out the fire with her long white sleeves
and remained visible over the church for the remainder of the siege. In
addition, in fighting outside the city the Incas saw the Christians led by an
armed man on a white horse with a long white beard and a red cross, like
that used by members of the noble order of Santiago, emblazoned on his
chest. Diez de Betanzos recounts that the Incas said it was the spirit of “el
marqués,” that is, Francisco Pizarro.63
Later accounts identified the visions as being manifestations of the Vir-
gin Mary and Santiago, or St. James. Guaman Poma, writing as a Christian
in the very early seventeenth century, both describes and draws the images
as canonical Christian saintly visions (Figs. 1.5 and 1.6). These visions are
usually written off as Spanish fabrications that helped justify the Conquest

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Figure 1.5. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Conquista Milagro de Santa María
(Conquest, Miracle of the Virgin Mary), ca. 1615. Ink on paper. Manuscript
property of the Royal Library of Copenhagen.

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Figure 1.6. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Conquista Milagro del Señor
Santiago Mayor Apóstol de Jesucristo (Conquest, Miracle of Saint James, Apos-
tle of Jesus Christ), ca. 1615. Ink on paper. Manuscript property of the Royal
Library of Copenhagen.

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 28 · Object and Apparition

by claiming that Christian deities fought along with the Spaniards. They
were certainly celebrated by Spanish residents of Cusco in the following
centuries, pointed to as key events that led to the triumph of Christianity
in the Andes, and rendered often as paintings and sculptures.64 But we
should note that, according to both Diez de Betanzos’s account around
1555 and Guaman Poma’s later descriptions and illustrations, Incas or
other native Andeans are the ones who perceive the visions, not Span-
iards. Thus, like the perception of the cross at Carabuco, an alternative read-
ing of these visions is that they are some of the earliest examples of native
Andeans envisioning the new religion. European precedents for such pre-
conversion visions are definitely present, as in the case of Paul, who was
called by God the Father and saw a vision of Jesus that inspired him to
become an apostle of the same.65 Another example, which like in the Inca
case is set within a military conflict, is the Roman Emperor Constantine’s
vision of a cross with the words “By this conquer.”66 Furthermore, anthro-
pologists of religion suggest that representations of gods can precede belief
in those same gods.67 Thus, we can see these Christian visions in the An-
des as part and parcel of the process of conversion, a process that was ac-
tively engaged in by native Andeans.
Guaman Poma, in his confident description and depiction of the vi-
sionary events, engages in a commentary on the proper appearance of the
Christian divine, based on his previously having seen images of Mary and
St. James. In the first drawing, Mary appears above the soldiers in an ac-
tive pose, in profile and raising her forearms. A series of short lines issue
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from her hands, representing the dirt that the author says she used to blind
the infidel soldiers. A wreath of clouds and an abbreviated cherub appear
under her feet, intended to show the viewer that this is an unearthly vi-
sion.68 Since part of the narrative is that the Virgin helped defeat the In-
cas, several soldiers are arranged in a disorderly pile at the lower right,
having been knocked down by the divine force, and several turn away or
close their eyes. But one man, located at the far right, calmly turns and
looks at the apparition, thus serving as witness to it. Another two men
above him also seem to experience the vision. And a man lying at the bot-
tom right looks up at the Virgin and makes the same gesture of admiration
and amazement that we saw in the Carabuco drawing. He does this with
his right hand, while his left hand places his weapon on the ground.
While the group of soldiers would appear to take us back to those referred
to by Diez de Betanzos, who only incompletely understood the vision as a
“lady from Castile,” Guaman Poma suggests that for some, the vision did
lead to conversion to Christianity.

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 29

The Virgin as drawn by Guaman Poma appears similar to small Span-

ish statues of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption that might
have arrived in Peru during his lifetime (Fig. 1.7). In fact, he names the
Virgin of the apparition in Cusco more specifically as “la Virgen Santa
María de Peña de Francia,” an advocation of the Virgin that had arisen as
a result of a vision in Asturias and in whose name Dominicans had estab-
lished churches and chapels in Quito and Lima.69 So his picture was likely
drawn after an image of the Virgin he had himself seen, possibly in the
form of a statue. The abbreviated cherub and clouds at its feet were also
commonly carved onto the bases of statues. The link between Guaman
Poma’s “visionary” Virgin and actual statues in Peru seems to be con-
firmed by the fact that he goes on to list an even longer name for the Vir-
gin: “Nuestra Señora de Peña de Francia y de Copacabana” (italics mine).
The Virgin of Copacabana is a miraculous statue of Mary enshrined in
the town of the same name near Lake Titicaca, an image whose fame and
likeness was being spread throughout the viceroyalty precisely at the time
of Guaman Poma’s drawing.
Santiago, on the other hand, rides a charger adorned with ostrich
plumes, which tramples an Inca soldier (Fig. 1.6). Here the imported
iconographic type is that of Santiago Matamoros, or St. James Moor-
Killer, except that a Muslim soldier has been replaced by an Inca. Surely
Guaman Poma had seen such images as panel paintings brought by the
Spaniards, and here he makes the iconographic jump to Incas that would
later come to characterize representations of St. James in Peru, as Santiago
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Mataindios. While here the drawing is not as suggestive of the process of

conversion, Guaman Poma’s accompanying text makes two important
moves. It likens Santiago to the Inca deity of thunder and lightning, Illapa,
thus indicating that a syncretic reading of that saint was developing. It also
underscores the real effects of this miracle, in that many Indians were
killed and the blockade of Inca soldiers was broken down.70
As will be seen further in the following chapters, near the end of the
sixteenth century statues of Christian deities began to populate Andean
churches. The very first statues were imported from sculpture workshops
in Europe, especially from Seville, and shipped by sea in wooden crates.
We can turn to one more literary account to find an intriguing case of a
Christian deity slipping into the Andean worldview in material form—as
a three- dimensional statue, as opposed to an ephemeral apparition. The
anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript was commissioned by the priest Fran-
cisco de Avila as part of his project to root out idolatry in the western prov-
ince of Huarochirí (see Map 1). The account is a masterful synthesis of

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Figure 1.7. Circle of Felipe Vigarny, Virgin of the Assump-

tion, after 1525. Castile, Spain. Wood, polychromed and
gilded, 135 cm high. Photograph courtesy of Loyola Uni-
versity Museum of Art, Martin D’Arcy Collection, Chi-
cago, Illinois.

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 Dissolution and Reconfiguration · 31

pre-Hispanic religion of the Huarochirí region, albeit with Biblical under-

tones.71 One curious episode suggests the arrival of Christianity in the
Andes by way of its sculpted images. It explains that the sister of the impor-
tant huaca Cuni Raya Vira Cocha was brought from the underworld to be
given to the Inca ruler Huayna Capac, the last Inca to rule independently
before the arrival of the Spaniards. The messenger in charge of delivering
the woman was given a small chest and could not resist opening it. Inside
was “a stately and beautiful lady. Her hair was like curly gold and she wore
a majestic costume, and in her whole aspect she looked very tiny.”72 Even
though the manuscript was written in Quechua, the word “lady” appears
in Spanish as señora, and two Spanish words are used for “chest,” taquilla
and cofre. Frank Salomon, an anthropologist, proposes that the tiny lady
serves to foreshadow the arrival of the Spaniards, since the acceptance of a
gift bride was seen as a gesture of submission. But this episode also dra-
matically foreshadows the arrival of Christianity, specifically in its mate-
rial and visual form, as a statue of the Virgin Mary enclosed in a wooden
box. The description of the lady would seem to reflect the appearance of a
statue such as the one we have already considered (Fig. 1.7). Scaled at
about half life-size (135 cm tall), the statue features the narrow, delicate
features popular in Castilian sculpture around the mid-sixteenth century.
Her hair is blonde and curly, like gold, and her clothing sumptuous. A
similar statue may thus have been the inspiration for the tiny golden lady
described in the manuscript. The text goes on to say that when the box
arrives to Huayna Capac, it is opened by the huaca Cuni Raya and the
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world lights up with lightning.73 While light was a feature of Andean vi-
sions of the divine, the Spanish friars in Peru often expressed the wish that
native Andeans be “alumbrados,” or illuminated, by the Christian faith.74
This same type of arrival, in a chest and from far away, would later be
narrated for some of the most prestigious Christian images in colonial
Peru (see Plate 1). A large painting executed in the late seventeenth cen-
tury and hung in the Cathedral of Cusco describes the arrival of the statue
known as the Virgin of Belén, later named Patroness of Cusco. At the top
right, the arrival of the statue on Peruvian shores, floating in a wooden
chest, is depicted. At the lower right, the chest is opened and a veil is lifted
to reveal the statue. Like in the Huarochirí description, she is a small
woman and finely dressed. Thereafter, the statue would be enshrined on
the main altar in the Cusco parish of Belén, as seen in the center of the
painting. She would also be periodically carried on a litter throughout the
city, blessing her followers, as seen at the upper left, and would advocate
for sinners in heaven before her son Jesus. The Virgin of Belén is the type

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 32 · Object and Apparition

of image that would replace the visual manifestations of traditional An-

dean deities. Both Spaniards and native Andeans became involved in the
process of envisioning. In the case of this painting, the Bishop of Cusco,
Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo, was the patron of the work (depicted
kneeling before the altar), and its creator was the indigenous master Basilio
de Santa Cruz Pumacallao.75 The cults to the new deities employed ritual
practices that echoed earlier Andean observances—they were dressed in
fine textiles and adorned with flowers, feathers, and precious metals, and
offerings were burned before them. Secondary images such as the paint-
ing by Santa Cruz recounted the miracles performed by these new statues,
thus spreading their fame. Then numerous statue paintings furthered their
cults, visually asserting and establishing a new religion in the Andes.
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