Worship, Festivals and Ancestors in the Inca World

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, worship in the Inca world linked people to sacred places, ancestors and political authority through practical acts: preparing food and drink, carrying offerings, attending processions and caring for the dead. Cusco, the imperial capital in the southern Peruvian highlands, hosted state festivals that drew rulers, temple personnel, royal kin groups and visitors from provinces; communities also maintained relationships with local mountains, springs and ancestral places. Spanish chroniclers recorded ceremonies after conquest, sometimes describing practices they had witnessed and sometimes recounting earlier rulers’ histories.

On this page6 sections

Offerings and sacred places

A huaca was a sacred being or place. It might be a mountain, spring, unusual stone, ancestral remains, or a shrine containing an image. People approached huacas through gifts and actions that fit the occasion. Food, maize beer, cloth, animal offerings and small metal or shell figures could be presented. These goods had to be prepared and carried: grain was brewed into chicha, garments were woven or assembled, and offerings travelled along roads to shrines or public plazas.

Religious work also relied on people who cared for sacred objects and spoke for them. Pedro de Cieza de León, writing in the 1550s, says that priests and camayocs, or guardians, brought huaca images to Cusco for an annual state gathering. He describes the rulers and priests asking each image’s attendants questions about harvests, illness, political danger and the coming year. His Catholic language repeatedly condemns the answers and rites as false, but his account records the sequence of gathering, consultation and gift giving. He calls the gifts made after the consultations capacocha and lists vessels of gold and silver, rich mantles and herds among them.

Hatun Raymi and the harvest

Cieza describes Hatun Raymi as a major harvest festival, celebrated in late August after maize, potatoes, quinoa and other crops had been gathered. He says people fasted for ten or twelve days before the main rites. After the fast, animals and birds were brought to Cusco for sacrifice. Priests interpreted signs in the offerings, while women attached to temple service prepared and supplied large quantities of chicha, or maize beer.

The festival then moved from offering to shared public ceremony. Cieza reports that participants ate meat from sacrificed animals and drank the sacred beer before forming a procession. Men sang songs said to have been composed by their ancestors; women played drums and joined in the singing. Images of sacred beings stood in a decorated structure in the plaza, where the Inca, priests, nobles and other participants performed acts of reverence. Cieza says the celebration lasted fifteen or twenty days and included music, dance, drinking and feasting in Cusco’s main plaza.

Cieza’s late-August date follows his account of the harvest. Other colonial writers place ceremonies in different months, while crop seasons shifted with altitude and local conditions.

Situa and the expulsion of illness

The Situa, also called Coya Raymi in some accounts, was a Cusco ceremony associated with the onset of the rainy season and the removal of sickness from the city. Its precise month is disputed. A comparison of colonial calendars by archaeologist Luis Rodolfo Monteverde Sotil shows Situa placed in August or September by different writers. The sources also differ in how they arrange activities, a reminder that the calendar was reconstructed from accounts written at different times.

In the detailed 1574–1575 account of the priest Cristóbal de Molina, the opening rites gathered images of sacred beings at Coricancha, the Sun temple in Cusco. Groups of men then left the main plaza by roads leading toward the empire’s four regions, calling for illness and misfortune to leave the city and casting them into rivers. The action made the city’s boundary part of the rite: sickness was treated as something that could be carried away from the community.

Other actions took place at homes and public places. Participants washed at rivers, while households smeared sanco, a thick maize preparation, on faces and houses. Some sanco was also offered to sacred images and the dead. On later days, royal ancestors were brought through the plaza and chicha was offered at the ushnu, a raised ritual platform in the main square. Representatives of provincial kin communities came with their own huacas, made offerings and renewed ties with the Inca; some sacred images remained in Cusco until the next annual observance. The ceremony thus joined household purification, royal ancestor care and state relationships with incorporated peoples.

Ancestors, kin and family rites

Royal ancestors were participants in Cusco ceremony, not simply names remembered in stories. Cieza says deceased Inca rulers were brought out during Hatun Raymi with service of gold and silver, then returned to their houses after the festival. Molina’s account of Situa, as analyzed by Monteverde, likewise places royal mummy bundles in the plaza alongside the living ruler and the panacas, the descent groups associated with deceased rulers. Food, drink, clothing and attendants supported the public appearance of these royal dead.

Another Cusco ceremony marked elite initiation. In Cieza de León’s account of early rulers, Sinchi Roca held sacrifices at Huanacauri, a sacred hill near Cusco, and initiated young nobles. Cieza says about four thousand youths gathered, had their ears pierced and received ornaments. The English translation by Clements Markham describes them as “armed as knights”; the account concerns initiation into Cusco’s elite and ear-ornament status, not a European knighthood. The number belongs to Cieza’s account of an early ruler, not a dated census of participants.

A different, later ceremony is described in colonial accounts of Capac Raymi in Cusco. Archaeologist Paula Martínez Sagredo compares accounts by Molina, Betanzos and Cieza, which assign specific tasks differently. Cieza describes a candidate’s mother and sisters weaving four garments in haste; Betanzos mentions a black-wool shirt. Molina records relatives preparing sandals and selected young women making chicha and carrying small jars. Young nobles visited Huanacauri and performed tests of endurance before the ear-piercing. These sixteenth-century preparations are distinct from Cieza’s story of the early ruler Sinchi Roca.

Capacocha and offerings across the empire

Capacocha, also spelled capac hucha, was a major state offering associated in colonial accounts with events such as a ruler’s accession or death, drought, or other political and environmental crises. Cieza uses the word for gifts following annual consultations with huaca images; museum and archaeological accounts also describe processions to distant sacred places. The rite could include animals, fine textiles, metal objects and the sacrifice of selected children. Unlike an ordinary household gift, a capacocha connected Cusco with communities and sacred places across a long route. Museum accounts of the chronicles describe representatives, priests, families and chosen children gathering in Cusco from the four regions of the empire. Communities selected some children, at times including the sons and daughters of local chiefs; processions then carried them to sacred sites, where they were buried with offerings.

At Llullaillaco, on the present-day Argentina-Chile border, archaeologists excavated a ritual complex in 1999 along a road that climbed from the mountain’s base to a platform near the summit, 6,730 metres above sea level. Three children were found there with their funerary offerings. The Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta describes the Maiden, about fifteen years old, in a woven mantle fastened by a silver tupu pin, with red pigment on her face and coca leaves in her mouth. The assemblage also included small human figures of gold and shell, miniature textiles, camelid-wool slings and finely made footwear.

The objects and road show several stages of preparation: specialists made miniatures and clothing, attendants dressed the children, and participants carried the offerings up a difficult mountain route. In contrast with a household’s food or drink offering, this was a state ceremony that connected chosen children, distant communities and a high-altitude sacred place.

Ceremony after conquest

Spanish conquest brought Christian authorities who attempted to suppress public ceremonies and replace local institutions. Cieza recalled that in August 1550, people still entered Cusco after harvest carrying ploughs and maize stalks to sing as they had done at harvest festivals. He also says church authorities opposed public performance of such rites. His account documents both the persistence of seasonal gatherings and the new religious restrictions, while its judgmental language reflects the colonial setting in which he wrote.

For a broader account of sacred beings and Inca cosmology, see sacred places. For the wider setting, see Daily Life in the Inca World.