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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
effect to speed up their ruthless advance into the Inca heartland. 3
The capital of the Inca empire was the city of Cuzco, a name meaning
‘the earth’s navel’ in the local Quechua language. 4 According to legend it
was established by Manco Capac and Mama Occlo, two children of the
Sun. Here, though the Incas worshipped the sun god, whom they knew as
Inti, quite another deity was venerated as the Most Holy of all. This was
Viracocha, whose namesakes were said to “have made the Nazca lines
and whose own name meant ‘Foam of the Sea.’ 5
No doubt it is just a coincidence that the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who
was born of the sea, received her name because of ‘the foam [aphros] out
of which she was formed’. 6 Besides, Viracocha was always depicted
uncompromisingly as a male by the peoples of the Andes. That much
about him is known for certain. No historian, however, is able to say how
ancient was the cult of this deity before the Spanish arrived to put a stop
to it. This is because the cult seemed always to have been around;
indeed, long before the Incas incorporated him into their cosmogony and
built a magnificent temple for him at Cuzco, the evidence suggests that
the high god Viracocha had been worshipped by all the civilizations that
had ever existed in the long history of Peru.
Citadel of Viracocha
A few days after leaving Nazca, Santha and I arrived in Cuzco and made
our way to the site of the Coricancha, the great temple dedicated to
Viracocha in the pre-Colombian era. The Coricancha was of course long
gone. Or, to be more exact, it was not so much gone as buried beneath
layers of later architecture. The Spanish had kept its superb Inca
foundations, and the lower parts of its fabulously strong walls, and had
erected their own grandiose colonial cathedral on top.
Walking towards the front entrance of this cathedral, I remembered that
the Inca temple that had once stood here had been covered with more
than 700 sheets of pure gold (each weighing around two kilograms) and
that its spacious courtyard had been planted with ‘fields’ of replica corn
also fashioned out of gold. 7 I could not help but be reminded of
Solomon’s temple in far-off Jerusalem, also reputed to have been adorned
3
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 6:276-7.
4
Paul Devereux, Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places, Blandford Books, London, 1992,
p. 76. See also Peru, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1991, p. 168.
5
The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and Legend, London and Oxford,
1988, p. 657.
6
Macrobius, cited in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, David
R. Godine, Publisher, Boston, 1992, p. 134. See also A. R. Hope Moncreiff, The
Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, BCA, London, 1992, p. 153.
7
Peru, p. 181.
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