{"it":{"id":"TX029","kind":"text","sub":"Andean (Inca)","name":"Viracocha accounts: Betanzos (1551), Cieza de León (1553), Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572)","place":"Held in several collections","date":"Colonial Spanish chronicles","oldest":"mid-16th c.","inst":"Betanzos ms. Fundación Bartolomé March, Palma; Sarmiento ms. Göttingen University Library","lang":"Spanish","src":[227,603],"tags":["Andes"],"sum":"Spanish chroniclers recorded Viracocha rising from Lake Titicaca, making sun, moon and stars and ordering Tiwanaku built.","why":"It is a creator god whose best-known portrait was painted by his worshippers' conquerors.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Compare Betanzos and Cieza.","rel":["TIW-PUM","TX030"],"hook":"Sarmiento recorded Viracocha as 'white and dressed in a white robe like an alb', with a staff and a book."},"S":{"227":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha"],"603":["Cristóbal de Molina, Fables and Rites of the Incas, trans. Markham 1873 (sacred-texts)","https://sacred-texts.com/nam/inca/rly/rly1.htm"]},"rec":{"id":"TX029","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA130","a":"Viracocha = non-human visitor linked to Tiwanaku.","who":"Hancock","main":"Andean creation myth filtered by Spanish/Christian authors; 'white bearded' detail likely colonial.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Betanzos, Suma y narración I.1-2","q":"Viracocha emerges from Titicaca, makes sun and moon, carves peoples in stone at Tiwanaku. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"Hamilton & Buchanan 1996","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha","mo":"creation at Tiwanaku"}],"tr":[{"by":"Hamilton & Buchanan (Betanzos)","yr":"1996","t":"Narrative of the Incas","lic":"copyright","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Betanzos"},{"by":"Clements Markham (Sarmiento)","yr":"1907","t":"History of the Incas","lic":"public domain","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Sarmiento_de_Gamboa"}],"mo":[{"v":"sky_descent","ev":"Viracocha from Titicaca (lake, not sky)","n":"partial match","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha"},{"v":"giants_hybrids","ev":"Viracocha's stone giants","n":"no contact","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha"},{"v":"withdrawal_of_gods","ev":"Viracocha departs over the sea","n":"no contact","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Andean creation myth filtered by Spanish/Christian authors; 'white bearded' detail likely colonial.","alternative_reading":"Viracocha = non-human visitor linked to Tiwanaku.","alt_proponent":"Hancock","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Colonial transmission; 'bearded white man' trope contested.","key_theme":"Viracocha rises from Lake Titicaca, creates sun, makes and destroys a first race of giants (stone), then humans; departs across sea","language":"Spanish","physical_object_institution":"Betanzos ms. Fundación Bartolomé March, Palma; Sarmiento ms. Göttingen University Library","composition_date":"Colonial Spanish chronicles","oldest_ms_date":"mid-16th c.","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0631","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha"},{"id":"S2604","t":"Cristóbal de Molina, Fables and Rites of the Incas, trans. Markham 1873 (sacred-texts)","u":"https://sacred-texts.com/nam/inca/rly/rly1.htm"},{"id":"VTX029-3","t":"Project Gutenberg eBook #20218 (plain text)","u":"https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20218/pg20218.txt"}],"sum":"# Viracocha: The Andean Creator Who Walked Away Across the Sea\n\nIn Cuzco, early in 1572, a book was read aloud to the descendants of the Inca kings. It was a history of their own ancestors, compiled by a Spanish sea captain and cosmographer named Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and it was read to them chapter by chapter in their own language. They had sworn to give truthful testimony. They discussed each chapter and suggested corrections, some of which were adopted. Then the finished book was signed off by leading Spaniards who had fought in the conquest, and sent to King Philip II with four painted cloths showing the Inca rulers, their families and their history. The fables of the creator god Viracocha were painted on the first cloth, because they \"formed the foundation for the whole history.\"\n\nThe book survives. And it contains the most famous portrait of the Andean creator ever written: \"a man of medium height, white and dressed in a white robe like an alb secured round the waist,\" who \"carried a staff and a book in his hands.\"\n\n## The god at the beginning\n\nViracocha was the creator and supreme deity of the Andes, worshipped before the Incas and by them. For the Incas his cult ranked even above that of Inti, the Sun. His names were many: Ticci Viracocha, Con Tici Viracocha, Viracocha Pachayachachi, \"teacher of the world.\" He made the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars and time itself, and he was remembered as the giver of civilisation.\n\nThe Spanish chroniclers who recorded his story did so in the first decades after the conquest of Peru in the 1530s. Juan de Betanzos wrote in 1551, Pedro Cieza de Leon in 1553, Sarmiento in 1572. Their accounts differ in detail, but the outline is the same.\n\nIn Betanzos's version, Viracocha rises from Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes, in a time of darkness, and brings forth light, making the sun, the moon and the stars. He makes people by breathing into stones. His first creation is a race of brainless giants who displease him, so he destroys them with a flood and makes better humans from smaller stones.\n\nSarmiento's version, written from the testimony gathered at Cuzco, is fuller. Viracocha first \"formed a race of giants of disproportioned greatness painted and sculptured, to see whether it would be well to make real men of that size.\" The people he then made broke his precept through pride and covetousness, and he cursed them. Some were turned to stone. Over all came a flood called unu pachacuti, \"water that overturns the land,\" which rained for sixty days and nights. Then, on the island of Titicaca, he ordered the sun, moon and stars to come forth into the sky.\n\n## The carved stone at Tiwanaku\n\nFrom the lake Viracocha went to the place now called Tiwanaku, the great ruined city near the southern shore. There, Sarmiento writes, \"he sculptured and designed on a great piece of stone, all the nations that he intended to create.\" He ordered his two servants to memorise the names of every tribe he had depicted and the valleys where each was to come forth. They set out on separate roads, one along the coastal heights and one along the Andes, crying out the order to \"go forth, and multiply and settle the land,\" while Viracocha walked the road between. At the sound of his voice people came out of lakes, springs, valleys, caves, trees, rocks and hills.\n\nAnother version Sarmiento heard says that the first people, still speaking one language, built the edifices \"the ruins of which may still be seen\" as a residence for their maker, and only afterwards scattered and began to speak different tongues. His English editor, Clements Markham, noted that the Titicaca myth seems to come from the more ancient people who built Tiwanaku itself.\n\nThen the god walked north as a teacher, working miracles. At a place called Cacha, people who disliked his dress and bearing gathered on a hill to kill him. He knelt with his hands clasped, and fire fell from above, burning the ground and stones \"like straw,\" until he put it out with his staff. Sarmiento says the burnt hill could still be seen, its stones made so light that a boulder too big for a cart could be lifted by one man.\n\nAt last, on the coast near the equator, Viracocha told his people that others would come claiming to be him, and that they must not believe them. Then he went into the sea with his two servants, \"travelling over the water as if it was land, without sinking.\" Because they looked like foam on the water, Sarmiento says, people called him Viracocha, \"the grease or foam of the sea.\"\n\n## Who was holding the pen\n\nHere the story turns on motive. The viceroy who ordered Sarmiento's history, Francisco de Toledo, governed Peru from 1569 to 1581, and he had a political purpose. He commissioned reports, thirteen of them, to prove that the Incas were usurpers who had no rightful claim to rule. If the Incas were tyrants, Spain's conquest was a liberation. Markham, who translated the book for the Hakluyt Society soon after its first printing in 1906, wrote that Toledo made final insertions \"to vilify the Incas,\" which some of the Spaniards who had attested the book would never have approved.\n\nThe famous description of Viracocha raises the same question. Markham flagged the \"foam of the sea\" etymology as \"a mistake,\" and the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega had already rejected it. The first Spanish chronicler to link Viracocha with a \"white god\" was Cieza de Leon in 1553; earlier writers made no such identification. Whiteness is not mentioned in the native legends of the Incas, and most modern scholars have treated the white god as a post-conquest addition, a detail that would have been convenient for newcomers who were themselves white, bearded and arriving from across the sea. Spanish interpreters soon used Viracocha's name for the Christian God, which made the creator a bridge for conversion.\n\n## What is left\n\nThe record lists the modern claim, that Viracocha was a non-human visitor tied to Tiwanaku, as unresolved interpretation with no measurable data. Defenders of early overseas contact point out that the Moche culture of Peru made pottery showing bearded men long before the Spanish came. Critics reply that some Native American peoples were reported with heavy beards, such as the Ache of Paraguay, and that the whiteness is what lacks a native source.\n\nStrip away what the Spanish might have added, and much still stands. A creator who experiments with giants before settling on the human scale. A flood that ends a failed humanity. A god who carves the plan of every nation on a stone at Tiwanaku, then sends his servants out with the names to memorise. A teacher who walks away across the ocean, warning that impostors will come in his name.\n\nIf the conquerors coloured the portrait, what did the people of the Andes remember before the Spanish arrived, and why did their creator leave by sea?","qs":["Viracocha creates, teaches, then walks off across the sea. Myth, memory of a real teacher, or a story bent by Spain?","The \"white, bearded\" god came to us through Spanish writers. How much should we trust a conqueror's version of someone else's god?","The myth says giants were destroyed before humans were made. Why does that pattern appear in so many cultures?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/MocheBeardedMen.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MocheBeardedMen.jpg","title":"MocheBeardedMen.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Pattych (talk)","cap":"Moche ceramic vessels depicting bearded men"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"mid-16th c.","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[304]},{"v":"Spanish","h":"Language","s":[304]}],"hs":{"304":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX029.webp","w":1181,"h":634,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/MocheBeardedMen.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}