{"it":{"id":"TX055","kind":"text","sub":"Andean (Quechua)","name":"Huarochirí Manuscript","place":"Madrid","date":"c.1598-1608","oldest":"c.1608","inst":"Biblioteca Nacional de España MSS/3169, h.64-114 (confirmed on bdh.bne.es)","lang":"Classical Quechua","src":[253,537],"lat":40.424,"lon":-3.69,"tags":["Andes"],"sum":"The Huarochirí Manuscript, called 'the closest thing to an Andean bible', was recorded by a priest trying to stamp out its beliefs.","why":"A rare Andean account of gods and origins, saved in Quechua by people living under colonial rule.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Read it in translation.","rel":["TX029"],"hook":"The Huarochirí Manuscript may have been compiled for the 'extirpator of idolatries' Francisco de Avila."},"S":{"253":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Huarochir%C3%AD_Manuscript"],"537":["Wikipedia: Huarochirí Manuscript","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huarochir%C3%AD_Manuscript"]},"rec":{"id":"TX055","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[{"v":"flood","ev":"flood llama","n":"no contact","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Huarochir%C3%AD_Manuscript"}],"tl":[{"comp":"oral; written 1608","old":"BNE MSS/3169 (c.1608)","pub":"Trimborn 1939 (German); Arguedas 1966","b":"V","url":"https://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/bdh0000087346"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"The fullest native Andean religious text, compiled under Francisco de Ávila.","alternative_reading":"Mountain beings as NHI.","alt_proponent":"rare","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Salomon & Urioste 1991 translation.","key_theme":"huacas (mountain deities) like Paryaqaqa born from eggs; flood llama story","language":"Classical Quechua","physical_object_institution":"Biblioteca Nacional de España MSS/3169, h.64-114 (confirmed on bdh.bne.es)","composition_date":"c.1598-1608","oldest_ms_date":"c.1608","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0089","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Huarochir%C3%AD_Manuscript"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Huarochirí Manuscript","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huarochir%C3%AD_Manuscript"},{"id":"VTX055-3","t":"University of Texas Press: The Huarochirí Manuscript","u":"https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292730533/"}],"sum":"# The Huarochirí Manuscript: Andean Gods in Their Own Language\n\nThe only surviving written record of a prehispanic Andean religious tradition in an Andean language was made for a man whose job was to destroy that religion. The Huarochirí Manuscript, written in Classical Quechua around 1600, tells the stories of the gods of a highland province near Lima, Peru. It has been called \"the closest thing to an Andean bible.\" It survives because Francisco de Ávila, a priest who led campaigns to stamp out what Spain called idolatry, wanted those beliefs set down in writing.\n\n## The priest and the tellers\n\nÁvila was born in Cusco around 1573 and became parish priest of the rural province of Huarochirí in 1597. In 1607 the local native lords brought charges against him in Lima for abuses against his parishioners. He answered by claiming that they hated him because his preaching threatened their secret worship of the huacas, the sacred beings of the Andes. The church authorities accepted his argument, and in 1608 he returned to Huarochirí with new powers as a judge of idolatry. He is credited with commissioning and compiling the manuscript, around 1608.\n\nWho actually wrote it is less certain. The University of Texas Press, which published the first English translation, says the manuscript \"is thought to have been compiled at the behest of\" Ávila, \"the notorious 'extirpator of idolatries.'\" The exact process of composition is unknown. The text is a composite of testimonies and social memories, with many crossings-out, tangents and marginal queries, probably Ávila's. The tellers, the publisher notes, \"were provincial Indians dwelling on the west Andean slopes near Lima, Peru, aware of the Incas but rooted in peasant, rather than imperial, culture.\" Because the stories were recorded some seventy years after the Spanish arrived, they also carry the marks of forced conversion and persecution.\n\nEven so, the publisher argues that the work \"expresses Andean religious ideas largely from within Andean categories of thought,\" and that it \"may bear comparison with such civilization-defining works as Gilgamesh, the Popul Vuh, and the Sagas.\" The philosopher Jorge Sanchez-Perez of the University of Alberta has argued that Ávila meant to use the myths to show the superiority of Christianity.\n\n## A book forgotten in Madrid\n\nFor centuries the manuscript lay forgotten in the royal library of Madrid. The German ethnologist Hermann Trimborn found it there and published a German translation with the Quechua text in 1939; most of that edition was destroyed in the Second World War. The Peruvian writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas made the first Spanish translation in 1966, and Trimborn and Antje Kelm published an expanded German edition in 1967. Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste's English translation, with Urioste's transcription of the Quechua, followed in 1991.\n\nThe manuscript runs to 31 chapters and two supplements.\n\n## The age of Huallallo\n\nThe first chapter sets out the order of the principal huacas, who fought one another for the right to pass life force to human beings. The earliest named, Yanañamca and Tutañamca, are barely known. They were overthrown by Huallallo Carhuincho, the first to give life force to people. In his time the land had red and yellow parrots. A crop could be harvested five days after sowing, and the dead came back to life after five days. Because no one stayed dead, the population grew so fast that people had to move into the mountains to find room. Huallallo allowed each family only two children, and ate one of them.\n\nThe manuscript describes how that return of the dead was received: \"When they were about to return, people waited for them with prepared food and drinks. When the dead arrived, they'd just say, 'I'm back!' and rejoice immensely in the company of their elders and their brothers. They'd say, 'Now I'll never die again forever!'\"\n\nThen Pariacaca deposed Huallallo and banished him, with his parrots, to the region of the Antis. Almost all of the rest of the manuscript is about Pariacaca, who was the leading huaca when the Incas arrived. Pariacaca is also a real mountain, the highest peak of its range at 5,751 metres, on the border of the Junín and Lima regions, and was sacred in ancient times.\n\n## Cuniraya and the fruit\n\nThe second chapter belongs to Cuniraya Huiracocha, a local huaca combined with the Inca creator god Huiracocha. He wanders the land dressed as a beggar. Mocked by the other huacas, he builds terraces by speaking and opens irrigation channels with the brush of a reed flower. A beautiful virgin named Cahuillan has refused every huaca. Cuniraya turns himself into a bird, puts his seed into a ripe lúcuma fruit and drops it beside her. She eats it and becomes pregnant.\n\nWhen the child can crawl, she calls the huacas together to learn who the father is. The baby crawls to the beggar. Ashamed, she snatches up her son and runs for the sea. Cuniraya follows, blessing or cursing each animal he meets according to its answer: the condor may eat any dead animal, the puma may eat people's llamas, the skunk will walk at night, hated and stinking. At the coast near the temple of Pachacamac, he finds that mother and child have become two islands, which are still there.\n\n## Flood and darkness\n\nChapters three and four tell of the oldest humans, before Pariacaca. In one, the animals sense the ocean is about to rise and climb to the heights. A llama, tethered by its owner, stops eating. When the owner throws a corncob at it, the llama speaks: the world will end in five days. They climb the mountain Huillcacoto, where all the animals have gathered, and the sea covers everything but its summit. The peak is so crowded that the fox's tail dips in the water, which is why it is black. After five days the water goes down.\n\nIn the next chapter the sun dies. For five days there is complete darkness. Rocks move and knock together, mortars and grinding stones come alive and eat people, and llamas chase people. A revolt of animals and objects is also a theme of Moche art about a thousand years earlier.\n\n## The poor man and the false god\n\nThe fifth chapter introduces Huatiacuri, a poor man on his way to see the birth of Pariacaca, his father. Resting on the road, he overhears two foxes, one from the mountains and one from the coast, discussing a rich man named Tantañamca who claims to be a god but is ill. His sickness, the mountain fox explains, has an odd cause: a grain of maize jumped from a cooking pot and touched his wife, who then fed it to another man. Snakes now live in his roof and a two-headed toad lives under his grinding stone. Huatiacuri cures him, wins his youngest daughter Chaupiñamca, and finds Pariacaca at last in the form of five eggs. The writer added a note to himself that the spring the toad flew to should be found.\n\nA priest gathered these stories to uproot them, and the marks of his campaign are on the page. How far can a testimony gathered for its enemy still speak for the people who told it?","qs":["How far can we trust a testimony gathered for its enemy?","What survives of a religion when its shrines are destroyed?","Why does it matter that the tellers were villagers, not Incas?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Huarochiri_Capitulo_7_ymanam_chay_curapacuna_chay_chuquisuso_niscacta_canancamapas_yupaychan_Capitulo_8_ymanam_pariacaca_vichaycorcan.png/1280px-Huarochiri_Capitulo_7_ymanam_chay_curapacuna_chay_chuquisuso_niscacta_canancamapas_yupaychan_Capitulo_8_ymanam_pariacaca_vichaycorcan.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huarochiri_Capitulo_7_ymanam_chay_curapacuna_chay_chuquisuso_niscacta_canancamapas_yupaychan_Capitulo_8_ymanam_pariacaca_vichaycorcan.png","title":"Huarochiri Capitulo 7 ymanam chay curapacuna chay chuquisuso niscacta canancamapas yupaychan Capitulo 8 ymanam pariacaca vichaycorcan.png","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"UnknownUnknown Editor: Francisco de Ávila (1573–1647)","cap":"Huarochirí Manuscript, Chapters 7 and 8, in Classical Quechua:"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Huarochiri_Capitulo_2_cuniraya_vira_cochap_causascan.png/1280px-Huarochiri_Capitulo_2_cuniraya_vira_cochap_causascan.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huarochiri_Capitulo_2_cuniraya_vira_cochap_causascan.png","title":"Huarochiri Capitulo 2 cuniraya vira cochap causascan.png","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"UnknownUnknown Editor: Francisco de Ávila (1573–1647)","cap":"Huarochirí Manuscript, Chapter 2, in Classical Quechua:"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c.1598-1608","h":"Date","s":[332]},{"v":"c.1608","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[332]},{"v":"Classical Quechua","h":"Language","s":[332]}],"hs":{"332":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Huarochir%C3%AD_Manuscript"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX055.webp","w":1280,"h":891,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Huarochiri_Capitulo_7_ymanam_chay_curapacuna_chay_chuquisuso_niscacta_canancamapas_yupaychan_Capitulo_8_ymanam_pariacaca_vichaycorcan.png/1280px-Huarochiri_Capitulo_7_ymanam_chay_curapacuna_chay_chuquisuso_niscacta_canancamapas_yupaychan_Capitulo_8_ymanam_pariacaca_vichaycorcan.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}