Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of PeruBingham, Hiram
History
Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru
Bingham, Hiram
Incas; Peru -- Antiquities; Peru -- Description and travel
Within a year or so another Augustinian missionary, Friar Diego
Ortiz, left Cuzco alone for Uilcapampa. He suffered much on the
road, but finally reached the retreat of the Inca and entered his
presence in company with Friar Marcos. "Although the Inca was not
too happy to see a new preacher, he was willing to grant him an
entrance because the Inca ... thought Friar Diego would not vex
him nor take the trouble to reprove him. So the Inca gave him a
license. They selected the town of Huarancalla, which was populous
and well located in the midst of a number of other little towns and
villages. There was a distance of two or three days journey from one
Convent to the other. Leaving Friar Marcos in Puquiura, Friar Diego
went to his new establishment and in a short time built a church,
a house for himself, and a hospital,--all poor buildings made in a
short time." He also started a school for children, and became very
popular as he went about healing and teaching. He had an easier time
than Friar Marcos, who, with less tact and no skill as a physician,
was located nearer the center of the Inca cult.
The principal shrine of the Inca is described by Father Calancha as
follows: "Close to Vitcos [or Uiticos] in a village called Chuquipalpa,
is a House of the Sun, and in it a white rock over a spring of water
where the Devil appears as a visible manifestation and was worshipped
by those idolators. This was the principal mochadero of those forested
mountains. The word 'mochadero' [5] is the common name which the
Indians apply to their places of worship. In other words it is the
only place where they practice the sacred ceremony of kissing. The
origin of this, the principal part of their ceremonial, is that very
practice which Job abominates when he solemnly clears himself of all
offences before God and says to Him: 'Lord, all these punishments and
even greater burdens would I have deserved had I done that which the
blind Gentiles do when the sun rises resplendent or the moon shines
clear and they exult in their hearts and extend their hands toward
the sun and throw kisses to it,' an act of very grave iniquity which
is equivalent to denying the true God."
Thus does the ecclesiastical chronicler refer to the practice in
Peru of that particular form of worship of the heavenly bodies
which was also widely spread in the East, in Arabia, and Palestine
and was inveighed against by Mohammed as well as the ancient Hebrew
prophets. Apparently this ceremony "of the most profound resignation
and reverence" was practiced in Chuquipalpa, close to Uiticos, in
the reign of the Inca Titu Cusi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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