The Inca Yahuarhuaccac, like George II., was at odds with his Prince of
Wales. He therefore banished the Prince to Chita, and made him serve as
shepherd of the llamas of the Sun. Three years later the disgraced
Prince came to Court, with what the Inca regarded as a cock-and-bull story
of an apparition of the kind technically styled 'Borderland.' Asleep or
awake, he knew not, he saw a bearded robed man holding a strange animal.
The appearance declared himself as Uiracocha (Christoval's name for the
Creator), a Child of the Sun; by no means as Pachacamac, the Creator of
the Sun. He announced a distant rebellion, and promised his aid to the
Prince. The Inca, hearing this narrative, replied in the tones of
Charles II., when he said about Monmouth, 'Tell James to go to hell!'[24]
The predicted rebellion, however, broke out, the Inca fled, the Prince
saved the city, dethroned his father, and sent him into the country. He
then adopted, from the apparition, the throne-name _Uiracocha,_ grew a
beard, and dressed like the apparition, to whom he erected a temple,
roofless, and unique in construction. Therein he had an image of the god,
for which he himself gave frequent sittings. When the Spaniards arrived,
bearded men, the Indians called them Uiracochas (as all the Spanish
historians say), and, to flatter them, declared falsely that Uiracocha was
their word for the Creator. Garcilasso explodes the Spanish etymology of
the name, in the language of Cuzco, which he 'sucked in with his mother's
milk.' 'The Indians said that the chief Spaniards were children of the
Sun, to make gods of them, just as they said they were children of the
apparition, Uiracocha.'[25] Moreover, Garcilasso and Cieza de Leon agree
in their descriptions of the image of Uiracocha, which, both assert,
the Spaniards conceived to represent a Christian early missionary, perhaps
St. Bartholomew.[26] Garcilasso had seen the mummy of the Inca Uiracocha,
and relates the whole tale from the oral version of his uncle, adding many
native comments on the Court revolution described.
To Garcilasso, then, the invocations of Uiracocha, in Christoval's
collection of prayers, are a native adaptation to Spanish prejudice: even
in them Pachacamac occurs.[27]
Now, Christoval has got hold of a variant of Garcilasso's narrative,
which, in Garcilasso, has plenty of humour and human nature. According to
Christoval it was not the Prince, later Inca Uiracocha, who beheld the
apparition, but the Inca Uiracocha's _son,_ Prince of Wales, as it were,
of the period, later the Inca Yupanqui.
Garcilasso corrects Christoval. Uiracocha saw the apparition, as Père
Acosta rightly says, and Yupanqui was _not_ the son but the grandson of
this Inca Uiracocha.[28] Uiracocha's own son was Pachacutec, which simply
means 'Revolution,' 'they say, by way of by-word _Pachamcutin,_ which
means "the world changes."'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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