Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s

pictures of huacas
LISA TREVER

I. Introduction ingas del Pirú (ca. 1590), also known as the Galvin
manuscript. Those earlier color drawings have only
In the early seventeenth century, the native Andean
recently resurfaced in the academic world and they
author and artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala penned
reveal much about Guaman Poma’s graphic production.
an illustrated account of the history of Peru from its
This study is art historical in its focus on formal shifts and
first inhabitants, through the Inca kings, to his own era
pictorial re-articulations, but its analyses also draw upon
of Spanish viceregal rule. Guaman Poma’s history, El
recent advances in Andean history, ethnography, and
primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (ca. 1615), is
archaeology.
best known for the 398 line drawings that illuminate
This essay will argue that Guaman Poma invented a
the text. No other early colonial Peruvian manuscript is
new colonial iconography for depicting native Andean
so heavily illustrated and thus Guaman Poma’s pictures
religion during his collaboration with Murúa and that he
have been repeatedly mined for the illustration of
continued to use and adjust that iconography throughout
Andean history, anthropology, and ethnography. Not
his career. Guaman Poma’s pictorial formulae integrate
until relatively recently, however, have scholars begun
conventional Christian tropes of idolatry with particular
to evaluate and contextualize Guaman Poma’s use of
Andean emphases on the sacrality of mountains and
European popular and religious iconography, survivals of
stone. It is well known that pagan forms from classical
pre-Hispanic visual traditions, and colonial-era agendas.1
antiquity informed Spanish interpretation of idolatry in
Within Guaman Poma’s corpus, one finds the invention
the American viceroyalties, and so it is not surprising
and recombination of pictorial language to serve the
that Guaman Poma draws heavily upon medieval
rhetorical needs of an often paradoxical writer. The
iconography of idolatry in these pictures. What is more
images of the Nueva corónica are just as polemical as
remarkable is how the illustrator adapts that vocabulary
its text, especially in their amplification of the author’s
to suit the local subject at hand. In the later Nueva
argument for a return to native rule in Peru, unburdened
corónica, Guaman Poma continues to employ the same
by both idolatry and corruption, but grounded instead in
idiosyncratic iconography of mountains-as-idols, but
the Catholic faith.
the formula shifts as he reveals a deeper understanding
In this essay I examine Guaman Poma’s pictures of
of the primacy of ancestral cults. Guaman Poma’s
native religion within this context of pictorial invention
most “authentic” visual articulation of pre-Hispanic
and colonial religious rhetoric. I bring together the
metaphysics, however, appears not in the Nueva
artist’s illustrations of huacas (central objects of Inca
corónica but, unexpectedly, in the illustrated Inca
and Andean devotion) in the Nueva corónica with the
romance that concludes Murúa’s Historia. In the change
watercolors that he made years prior to illustrate the
of genre to romantic fiction, Guaman Poma’s pictures are
same subject for the Spanish friar Martín de Murúa’s
seemingly freed from the constraints of religious rhetoric.
Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes
What results is a radically different representation of
two huacas (Pitusiray and Sahuasiray) in an image of
Several ideas developed here were first presented at the Association apotheosis that is singular in the history of art.
for Latin American Art’s first triennial conference “Open Dialogues” at
New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in October 2007. A version
of this paper was presented during the Vanderbilt-Chicago-Harvard II. Assembling the huacas
workshop “Materiality, Ontology, and the Andes” at Harvard University
in April 2009. The author heartily thanks Tom Cummins, Irene Winter, At the opening of his chapter on idolatry in the Nueva
Gary Urton, Joanne Pillsbury, Jessica Berenbeim, Eulogio Guzmán, corónica, Guaman Poma illustrates the fifteenth-century
César Astuhuamán, Francesco Pellizzi, Juliet Wiersema, and the Inca king Topa Inca consulting an assembly of huacas
anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments, suggestions, and (fig. 1).2 “Huaca” is a Quechua and Aymara term that is
criticisms.
1.  See, for example, Cabos Fontana 2000; Chang-Rodríguez
2005; Cummins 2003; Fraser 1996; Van de Guchte 1992; Gisbert 2.  The holographic manuscript is held in the Royal Library of
1992; Holland 2002; López Baralt 1988, 1993; Schenone et al. 1994; Denmark in Copenhagen (GKS 2232 4°). A transcription has been
Zuidema 1994. published (Guaman Poma 1980 [ca. 1615]) and is also available
40  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011
Figure 1. Topa Inca consults the huacas. Guaman Poma, El
primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ca. 1615, p. 261
[263]. Photo: Courtesy of the Royal Library of Denmark,
Copenhagen.
often glossed in early Spanish dictionaries and chronicles
as “idol” (González Holguín 1901 [1608]:123; Bertonio
1879 [1612]:277) but that more appropriately refers to
a range of numinous Andean subjects including local
gods, shrines, statuary, and sacred features in landscapes.
In this pen-and-ink illustration, the Inca king speaks
with a circle of twelve huacas that vary from vaguely
human figures to angular monoliths and a small temple.
He says: “Huaca vilcacona! Who among you has said
for it not to rain, not to freeze, not to hail? Speak! That
is all.” Several huacas turn away as they collectively
online (Guaman Poma 2006 [ca. 1615]). A small group of scholars has
argued that the Jesuit Blas Valera was the real author of this manuscript
(Cantù 2001; Laurencich 2007) but the authenticity of the “Naples
documents” that support their claim is questionable (Andrien 2008).
deny his accusations: “It was not us, Inca!”3 At left we
see the mountain Huanacauri just outside of Cusco,
the capital of the Inca empire. At its summit Guaman
Poma has drawn a small seated figure (Huanacauri
huaca) within a shrine.4 From his mountaintop abode,
the apical huaca of the Inca kings—also known as Ayar
Uchu, the petrified brother of the Inca dynastic founder
Manco Capac (Betanzos 1996 [1557]:pt. 1:4:15–16;
Sarmiento 2007 [1572]:12:66; Cobo 1979 [1653]:bk.
2:3:104)—watches silently over the assembly. Yet an
early colonial account of the huacas of Cusco states that
the sacred object revered within the shrine at the top
of the mountain Huanacauri was a plain stone: “It was
of moderate size, without representational shape, and
somewhat tapering. [. . .] After the Spanish arrived, they
removed a great quantity of gold and silver from this
shrine but paid no attention to the idol, because it was,
as I have said, a rough stone” (Cobo 1990 [1653]:bk.
1:15:74 [Co-6:7]).5 Guaman Poma’s anthropomorphic
image of Huanacauri is not a faithful description of what
the aniconic mountaintop huaca looked like, but rather
a conceptual illustration of the huaca personified. With
this image Guaman Poma begins a highly unusual series
of colonial pictures of ancient American religion.
The term “huaca” eludes easy definition and
historically it has been interpreted and constructed in
various ways. In general, however, a huaca is a sacred
place, person, animal, or thing that is especially imbued
with the activating, manna-like force known in Quechua
as camay (Salomon 1991, 1998; Taylor 2000:1–17). As
an ontological category, huaca may include divinities,
celestial bodies, ancestors, ethnic origin places
(pacarinas), or personified forms in the landscape, as
well as shrines, trees, portable objects, or any thing that
is exceptional for its type, such as an egg with two yolks,
a person with a cleft lip, or a strangely shaped stone
3.  The Quechua dialogue reads: “Uaca bilcacona! Pim
camcunamanta ‘ama parachun, cazachun, runtochun’ ninqui? Rimari.
Chaylla.” The huacas respond: “Manam nocacunaca, Ynca” (Guaman
Poma 2006 [ca. 1615]:261[263]). My translation is adapted from
Roland Hamilton’s recent English translation (Guaman Poma 2009 [ca.
1615]:201). Guaman Poma glosses the scene in Spanish: “con todas las
uacas habla el Ynga.”
4.  Masonry ruins of an Inca temple on Huanacauri have been
described by Romualdo Aguilar (1913) and John H. Rowe (1944; see
also Bauer 1998:108).
5.  Bernabe Cobo’s list of over 350 huacas (1990 [1653]:ch. 13–16)
is thought to be based on Juan Polo Ondegardo’s ca. 1559 survey of the
shrines of Cusco (Julien 2008). Some other colonial accounts describe
the stone idol of Huanacauri as anthropomorphic (such as Betanzos
1996 [1557]:pt. 1:4:15–16; Molina 1988 [ca. 1576]:77), but I find
Cobo’s account to be the more reliable physical description.
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  41

(Polo Ondegardo 1982a [1585]:447; Gonzalez Holguín

1901 [1608]:123; Garcilaso 1989 [1609]:bk. 2:4:76–77;
Rowe 1963 [1946]:295–297; Salomon 1991:16–19). In
broad strokes, the concept of huaca does not describe
a particular type of thing so much as an extraordinary
state of being. But rarely are huacas pictured in colonial
Peruvian books or manuscripts and they seem never to
have been represented mimetically in earlier Inca art.
Only one other set of images even remotely resembles
this series: the watercolor illustrations that Guaman
Poma made for Martín de Murúa’s Historia del origen y
genealogía real de los reyes ingas del Pirú (ca. 1590).6
Considered together, these two series of images make up
an exceptional collection of early colonial visualizations
of pre-Hispanic religious forms.
Guaman Poma established a precedent for his image
of Topa Inca addressing the huacas in a watercolor made
for Murúa (fig. 2). In that drawing, the Inca king Capac
Yupanqui speaks with a group of huacas in Cusco.
Several formal differences are apparent—color is added,
the composition is reversed,7 Huanacauri is not present,

6.  Two versions of Murúa’s illustrated history are known to exist

in manuscript form. The earlier manuscript (Murúa 1946 [ca. 1590];
2004 [ca. 1590]), which is in the private collection of Sean Galvin and
discussed here, is dated 1590 on its title page although it was probably
completed around 1600 (Adorno and Boserup 2005:177–184). Murúa’s
later, ca. 1613 manuscript, titled Historia general del Piru (Murúa 2001
[c.1613], 2008 [ca. 1613]), is in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Ms. Ludwig
XIII 16). Emilio Mendizábal Losack (1961:254) was the first to suggest
that Guaman Poma illustrated parts of the earlier Galvin manuscript.
Indeed, Guaman Poma created over ninety illustrations for that work
(Adorno and Boserup 2005:110), four of which were later removed
Figure 2. Capac Yupanqui consults the huacas. Murúa, Historia
and bound in the Getty manuscript (ibid.:167–169, 253–254; John
H. Rowe identified these insertions in an unpublished 1979 study). del origen y genealogía real de los reyes ingas del Pirú, ca.
Other illustrations in the Getty manuscript were executed by Murúa 1590, bk. 3, ch. 45, fol. 96v. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Cummins.
himself (Cummins n.d.). The Getty manuscript illustrations were never
completed and only the earlier Galvin manuscript includes drawings of
huacas, all of which are the work of Guaman Poma.
7.  Mercedes López-Baralt (1988:187–267) and Rolena Adorno
(2000:89–120) both argue that there is an indigenous system of spatial
and a group of men accompanies the king—but both
values found throughout Guaman Poma’s illustrations in the Nueva depict similar episodes. The huacas in Murúa’s manuscript
corónica. They interpret figures placed at the top or left of the page illustration vary in shape from plain monoliths to a phallus
(or, the “conceptual right” if one assumes a perspective internal to the to anthropomorphic figures. Pacha iachachic, a name for
picture) as consistently dominant to those at the bottom or right. They the Inca creator deity,8 is inscribed in Murúa’s handwriting
argue that this spatial coding derives from asymmetric duality found
in the hanan (greater, upper, right) and hurin (lesser, lower, left) moiety
across the surfaces of two monolithic huacas.9 Here, as in
structure in the Andes. Adorno (2000:100) observes that divinities are
always drawn to the left of worshippers in the Nueva corónica. In some
of Guaman Poma’s illustrations in the Galvin manuscript the divinity is 8.  John H. Rowe (1963 [1946]:293) discusses the full name of
also placed at the left (36v, 39v, 64v), but in most it appears at the right the Inca creator deity as Ilya-tiqsi Wiraqoca Pacayacaciq (“Ancient
(7v, 95v, 96v, 98v, 99v, 100v, 101v, 102v, 103v, 104v, 105v). I perceive foundation, lord, instructor of the world”).
no inversion of value resulting from this compositional reversal. If such 9.  Both Guaman Poma and Murúa inscribed the illustrations in the
a spatial code exists in the Nueva corónica, it is not present in the same Galvin manuscript, although the images of idolatry were inscribed solely
way in Murúa’s Historia. by Murúa (Adorno and Boserup 2005:162–165, 198–199, app. 6).
42  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011
the Nueva corónica, Guaman Poma’s picture is
didactic in its presentation of Andean divinities as
occupying points on a spectrum between lithic and
anthropomorphic extremes and it reveals an
understanding of some huacas as liminal, mythological
beings that could shift from humans into stones and vice
versa.10 It is this set of stony huacas in particular that
Guaman Poma emphasizes throughout his drawings of
native Andean religion.
Although huacas might be any physical objects
especially imbued with camay, they are most often
described in colonial extirpation accounts as stones,
springs, temples, and mountains that had numinous
properties, oracular powers, and mythological
importance, and were active agents in ancient political
conflicts and alignments (Polo Ondegardo 1982a
[1585]:447; Arriaga 1999 [1621]:2:28–31; Rowe 1963
[1946]:296; Curatola and Ziółkowski 2008). These
huacas are often encountered in landscapes and many of
their shrines are arranged along conceptual lines called
ceques that radiated out of Cusco (Cobo 1990 [1653]:bk.
1:12–16, 47–84; Zuidema 1964; Rowe 1979; Van de
Guchte 1990; Bauer 1998; Christie 2008). Processions
to and rituals at these shrines continue to be performed
by communities following a religious calendar (Sallnow
1987; Reinhard 2005).11
Inca and other Andean sculptures in metal often
represent figures naturalistically but sculptures that
10.  Inca and Andean mythology is replete with tales of petrification
and lithomorphosis. For example, through divine intervention, stones
in the battlefield transformed into soldiers to aid Inca Yupanqui in
a pivotal victory against the Chancas (Pachacuti Yamqui 1995 [ca.
1613]:58 [19r]; Cobo 1979 [1653]:bk. 2:10:127–129). After he became
king and took the name Pachacuti, the Inca had these stones installed
in temples throughout Cusco (Acosta 2002 [1590]:bk. 6:21:364; Cobo
1990 [1653]:bk. 1:8:35–36).
11.  Recently historian Peter Gose (2006, 2008) has argued,
however, that the worship of mountains, rocks, and stones was not
original to pre-Hispanic religion. Rather, he proposes that landscape
worship arose only in the aftermath of sixteenth-century reducción
and extirpation campaigns that rid communities of the mummified
ancestors and sculptural “idols” that formed the original core of
Andean worship, leaving only the land itself as the object of devotion.
Gose’s study is important in its historicization of the forms of native
Andean religion. What that author does not analyze critically, however,
is the physical form of those Andean “idols,” which he seems to accept
as anthropomorphic statues in the classical European sense. The
“idols” of pre-Hispanic Andean ancestral cults—such as the stone of
Huanacauri—were just as likely (or perhaps more likely) to be rough
stones as anthropomorphic statues. As such, they maintained a material
continuity with the landscape and thus the change that Gose observes
may better be understood as a colonial shift in emphasis rather than a
complete rupture in religious practice.
survive in stone conform to distinct stylistic and aesthetic
canons. Stone huacas were often either uncarved
rock formations (fig. 3) or sculpted stones that were
abstract or only vaguely figural in form (Dean 2006a;
Paternosto 1996). At times lithic huacas evoked the
shapes of humans and animals (Allen 1997:78), but they
were rarely fully formed and their identification often
required visions and extraordinary acts of perception
(Brittenham n.d.). Large stone huacas were often
described by Spanish priests as formally ambiguous,
monstrous, or malformed, looking almost like a man
or a child but not quite (see, for example, Acosta 2002
[1590]:bk. 5:9:270; Arriaga 1999 [1621]:10:97; Cobo
1990 [1653]:bk. 1:11:46).12 Even the portable huacas
that were considered the “doubles” or “brothers”
(huauques) of the Inca kings and deities did not
represent their subjects directly but instead took the
shapes of birds, fish, or snakes (Van de Guchte 1996;
Dean 2006a). Monolithic huacas set in the landscape
often echo the forms of mountains beyond and require
proper alignment of viewer, stone, and landscape (Dean
2006b; Astuhuamán 2008). Seeing figures in stone
huacas was, and remains, part of a process of visual
imagination and active engagement between object
and viewer. These stone huacas are incommensurate
with Western religious sculpture that informed Spanish
encounters with native religion in the Americas (see, for
example, Cummins 1994, 1995, 2002a; Dean 2006a).
In contrast to Renaissance or classical sculpture, Inca
and other highland Andean artistic traditions emphasize
visual abstraction, metonymy, and materiality over
verisimilitude and mimesis. The division between
sculpture and nature, between “idol” and rough stone,
was not as firmly defined in the pre-Hispanic Andean
world as it was in the European tradition.
In the text of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica, as in
most colonial accounts (see Duviols 1977; MacCormack
1991; Mills 1997), however, the author describes huacas
simply as “idols.” But whereas such glosses fall short
in defining the complexity of what the huacas were,
Guaman Poma’s images offer richer commentaries on
the physical and metaphysical qualities of these Andean
religious forms as they are situated within the colonial
ideology of the artist’s time. Let us turn to Guaman
Poma’s earliest pictures of huacas, created for Murúa’s
Historia.
12.  A possible exception, the purportedly Inca stone statue in
the Museo de América, Madrid (Van de Guchte 1996:fig. 1) is in all
likelihood a colonial reworking of an original Inca stone.
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  43
Figure 3. “El Matrimonio” rock formation on the mountain
Pitusiray, near Calca. For a sense of scale note the size of the
hiker near the base of the outcropping. Photo: Courtesy of
Renato Pérez Valerga.
III. Huaca illustrations in Murúa’s Historia (ca. 1590)
With the recent publication of the earliest known
version of Murúa’s illustrated history (2004 [ca. 1590]),
the corpus of Guaman Poma’s illustrations has increased
dramatically. Rediscovered in a private Irish collection
by historian Juan Ossio in 1997 (Ossio 1998), Murúa’s
Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes ingas
del Pirú is one of only four illustrated manuscripts
known from early colonial Peru and it contains over
ninety illustrations by the hand of Guaman Poma.13
13.  The other three are the Getty manuscript, the Nueva corónica,
and Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui’s Relación de antigüedades
de este reino del Perú (1995 [ca. 1613]), although the latter contains
only three drawings. All four works were completed within twenty-five
years by three primary individuals, and they represent a rich, though
Sometime during 1596–1600 Guaman Poma worked as
Murúa’s illustrator, but the circumstances are not well
known (Adorno and Boserup 2005:187–188, 191–196).
Guaman Poma’s own chronicle is modeled closely in
places on Murúa’s history (Mendizábal Losack 1963;
Murra 1992; Ossio 2001). The formal relationships
between illustrations in Murúa’s history and the Nueva
corónica are exceptionally close at times and the
rediscovery of the former allows for many new insights
into the latter.
Guaman Poma’s work as Murúa’s illustrator was
one phase in the long life of a colonial Andean artist
and chronicler who described himself as a prince and
descendent of native Andean lords. Born sometime
between 1535 and 1550, probably in Huamanga,
Guaman Poma has been described as an indio
ladino—an Indian who was Christian, spoke Spanish
as well as Quechua and other native languages, and
who dressed and conducted himself as a Spaniard.
In 1569–1570 he assisted the ecclesiastical inspector
Cristóbal de Albornoz in the extirpation of native religion
in Soras, Lucanas, Laramati, and Lucanas Andamarca
(Adorno 2000:xlii–li, 2008:255–257). During these
years Albornoz led the repression of the native religious
movement Taki Onqoy (“dance of sickness”) (Molina
1988 [ca. 1576]:129–134; Albornoz 1988 [1581–
1585]:192; Duviols 1977:133–142; Gose 2008:81–117;
Millones 1990; Mumford 1998). Guaman Poma may also
have accompanied viceroy Toledo’s inspection tour from
Huamanga to Cusco, where he spent time in the 1570s
(Adorno 2008:256).
Guaman Poma and Murúa both demonstrate
considerable familiarity with the texts of the Third
Provincial Council of Lima, which was convened by
Archbishop Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo and held
in 1582–1583. Guaman Poma may even have been
in Lima during that time (Adorno 2000:xlviii; Gisbert
1992:76). Most of Murúa’s chapters on pre-Hispanic
Andean religion in the Historia are copied directly from
passages in the “pastoral complements” published in
the Council’s Confessario para los curas de Indios in
1585.14 In particular, the detailed descriptions of Inca
and Andean religion written by the corregidor Juan Polo
Ondegardo (1982a [1585], 1982b [1585]) that he used
short-lived, flourishing of manuscript illustration in early colonial Peru.
In contrast, manuscript painting thrived in colonial Mexico where
artists drew upon long-standing pre-Hispanic traditions of codex
illustration (Boone 1998).
14.  Juan Ossio (2004:179–202) has documented Murúa’s extensive
borrowing from these documents in chapters 45–62 of book 3.
44  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

became standard references for the Catholic Church in

the 1580s.
But whereas Murúa’s accounts of Andean religion
are canonical, the illustrations are anything but
conventional. The images of Andean worship in the
Historia begin with a drawing of the Inca king Capac
Yupanqui venerating the sun (fol. 95v, see fig. 7), but
the manuscript’s first image of a huaca is found in the
illustration of the Inca captain Apomaita (fol. 39v).
Apomaita is depicted removing a green demonic figure
(a huaca, according to the text) from the top of a hill
or monolith (fig. 4).15 This image of Apomaita with the
huaca-as-devil is reminiscent of a woodcut illustrating
cannibalism that was published in Pedro de Cieza de
León’s Parte primera de la chrónica del Perú in Seville
in 1553 (fig. 5).16 In Cieza’s image a winged devil
appears on a column while a man cuts into the chest
of another and two dead captives hang from ropes. This
image of the devil in the New World derives directly
from medieval European iconography of idolatry (see
Camille 1989; Cummins 2002b). Similar conventions are
employed, for example, in a scene of Armenian idolatry
from a late-fourteenth-century French illuminated
manuscript of Marco Polo’s Livre des Merveilles (fig. 6).
In that image two men kneel before an anthropomorphic
idol that stands upon a column. Throughout his oeuvre,
Guaman Poma demonstrates a broad familiarity with the
iconography of European popular images and religious
prints and engravings that he recombined to serve new
pictorial needs (see, for example, Van de Guchte 1992;
Holland 2002; Schenone et al. 1994). Guaman Poma
would have had ample access to prints and illustrated
books in Lima and Cusco, for example, in the library of
Albornoz, and he might have made a living for some
time as a print seller (Van de Guchte 1992:92). Surely Figure 4. The Inca captain Apomaita captures a huaca.
he would have been cognizant of this type of medieval Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes ingas
del Pirú, ca. 1590, bk. 2, ch. 5, fol. 39v. Photo: Courtesy of
image, among many others. But whereas Cieza’s
Tom Cummins.
woodcut lifts its representation of the devil directly
from Christian iconography, Guaman Poma’s drawing

15.  Like Mesoamerican deities (Cervantes 1994), Andean spirits
called supay were often interpreted as demons in colonial histories
(Duviols 1977:38–41; MacCormack 1991:255–257; Harrison 1989:47–
48) and they are often imagined as such in colonial Peruvian paintings
and prints (Mesa and Gisbert 1982). Horned and winged supay are
frequently depicted in the illustrations in the Nueva corónica, but the
demon huaca with Apomaita is the only example in Murúa’s ca. 1590
Historia.
16.  A different woodcut illustrating this same scene was published
in Cieza’s 1554 Antwerp edition (1954:19:48). In that image the
winged devil stands upon an altar within a curtained temple.
of Apomaita deviates from standard conventions. In
that drawing, the Andean artist has replaced the usual
column or altar with a monolith or a hill. In the French
illumination, the idolaters kneel with a hill behind them,
but in Guaman Poma’s drawing the landscape is brought
to the fore and incorporated into the representation
of the idol itself. The stock image of idolatry is thus
modified in Guaman Poma’s picture through the addition
of Andean reverence for the sacred landscape.
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  45
Figure 5. An incident of cannibalism in Peru. Cieza, Parte
primera de la chrónica del Perú, 1553, ch. 19, fol. 22. *58-
803F, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
This iconographic innovation of including the
monolith/mountain as a necessary component of the
Andean idol recurs throughout the illustrations of huacas
in Murúa’s Historia (figs. 7–10). Guaman Poma’s drawing
of Capac Yupanqui offering sacrifices to the sun (fig. 7),
which introduces Murúa’s chapters on Andean idolatry,
is a fine example. In the text, Murúa describes how the
Incas offered sacrifices to the sun and to the creator god
Pachayachachic, which he states was represented by a
gold statue in the form of a ten-year-old boy.17 But in
the image one sees the Inca king and queen offering a
child and corn beer to the sun and to a mountain that
Murúa has labeled Pachayachachic. The image offers an
alternative representation of the Andean creator god not
as an anthropomorphic idol, but as a mountain.18
The divine mountain or monolith appears again in
the drawing of the Indians of Cusco worshipping the
sun and the Inca king, who was understood to be the
son of the sun (fig. 8). The text describes how cusqueños
would pray to the sun, and then to the Inca, but nowhere
17.  This description of the statue of Pachayachachic (fols. 95r–96v)
is a later textual addition in Murúa’s hand.
18.  Only later in the manuscript (bk. 3, ch. 50) does the text state
that huacas often took the forms of rocks, hills, and mountaintops.
Figure 6. Idolaters of “Lesser Armenia” (Armenian Cilicia).
Marco Polo, Livre des Merveilles, 1390–1400. The Pierpont
Morgan Library, New York. MS M.723, fol. 82r.
does it mention the monolith that appears behind the
king. Rather, the mountain/monolith has become part
of the manuscript’s graphic shorthand for indicating
Andean divinity. By overlapping the body of the king
and the monolith, the artist conflates their forms, as if
to indicate that they share in the same sacred quality of
being. The mountain/monolith motif appears again in
the image of the Indians of Cusco worshipping an idol
named Sanco Casoa (fig. 9).19 The illustration clearly
references Christian iconography, as comparison to the
French illumination of Armenian idolatry readily reveals
(fig. 6); in both illustrations men kneel in a landscape
and raise their hands in European-style prayer to the
anthropomorphic idol that is elevated at the right of the
page.20 But in Guaman Poma’s image the Andean idol is
19.  One presumes that a huaca by this name existed in Cusco, but
it is not included in Polo’s huaca list (Cobo 1990 [1653]:bk. 1:12–16,
47–84) or in the extirpation accounts produced by Cristobál de Molina
(1988 [ca. 1576]), Albornoz (1988 [1581–1585]), or José de Arriaga
(1999 [1621]). Rudolfo Cerrón-Palomino (personal communication,
2011) suggests that this may be a misspelling of the name of the Inca
king Manco Capac.
20.  In contrast, typical Andean gestures of worship (mocha) involve
placing the left hand on the forehead and extending the right, pulling
out eyebrow hairs as offerings, and making kiss-like sounds.
46  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011
Figure 7. Capac Yupanqui offers sacrifices to the sun and to
Pachayachachic. Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real
de los reyes ingas del Pirú, ca. 1590, bk. 3, ch. 44, fol. 95v.
Photo: Courtesy of Tom Cummins.
elevated on a monolith and within a masonry wall, not
on a column or an altar.
The image of a numinous figure standing on top of
a monolith is repeated in the illustrations of the huacas
of the four quarters (suyus) of the Inca empire (fols.
100v, 101v, 102v, 103v). In one image (fol. 101v), an
Indian offers smoke and prayers to an anthropomorphic
idol named Pachacamac (“Animator of the World”),
who was a major pre-Inca oracle whose temple was
sacked by Hernando Pizarro in 1533. Early accounts of
Pachacamac describe the cult object as a carved wooden
staff kept in a painted temple (Estete 1872 [1534]:82–83;
Figure 8. The Indians of Cusco worship the sun and the Inca
king. Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes
ingas del Pirú, ca. 1590, bk. 3, ch. 48, fol. 99v. Photo: Courtesy
of Tom Cummins.
Cobo 1990 [1653]:bk. 1:17:88; MacCormack 1991:56)
or as a gold statue in the shape of a fox (Albornoz 1988
[1581–1585]:191), neither of which corresponds to
Guaman Poma’s drawing. The illustration of the idolatry
of the southeastern quarter, Collasuyu (fig. 10), depicts
two Indians offering coca leaves and an alpaca to an idol
named Titicaca and to the sun. The Island of Titicaca (also
called the Island of the Sun) in the lake by the same name
is the setting of an Inca myth of the creation of the world
(Betanzos 1996 [1557]:pt. 1:1:7–8; Sarmiento 2007
[1572]:7:49–55; Molina 1988 [ca. 1576]:50–52; Acosta
2002 [1590]:bk. 1:25:72; Bauer and Stanish 2001). But
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  47
Figure 9. The Indians of Cusco worship the idol Sanco Casoa.
Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes ingas
del Pirú, ca. 1590, bk. 3, ch. 47, fol. 98v. Photo: Courtesy of
Tom Cummins.
the huaca of Titicaca is described in historical accounts
as an uncarved crag of living stone that was adorned with
fine textiles and gold, not as an anthropomorphic figure
(Cobo 1990 [1653]:bk. 1:18:91–99; Pachacuti Yamqui
1995 [ca. 1613]:12 [5v]).
Guaman Poma’s images of the regional huacas in
Murúa’s Historia are generic and essentialized; they
do not correspond to the known physical forms of the
principal huacas in any of these areas. They name only
two specific shrines: Pachacamac and Titicaca, which
were the paramount huacas of the coast and the sierra,
respectively (Gose 2008:94, 104), and which, according
Figure 10. The Indians of Collasuyu offer coca and an alpaca
to the idol Titicaca and to the sun. Murúa, Historia del origen y
genealogía real de los reyes ingas del Pirú, ca. 1590, bk. 3, ch.
52, fol. 103v. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Cummins.
to millenarian Taki Onqoy practitioners, were preparing
to lead the charge against the Spaniards and their
Christian God in the sixteenth century. The other two
images illustrate regional variations of the Inca creator
god.21 Furthermore, since both Pachacamac and Titicaca
are linked to the creation of the world, one may interpret
all four of these images as representing Lascasian
manifestations of a creator God. These homogeneous
21.  The huaca of Antisuyu is named “Anti Viracocha” (fol. 100v)
and the huaca of Chincaysuyu is named “Ticci Viracocha Pachacamac”
(fol. 102v).
48  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

representations lack understanding of provincial religious

practices. Additionally, the drawings depart from the
content of the texts they illustrate and it is only through
the image inscriptions that Murúa defines these as
illustrations of Andean idolatry in the four suyus per se.
The quadripartite geographic division of the regional
huacas is not found in the accompanying text, although
Guaman Poma will use that format in the Nueva
corónica. Murúa’s account of native religion continues
and contains illustrations of an apacheta (fol. 104v),22
a sacred cave (fol. 105v), and Inca religious specialists
(fols. 106v–113v).
Guaman Poma’s illustrations of huacas in Murúa’s
Historia are best comprehended in light of the Catholic
iconographic traditions and visual rhetoric that shaped
them as well as Polo Ondegardo’s mid-sixteenth-century
descriptions of native religion. Working closely with the
Spanish friar Murúa, whose inscriptions are essential to
establishing the content of the images, Guaman Poma
manipulates European conventions for depicting idolatry
in order to convey the telluric nature of native Andean
religion as described by Polo and understood in early
colonial Peru. The images suggest that native Andean
religion was defined in particular by reverence for the
landscape but that it was also essentially akin to idolatry
anywhere else in the pagan world. The iconographic
forms and colonial rhetoric of mountain worship
established here reappear, and continue to evolve, in
Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica.

Figure 11. An Inca king offers an alpaca to an idol during the

IV. Huaca illustrations in the Nueva corónica (ca. 1615)
Guaman Poma completed El primer nueva corónica
y buen gobierno, a nearly 1,200-page illustrated
manuscript written to the Spanish king Felipe III, about
fifteen years after his collaboration with Murúa. This
history, which Guaman Poma hoped to publish in
Spain, consists of three parts: an account of Peru from
biblical creation through the Incas, the Spanish conquest
of Peru, and a critique of abuses by the church and
22.  An apacheta is a pile of stones or other objects left by travelers
at high passes as thanksgiving to the mountains. Carolyn Dean (2006b)
has recently interpreted Guaman Poma’s anomalous representation
of the apacheta as a stela-like monolith (fol. 104v) as evidence that
apachetas also took that physical form. But Guaman Poma’s other
illustrations bear no real resemblance to the huacas they illustrate;
they are conceptual illustrations, not objective documentation. It is
noteworthy that the apacheta illustration includes no numinous figure.
One might thus interpret this as signifying that the apacheta was just
stone and did not embody the sacred directly as did other huacas.
month of March. Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica y
buen gobierno, ca. 1615, p. 240 [242]. Photo: Courtesy of the
Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen.
colonial administration (Adorno 2000:9). Among the
author’s primary arguments is that from their first age
the pre-Inca Indians of Peru were already Christians—he
describes them as descendants of Spaniards and of Adam
and Noah (pp. 49, 81)—who worshipped the Creator.
They later became disoriented and lost sight of God (p.
59). In his illustration of the second age of the Indians,
Guaman Poma depicts a man praying, not to a huaca
or an idol, but to an unseen God: “Maker of the World,
where are you?”[Pachacamac maypim canqui] (p. 53).
Guaman Poma claims that when the Incas came to
power the idolatrous queen Mama Uaco commanded
all Indians to worship huacas and turn away from their
faith (pp. 81; 182–183 [184–185]), which was restored
by the arrival of the Gospels with the Spanish in the
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  49
Figure 12. The “Intihuatana” at Machu Picchu. Photo: Courtesy of Stephen Trever.
1530s. Central to Guaman Poma’s entire enterprise is the
argument that native Andeans did not require forcible
conversion—since they were already in fact Christians—
and thus the conquest and colonial occupation of Peru
were theologically and politically unjustified (Adorno
2000:13–35, 60). Guaman Poma thus calls for a return
to native Andean rule that would maintain this original
Christian faith.
For Guaman Poma, the huacas of the Incas were
theologically equivalent to other pagan idols and
he continues to employ his iconography of Andean
mountain idolatry to make the point visible. The clearest
iconographic parallels between the two works may
be observed in his drawings of Inca rites in the Nueva
corónica. In the illustration of the rites of February (p.
238 [240]), an Inca king offers sacrifices to a small
anthropomorphic figure that stands at the top of a stone
monument. Likewise, the illustration of March depicts a
king offering an alpaca to the numinous figure on top of
a monolith (fig. 11).
The forms of these huacas are distinct from those seen
in Murúa’s Historia; it is clear that they are not natural
forms in the landscape but instead abstractly carved
stones. The monolith in the illustration of the rites of
March bears a remarkable resemblance, for example, to
the “Intihuatana” at Machu Picchu (fig. 12). But there is
no evidence that the Inca ever placed anthropomorphic
statues on top of stone sculptures like this. Instead, I
propose that Guaman Poma has represented the huaca
here in two ontologically distinct parts: the carved
stone at bottom that is the visible, physical form and
the figure at top that is the usually unseen, conceptual
form. What was described earlier as an iconographic
shift (that is, the replacement of the column with the
mountain/monolith) can thus be seen to have had a more
profound representational effect in allowing the artist to
break down the nature of a huaca into its physical and
metaphysical components.
Elsewhere in the illustrations of the Nueva corónica,
Guaman Poma makes similar bottom/top distinctions
between the physical/conceptual realities of his
subjects. In an image of an Inca messenger, the artist
has drawn a placard that reads “carta” (letter) above
a quipu (an Andean knotted record-keeping device)
(p. 202 [204]). Such a placard would never have been
carried by a messenger. It is present only to explain a
foreign object to the Spanish reader. A similar strategy
appears in the image of Tupac Amaru being led out of
Vilcabamba in chains (p. 449 [451]). A soldier holds
a gold idol of the sun, above which appears a similar
figure within a burst of light. Unlike the stone huacas,
this gold idol was an anthropomorphic sculpture
50  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

representing the anthropomorphic spirit of the sun.

Therefore the physical (lower) and conceptual (upper)
forms of the mimetic idol are congruous. Throughout the
Nueva corónica Guaman Poma demonstrates his desire
to offer an account that would be understood cross-
culturally (Adorno 2000:68–71) and these pictorial
strategies serve that didactic purpose.
The visual differentiation between matter and spirit is
grounded in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and
other medieval theologians, whose distinctions between
“substance” (true reality) and “accident” (external
appearance) resonated throughout early colonial
accounts of religion in the New World and served as
the theological foundations for the Catholic doctrine
of Transubstantiation (MacCormack 1991). This
philosophical distinction between monolith (accident)
and numen (substance), which I argue is made visible in
Guaman Poma’s huaca illustrations, is not one that is
inherent to Andean religious thought. As ethnohistorian
Frank Salomon (1991:19) has observed in his analysis of
the Quechua myths in the Huarochirí manuscript (ca.
1608), “The world [. . .] does not seem to have been
made of two kinds of stuff—matter and spirit—like that
of Christians; huacas are made of energized matter, like
everything else, and they act within nature, not over and
outside it as Western supernaturals do.” The bipartite
spatial structure that separates the material from the
conceptual in Guaman Poma’s pictures is not one
that can be explained by Andean metaphysics or Figure 13. The idols and huacas of Antisuyu (Sahuasiray,
asymmetric duality.23 Rather it is expressly dependent Pitusiray, otorongo). Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica
on medieval Catholic theology. Thus one finds that y buen gobierno, ca. 1615, p. 268 [270]. Photo: Courtesy of
Guaman Poma employs Catholic religious imagination the Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen.
as well as iconography in his efforts to explain the
nature of the huacas.
Guaman Poma’s cross-cultural illustrations of native
religion continue in his chapter on the idols (pp. 261 The drawing of the huacas of Antisuyu demonstrates
[263]–286 [288]), which opens with the scene of greater geographic specificity (fig. 13). Lowland
Topa Inca consulting the huacas (fig. 1). Huanacauri Indians offer sacrifices to three huacas: a jaguar
appears again in an illustration of the idols of the Incas (otorongo) and the mountains Sahuasiray and Pitusiray.
(p. 264 [266]).24 There the mountain huaca is depicted Here the artist has drawn the particular forms of the
directly below the sun and above the caves of the twin-peaked Pitusiray (pitu: pair or couple) near its
mountain Tampu T’oqo, from which the Inca dynastic neighbor Sahuasiray (see Barham Ode 2007:186–
founders emerged (Urton 1990). These distinct places 188). He depicts these personified peaks as vaguely
are collapsed into a single mountain form and their anthropomorphic, phallic forms that are reminiscent of
condensed image reappears elsewhere as an emblem the assemblies of huacas consulted by the Inca kings
within a colonial Inca coat of arms (p. 79). (figs. 1–2). We shall return to these particular mountains
of Antisuyu again below.
Guaman Poma continues to adjust his methods
23.  See note 6.
for illustrating mountain huacas in a drawing of the
24.  The huaca Coropuna in Condesuyu is similarly depicted as an huaca of Chinchaysuyu: Pariacaca/Pachacamac (fig.
anthropomorphic, mountain-top figure (p. 272 [274]). 14). Here Pachacamac is conflated with Pariacaca,
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  51
Figure 14. The idols and huacas of Chinchaysuyu (Pariacaca/
Pachacamac). Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno, ca. 1615, p. 266 [268]. Photo: Courtesy of the Royal
Library of Denmark, Copenhagen.
the other paramount huaca of the region whose deeds
are recorded in the Huarochirí manuscript (1991 [ca.
1608]). Pariacaca is also illustrated in Diego Dávila
Briceño’s 1570 Mapa de Huarochirí in the Real
Academia de la Historia, Madrid. The huaca is depicted
in that map as a twin-peaked mountain accessed via a
monumental stone stairway. The stairway of Pariacaca
is the best known feature of a sanctuary complex that
includes a ceremonial road, offering cave (boquerón),
mortuary caves, and a sacred rock carved with six
protrusions that echo the forms of nearby mountains
and represent the twin-peaked Pariacaca and his four
brothers (Astuhuamán 1999, 2008; Duviols 1997). In
contrast to the Mapa de Huarochirí, Guaman Poma’s
drawing does not include any particular details of the
shrine complexes of either Pachacamac or Pariacaca.
In his image, two Indians offer sacrifices to a crouched
figure depicted within the mountain, not above it.
That mountain figure is not an ambiguous numen like
those seen in Guaman Poma’s other pictures of huacas.
Instead, he wears the same headdress as the man who
offers a human sacrifice. Furthermore, the mountain
figure’s shroud and hunched posture suggest that he is
a mummy (see Guaman Poma’s chapter of the burials
[pp. 287–297 (289–299)]). This figure might reference
the funerary caves at the shrine of Pariacaca but, within
the context of Guaman Poma’s other pictures of huacas,
I suggest that it depicts Pariacaca/Pachacamac himself
as an ancestral spirit residing within the mountain.
Guaman Poma illustrates Vilcanota, an important huaca
of Collasuyu (Bauer 1998:145–146) in the same manner
as Pariacaca/Pachacamac (p. 270 [272]). The figure
within this mountain appears as a mummy wearing the
headdress that identifies the huaca as ancestral to the
Colla Indians. One could also interpret these mountain
figures as victims of capac hucha, the Inca rite of
sacrificing children at mountain-top shrines (Reinhard
2005) because through capac hucha those offered in
sacrifice were understood to become huacas themselves
(Salomon 1991:17). What is most significant is that the
artist has established a direct, genealogical relationship
between the mountain huacas and their devotees. Yet
by maintaining the recurring composition of kneeling
worshippers offering sacrifices to the elevated huaca,
Guaman Poma continues to code these images of Inca-
imposed religious practices within Christian iconography
of idolatry.
In the Nueva corónica, Guaman Poma adjusts his
conventions for illustrating huacas as he seems to
struggle with how best to present Andean religion
graphically to his Spanish audience. He demonstrates
a deeper understanding of Andean beliefs and sacred
geography than is evident in his earlier drawings of
huacas for Murúa. In particular, the illustrations of
huacas as ancestors offer a refreshing perspective
that is not found in his text, which denounces huacas
as demons and idols and calls for the immediate
eradication of their cults. Despite this greater
ethnographic sensitivity, Guaman Poma continues to
operate within the framework of Christian iconography
and religious imagination. Yet, as this essay’s final
example demonstrates, when presented with the
opportunity to illustrate huacas outside of the context
of Christian rhetoric—that is, in an account of an Inca
romance in the final pages of Murúa’s Historia—Guaman
Poma offers a more nuanced visualization of native
Andean metaphysics.
52  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

V. The apotheosis of huacas in Murúa’s Inca romance return to their palace unaware of the contents of the staff
(ca. 1590) they carry. After Chuquillanto falls asleep, Acoytapra
emerges from the staff and the couple passionately
Murúa’s Historia closes rather unexpectedly with
reunites. But their happiness is short-lived and the next
a mythological epilogue of the romance between the
morning they flee the palace with guards in hot pursuit
Inca princess Chuquillanto and the shepherd Acoytapra
(as illustrated on fol. 147r). As they run toward the
(fols. 144r–147v).25 Murúa presents the story, which
mountains the couple turns into stone. More specifically,
is illustrated by Guaman Poma,26 as an authentic Inca
Murúa writes that they were transformed into the twin
tale, although literary features of the Spanish pastoral
peaks of Pitusiray (compare fig. 13) and that one could
romance mix freely with elements of Quechua narrative
still see their “statues” between the towns of Calca and
(Dedenbach-Salazar 1990). Parts of the story might
Huayllabamba.28
have more ancient, pre-Inca origins (Sánchez and Golte
The apotheosis of Chuquillanto and Acoytapra is
2004). The story begins in the high plains of the Yucay
depicted in the final illustration of Murúa’s Historia
valley, not far from Cusco, where a shepherd tends a
and it has no precedent or parallel in Guaman Poma’s
flock of sacrificial llamas. While he plays his flute two
oeuvre (fig. 15). In the image the lovers’ eyes are closed
sisters appear. They are both princesses (ñustas) and
and their bodies are partially transformed, as indicated
virgins devoted to the worship of the sun (acllas). The
by the replacement of their lower bodies with stony,
shepherd recognizes them also as the personifications
blue columns with flanged bases. Petrification as divine
of sacred springs (that is, as huacas). The shepherd and
retribution for amorous transgressions is a recurring
the elder sister Chuquillanto fall in love but the women
theme in Quechua narratives (Millones et al. 1982) but
must return to their palace by nightfall.27 That night
it is also often found in classical mythology. Murúa’s
Chuquillanto pines for her forbidden love. In a dream
reference to the “statues” (estatuas) of Pitusiray seems
a nightingale tells her to sit at the center of the four
colored by Roman myths such as the transformation
springs that flow into the palace and sing what she feels
of Niobe into a stone statue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
in her heart. When she does this the springs respond
(Ovid 1958 [a.d. 8]:bk. 6:167–172). It is extremely
by singing in unison and she knows that her love will
unlikely that figural statues of the lovers ever existed
be requited (as illustrated on fols. 144bisv–145bisr).
on the mountain; rather, they are identified with two
Meanwhile, the shepherd is also lovesick and his diviner
large pillars of rock on Pitusiray known today as “El
mother hatches a plan to reunite the lovers. The next
Matrimonio” (fig. 3). As befits Inca religious aesthetics
day the girls arrive at the shepherd’s hut but he is not
of stone, these rock formations only vaguely evoke the
to be found. The mother gives them a wooden staff that
figures of the princess and the shepherd.
once belonged to the oracle Pachacamac, within which
The illustration of the transfigured lovers reveals
she has magically hidden the shepherd, and the acllas
bipartite and tripartite structures that define relationships
between landscape, mythical heroes, and Andean
25.  A revised version of this myth appears unillustrated in the later communities. As two parallel columns, the peaks
Getty manuscript (bk. 1, ch. 91–92, fols. 214r–218v ). Pilar Alberti Sahuasiray and Pitusiray/Urconsiray are linked to
Manzanares (1985) has compared the two versions and has shown that
the princess and the shepherd, and the princess and
many native Andean elements were removed from the later edition. In
1910 Clement Markham published a translation of the romance as “a the shepherd to the towns Huayllabamba and Calca,
little fairy tale” (1969 [1910]:App. E:408–414) and Murúa’s tale was respectively, all of which Murúa has carefully labeled.
later included in Luis Valcárcel’s Cuentos y leyendas inkas (1939:33– The couple appears as a pair of caryatid figures,
44). connecting the mountains above and the towns below.
26.  All of the illustrations of the romance are by Guaman Poma
with the possible exception of the rendering of the aclla’s song (fol.
145bisr), which could have been drawn by Murúa or his scribe. All of
the image inscriptions are written by Murúa, with two exceptions (fols. 28.  The romance of the mountains Pitusiray and Sahuasiray is
146v, 147r) where Guaman Poma’s own hand is found (Adorno and recounted in a version of the myth of Sumaq T’ika, the “Princess
Boserup 2005:app. 6:243). of the Village without Water” (Dumézil and Duviols 1974; see
27.  The palace (acllahuasi) is illustrated earlier in Murúa’s Historia also Sánchez Garrafa 1992; Barham Ode 2007:101–110; Concha
(fol. 94v). Susan Niles (1999:188–194) has studied the remains of late Tupayachi 2006:31–34). The mountains Pitusiray and Sahuasiray are
Inca architecture within Huayna Capac’s estate in the modern town of also understood as the paired guardians of maize agriculture and they
Yucay, including the so-called “Palace of Sayri Topa” and “Palace of the give their names to the metaphoric couplet of the souls of the plants:
Ñusta,” one of which could be the palace referred to in Murúa’s story. pitusira/sawasira (Gose 1994:103–140).
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  53

Figure 15. The apotheosis of Chuquillanto and Acoytapra. The image of

the couple fleeing into the mountains, drawn on the reverse (fol. 147r), is
visible through the page. Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de
los reyes ingas del Pirú, ca. 1590, bk. 4, fol. 147v. Photo: Courtesy of Tom
Cummins.

The tripartite hierarchy of mountain, mythical person,
and town coexists with a bipartite moiety division that
remains fundamental to many Andean communities.29
29.  The binary hanan/hurin division of Andean moieties is
apparent in this image but its layout seems to contradict the spatial
interpretations that López-Baralt and Adorno have offered for Guaman
Poma’s illustrations (see note 6), since the male (hanan) figure is placed
in the position inferior to the female (hurin) figure. In her ethnographic
study of Yucay, however, Antoinette Molinié (1996:220) observes a
similar reversal in social and geographic structures, such that the lower,
feminine moiety (Uray) is understood as superior and to the right of the
higher, male moiety (Wichay). She understands this reversal as typical
of Yucay symbolic structures, as contrasted with those of Cusco.
54  RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011
The princess and the shepherd are identified in the
illustration not just with the twin monoliths on Pitusiray,
as described in the text, but also separately with the
mountains Sahuasiray and Pitusiray/Urconsiray. This
image of the cultural landscape is a remarkably early
conceptualization of mountains as the embodiments
of gods, heroes, and ancestors that sustain nearby
communities (see Bastien 1978; Gose 2006, 2008;
Sallnow 1987). In modern Andean narratives, sacred
mountains are not static places but are understood in
anthropomorphic terms to move around the landscape
having affairs and adventures with other mountains,
lakes, and streams (see Sikkink and Choque 1999).
Guaman Poma would later allude to the ancestral
qualities of mountains and landscapes in his illustrations
of Pariacaca/Pachacamac and Vilcanota in the Nueva
corónica (fig. 14), but here the concept is most fully
articulated. Yet none of these socio-spatial relationships
or metaphysical structures is acknowledged in Murúa’s
text. The image proves to be the far richer source for
conceptualizing stone huacas and mountains as they
are situated in the ritual landscape and bound to native
communities.
It is here, within the pages of an illustrated fiction,
that one finds Guaman Poma’s most articulate illustration
of huacas. Unlike his pictures of huacas as idols, the
image of the apotheosis of Chuquillanto and Acoytapra
lacks any identifiable European model. Instead it calls
upon Inca and other highland Andean artistic traditions
of abstraction and schematic representation, as seen,
for example, in pre-Hispanic ceremonial drinking
vessels (queros) and textile designs (tocapu) (Cummins
2002a).30 But as elsewhere in Murúa’s Historia, the
artist does not act alone. Murúa participated in the
formulation of this extraordinary image by inscribing
the captions that give meaning to its interlocking parts.
An image like this was apparently only permissible in
Murúa’s manuscript and in Guaman Poma’s oeuvre in
a fictional context. Here there is no need to maintain
the iconographic program of idolatry. Instead, in the
illustration of a seemingly innocuous romantic fiction,
the artist is freed from extirpation rhetoric and creates
an image that offers nuanced insights into native Andean
30.  The only image that even compares to this illustration in its
diagrammatic and hierarchical arrangement of figures in a landscape
is Pachacuti Yamqui’s drawing of a scene of creation that reportedly
hung in the temple of the sun in Cusco (1995 [ca. 1613]:36 [fol.
13v]). Although that image is often interpreted as an Inca cosmogram,
Pierre Duviols (1994) has suggested that it is modeled on a Catholic
altarpiece.
religious imagination and social organization. In Andean
religion the maintenance and worship of huacas requires
social memory, the performance of oral narratives, and
processional movement through the landscape. When
narrative is retained and the relationships among huacas,
landscapes, and communities are brought to the fore, as
they are here, Guaman Poma’s picture of huacas most
successfully conveys its subject.
VI. Conclusions
Guaman Poma’s pictures of huaca worship in the
Nueva corónica (ca. 1615) evolved out of his artistic
collaboration with Murúa. In that author’s ca. 1590
Historia the artist’s references to medieval European
iconography of idolatry are most direct. Yet even in
his earliest images of huacas as idols, Guaman Poma
innovates on standard tropes and his illustrations offer
their own colonial commentaries on the nature of
native Andean religion in Cusco and the four suyus
that augment—and at times contradict—the texts that
they illustrate. In the manuscript’s romantic epilogue,
Guaman Poma’s illustration of the apotheosis of
Chuquillanto and Acoytapra offers a unique visualization
of Andean metaphysics. The artist continues to expand
upon and modify his own iconographic formulae for
representing huacas in the Nueva corónica and his
pictures offer several important observations on the
religious and social meanings of huacas and mountains
as ancestors. But nowhere in that later work does he
illustrate his subject so fully or freely as he did in the
illustration of the lovers as Sahuasiray and Pitusiray at the
close of Murúa’s Historia. When Guaman Poma returns
to illustrate these same peaks of Antisuyu in the context
of Inca religion in the Nueva corónica, the profound
knowledge that he previously demonstrated falls away,
as if forgotten, and the huacas revert to colonial “idols.”
Guaman Poma’s agenda to present Inca religion as
idolatrous, in contradistinction to the true, monotheistic
faith of pre-Inca Andeans, trumps the need to convey
more specific knowledge of these sacred mountains in
the Nueva corónica. In his polemical letter to the king,
Guaman Poma returns to rely again upon Christian
iconography and religious imagination.
Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas present an
exceptional case study in the history of art for the
invention of pictorial forms and the marshalling of
images to serve rhetorical and didactic ends within
a cross-cultural setting. His illustrations are rich
visualizations of religious forms in colonial perspective
and they express varying degrees of ethnographic detail
 Trever: Idols, mountains, and metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas  55
and Christian rhetoric depending on the demands of
their ideological contexts. These images constitute
neither a linear development of pictorial practices nor a
single unfolding of increasing cultural understanding, but
rather a complicated, and at times contradictory, path
through the artist’s often ambivalent attitudes toward the
religious traditions of the pre-Hispanic Andean past.
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