Viracocha
(American mythology)
The supreme being of the Incas: a storm god and a sun god. Of great importance in Peru even before the rise of the Inca Empire, Viracocha was represented with the sun for a crown, thunderbolts in his hands, and tears descending from his eyes as rain. He was Illa, ‘light’; Tici, ‘the beginning of things’; while Viracocha itself may have meant ‘the lake of creation’. Lake Titicaca, according to one tradition, was the site of the creation of the sun, moon, and stars. Yet in his legendary wanderings on earth, he assumed the form of a beggar. The ragged and reviled mendicant was probably connected with the unique feature of Viracocha, his cosmic tears. The living waters were the tears of the creator deity, who knew the sufferings of his creatures and still felt obliged to sustain their lives.
Viracocha made the earth, the stars, the sky, and mankind. But this first creation did not please him, so he swept the world in a deluge, killing the first men, who were probably giants. Then he made new and better men, among whom he wandered as a beggar teaching the rudiments of civilization as well as working numerous miracles. A late cosmology, however, describes five ages. The first was the age of Viracocha, when the gods ruled and death was unknown; the second was an age of giants, the worshippers of Viracocha; third came the age of the first men, who existed on a very primitive level; fourth, that of the auca runa, ‘warriors’, the authors of early civilizations such as the Mochica; and fifth that of the Inca rule, ended by the coming of the Spaniards in 1531. Viracocha himself disappeared across the Pacific Ocean, ‘travelling over the water as if it were land, without sinking’. The Incas did not forget this god in spite of their elevation of Inti, the sun god.
