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THE INCA'S NATION

Dear Readers,
Through eleven issues, we had delivered to you each of the most important cultures along Peru before the Incas. But now is the time to extend ourselves about the Inca culture and give you a broad view of this civilization, with its greatness and endemic problems that manifest a complex organization as well as an expiration date.
We have chosen four major topics to reveal under the lights of the new historic investigations: the beginning of the Inca's nation, where reality and myth mingled magically; the biography of Pachacutec, the great Inca that unified the Tahuantinsuyu and achieved the most important conquests; the incest among the Incan royal family, its origins, explanation and consequences; and the duality in the Tahuantinsuyu, the discovery of a different political and religious organization among any civilization.
We know there will be readers longing for more information, questions never answered, inquietudes never soothed, but what we must understand is that there will always be something new about the Incas waiting for reveal itself upon the world, new motives to be astonished and proud of this ancient culture in some aspects more civilized than ourselves.
Regards,
José and Cynthia

THE FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS

At the end of the Huari hegemony, the absence of a central power which controls the expansionist affairs of some ethnic groups, added to the onslaught of stormy rains and droughts, constant demographic exodus in search of new lands were motivated through the region.
In most of the cases, the traditions or memories say that these groups were directed by semi-divine creatures or cultural heroes. These characters were described in different ways. Sometimes the tales ascribe them the carry of magical rods that could recognize the right place to settle their towns; other times they appear with superhuman capacities, capable to control the elements such as rocks and mountains, the rain and the hail. However, these characters were animated by some natural divinity such as the sun or the moon, among others.
THE FOUNDERS THAT CAME IN FROM THE LAKE
The tales the chroniclers collected remit to a set of forefathers that were originally settled far away the Cusco valley like the Manco Capac legend. In this sense, his arrival to Cusco is presented as the end of a long pilgrimage and a series of interethnic fights in order to find the appropriate lands for agriculture and cities edification.
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PACHACUTEC

THE END OF THE VIRACOCHA REIGN
The old Inca Viracocha announced his decision of lending the royal tassel to one of his heirs; the chosen one was a young prince called Inca Urco. After the announcement, the Inca retired himself to his palace in Calca, at the Yucat valley, and immediately Inca Urco started to take care of the affairs of the State. But Urco neglected the government and dedicated himself to the pleasures and vices, concurring assiduously to the recreation houses placed at the vicinity o the capital.
The politic tension and the social discomfort that was beginning to sense at Cusco were aggravated by the arrival of alarming news: the Chancas -a confederation with great expansionist ambitions- had mobilized their troops and were prepared to assault the Inca's capital.
In front of this terrible peril, never before experimented by the Cusco population, the old Inca decided to abandon Cusco with his sons Urco and Zoczo, their women and retinue, and take cover at the locality of Chita. When everything seemed lost, the figure of the young prince Cusi Yupanqui appeared who took the decision to stay in Cusco and defend the city.
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THE ROYAL INCEST OF THE INCAS

In the text "Pachacutec and the dynastic incest", the psychoanalyst Moises Lemlij brought back to these days the incest in the Incan society. Anthropologists, archaeologists and historians express their view about this controversial subject.
Two lapidary accusations decided Inca Atahualpa's life: fratricide and incest. For the Spaniards of the XVI century, these acts were the perfect excuse to condemn the last heir of the Tawantinsuyu Empire to die by strangulation; he had ordered to kill his brother Huascar and he also had as his main wife -between other concubines- his sister by maternal bloodline.
How much of truth and how much of myth exists around the incest between the Incas? According to the historian Maria Rostworowski, in the Andean society there were not reject to the incest as it used to be between the Europeans, because they had not the concept of "family" based in the connivance of a father, a mother and children. First glances of this matter are in the myths of the beginning of the Tawantinsuyu. "If we analyze these myths -the historian says- you can realize that the father was always murdered or death or simply never exists. Then it is just a binomial between the mother and the son. Even the chronicler Guaman Poma related that Mama Huaco (a founder character of one of the myths) was mother and also wife of his son".
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BETWEEN THE SIMPLE AND THE COMPLEX

In order to understand the way of thinking and the religious and politic practice in the Andean world we have to bring near their myths, because they translate the inner structure of their logic and at the same time they bring us far from the deceitful explanations made based in the traditions and faiths Christian-Jewish.
The God Viracocha, according to Cieza de Leon -and many other chronicles- was a "white tall man with appearance of authority and reverence". With this description this deity did not correspond to a native vision, but to a Spanish one. Keeping the track of the chronicles about the presence of a pair of Viracochas -being this a more Andean model- there is a couple named Imaymana Viracocha and Tocapu Viracocha. According to the myth Imaymana outfit his properties to the plants in his magic-healing aspect. The term Tocapu, as long as in aymara as in quechua, is related with fine and rich textiles with geometric designs which seem to be some kind of language or information code.
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