Sacred Objects & Places in the Inca World: Interview With Dr. Cummins

For the Incas, certain objects and places in nature (or crafted by humans) are huacas – sacred stuff. What does this concept mean? Is everything sacred, or are some things more sacred than others? How do we understand objects and nature? And what are the amazing qualities of this ancient and still enduring culture? Inca roads, Pachacamac, Coricancha, Machu Picchu, and more in a fascinating conversation with Dr. Thomas B.F. Cummins.

Dr. Cummins is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Latin American Art at Harvard University and Director of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. He is a prolific author and speaker, who has taught at many universities (University of Chicago, L’Ecole des Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Ponteficia La Universidad Catolica del Peru in Lima, etc.) and received many awards and honors from The Getty Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chicago Humanities Institute, etc. His books include Sacred Matters: Animism and Authority in the Pre-Columbian Americas with Steve Koisiba and John Janusek (Dumbarton Oaks), Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Kero Vessels. An Arbor: University of Michigan Press, and many others.

RM: In your lectures and research, one of the many interesting themes is the spiritual, animated experience of the Incas and other indigenous peoples.  

Dr. Thomas B. F. Cummins (TC): Objects in the pre-Columbian world were vested with meaning that is sacred — a world that objects share with the living in a way that we sometimes don’t see with our distinction between subject and object, between us as humans and the inanimate objects. It’s an animated world.

RM: This brings up a lot of issues, both mental and physical, about our relationship to the world. 

TC: If we can get our heads around both transubstantiation in our own religion, as with Catholicism, the moment that the words in mass are said, “And transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ,” then we are not so distinct, I should say, from the worlds that we see as living in an animacy with objects. And it’s different of course, but it’s not as what people like to use as ontologically distinct from a world in the Amazon. It is but we sometimes forget how our relationship to non-subjects, that is objects such as a corporation, such as bread and wine, are vested with subjecthood.

The Indian world is completely animate, where there are huacas, fields, latent energy, vitality, that rests in stone, rests in walls, rests in a universe that’s always in circulation, always in movement. So, we can think about images and objects from that point of view, but what’s really interesting, from my end, not only as a professor, is how that resonates with my own world? Am I completely alien to that, or does it somehow provoke retrospective looking at the way that we as a culture sometimes share a commensurable understanding of animacy?

RM: To bring in another culture for a moment: I recall your example of the Aztec craftsman who cuts down the tree, fashions the object, venerates it, and then even bleeds for it.

TC: That is from Bernardino de Sahagún’s first volume of his tremendous encyclopedia. It’s not called an encyclopedia, but we would call it that. It’s on Mexican deities and religious practices. The book is in Spanish and in Nahuatl — they are parallel texts there.

This image occurs in an appendix that is a Nahuatl translation of the Book of Wisdom. That’s written in Latin on one side and Nahuatl on the other. The Nahuatl takes what’s written from the Old Testament’s Book of Wisdom, then translated into the cosmology and practices of Aztec artists and beliefs. It’s a very interesting kind of transposition in which there’s commensurability between practices that, in the end, of course, are all idolatrous. It takes the old world and Old Testament discussion of idolatry and then localizes it and makes it very specific.

RM: You talk about the divine or numinous within objects. How do we get close to an understanding of this?   

TC: I can’t say that I see it solely from the Inca point of view, but as an art historian and someone interested in the artistic expressions and meanings outside of my own culture, it is a path, so to speak, to try and understand. There is the means of existing in the world in which you have a relationship that extends beyond the mere material to a world that is manifested through beauty. And, of course, that is a world that is culturally bound yet shared. People in all cultures find ways of heightening what they see and experience.

RM: So, you’re using a wide-ranging approach and many tools to understand their ideas, objects, texts?  

TC: Well, yes. So, one has to ask: what choices do people make? What are they trying to articulate? And for me, it’s always very interesting working with very early cultures to say, “Well, we don’t really have any texts, whether they’re oral or written, that express that or tell us anything about it.” It’s the objects themselves that are communicating to us through what these people wanted to express.

I often write in a conditional sense; I don’t completely know and may not know at all, but I certainly use tools at my disposal such as looking at techniques, iconography, the choices that the artisans of these communities invest themselves in to give us a body of archeological material that is distinct. They may be shamanistic cultures predicated on certain kinds of underlying beliefs about an animated world in which certain individuals are gifted. They communicate outside of the daily world — what we would call a supernatural world.

That is an underlying belief system in the Americas, but that doesn’t mean that it all expresses itself the same way. Choices that are made, for example, in a material culture, are not just about making buildings. That’s part of aesthetics that’s not Kantian. Disinterested aesthetics is a very interested aesthetics — but it is still aesthetics. I argue that, yeah, there is art and there is a sense of aesthetics. There is a sense of beauty. There is a sense of heightened awareness and the desire to see it, to possess it, to be in communion with it, and that’s what performance does. It makes a collectivity of people. It also makes a hierarchy in terms of who’s a priest, who isn’t, etc. Power is involved. There is certainly economics in terms of scarce resources that are used such as feathers, gold, silver.

But those are given values that are distinct from monetary values. They’re not utilitarian values in the way that we understand utilitarian processes. So, metallurgy, which is a hallmark of Indian culture, is not directed primarily towards weapons or tools. It’s really directed towards a kind of brilliance, a kind of malleability, that you can use to make beautiful objects. And so that is an underlying set of principles that continue in the Indian world up until the arrival of the Spanish. I mean, it’s not that they don’t make certain kinds of weapons. The Inca do; they have bronze-headed clubs, and they use bronze to sometimes seal buildings. They make it, but that’s not the major use of that.

The plow, for example, was called a chaquitaclla, which is a foot plow. The end of it is stone or wood. It’s not a blade made from metal. So, these are choices that people are making. They’re technological choices but they are metaphysical ones at the same time. It’s about their reality, and that’s what metaphysics really means.

RM: We’ve seen them all over Peru and Bolivia — huacas. Can you define this term? 

TC: Huaca is a Quechua term. Huaca is the manifestation of camay, the sacred. So, an artisan, for example, is a camayok, that is somebody who energizes an object and brings it into being, but it already preexisted. It’s sometimes to me very much like Plato’s idea of the world that exists prior to its being, in a sense, and is brought forth. But a huaca can be an auspicious place or thing. It can be a sacred origin place, and it is filled with a life spirit, the camay. And so, a stone in the middle of a field can be a huaca. Certain stones, for example, at Machu Picchu are carved in geometric shapes that really capture some of the energizing aspects of the cosmic world they live. They capture both bright sun and shadow.

So, you’ll often see the markings on the earth through a carving of the celestial deity of Inti, the sun, as it marks the element on the ground. You can see this at Machu Picchu with the Intihuatana, which is that high sculpted, rounded living stone with a sort of piece that stands erect that looks like a sundial. In fact, it’s given the name Intihuatana, but that’s a neologism, a word that’s been made up in the 19th century. Inti means sun, of course, and huatana means to pull down or to tie down, but there’s no word like that in the 16th century that I know of.

But regardless of what it’s called today, it does interact with the cosmic sense of light and shadow and stone, which is a living thing as well. That’s another aspect that’s hard to understand. Stone is not an inanimate nor solid substance. It flows. So that interaction is one that is experienced through light and shadow, but it’s also experienced over time because it shifts as the sun moves. It has this capacity to mark both the integration of warmth and shadow, light and time, which is a critical aspect of Inca cosmology. And so, what appears to us to be a solid, frozen world is constantly in movement, constantly circulating. Some of the objects that manifest that in the world are huacas. They can also be the bodies of ancestors. They can be a stone or a river, a place in the river. It just depends on the recognition of that as a sacred manifestation.

RM: Sacred everywhere. Now how do oracles and pilgrimages figure in the realm of the sacred?   

TC: In the Andes, there are very international sites of pilgrimage in which the sacred is most evident because of what happened there mythologically. Pachacamac is one of them. It is a place that is thousands of years old — a huge center of pilgrimage for the Andes that people constantly visited.

The Incas were invoked in a millennial revolt against the Spanish in the 1570s in which Pachacamac and other deities, but most importantly, Lake Titicaca, would unite in a cosmic battle with the Christian deities. And still today, there are pilgrimages at Qoyllurit’i in the Andes in which communities march in a festive state to a sacred appearance of Christ actually in the mountains, in the snowfields south of Cusco. That still goes on. Syncretism is the word that is often used for that — practices that are pre-conquest are united with Christian manifestations of the sacred.

RM: I remember that syncretism so vividly in Peru and Bolivia, as well as in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, for example. So, at Pachacamac (oracle outside of Lima), did the oracle-priests speak for the gods or did the gods speak through them?

TC: Well, Pizarro’s brother went to Pachacamac and describes how the priest would hide above the idol and would respond, but it would be the idol itself that was speaking. Really interesting. There are many oracles throughout the Andes. Chavín de Huántar also was an oracle; at its apogee, it was a major oracle site.

There are others where people from the highlands would come down to the lowlands, visiting these sites, often having subterranean passages going to the center. There’s a description of one from, I think, the 1580s in Huacho. It has four entrances, one for the males of the coast, one for the females of the coast, one for the males of the highland, and one for the females of the highland. The quadripartition of the world is based upon that kind of geographic and gender differentiation. As you know, the Inca empire is called the “parts of four worlds,” or Tahuantinsuyu, which gets manifested in these sacred places.

RM: These pilgrims came from everywhere, made offerings, communed with the sacred powers. It’s such a universal concept and practice – pilgrimage.   

TC: Well, yes. And it’s part of the road system that the Incas built because those roads all preexisted. What’s true for all pilgrimage sites is that they combine both the desire to come close to the highest part of religious experience but also economic life. So, if you think about 11th-century pilgrimages in Europe, there’s the pilgrimage routes — and they’re all free-trade zones. One famous place was Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

These roads in Peru you still can walk on. I’ve enjoyed that. This would be walking from the coast towards Chavín de Huántar, which is a site that is on the watershed side of the Andes towards the Amazon. The road goes up to about 15,000 to 16,000 feet and then down into the valley. We had mules or llamas. What the Inca did as a political entity was to connect these roads.

RM: It’s so much like all roads lead to Rome. So, Rome has the Pantheon, and Cusco has the Coricancha. What is the latter?

TC: The Coricancha, meaning golden enclosure, is amazing. Concha really means a kind of structure that is enclosed by walls so it’s usually quadripartite — four sides to it and structures inside. And when you were there with the NEH group years ago, you saw that those beautiful walls fit together without any kind of cement or anything.

RM: What was the Coricancha used for?

TC: What was kept in there is not clear. There was some image of the sun. There were other sculptures in gold and silver, and we know this because of the inventories. Things were taken out and shipped to Spain — sculptures of animals and humans that are life-size of gold and silver. None of that has survived. It was all melted down because Charles V was at war — and was just about to go to Tunis against Barbarossa and Suleiman. He needed to pay for it.

There’s not a lot of sculpture the way there is for the Aztecs, except there was a lot of metal work. There clearly was an image of the sun. I don’t know if you know this expression “to gamble away the sun before it rises.” This expression means to give away everything that you’ve ever had. And it’s a true story because one of the conquistadors who comes into Cusco is awarded this gold image of the sun, and he plays cards that night and loses it to somebody else. So, it’s to gamble away the sun before it rises. We know that that existed, but what it looked like we don’t know.

RM: What kind of rituals and other activities took place in the Coricancha? 

TC: What’s interesting about the Coricancha is that the few descriptions of any religious activity are very restricted to a priesthood. What they did precisely isn’t really known. There was supposed to have been a crystal in there that refracted light, which makes a lot of sense given their interest in that kind of experience. But most religious activity took place in the plazas where there were lots of people and where the greatest aspect of ritual celebration is toward the sun itself. The Inca would offer drinks and food to the sun.

It’s interesting thinking about idolatry among the Inca, which drove the Spanish crazy because huacas can be a mountain, and you can’t destroy a mountain. There is all this extirpation literature that discusses the inability to get rid of the huacas.

RM: Did the Incas know themselves to be a chosen people the way many ancient civilizations and tribes viewed themselves? Would Cusco, with its Coricancha, be the axis mundi?

TC: It is the axis mundi — that’s how the Spanish described it. They also described it as the New Jerusalem or the New Rome, a center of an empire. And as I said, the Inca empire is divided into four parts. That’s what the name of the Inca empire means. Tahua means four, and suyu is place or entity. And so, Tahuantinsuyu means “place of four parts” roughly translated, and Cusco is the center. There were four roads that went out from Cusco, dividing into Antisuyu, Cuntisuyu, Cinchaysuyu, Collasuyu.

In fact, Pablo Jose Arriaga, who is an extirper, writes in 1621 about the experience of one priest who gathers what he thinks is an idol; he breaks it up and takes it to Lima, and he throws it off the bridge. And the community would come once a year, twice a year, and just show veneration to where it was thrown off the bridge.

It’s a different kind of relationship to these objects than, say, happened in Mexico where the Spanish conquistadores and the Franciscans saw a parallel to the Roman Pantheon. They make direct analogy between Aztec deities and Roman deities.

RM: It’s like the Incas had the last laugh. I know you have to go. I hope we can continue this sometime. It’s been a while since that NEH grant in Peru and Bolivia. Thank you for this wonderful experience and knowledge. 

TC: Thank you. That would be good to continue at another time.