Viracocha
The creator god of the Andes, who in the stories made the sun and moon at Lake Titicaca, called the peoples out of the land, and walked away into the sea. The Incas took him into their own pantheon, and an Inca emperor took his name.
Meaning
Britannica describes Viracocha as a creator worshipped by peoples of Peru before the Incas and later taken into the Inca pantheon, perhaps under the emperor who took the god’s name and died about 1438. To the Incas, it says, he was a remote god who left the running of the world to the other gods he had made, worshipped by the nobility mainly in times of crisis. He was sometimes shown as an old man with a beard and a long robe, carrying a staff. The Spanish chroniclers record other names: Ticiviracocha in most places, Cieza de León writes, Tuapaca in the Collao and Arnauan elsewhere; Sarmiento de Gamboa gives his title as Viracocha Pachayachachi, “Creator of all things”.
Origin and history
The story was taken down by Spanish writers from Andean informants in the generation after the conquest. In the version Cieza heard, the land had long been without sun until it rose, shining brightly, from the island of Titicaca. Then a man of great stature came from the south who could turn plains into mountains and make water flow from stone; the people called him “the Maker of created things, the Prince of all things, Father of the Sun”. He went north, teaching people how to live, and never returned. Long afterwards came another man like him, who healed the sick; at Cacha, in the province of the Canas, people rose to stone him, and fire from heaven stopped them. He went on to the coast and walked into the sea, holding his mantle, and was never seen again, and so, Cieza writes, they named him Viracocha, “the foam of the sea”. Sarmiento’s informants, in 1572, said Viracocha first made a dark world without sun, moon or stars, then went to Tiwanaku and carved there on a great stone all the nations he intended to create, sending them out from lakes, springs, caves and hills to people the land.
Did the Incas call the Spaniards Viracocha?
They did, but Cieza says not for the reason usually given. People in his day explained the name as “foam of the sea”, because the Spaniards came by sea; Garcilaso, as Markham notes in his edition of Sarmiento, also rejected that meaning. Cieza heard at Cusco that the Incas of Huascar’s defeated party, rejoicing at news of Atahualpa’s capture, took the Spaniards for envoys of their great god Ticiviracocha and called them his sons. Sarmiento’s informants described Viracocha himself as a man of medium height, white, dressed in a white robe and carrying a staff and a book, and Cieza as a white man of great stature. Both were Spaniards writing two to four decades after the conquest.
At Tiwanaku
Britannica suggests that Viracocha may be the “weeping god” carved at Tiwanaku, the figure on the Gateway of the Sun, and Cieza wrote that the great blocks there were held to date from his time.
Read next
- Next in Andean and Inca symbolsQuipu (khipu)A record made of knotted cords: a main cord with many cords hanging from it, whose knots, colours and positions stored numbers. The Inca state kept its censuses, tribute and stores on quipus (khipus); whether some also recorded words is still debated.
- Both creator gods whom Spanish writers described as white and beardedQuetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent)The feathered serpent, one of the oldest gods of ancient Mexico. For the Mexica (Aztecs) he was a god of wind, Venus and the morning, and the legendary priest-king of Tula; his name means “quetzal serpent” or “serpent of precious feathers”.
See also
Gateway of the Sun (the Staff God), Nazca lines, Nazca hummingbird, Nazca monkey, Nazca spider, Tumi (ceremonial knife).
Sources
- Viracocha, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
- The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, by Pedro de Cieza de León, Pedro de Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú, part 2 (written about 1550), translated by Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 1883 (Project Gutenberg), Hakluyt Society (Project Gutenberg edition), chapter V
- History of the Incas, by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Historia de los Incas (1572), translated by Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 1907 (Project Gutenberg), Hakluyt Society (Project Gutenberg edition), chapter VI; note 26
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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