The Incas were very successful in creating a religious state with a perfectly and quite simple pattern: a vast empire that functioned like one immense body of people among many in the long and wide Highlands of the Central Andes.
Cosmology and the human body were deeply interrelated in Inca's beliefs, according to the symbolic systems derived from this interrelationship. They perceived the gift of life as an association of patterns connected in a way with the ones in which the universe functioned.
After a period of unification and conquest of about 4 centuries, every man, woman, and child, living in the land, had a place to live and the knowledge to perform the steps they needed to take or perform in order to maintain the pattern and rhythm of the whole body.
The Incas were able to build an empire extending over 4,300 kilometers along the Andes from present-day Southern Colombia to Northern Chile and Argentina, and encompassing a population of approximately ten million.
The Incas exercised control over their vast territory by extending the Andean practice of reciprocity of goods and services among individuals and communities throughout the land. As long as they fulfilled their obligations with regard to the state religion, the subjects were free to retain their local beliefs. In fact, Inca religion, like Inca government, developed from long-standing Andean traditions.
The Inca believed that the human body was the mediator of cosmic structures and processes through its own structures and processes. Also the human life cycle and the agricultural life cycle were observed deeply and studied and then carefully followed because their survival depended on the harmony between the universal forces acting in each of its regions (Upper, Middle, Under, worlds). The Inca myths and rituals both expressed and enacted this corporeal and cosmic order.
The Inca Empire as a body was called Tahuantinsuyo (Four Quarters). It was divided into 4 regions, each one governed by a designated individual trained in all the crafts and knowledge of the religion law, then a descending series of officials were in charge down to the level of a kin group of individuals holding a piece of land in common. The land was treated as a property of nature and whoever was in charge had to guard the proper use of it. At the head of the empire was the Sapa Inca who was held to be the mediator between the 3 levels of existence (heaven, earth and the underworld).
The Inca ruled from the city of Cuzco (Peru), the administrative and religious centre of the empire. All the sons of local leaders from throughout the empire were sent there to be instructed in the all the arts and religion, also they needed to learn the official (Quechua) language, and the use of the quipus (a device based on knotted strings). The Incas had no writing, but kept an extensive data, from traditions to statistic stored on these recording machines (quipus).
During the reign of Huayna Capac, a bitter battle over who was to become the next Inca, as well as a devastating smallpox epidemic brought by the Europeans invaders in the 1530s threw the empire into chaos. The Europeans took advantage of the mayhem.
The civil battle for control arouse between 2 half-brothers. The one named Huascar, was the son of the Inca's wife in Cuzco, the other named Atahualpa, was the son of a concubine, daughter of a high rank official in the Northern territories. Atahualpa won the contest and killed his brother. It was a this point that the Europeans burst into the Tahuantinsuyo and captured Atahualpa through a ruse. The devastated state of the empire after the epidemic disease, and the presence of dissatisfied Inca subjects shattered the Inca pattern of survival and broke up its body. The unsatisfied ones, trying to restore harmony, helped the foreigners, which in turn they had already elaborated a deceitful plan (they only wanted to be rich). The same local people expecting to gain peace helped the foreigners to perform their plan without knowing the real craving they had. The initial Andean perception of the foreigners was that they were sent by a divine force to help them to restore the needed harmony. The outcome was that Atahualpa was tried and executed, after the foreigners collected an enormous ransom in gold for his promised release. Much of the gold from Coricancha was stripped, and despite the payment, they kill him.
The most important factor, however, was the shattering of the Inca pattern, scattering its people, and breaking up the body. Millions of men and women who had existed only as parts of a great cause , suddenly found themselves with the inability to continue the life as it was before the civil war. To act on its own, the body needed its head, and the head was captured and assassinated. The social structure which worked so well to integrate the empire into a hierarchical whole, now it is disintegrated, leaving l the Inca's subjects unequipped to deal with the nightmare of chaos, now acting through the audacity of the small group of foreigners that at the end killed the whole body.
The Andean people confronted a radically different image of life. While the conquerors destroyed the Inca civilization and imposed a new culture on its former inhabitants, however, many of the Inca principles have managed to survived in the Highland of the Andes to the present day. This principles are universal and will never fade.
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