THE ANDEAN PACARINAS.

Pacarinas is a term that ancient Andeans used to describe the place of origin of their souls and the final destination of each one of them. They were understood as a type of portals through which the forces of life and death flowed and from which people both emerged  at birth and returned at death.
All beings were believed to be intrinsically interconnected through the sharing from the matrix of the animated substance. The first inhabitants, according to their beliefs, came to the world of the living, and followed the specific tasks ordered by the Creator god (Apu-Con-Ticci-Viracocha),  through the portals manifested in the form of caves, lakes, or springs of water.
The Creator god was an androgynous deity, created or formed by Himself (Hermaphrodite). He was and still is the most important deity for the Andean people. He was associated with the creation of the universe, and was related to the sea (mind), since according to an ancient legend, He returned to the ocean once He created the universe, and promised to come back. His appearance was described as an entity full of light resembling the form of a human being, tall in stature, with a tunic and a book on his hand.
The Creator god was the one who made all the souls that exist in the universe and determined that the soul of every human being had to return to the original places from where they emerged. From there they had to follow the path leading to their final destinations in the world of the light. Some of them had to wait until they were ordered to be transferred to another body and be reborn as humans, and others were not successfully accepted to continue their existence in the world of the light, being placed in the underworld or the world of darkness forever.
A reciprocal and intimate relationship between life and death was believed to be established, shaping the interaction among closely related individuals. People accepted death as a mean necessary in order to get a place in the afterlife or be reborn.
The reciprocal and intimate relationship of life and death also was believed to be connected between the human and nonhuman worlds. That is the reason that the centrality of social relationships emphasized not only the relationship between people but also between people and the sites of central energies, known as Huacas, and between the Huacas themselves as places of sacred forces acting in them. The social relationship then was based on reciprocity in the exchange of food, drink, labor, and energy, and the goal of these reciprocal exchanges was the ongoing reproduction of society and the renewal of the Andean world.
Many of the gods that the Incas worshiped were chosen from the environment, like the thunder, the moon, the sun and so on. All of them reflect the profound respect that they had to the place where they were permitted to live, and the soil that they were assigned to work and put a very special effort to maintain balance between the places that they built and the nature itself. To all ancient Andean cultures, a necessary and appropriate balance between nature and the environment was enforced since their primary beliefs rested in the duality of the universe (day-night, up-down, and life-death)
The sun god Inti was and still is very important to the Andean people lying on the fact that its energy is the principal benefactor of all living creatures. It brings the light that the plants needs to create oxygen and without its light the day wouldn't exist.

THE INCA BELIEF ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE.

The Inca believed strongly in the afterlife. For them the heavens were divided into four quarters. They believed that the souls of its people were sent to live in heaven or in hell after the death of their earthly bodies. The people who obeyed the Inca rule: -Do not steal (power), Do not lie (about your own power), Do not be lazy (work your own ground)- were sent to live a good afterlife in heaven, in the part of the quarters where the warmth of the sun was present and where there was plenty of food and drink. Those who did not live by this rule spent their afterlife in the underworld where it was dark and cold and they only had rocks to eat.
The Incas believed that the members of the ruling class were somehow direct descendants to a higher mind of which the first emperor, Manco Capac and his sister-wife Mama Ocllo, proved to be the first of its kind. To keep this sacred ruling the emperor would always marry his sister as his official wife, so that the heir would be a pure descendant of the all powerful force of the Sun (Inti) and they would rule with divine power.
Important roles occupied by these powerful souls in their earthly life were, at the point of death, subject of greater care by its subjects, in embalming and mummifying their bodies before burial. The body, then, was left in their palace or in a designated sacred place with numerous objects, in above ground chambers, to help them in the journey to their final destination known as "Pacari'Na. Upon reaching the Pacari'Na, the mummies were suppose to be able to mingle with the ancient ancestors that were also buried there. The Incas even kept some servants to watch over the dead emperor as a symbol of continuity of its life force (mind power) towards the afterlife. For certain Festivals, the dead emperors were paraded through the streets.
The Incas believed in reincarnation, and this is the main reason why funerals were a very sacred events.
The funerals rites were held for eight days. Relatives would re-enter the tombs or palaces and consult the mummies on important daily affairs. The dead were considered a manifestation of spiritual powers that were able to be manifested through natural events and/or through dreams using symbols. The priests were able to train their mind by using herbs and sophisticated methods to guide it to the correct channel of interpretation, otherwise they would ended up losing their own mind.
The Huacas, as sacred places or objects of natural source such as a rock, a statue, a cave, waterfall, mountain, or even a dead body, were manifestations of powerful forces, either from the light or darkness, alive in the spiritual world and manifested themselves in the physical world to communicate something sacred. The mountains, for example, were very important and powerful source of energies and for this reason considered very sacred, since they were the source of the natural element of water. Compared to the human body, the mountains were similar in power as the mind that empower the whole physical human body.
The Incas believed in an existence of an overall supreme power, and that the course of history formed a succession of repetition and renewal. Each age was ruled over by the power of the Sun (Inti), and the general course of development was from the most primitive to the sophisticated. Each world was suppose to end by some sort of catastrophic event.