{ "id": "cristobal-de-molina-fabulas-y-ritos-de-los-incas", "type": "entity", "name": "Cristobal de Molina, An Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas (Cuzco, c. 1575; first printed in English, London 1873)", "summary": "A report on Inca religion written at Cuzco by the priest of the hospital parish for natives, who says on his first page how he got it: he assembled aged people who had themselves taken part in the rites under Huayna Ccapac, Huascar and Manco. It is the fullest surviving description of the Inca ritual year and it carries, in the same manuscript, the earliest close account of the huaca revival that swept the Andes after 1560 - written by a man whose office was to end it.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "peru", "historiography", "indigenous-peoples", "religion", "language", "books", "spanish-empire", "sixteenth-century" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "polo-de-ondegardo-report-on-inca-government" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "pachacuti-yamqui-antiquities-of-peru" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "betanzos-suma-y-narracion-de-los-incas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "inca-garcilaso-de-la-vega" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospitales-de-indios-de-los-andes" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quechua-printed-lexicography-1560-1754" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "tercero-catecismo-de-lima-1583" } ], "questions": [ "What is Cristobal de Molina's Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas?", "How did Spanish priests record Inca religion?", "What is the earliest description of the Taqui Onqoy movement?", "What was the Inca ritual calendar?", "Which Spanish source for Inca religion is considered the most reliable?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The report states its own method on its opening page. It is headed \"The Fables and Rites of the Yncas, by Christoval de Molina, priest of the parish of Our Lady of Healing of the Hospital for Natives in the city of Cuzco\", addressed to the bishop of Cuzco Sebastian de Artaun; the author says he had already submitted an account of the origin, lives and customs of the Yncas, and that to describe the ceremonies more fully he \"assembled a number of aged persons who had seen and participated in them in the days of Huayna Ccapac, of Huascar Ynca, and of Manco Ynca, as well as some leaders and priests of those days\". The evidence is named as elderly eyewitness testimony, taken by a resident priest, in the generation that still remembered the rites.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "What follows is a ritual calendar month by month, described in working detail rather than in summary. For the sowing season the volume records a fast kept from the sowing of the maize until it stood a finger's length out of the ground, wives and children eating only boiled maize and herbs, drinking no chicha but a muddy stuff called concho and chewing no coca; the commoners' feast called yahuayra, sung in red shirts reaching to the feet; and a sacrifice of a white llama, maize, coca, coloured plumes and the sea shells called mullu, offered at dawn by the priests of the Creator at the place the Spaniards then called Limapampa, with the Tarpuntaes or priests of the Sun and the priests of the Thunder, Chuqui Yllapa, praying for warmth and for rain without hail. August, called Coya-raymi, is the month of the Situa, for which the figures of the huacas were brought to Cuzco \"from all parts of the land, from Quito to Chile\".", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Molina's report is also the earliest close description of the Andean religious revival now usually called the Taqui Onqoy. The volume prints that from the year 1560 it was believed among the Indians that an ointment made from their bodies had been sent for from Spain to cure a disease for which there was no medicine there, so that they would not carry fuel or grass to a Spaniard's house for fear of being taken and killed for it; that the huacas the Christians had burnt were held to have risen again and divided into two parties, one joined to the huaca Pachacama and the other to Titicaca; and that preachers went out among the Indians declaring the huacas were wandering in the air, thirsty and dying of hunger because they were no longer given sacrifice or chicha, and that many fields had been sown with worms to be planted in the hearts of the Spaniards, of the Spanish sheep and horses, and of those Indians who stayed Christian.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The terms of return are recorded as a rule of life, and they are a boycott. Those who would go back to the huacas and live were to fast some days, eating no salt, no aji and no coloured maize, taking \"no Spanish thing\", not entering churches, not obeying the call of the priests and not using their Christian names; the times of the Yncas would then be restored, and the huacas would no longer speak from stones and fountains but would enter men's bodies, so houses were to be kept ready in case a huaca wished to lodge in one. The volume then describes people trembling, falling and tearing at themselves, and being carried by their neighbours to a prepared lodging of straw and cloaks to be worshipped as the huaca that had entered them.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The motive of the document is on the same pages as its evidence, and it is not disinterested. The rites are described in order to be recognised and suppressed; the movement is called an apostasy and attributed to the Devil and to wizards kept by the Yncas at Uiscacabamba; and the volume prints, as an aside in the middle of the account, that the Indians of the land had much respect for the things of the Ynca \"until the Lord Viceroy, Don Francisco de Toledo, abolished and put an end to them, in which he greatly served God our Lord\". The best surviving record of Inca religion was made by a man who approved of its destruction.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The editor of the 1873 translation ranks Molina above the better-known authority for a stated reason: Garcilaso de la Vega wrote of what he had heard in Peru after a lapse of many years, whereas \"the evidence of Molina is more reliable, because he wrote on the spot, with a full knowledge of the language, and after carefully examining the surviving priests and wise men of the old Ynca court\". Markham also notes that Molina gives Punchau, not Ynti, as the Ynca name for the sun, against Garcilaso, and that the name most constantly used for the deity in Molina's prayers is Pachayachachic, \"the teacher of the universe\". This is a Victorian editor with a declared enthusiasm for Inca institutions, and the judgement is recorded here as his.", "sources": [ "markham-introduction-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The most valuable part of the report is also the most damaged. Markham counts fourteen prayers of the Inca priests given by Molina - four to the Supreme Being, two to the Sun, one for fruitful flocks, four for the Yncas, two to the other huacas and one to the earth - and warns in the same paragraph that the Quichua words have in many instances been incorrectly transcribed, so that the meaning is not always clear, and that the Spanish translations, now given again in English, are in some cases far from literal. Anything quoted from these prayers in English has passed through a defective transcription and two translations.", "sources": [ "markham-introduction-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The text reached print late and in another language. Markham states that the four papers in his volume, Molina's among them, \"have never been printed in the language in which they were written, and are now translated for the first time\" - so a report written at Cuzco in the 1570s first became a printed book in London in 1873, in English, at the Hakluyt Society.", "sources": [ "markham-introduction-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English pages on Molina are almost all about the Taqui Onqoy and reach him through modern secondary literature; pages on the Inca calendar cite Garcilaso. This object works from the printed text itself and puts four things on the same page that are usually kept apart: the method Molina states in his own first paragraph, the ritual year as he records it, the boycott rule of the huaca revival in its own terms - no salt, no aji, no Spanish thing, no Christian names - and the aside in which the same author thanks viceroy Toledo for abolishing the things of the Ynca. It also states what a reader loses by coming to the prayers in English: a transcription its own editor calls incorrect in many places, and translations he calls far from literal.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-15", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/cristobal-de-molina-fabulas-y-ritos-de-los-incas", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/cristobal-de-molina-fabulas-y-ritos-de-los-incas.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Cristobal de Molina, An Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas (Cuzco, c. 1575; first printed in English, London 1873)", "description": "A report on Inca religion written at Cuzco by the priest of the hospital parish for natives, who says on his first page how he got it: he assembled aged people who had themselves taken part in the rites under Huayna Ccapac, Huascar and Manco. It is the fullest surviving description of the Inca ritual year and it carries, in the same manuscript, the earliest close account of the huaca revival that swept the Andes after 1560 - written by a man whose office was to end it.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/cristobal-de-molina-fabulas-y-ritos-de-los-incas", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-15", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas, translated from the original Spanish manuscripts and edited, with notes and an introduction, by Clements R. Markham (London, printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1873)", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=W3RfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA3" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Clements R. Markham, introduction to Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas (Hakluyt Society, London, 1873), pp. v-xx", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=W3RfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR10" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Cristobal de Molina, An Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas (Cuzco, c. 1575; first printed in English, London 1873)" } }