The Sapa Inca ruled as the son of Inti, the Sun, and the empire's ceremonial centre was the Qorikancha at Cusco, the golden enclosure, whose walls the Spanish found plated in gold and whose courtyard held images of the Sun, the Moon, the thunder and the stars. Above and behind Inti stood Viracocha, the creator, whose worship the sources associate especially with the ruler of that name.
Radiating from the Qorikancha ran the ceque system, more than forty lines of sighting along which over three hundred huacas, shrines, were arranged: springs, stones, mountain peaks, tombs, battlefields. Each line was assigned to a particular kin group of Cusco, which was responsible for the offerings made along it, so that the calendar, the ritual duties and the social order of the capital were all inscribed on the landscape at once. Brian Bauer's field survey relocated a large number of these shrines and showed that the arrangement, described by the seventeenth century Jesuit Bernabe Cobo, corresponds to real places.
Death did not remove a ruler from politics. Each dead Sapa Inca was mummified, kept in his own palace with his estates and servants, brought out to festivals, consulted and fed. Since the mummy retained the property, each new ruler had to conquer his own, which is one explanation historians offer for the empire's extraordinary speed of expansion.