Mama Killa, Mother Moon, is the Inca goddess of the moon, wife and sister of the sun Inti, and the keeper of the calendar: the Inca year was reckoned by her months, and the great state festivals were timed by her. Women, marriage and childbirth were her concern, and priestesses served her. The Spanish chroniclers report that her image in the Coricancha, the golden temple at Cusco, was made of silver as Inti's was of gold, and that the mummified bodies of dead Inca queens were kept in her precinct.
A lunar eclipse was understood as a mountain lion or a great serpent attacking the moon-goddess, and people responded by making as much noise as they could, shouting, sounding instruments, and making dogs howl, to frighten the animal away and save her. Her marks are still read in the face of the moon in some Andean communities, where the moon keeps her feminine and calendrical associations, a strand of belief that persisted through and beneath Christianization.