Inca

Inca religion was administered. The state organised worship as it organised everything else, by census, quota and calendar, and the pantheon reflects that: a ranked order of deities with the sun at its head, a professional priesthood, and a system of shrines around Cusco laid out along lines radiating from the Coricancha, each with an assigned custodian and an assigned day.

Inti, the sun, is the state god and the ancestor of the ruling line, which makes the cult of the sun and the legitimacy of the dynasty a single institution. Above or beside him stands Viracocha, the creator, who made the world and the peoples in it and then departed westward across the sea. That withdrawal is the reason the creator is not the ruler here.

Expansion enlarged the pantheon rather than replacing it. Conquered peoples kept their huacas, and principal images were brought to Cusco, which honoured them and held them as security. Absorption was policy, and it was also leverage.

The Sapa Inca was the son of the sun. At death his body was preserved, retained his estates and his household, was consulted, carried in procession and fed. The dead ruler did not vacate his position, which makes the boundary between the royal ancestor and the god unusually thin even by the standards of the traditions the atlas records.

The Incas kept detailed records and did not write. Administration ran on the khipu, knotted cord, which encoded number reliably and whose capacity to encode narrative is still argued over. No Inca account of Inca religion survives in an Inca medium.

Everything therefore arrives through Spanish. The chroniclers wrote within decades of the conquest, from interviews with people who had lived under Inca rule, and they wrote with purposes: to justify the conquest, to argue about how the colony should be governed, or to equip the campaigns against continuing native worship. Cieza de Leon, Betanzos, who married into the Inca elite and worked from her family's testimony, and the later systematic account of Cobo are the principal witnesses, and they disagree on important points including the standing of Viracocha.

Guaman Poma is a different kind of source: an indigenous Andean author writing a vast illustrated letter to the king of Spain, both an insider account and an argument.

The Huarochiri Manuscript is the exception that shows what is missing elsewhere. Compiled around 1600 in Quechua, it records the traditions of one province in that province's own language, and it is the closest thing to Andean religion describing itself.

The campaigns to extirpate idolatry generated their own archive, hostile and detailed, and are a further source for what people were still doing a century after the conquest.