Pachamama in the Inca and Post-Inca Period: An Andean Vision from the Colonial Chronicles of Peru (16th and 17th Centuries)

Abstract

This article analyzes the cult to Andean Mother Earth known as Pachamama, starting from the references contained in those Peruvian chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that make of the Andean religion one of its primary objects of study. We emphasize, in particular, the peculiarity of the details that they provide about terminology, representations, beliefs and rituals associated with telluric cults in the Prehispanic period, and their persistence throughout the first decades of colonization of the central Andes. In this sense, we also underline how the various chronicles taken into examination provide an increasing accuracy of the informations concerning the veneration to the Mother Earth, something that we think it represents a source of ethnohistorical richness extremely useful for the development of knowledge of ancient Andean religion.