Amaru

Between two lagoons on the high road to Pariacaca, a vein of white marble runs through the rock beside the path, about twenty centimetres wide, crossing the ridge from one league to the next. Around 1580 the idolatry inspector Cristóbal de Albornoz walked past it and wrote down what the people living nearby told him. When the Spaniards came into these kingdoms, they said, a snake called amaro left one lake to travel to the other, heard the news, went cold, and turned to stone. Albornoz added, in the flat register of a man logging evidence, that it does have the shape of a snake, because he had seen it himself. He had also seen what travellers left lying on top of it. Chewed coca and small offerings, every time he passed.

The word is Quechua and it means a very large snake. Albornoz filed it under a class of huaca he was hunting: a kind of snake of various shapes, which they worship and serve, and whose names the principal Incas took for themselves. He named two, machacuay and amaro. Nothing in that entry suggests a god. An amaru was a creature, enormous and specific, and the Andes kept a great many accounts of what happened when one moved.

The fullest of them was set down at the turn of the seventeenth century by Francisco de Ávila, parish priest of Huarochirí, in the Quechua manuscript that preserves the myths of that province. It tells of a long fight between two huacas, Huallallo Carhuincho and Pariacaca, over which of them would rule the region. Pariacaca, being five men at once, sent torrents of rain from five directions, yellow rain and red rain, then lightning from the same five directions; Huallallo held out from dawn until evening as an immense fire that reached the sky and would not let itself be killed. When the water filled the lake and the fire finally went out, Huallallo tried something else. He brought out a huge two-headed serpent called Amaru, and said it would terrify Pariacaca.

It did not. Pariacaca looked at the great snake, made himself a staff of gold, and drove it into the middle of its spine. The Amaru went cold and became stone. The frozen Amaru, the manuscript says, can still be seen plainly on the road that goes by Caquiyoca, up in the heights, and men from Cusco or from anywhere else who know, who have knowledge, scrape its body with a stone and take the powder away to use as a remedy. I will not fall ill, they say.

That is the detail worth holding on to. A dead monster in the Andes is not finished business. It is a useful deposit lying beside a road, and people with the right knowledge stop and take a little.

Cusco had its own. Around 1613 the Andean writer Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua described the birth of a legitimate elder son to the Inca Pachacutec at Pomacocha, a hot place looking back toward the capital, and the news that reached the household while it was still there. A yauirca or amaro had come out of the hill of Pachatusan, a very fierce beast, half a league long and two and a half fathoms thick, with ears and fangs and a beard. It came down by Yuncay Pampa and Sinca and went into the lake of Quibipay. Because of this amaro, he wrote, the child was named Amaro Yupanqui. Nearly three kilometres of snake, something over four metres across, crossing the eastern rim of the Cusco basin once and then gone into the water. He does not say why it made the journey. He says where it went, and that it stayed alive in there.

The same night, according to him, two comets of fire went out from the snow peak of Ausangate, one north and one southwest, and creatures were seen with wings and ears and tails and four feet, with rows of spines on their backs like a fish, which from a distance looked like nothing but fire.

A snake that size cannot move without the ground moving with it, and that is exactly what the sources do with it. Volcanoes, in Andean reckoning, were mountains quarrelling. Earth tremors were an amaru surfacing. The zigzag profile of the Pachatusan summit, seen from the valley floor or from the air, reads as the track of something that went over the top in long lateral curves, and the geological faults ringing that side of the Cusco basin are named, as it happens, Pachatusan and Amaro. Both were still active at the earthquake of 1950.

Set beside the composite dragons that circulate under the name now, the older record is austere. Andean apu could appear as men, as mountains, as birds. An amaru was always a great serpent, sometimes black, and its one real variation was a head at either end. Two-headed boas turn up north of Cusco with some regularity: on Moche and Chimú pottery, on a carved gaming board excavated at Pashash in Ancash and carbon-dated to around 540 CE, and in the hairy two-headed omeco-machacuai that Bishop Martínez de Compañón had painted in Trujillo at the end of the eighteenth century, coiled around a catahua tree, eating a monkey with one mouth and a deer fawn with the other. At Cusco itself the amarucuna have a single head. Nobody has explained the difference.

Some of them were simply animals. Juan de Betanzos, writing in the 1550s from Cusco sources and married into the Inca nobility, records that Pachacutec came back from the conquest of the Andes bringing jaguars and thick snakes that they call amaro, some as thick as the calf of a well-built man and four fathoms long, carried in litters, coiled, fed meat the whole way, because the lords of the Antis kept them tame in their houses. When the triumph was over they went into the enclosure of the wild beasts along with the prisoners. The eastern forest was the frontier Cusco never digested, and its boas came home as trophy and as warning at the same time.

Which is roughly how the amaru ended up on a shield. Guaman Poma de Ayala drew the second of the Inca arms with two of them rampant, a royal fringe issuing from each mouth. A manuscript in the Escorial describes another: on a blue field, two golden snakes linked by their tails, holding between their mouths a llautu with its gold tassel, and above them a gold sun and a silver moon. Names carried the animal too. Amaru Tupa Inca, Pachacutec’s son, was the heir his father named first and then set aside; the great walled compound on the Cusco plaza was Amarucancha, the serpent enclosure.

The assimilation to Europe came fast and never quite finished. In 1608 the Jesuit Diego González Holguín settled it in his Quechua dictionary in three words: Amaro. Dragon, serpiente. Four years later Ludovico Bertonio glossed the Aymara yauirca as a species of very large black vipers. A dictionary line is a small thing, but that one did heavy work, because a dragon in a Spanish mind was a shape the devil took, and the devil lived underground, and the amaru already came out of hills and slept in caves. Colonial painters gave it multicoloured wings. By the end of the eighteenth century the creature fighting a lion in the Lienzo de Urquillos is not a boa at all. It is a dragon, and it stands for José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who had taken the name Túpac Amaru.

What an amaru can do follows from what it is. It is too large to travel without ruining whatever it travels over, so its power is neither aimed nor personal; it is displacement, at the scale of a landslide. It belongs to water and to the hot lowlands, and it is at its most dangerous in the moment it leaves one and crosses the other. Its limits are just as physical. It can be stopped cold, and the sources mean that literally: a golden staff in the spine, the news of an invasion, some shock that catches it mid-journey and leaves it as rock, after which it stops being a danger and becomes a landmark and a supply of medicine. It can also, apparently, be caught, tied, laid in a litter and fed. The lords of the eastern forest had them lying tame in the house, and the Inca army carried them alive over the mountains.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Amaru in Inca mythology?

The Amaru is a giant serpent from Inca and wider Andean belief, described in colonial-era sources as a boa large enough to be measured in leagues. It lives in lakes, in caves and in the hot country east of the Andes, and its movement across the surface was held to cause earth tremors. Its name is simply the Quechua word for a very large snake.

Does the Amaru have two heads?

Sometimes. In the Huarochirí manuscript the Amaru that Huallallo Carhuincho sends against Pariacaca has two heads, and two-headed serpents appear on Moche and Chimú pottery, on a carved board from Pashash in Ancash, and in Peruvian watercolours of the late eighteenth century. The amaru described at Cusco itself, the one that came out of the hill of Pachatusan, had one head.

How was the Amaru defeated?

By being turned to stone. Pariacaca made a staff of gold and drove it into the middle of the Amaru’s spine, and the creature went cold and became rock. A separate account collected by Cristóbal de Albornoz has an amaru petrify between two high lagoons when it heard the Spaniards had arrived, and people who knew what the stone was scraped powder from it and carried it off as a remedy.

Why does the Amaru appear on Inca coats of arms?

Guaman Poma de Ayala and a manuscript held in the Escorial both show Inca arms carrying paired serpents, in one case golden, linked by their tails and holding the royal fringe in their mouths beneath a gold sun and a silver moon. The amaru stood for the eastern frontier and for the enemies the Cusco Incas fought there. Several Inca names carried the word, including Amaru Tupa Inca, a son of Pachacutec.

Is the Amaru a dragon?

Not originally. The Quechua material describes a very large snake, but in 1608 the Jesuit lexicographer Diego González Holguín glossed amaro as “dragon, serpent”, and colonial painters went on to give the creature wings and many colours. The winged composite dragon that circulates under the name today comes out of that Spanish assimilation rather than from the pre-Hispanic record.

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Pariacaca, Coniraya, Viracocha, Inti, Mama Quilla, Illapa, Supay, Pachamama, Mama Cocha, Manco Cápac, Yacumama, Sachamama, Boiúna, Caicai-Vilu, Amphisbaena