Catequil

Above San Jose de Porcon the air thins until breathing is work, and the storms that build on Cerro Icchal give almost no warning. A darkening. The smell of wet stone. Then the crack. The people of Huamachuco knew precisely what they were hearing. A god was working a sling, and every bolt was a stone flung from a whirled leather cord. The Augustinian friars who compiled the earliest account of the province in 1560 wrote it down without embroidery: the respect and fear the people held for Cataquil was great, because they said it was he who made the lightning bolts and the thunder and the flashes, and that he made them by throwing them with his sling.

He came into the world through a killing. The friars recorded a creation story in which the aloof high god Ataguju made a being called Guamansuri and sent him down to Huamachuco, where he found the land already occupied by a people called the Guachemines, who set him to work their fields. The Guachemines kept a sister, Cautaguan, shut away. Guamansuri got to her anyway, and when her pregnancy showed, her brothers seized him, burned him, and ground what was left of him to dust. The dust went up into the sky to Ataguju. Days later Cautaguan gave birth to two eggs and died. The eggs were thrown onto a dung heap, where they hatched into two boys, and an aunt raised them. One was called Piguerao. The other was called the great lord Catequil.

The first thing he did with his power was fetch his mother back from the dead. She gave him two slings that Guamansuri had left behind for him, and with those he went through the Guachemines, killing many and chasing the rest out of the province entirely. Then he went to Ataguju and asked for people to fill the emptied land, and was told to go to a hill called Guacat and dig them out of the ground. The hill is still on the topographic maps, at the southern edge of the old province where the Tablachaca meets the Santa. So are the ravines along the northern frontier that carry the name guachemin, all of them dropping steeply toward the hot country. The word may be related to an old term for coastal fishermen, which turns the story into something sharper than a fairy tale: an account of who the highlands belong to, and who was driven downhill.

His shrine stood at Namanchugo, on a plain at the foot of Cerro Icchal, and it was old. The site was in use from roughly 400 CE until the middle of the sixteenth century. Excavation there found two patio systems and a network of channels cut for libations, so that poured liquid ran through the sanctuary along fixed paths. Two enormous boulders were dragged across the plain from the mountain’s base and set at the northeast end of the main mound. On the summit above, a central rock stands for Catequil, a smaller peak beside it for his brother Piguerao, and a curved rock for the mother he raised. A stone idol recovered at the site shows a belly still swollen from childbirth.

What made him famous beyond his own province was his mouth. By the last century before the Spanish arrived, Catequil was the oracle of the north, and the Augustinians called him the most feared and honoured idol in all Peru, worshipped and revered from Quito to Cuzco. Huayna Capac is said to have carried the huaca with him to Quito; seven springs in Ecuador still bear the name Catequilla, and a hill north of the capital carries it too. Delegations arrived at Namanchugo with questions. The priests took them, the channels ran, the answer came back. He had reportedly told Huayna Capac how his northern campaign would end, and he had been right.

Then, in the middle of the war between Huayna Capac’s sons, Atahualpa sent to ask him about his own prospects. The oracle said the advance would end badly. Atahualpa came to the sanctuary himself with a golden axe in his hand, and an old priest, said to be past a hundred, came out to meet him in a long robe sewn over with seashells. Atahualpa brought the axe down on his skull. Then he had the shrine pulled apart and the idol shattered. Twenty-odd years later the Augustinians found the fragments, ground them finer, and poured the powder into a river.

The sources do not entirely agree on that ending. Witnesses from Conchucos, where his cult also ran deep, told it differently: that it was Huayna Capac who burned the shrine at Porcon, and that the priests got the idol out whole and carried it south to Cabana and Tauca, where they built it a new temple. Both versions agree he began in Huamachuco. Both versions end with somebody trying to destroy him. The friars Antonio Lozano and Juan Ramirez finished the job at Namanchugo, tearing down the walls, mutilating the groin of the mother’s statue, toppling the boulders that held Piguerao, and pecking a Christian cross into a rock in the plaza.

His powers follow from what he is. He was born of a man burned to powder and a woman who died giving birth to eggs, so he holds the border between death and return, and the first miracle credited to him is a resurrection. He inherited weapons rather than choosing them, and the sling is a herder’s tool before it is a god’s, which is why the thunder over the Huamachuco puna sounds like something thrown by a person rather than decreed by a throne. He gives rain, fertility and the well-being of a province, and he gives answers.

His limits follow just as directly. A god who lives in a particular stone on a particular mountain can be reached by anyone willing to climb it with an axe. His truthfulness was not a defence but the trigger: he was destroyed for the accuracy of a prophecy, not the falsity of one. And a cult tethered to a shrine can be interrupted by burning the shrine, which is exactly what two Incas and two friars each tried in turn. It did not entirely work. The Augustinians were still writing about his worship in 1560, generations after the axe, and Conchucos was still keeping him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Catequil?

Catequil is the thunder and lightning god of Huamachuco in the northern Peruvian Andes, and the most widely consulted oracle in the region before the Spanish conquest. He was born from one of two eggs laid by Cautaguan, and his brother Piguerao hatched from the other. Later Inca practice absorbed him into the imperial religious landscape, but the Augustinian account of 1560 ties him specifically to Huamachuco.

How does Catequil make lightning?

He throws it with a sling. The 1560 Augustinian report states that the people of Huamachuco believed he produced the lightning bolts, the thunder and the flashes by hurling them from his sling. The two slings were left to him by his father Guamansuri and given to him by his mother after he raised her from the dead.

Why did Atahualpa destroy Catequil’s shrine?

Because the oracle told him his campaign would end badly. During the war with his brother Huascar, Atahualpa sent to consult Catequil at Huamachuco and received an unfavourable answer, then came to the sanctuary with a golden axe, killed the aged priest who met him, and had the idol shattered and the shrine pulled down.

Where was Catequil worshipped?

His principal sanctuary was Namanchugo, on the plain below Cerro Icchal near San Jose de Porcon in the province of Huamachuco. His cult also ran strongly through Conchucos, and it spread north into what is now Ecuador, where seven springs and a hill near Quito still carry the name Catequilla.

Who are Ataguju, Guamansuri and Piguerao?

Ataguju is the distant creator god of the Huamachuco account, Guamansuri is the being he sent down who fathered Catequil and was burned to dust for it, and Piguerao is Catequil’s twin, hatched from the second egg. On the summit of Cerro Icchal a smaller peak beside the central rock was identified with Piguerao.

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