Chasca

Before the sun clears the eastern cordillera there is a stretch of perhaps forty minutes when the sky over Cusco goes the colour of watered milk and every star has gone out except one. It sits low and steady above the ridge, bright enough on a clear morning to lay a faint shadow off a wall, and it does not flicker the way the others do. The Inca called it Chasca, and the word means hair worn long and loose and curling.

That gloss comes from a man who grew up speaking the language. Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Cusco in 1539 to an Inca noblewoman and a Spanish captain, wrote in his Comentarios Reales that they called the star Venus Chasca, which is to say of long and curly hair, and honoured her because they said she was the page of the Sun, who went nearest to him, sometimes in front and sometimes behind. It is precise observation dressed up as court protocol. Venus never wanders far from the sun; she rises ahead of him for months on end, then swaps sides and follows him down into the west. A boy on a rooftop in Cusco saw a servant keeping close to a lord. An astronomer would say the same thing in duller words.

The hair is not a metaphor anyone had to reach for. Seen through the thin dry air at four thousand metres, the planet does not resolve to a clean point but to a small white snarl of filaments, and the Quechua word for that tangle is also the word for an unbrushed head of curls. Garcilaso carried the picture further. When the sun went down into the sea, he wrote, they said he entered the water and dried up a great part of it with his heat, and then, like a strong swimmer, dove beneath the earth to come up again next morning in the east. The star went down with him and came up with him, which is exactly what a page does.

The fullest description of Chasca as a person occupies about three lines in a manuscript now in the national library in Madrid. It is anonymous. It has long been attributed to Blas Valera, the mestizo Jesuit whose own writings were largely destroyed, and it says that the Dawn was goddess of maidens and of princesses, author of the flowers of the field, lady of the early morning and of the twilights and the coloured clouds, and that she threw the dew onto the earth when she shook out her hair, and so they called her Chasca. It is a lovely sentence. It is also, near enough, the whole of the case for Chasca as a person rather than a light.

That matters, because the manuscript’s authorship is genuinely unsettled. Recent scholarship on the text argues that the Spanish version is a later translation and reworking of Latin material Valera handed to another Jesuit in 1586, revised by a hand that was not his. The flowers, the maidens and the twilight are therefore a single strand, at one or two removes from anyone who watched the cult, and they are corroborated by nobody. Garcilaso, who had both the language and the city, gives her no flowers and no maidens whatsoever. He gives her a job.

The sources cannot even agree that she was a woman. Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, an Andean nobleman writing around 1613, drew a diagram of what he said had been mounted on the main wall of the Coricancha, the sun temple in Cusco, and laid the sky out across it: the sun, the moon, the Pleiades, the southern cross, the rainbow, and Venus in both of her appearances. The morning star he labelled Chasca Coyllur, and beside it Achachi Ururi, the grandfather star. The evening star opposite is Choquechinchay, the golden puma, and also Apachi Ururi, the grandmother. On that wall the bright thing that comes up before the sun is an old man.

Nobody has found a temple that belonged to her.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, listing what the Inca worshipped in his enormous illustrated letter to the Spanish king, sets chasca cuyllor down beside chuqui ylla, and separates the two with a mark of punctuation that keeps them distinct: the morning star, and then the thunder, which is another god entirely. The star turns up in the record like this again and again, named in a list, given a title, never given a story of her own.

She is older than the empire that catalogued her. In the highlands of Ancash the same light was called Huarac, from the word for daybreak, and it was called on when boys were given the short breeches that marked them as grown, with sacrifices made in its name. In the Culli-speaking country of the northern sierra it was Exquioc, the shining one, and there it was understood as two lights, one that came up at dawn and one at dusk, and both were worshipped so that it would grant life. Cusco did not invent this cult. Cusco inherited it, promoted it, and put it on the temple wall.

Once, in a story from the islands of Lake Titicaca written down by a Spanish priest, she fights. In the beginning there was another star that shone as brightly as the sun and lit the whole world, and when the sun was born on the island and rose from it into the sky the two of them fought for the heavens. The sun won. The beaten star hid its light and now travels at night, frightened and ashamed, and slips away before dawn rather than be seen in front of him. That is the closest thing to a myth she has, and in it she loses.

What she does is quieter than that. She brings the dew, which on the high puna is not a poetic flourish but the difference between a pasture and a stone field. She opens the flowers. She marks the hour, standing over the ridge at a height that told a herder how much of the night was left, and her slow seasonal drift told a farmer when the ground was ready. In the manuscript of Huarochiri, a shaman carrying a sealed box from the lowlands to the Inca cannot resist opening it on the road, and inside is a very small woman in fine cloth with hair like curled gold, and the instant he lays eyes on her she is gone. Some readers take her for Venus. The text does not say so, and the shaman is nearly killed for looking.

Her limits are built into the arrangement that gives her her rank. A page cannot outrank the man she attends. She is never sovereign, never a creator, never the recipient of the great sacrifices that went to the sun and the thunder, and her brightness is only ever borrowed proximity to something brighter. She cannot be found in the middle of the night at all. Watch her at dawn and she holds for half an hour, an hour, longer in winter, and then the sky whitens from the east and she is simply not there any more, and the people who kept time by her had nothing to do but wait for the following morning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chasca in Inca mythology?

Chasca is the Inca name for the planet Venus, the morning star, personified as a deity attending the sun. The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega recorded that the Inca called Venus Chasca, meaning long and curly hair, and honoured the star as the page of the sun because it travels close to him, sometimes ahead and sometimes behind.

What does the name Chasca mean?

Chasca comes from the Quechua ch’aska, which means both the morning star and a head of long curling hair. The fuller form Chasca Coyllur pairs it with quyllur, star. The name describes the way the planet’s light appears to spread into filaments rather than staying a clean point, like loose curls.

Was Chasca a goddess of dawn and flowers?

That description exists, but it rests on a single passage. An anonymous manuscript in Madrid, long attributed to the Jesuit Blas Valera and of disputed authorship, calls her the goddess of maidens and princesses, author of the flowers of the field, who threw dew onto the earth when she shook out her hair. No other chronicler repeats it, and Garcilaso describes only her role as the sun’s attendant.

Was Chasca male or female?

The sources disagree. Most describe Venus as female, but the diagram of the Coricancha drawn by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui around 1613 labels the morning star Achachi Ururi, the grandfather star, and the evening star Apachi Ururi, the grandmother. The chroniclers also disagree over whether the morning and evening appearances of Venus were one being or two.

How was Chasca worshipped?

Chasca was honoured across the Andes under several names before the Inca absorbed the cult, and no temple or priesthood dedicated to her alone is recorded. In Ancash the morning star was called Huarac and invoked with sacrifices at the rite in which boys were given adult clothing, and in the Culli-speaking north it was called Exquioc and worshipped in both its dawn and dusk forms so that it would grant life.

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