Copacati

Also Known As: also Kopakati; the name of both the idol and the hill it stood on, near Copacabana on Lake Titicaca; often explained as copa, a blue-green stone, joined to a short form of Aymara katari, snake
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Andes Mythology, Incan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Copacati was a stone huaca wound about with snakes, a holy thing with the power to send or hold back the rain.
Role in Mythos: It was the rain shrine of the Copacabana peninsula, the hilltop partner of the blue stone idol that watched over the lake and its fish.
Relation to Humans: Farmers climbed to it in dry years to ask for water for their sown fields. A Spanish priest had it hauled down and destroyed, and the one account of it was written by a friar who was glad to see it go.

The rains on the high plain around Lake Titicaca are supposed to come in November. Some years they do not. The sky stays a hard, clean blue, the wind lifts dust from the terraces, and the potato plants sit small and grey in the furrows. In such a year, four hundred and more years ago, the farmers of the Copacabana peninsula knew which hill to climb.

The hill was called Copacati, and so was the thing on top of it. It was a stone. Somebody had carved a figure on it, and snakes were worked all around the figure, coil upon coil, so that the whole surface seemed to writhe. People went up to it with their request when the fields were drying out. They wanted water for the crops, and the stone was the one to ask.

Nearly everything known about Copacati comes from one man. Alonso Ramos Gavilán was an Augustinian friar who lived at Copacabana for about two years and published a history of its shrine in Lima in 1621. His book is about the Virgin of Copacabana and her miracles. The old holy places of the peninsula come into it as the enemy she defeated, and Copacati gets a few sentences among them. He says it belonged to the Yunguyo people, that it took its name from its hill, that the figure on it was a very ugly one, that it was all twisted about with snakes, and that it was visited in times of drought. That is the entire portrait.

He adds one story, and it is a good one. A priest named Almeida, who had charge of the parish, decided the idol had to go. He had it carried down from the hill and set out in the open where everyone could see it. Spaniards and local people gathered round. Then a large snake came loose from the stone, a real one, and began to move around it across the ground. The crowd fell on the snake with sticks and rocks and killed it. The idol was broken up afterwards and thrown into the water.

Ramos Gavilán told this as proof that a devil lived in the carving. It is not hard to read it another way. Snakes like warm stone. The people watching had prayed to that rock for rain all their lives, and what they made of the animal that slid off it nobody wrote down.

The snakes were not there for decoration. Across the Andes the serpent stands for water in motion. The amaru is a great snake that lives in lakes and springs and bursts out as flood or landslide, and lightning is a snake of fire in the sky. A zigzag is how both are drawn. A stone covered in snakes on a hilltop is a fair picture of a thunderstorm.

Copacati did not work alone. Down by the shore stood a second idol, which gave its name to the town. It was a handsome blue stone with a human face and no hands or feet, and later writers gave it the body of a fish. The Peruvian historian Maria Rostworowski read the two as a pair of the kind Andean thought is full of. The hill idol with its snakes ruled the upper water, the rain. The shore idol ruled the lower water, the lake and what swam in it. Both names begin with copa, a word for a blue or blue-green stone. The second half of Copacati may be a worn-down form of katari, the Aymara word for snake. That would make the name something like the blue serpent, though this is a modern reading and the friar offers no meaning for it.

No story tells how Copacati came to be. There is no maker, no first appearance and no parents. Ramos Gavilán does not call it male or female. English reference books of the twentieth century turned it into a lake goddess of Tiahuanaco who sank the temples of rival gods beneath Titicaca out of jealousy. That tale appears nowhere in the friar’s history, and nobody who repeats it names an older source. It has been copied so often that it is now the most common thing said about Copacati. It is probably wrong.

What the record supports is narrower. Copacati could bring rain, or was trusted to. Its power was local, tied to one hill and the fields in sight of it. It was not one of the great state shrines the Incas built on the Island of the Sun across the water, though it sat in the middle of their holiest landscape and outlasted them by a generation or two.

Its limit was that it was a stone, and a stone can be carried off. One priest with a work party ended a cult that was certainly older than the Incas. The hill is still there, a short way from Copacabana, and it still has the name. Rocks on it are cut into steps, seats and channels in the Inca manner, and archaeologists list Kopakati among the carved-stone sites of the peninsula. The snake stone itself is not among them. In dry years the people of Copacabana now carry their requests to the Virgin in the basilica, which stands a little above the shore.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what was Copacati?

Copacati was a stone idol on a hill of the same name near Copacabana, on the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca. It was carved with a figure and covered in coiling snakes. Local farmers went to Copacati in times of drought to ask for rain for their crops.

Was Copacati a lake goddess who sank the temples of Tiahuanaco?

Probably not. That story appears in modern English reference books, but it is not in the 1621 history by Alonso Ramos Gavilán, which is the only early account of Copacati. Ramos Gavilán describes a rain idol on a hill and does not say whether Copacati was male or female.

What happened to the Copacati idol?

A Spanish priest named Almeida had the Copacati idol carried down from its hill and shown in public. According to Ramos Gavilán, a large snake came off the stone and was killed by the crowd. The idol was then broken up and thrown into the water.

Why was Copacati covered in snakes?

In Andean belief the snake stands for moving water, including rain, floods and lightning. An idol wrapped in snakes fits Copacati’s job as a bringer of rain. The name Copacati may itself include a short form of katari, the Aymara word for snake.

How was Copacati connected to the idol of Copacabana?

The historian Maria Rostworowski read Copacati and the idol called Copacabana as a pair. Copacati, on its hill, governed the upper water, meaning rain. The blue stone idol of Copacabana, by the shore, governed the lower water of the lake and its fish.