Mama Quilla

Also Known As: Quechua Mama Killa, “Mother Moon”; also written Mama Kilya, and called Mamacullia by the early chroniclers
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Incan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She governs the month and the lunar calendar, weeps silver, and can be wounded and eaten by the animal that causes eclipses.
Role in Mythos: She is the moon, elder sister and wife of the sun Inti, and the timekeeper whose cycle sets the Inca festival year.
Relation to Humans: She oversees marriage, women’s cycles and the protection of women, and her shrine was staffed only by women of royal Inca descent. When she sickened during an eclipse, ordinary people were expected to save her with noise.

Silver gives back only what it is given. In the moon’s chamber at the Coricancha the plated walls did exactly that, throwing a cold second-hand light across a room where the embalmed queens of Cusco sat in order of seniority, the oldest nearest, all of them facing a woman’s face beaten into a plate of silver.

That face was Mama Quilla, and her name is not a riddle. It says Mother Moon in Quechua and means it.

The Inca ran her cult beside her husband’s and staffed it differently. Inti’s sanctuary was lined in gold and served by priests. Hers was lined in silver and served by women of royal Inca descent who lived inside the temple precinct and did nothing else with their lives. Bernabé Cobo, going through the wreckage of the religion a century after the conquest, wrote down why the moon was worshipped at all, and the reason was not fear. It was her admirable beauty, and the benefits she bestowed upon the world.

The chief benefit was arithmetic. Quilla means moon and month in the same breath, and the Inca year was twelve of them, each named for the festival it carried, each set by her cycle and then nudged back into agreement with the sun. Planting, tribute, pilgrimage and sacrifice all hung off that reckoning. A state running an empire the length of the Andes needed a calendar it could trust, and the calendar was her.

In September, once the equinox had passed, the city watched the eastern ranges for the first thin curve of her. When it showed, Cusco began the Situa. Ash and old grain went out of the houses, people scrubbed themselves in the rivers, runners carried the sickness of the year out along the four roads at a dead sprint, and the festival that followed carried the queen’s name, Coya Raymi. It was her month, and the cleaning waited on her signal.

She was the daughter of Viracocha and the elder sister and wife of Inti, which in the Inca telling was not scandal but symmetry. From that marriage came Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, the pair who walked out of the origin story and founded Cusco. Every Sapa Inca after them claimed descent from the sun, and by the same arithmetic from the moon.

The descriptions of her appearance are unanimous and brief: a beautiful woman. The image in the shrine gave her a human face worked in silver, and silver was her metal in the way gold was her husband’s, so completely that she was said to weep it. The dark patches on her surface had their own explanation. A fox fell in love with her, on the reasonable grounds that she was the most beautiful thing visible from the ground, and climbed into the sky to be near her. She caught him and pressed him against herself, and he is there still. It is one of the few myths in which the punishment for infatuation is being kept forever.

Then there were the nights when the animal reached her. An eclipse meant a puma, or by other accounts a serpent, had caught the moon and begun to eat, and the darkening was read as sickness rather than shadow. If it finished, she would die, fall out of the sky and crush everything underneath. So the city fought for her with sound. Trumpets, conch shells and drums went up at once, men shot arrows into the dark, and every dog in Cusco, large and small, was tied and beaten until it howled, because a story held that the moon was fond of dogs for some old service they had done her, and the noise of them crying might pity her awake.

She could die. That is the plain fact underneath all of it, and it sets her apart from most great sky deities, who get threatened in stories and are never actually at risk.

The noise did not stop at the conquest. Generations after Cusco was baptised, eclipse nights still filled with drumming, and the Spanish, who could predict the timing to the hour, found that the prediction bought them more standing in the Andes than any amount of preaching had.

Her rank depended on where you stood. In the imperial reckoning of Cusco she came third, behind Inti and behind Illapa the thunder, which is the order Cobo sets down. On the north coast it was reversed outright. The Chimú put the moon first among all the gods, above the sun, on the grounds that she could be seen by night and by day both while the sun managed only half of that, and they gave their moon, Si, offerings of spondylus shell brought up the coast at real expense.

Her name travels further than her empire did. Quechua killa and the Aymara and Mapuche words for the moon resemble one another more closely than unrelated languages have any business doing, and linguists have proposed that all of them borrowed it from Puquina. The resemblance is not only in sound. In Mapuche cosmology as in the central Andes, the sun and the moon are married.

What she gave was reliable. She fixed the month and therefore the year, oversaw marriage, governed women’s cycles and stood as protector of women generally, and the women who served her held a position no man could occupy. What she could not do was defend herself. The record has her sickening, weeping, and needing to be shouted back into the sky by people standing on the ground with drums and howling dogs. The keepers of the calendar had to keep the calendar alive.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mama Quilla?

Mama Quilla is the Inca goddess of the moon, whose name means Mother Moon in Quechua. She was the daughter of Viracocha, the elder sister and wife of the sun god Inti, and the mother of Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, the founders of Cusco. She oversaw marriage, women’s cycles and the calendar.

What did the Inca believe caused a lunar eclipse?

The Inca believed an animal, usually named as a puma or a serpent, had caught Mama Quilla and was eating her. They feared that if it finished, she would die and fall from the sky, crushing the world. During an eclipse people in Cusco blew trumpets and conch shells, beat drums, shot arrows into the sky and beat their dogs so the howling would rouse her.

Why is Mama Quilla associated with silver?

Silver was Mama Quilla’s metal in the same way gold was Inti’s. Her chamber at the Coricancha temple in Cusco was plated with silver, her image was a woman’s face worked in silver, and she was said to weep tears of silver.

What festival was held for Mama Quilla?

The Situa, held in September on the first new moon after the spring equinox, was the great purification of the Inca year, and the festival month that carried it was Coya Raymi, the queen’s festival. Houses were cleaned out, people washed in the rivers and runners carried the year’s impurity out of Cusco along the four royal roads.

Was the moon more important than the sun in the Andes?

In Cusco, no. Imperial reckoning placed Mama Quilla third, after Inti the sun and Illapa the thunder. On the north coast the order was reversed, and the Chimú ranked their moon deity Si above the sun because the moon could be seen by day as well as by night.