Pariacaca

Also Known As: also written Paria Caca, Pariaqaqa and Paryaqaqa; the god and the snow peak carry the same Quechua name
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Andes Mythology, Incan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is rain, hail and flood in five bodies at once, and he can hollow a valley, raise a lake or stop a heart with weather.
Role in Mythos: He ends the reign of the man-eating fire huaca Huallallo Caruincho, drives the hot lowland world up into the mountains, and becomes the common father of the peoples of Huarochiri.
Relation to Humans: He walks among people disguised as a beggar and rewards or destroys them according to how they treat a stranger who has nothing. Those who fed him became his children and his priesthood; the village that ignored him went into the sea under yellow and white stones.

Five eggs lay on the cold ridge of Condorcoto, and around them the air began to move. Before that, the tellers of Huarochiri say, there had been no wind anywhere. A poor man in a torn cloak walked up to look at the eggs most days, the way a farmer checks a field he is worried about, and then went back down into a country that was still hot, still lowland, and still eating its own children.

That country belonged to Huallallo Caruincho. Under him the land between the coast and the cordillera was yunca, warm and green and loud with macaws and parrots, and it had two rules that made the warmth hard to enjoy. The dead came back on the fifth day. The crops ripened on the fifth day too. No woman was to bear more than two children, and one of the two was handed over for the god to eat, the parents choosing which. It reads like an abundant world until the arithmetic arrives.

The ragged man on the ridge was Pariacaca, and before he came out of his egg he worked through a son. Huathiacuri was as poor as his father and got his name from his food, huatyasca, the half-baked stuff a man eats when he has no proper hearth. Sleeping on the height of Latallaco, he overheard two foxes swapping gossip on the road, one coming up from the sea and one going down to it. A very rich man at Anchicocha was dying, they said. His house had walls dressed in yellow and red feathers and his llamas came out of the womb already blue and yellow and scarlet, so that nobody needed to dye wool, and he had let it be known that he was the Creator. What no physician had worked out was that a grain of toasted maize had fallen on his wife’s skirt, that she had given it to a man, and that she had gone to bed with him afterwards, and that two serpents were now sitting on the roof waiting to eat the house while a two-headed toad waited under the grinding stone.

Huathiacuri walked down, asked the sick man’s younger daughter for her hand as his fee, and told the whole room what was wrong, including the part about the wife. The serpents were found and killed. The stone was lifted and the toad hopped out and went off to a spring near Anchicocha where it still makes travellers lose their way. The rich man recovered and immediately regretted the price, because his elder daughter’s husband could not bear the disgrace of a brother-in-law in rags, and challenged him to a series of contests. Drinking and dancing first: Pariacaca sent his son to lie on a hillside as a dead guanaco until a pair of foxes set down a jar of chicha and a set of pipes to eat him, and when Huathiacuri’s wife struck the fox’s drum in the plaza the ground itself kept time. The jar never emptied. Then a contest of festival dress, and Pariacaca gave his son a shirt of snow. Then puma skins, and the skin from the spring came with a rainbow standing over its head. Then house-building, and while the rich man’s labourers slept, birds and snakes and lizards finished the walls in silence, and a screaming wildcat panicked the llamas carrying his rival’s thatch until the straw was scattered down the hillside. The last dance ended with the rich man running out of the square and turning into a deer, and his wife set upside down in stone at Anchicocha, head to the ground and feet in the air, where people were still leaving coca for her when the priest who wrote this down was alive.

Then the eggs opened. Five falcons came out, and the falcons became five men, and the storm they raised took the pretender’s house, his family and the great pullao tree that arched between two mountains with parrots crossing it, and washed all of it into the sea.

He walked toward his mountain after that, and at a village called Huagaihusa he found a festival going. He sat down at the end of the line, as an uninvited man does, and for a whole day nobody passed him a cup. One girl noticed, filled a white gourd with chicha and carried it over. He told her she had just bought her life, that she should take her children and go, and that she would die with the rest if she said a word to anyone. On the fifth day the rain came down with hail and with yellow and white stones in it, and the village went into the sea. He did not punish those people for cruelty. He punished them for bad manners, which in the Andean telling is not a smaller crime.

Across the river the fields of the Copara people were drying out. A woman named Chuquisuso stood weeping over her maize because the trickle from the little dam above her was not enough, and Pariacaca, watching, pulled off his cloak and stuffed it into the drain so that the water stopped altogether. Then he came down and asked what the matter was. She said her crop was dying. He said she had gained more than she had lost, and offered her water for her love. She told him to produce the water first. He opened the dam, the flood came, the crop was saved, and she said there was plenty of time to think about the rest. So he offered to cut a canal from the ravine of Cocachalla that would water every field the ayllu had, and she agreed to watch it flow before she agreed to anything else. Every animal on the hillside was called out to dig, and the fox got himself appointed surveyor over a crowd of rivals, and was running the line beautifully until a partridge burst up under his nose crying pichpich and he dropped the water down the slope. The snake took the job over and did it worse. The kink is still in the channel above the church at San Lorenzo, and the people who irrigate from it have never stopped saying it would have run higher if the fox had kept his nerve. When the water reached the fields Chuquisuso kept her side of the bargain, and then would not leave him, and finally asked to stay at the intake. She became stone there, at the head of the Cocochalla canal.

The reckoning with Huallallo came at the mountain. Pariacaca fought him as five persons raining from five places at once, and the rain was yellow and red, and one of the five selves knocked a mountain down to dam the water from below until the fire was under a lake. That lake is Mullococha. Huallallo went east into the Antis and was left with dogs to eat instead of children, which is the sort of sentence a victor invents to be remembered by.

The manuscript that carries all this goes on for more than twenty further chapters after the battle: how he ordained his own cult, who his son Tutayquiri was, how his children took the yunca lands one valley at a time, how the Inca summoned every huaca in the empire and what came of it, and how people fed the dead during his festival. His powers are the powers of a mountain that makes weather, water on demand and water as a weapon, and they come with the mountain’s limits. He does not create the world and he does not destroy his enemy, only pushes him over the ridge into somebody else’s country. Everything he gives is a trade, and he asks first. The snow peak that carries his name still stands above 5,700 metres on the divide between Lima and the Junin highlands.

The priest who collected these stories, Francisco de Avila, was posted to San Damian and was campaigning to stamp them out while he wrote them down. He mentions, without seeming to hear himself, that he had shot several condors and that the local people kept asking how he had dared. Four centuries on, the villages below the glacier still walk up to the intake of the Chaucalla canal each year to clean it, still leave coca and cigarettes and a drink for the abuelos at the sacred stops along the way, and still bring the water down to a shawm and a drum. The 1608 text calls the people of that province huk yayayuq, the ones with a single father. They meant the mountain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pariacaca?

Pariacaca is the storm, water and mountain god of the Huarochiri province of the central Peruvian Andes, and also the snow peak that carries his name. He is the central figure of the Huarochiri Manuscript, the only surviving book-length account of Andean religion written in Quechua. He overthrew the fire huaca Huallallo Caruincho and became the common ancestor of the region’s peoples.

How was Pariacaca born?

He appeared as five eggs on a mountain called Condorcoto, between Huarochiri and Chorrillo. Five falcons hatched from them and the falcons turned into five men. The manuscript itself is unsure whether that makes Pariacaca one god with five bodies or five brothers, and it devotes a whole chapter to the question without settling it.

Who did Pariacaca fight?

His great enemy was Huallallo Caruincho, a fire huaca who ruled the hot lowlands and ate one child from every pair a woman bore. Pariacaca attacked him as five persons raining from five directions at once, in yellow and red rain, and one of his five selves dammed a valley to drown the fire under the lake now called Mullococha. Huallallo fled east into the jungle and was condemned to eat dogs.

What is the Huarochiri Manuscript?

It is an anonymous Quechua-language account of the gods, ancestors and rituals of the Huarochiri region, compiled in the parish of San Damian around 1598 to 1608 under the extirpator of idolatries Francisco de Avila. Its thirty-one chapters are the fullest surviving record of any Andean local religion. Frank Salomon and George Urioste published the first full English translation in 1991.

Is Pariacaca still remembered today?

Yes, though not as a god with a public cult. Villages beneath the glacier still hold annual canal-cleaning and reservoir rituals with offerings of coca, cigarettes and liquor at sacred points along the route, and people in San Damian still describe the whole province as coming from the mountain. The 1608 text called them huk yayayuq, those with one father.