Urcuchillay

Also Known As: also Urcochillay, Urquchillay, Urcachillay; from Quechua urqu, “male”, with a second element read either as chilla, “wild”, or as chi-illay, “giving off astral brightness”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Incan Mythology, Andes Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A star understood as a male llama of many colours whose whole office is the preservation and increase of the herds below it.
Role in Mythos: He is the llama’s double in the sky, the second cause appointed to keep that one species alive and multiplying.
Relation to Humans: Herders venerated him directly and sacrificed to him for the safety and fertility of their animals, which in the high country was the same thing as their own survival. Nothing in the record shows him speaking to anyone, appearing to anyone, or asking for anything beyond the offering.

Above four thousand metres the cold arrives after sunset all at once, as though poured, and the herders of the Peruvian high country walked out to their corrals in the dark with their breath hanging white in front of them. The flock shifted and grumbled behind the drystone wall. Overhead the sky was so crowded that the black gaps between the stars looked like objects in their own right. Somewhere in that crowd was the one they sacrificed to, and it was a llama.

The oldest surviving account of him is one sentence, written by a man whose job was to find him and end him. Juan Polo de Ondegardo, a Salamanca-trained lawyer who reached Peru in 1545, compiled an inventory of Andean worship called Los errores y supersticiones de los indios so that the things listed in it could be destroyed. In it he set down that the herders venerated and sacrificed to a star they called Urcuchillay, which they say is a ram of many colours, which attends to the conservation of the flock, and which is understood to be the one the astrologers call Lyra. Every later chronicler who wrote about Andean stars copied that line, some of them word for word.

A ram of many colours is all the description there is. No horns, no size, no scars, no face. Anyone who has stood in a llama corral can supply the rest without inventing anything: the animals really do come in rust and cream and charcoal and every patchwork between, and the fleece is heavy with dust and lanolin and holds the day’s warmth long after the ground has given its up. That is where the god lived, in the ordinary appearance of the animals he was responsible for, projected upward and set burning.

His work was not dramatic, which is the point of him. Ewes took. Crias were born wet into the frost before dawn and got their legs under them on the third or fourth attempt. The flock came down off the pasture in the evening at the same number that went up in the morning. When a herder burned fat and coca for him and the smoke went thin and sweet across the corral, that was what the offering was buying: no miracle, just continuation.

The reason he existed at all is a piece of Andean cosmology that Bernabé Cobo, writing in 1653, stated as plainly as anyone ever has. The worship of the stars, he said, came from the belief that for the preservation of each kind of thing the Creator had appointed a second cause, so that every animal and bird on earth had its likeness in the sky, which attended to its conservation and increase. Urcuchillay was not a personality. He was a post. The same passage of Polo names another star, Machacuay, with authority over serpents so that they did no harm, and two more beside Urcuchillay called Catachillay and Urcuchillay, which the herders held to be a ewe with a lamb.

Nobody says where he came from. He has no parents, no birth, no rivalry, no death. The record gives him an office and no biography, and the silence is consistent rather than accidental: a sky-llama does not need an origin story, because there are llamas, and therefore there is one in the sky.

Where the record does open up is in a direction the Spanish never quite followed. Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Cusco to an Inca mother, remembered people pointing him at the Milky Way and asking him to see, in the black patches running along it, a ewe with her whole body, suckling a lamb. See there, the one with the lamb feeding, they told him. See the body, the legs of the one and of the other. He looked, and wrote afterwards that he saw only the patches, and that this was probably because he did not know how to imagine them. It is one of the most honest sentences in the colonial record.

Those black patches are the other llama. A Quechua manuscript collected around 1600 in the province of Huarochirí devotes a chapter to how something called the Yacana comes down from the sky to drink water, and describes it as a shadow of the llama, a double of the animal, walking through the middle of the sky. At midnight, unseen, it drinks the sea, and if it did not the sea would come over the world. The Andean llama in the heavens is not a pattern of bright stars at all. It is an absence, shaped by the dust in front of the galaxy, and the two brilliant stars at its head are its eyes.

Which leaves the identification with Lyra looking like what it probably was. Polo hedged even as he wrote it, saying only that the star is understood to be the one the astrologers call Lyra, and he had reason to hedge. He had learned his one piece of sky in Salamanca, where astronomy was half-forbidden and confused with astrology, and he had brought home the name of a brilliant blue-white star that culminated near the zenith to the south. Shown a brilliant blue-white star culminating near the zenith to the south from a Cusco corral, he reached for the only word he owned. Peruvian astronomers who later ran the coordinates for Cusco’s latitude found the figure will not stand up there at all.

The llama drawn among Lyra’s stars, the one that circulates as though it were ancient, is not ancient. In the early twentieth century Robert Lehmann-Nitsche selected eleven stars from Lyra and three from Hercules, several of them barely visible to the naked eye, and joined them into a stylised llama, working from a star atlas in La Plata and conceding that he could not observe the constellation properly from there. From Cusco the animal hangs upside down. The etymology is no steadier: Lehmann-Nitsche read the name as urqu plus a mangled chilla and got “wild male llama”, while Vicente Fidel López split it urqu-chi-illay and got “the resplendent male”. Nothing decides between them.

What Urcuchillay could do was narrow and enormous. He made the herds increase, and the Inca state ran on herds: cargo trains, cloth, meat, and the animals burned at every festival in Cusco. A god of that one function sat very close to the centre of everything without ever becoming famous. What he could not survive was paperwork. He had no enemy to lose to and no myth in which to be defeated, only a lawyer with a notebook and a mandate, and within a lifetime of that notebook the people who could have pointed at the right light were gone or had stopped pointing. Nobody today can say for certain which star he was. The name went back up anyway: the International Astronomical Union’s official register of star names now carries Urquchillay, attached to a star in Lyra, the constellation Polo guessed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Urcuchillay?

Urcuchillay is an Inca deity worshipped by herders as a star in the shape of a multicoloured male llama. His function was to watch over the preservation and increase of the flocks of llamas and alpacas. He is first recorded in the sixteenth century by the Spanish official Polo de Ondegardo.

What does Urcuchillay do?

Urcuchillay attends to the conservation and multiplication of livestock. In Andean thinking, every kind of animal on earth had a counterpart in the sky responsible for keeping that species going, and Urcuchillay held that post for llamas. Herders made sacrifices to him for the safety and fertility of their animals.

Which star is Urcuchillay?

No one can say with certainty. Polo de Ondegardo wrote that the star was understood to be the one astronomers call Lyra, but he hedged the claim and later Peruvian astronomers argued that the identification does not hold from the latitude of Cusco. The International Astronomical Union has since attached the name Urquchillay to a star in Lyra.

Is Urcuchillay the same as the Yacana?

They are closely related but not identical. The Yacana, described in a Quechua manuscript from Huarochirí, is a dark llama formed by the black dust lanes of the Milky Way rather than by bright stars, and it comes down at midnight to drink the sea. Urcuchillay is named as a star, and the two traditions sit side by side in the colonial record without being reconciled.

What does the name Urcuchillay mean?

The first element is Quechua urqu, meaning male. The second is disputed: one reading takes it from chilla, wild, giving “wild male llama”, while another splits it as chi-illay, giving something like “the resplendent male”. No source settles the question.