Mama Quilla, the Inca Mother Moon and the silver room of the Coricancha
Mama Quilla, wife of Inti in Inca religion: the silver hall of the Coricancha described by Garcilaso, eclipses, the queens and the Coya Raymi festival.
In the religion of the Inca empire the Sun, Inti, was the divine ancestor of the rulers, and beside him stood the Moon, Mama Quilla, «Mother Moon». If gold was the metal of the Sun, silver belonged to her. Our information about this goddess comes mainly from chroniclers of the colonial period, Spanish and mestizo, who gathered the memories of a world that had just vanished after the conquest of Peru in the 1530s.
The room of the Moon
The greatest Inca sanctuary was the Coricancha of Cusco, the «golden enclosure», dedicated above all to the Sun. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, left a description of it in the Comentarios Reales de los Incas, published in Lisbon in 1609. Next to the hall of the Sun, he writes, was that of the Moon, entirely lined with silver plates, with an image of the goddess bearing a woman's face.
According to Garcilaso himself, the embalmed bodies of the dead queens, the coyas, were arranged in that hall in order of age, facing the image of the Moon. The choice reflects a precise idea: just as the kings were sons of the Sun, the queens were placed under the protection of the Moon, regarded as the sister and wife of Inti. Today the convent of Santo Domingo stands on the foundations of the Coricancha, still preserving parts of its original walls.
When the Moon falls ill
Lunar eclipses aroused great fear. Garcilaso relates that the Incas, seeing the Moon darken, said that it was ill and that, if it died, it would fall from the sky and overwhelm the world. To ward off the danger they sounded trumpets and horns, beat drums and struck dogs to make them howl, convinced that the Moon was fond of those animals and would hear them.
Other chroniclers report similar beliefs, according to which a puma or a serpent was trying to devour the Moon. It is an explanation of eclipses found, with different animals, in many cultures of the world, from China to India to Scandinavia. In these tales the Moon appears vulnerable, in need of human help to survive, and the collective noise becomes a gesture of solidarity with the threatened heavenly body.
The calendar and the queen's festival
Like many farming peoples, the Incas regulated time with a calendar that combined lunar months with observation of the Sun, needed to fix the dates of sowing and harvest. The indigenous chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, in his Nueva corónica, illustrated at the beginning of the seventeenth century, gives the month of September the name Coya Raymi, the festival of the queen, dedicated to the Moon.
At that time the Citua was also held, a collective ceremony intended, according to the beliefs of the time, to drive diseases out of the city with the arrival of the rainy season. Mama Quilla was thus bound to the rhythm of the year, to the figure of the queen and to the lives of women. Nothing remains of her silver hall, but her name survives in the Quechua language, where quilla still means both the Moon and the month.