Inti

The Quechua word inti means simply 'sun' — the celestial object and the deity are designated by the same term, there being no distinction in the Inca theological vocabulary between the physical sun and the divine being it embodied. Inti was the patron deity of the Inca royal lineage: the Sapa Inca (the supreme Inca ruler) was understood to be the son of Inti, a divine descent that gave the ruling family both its legitimacy and its distinctive epithet. The Coricancha (Temple of the Sun) in Cusco was the most sacred structure in the Inca Empire, its interior walls sheathed in gold — the sun's own sweat, in Andean conception — and its sanctuary containing a great gold disk representing Inti, surrounded by mummies of previous Sapa Incas. The temple was oriented to receive the light of the rising sun at the solstice directly through its primary window.

The principal festival of the Inca year was Inti Raymi — 'Festival of the Sun' — celebrated at the June solstice (the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere), when the sun is at its farthest north and must be ceremonially invited to return. At the height of Inca power, Inti Raymi was a nine-day celebration at which the Sapa Inca communicated with his divine father, llamas were sacrificed, chicha was offered in golden vessels, and the dried mummies of previous Incas were brought from the Coricancha to witness the ceremony. When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in Cusco in 1533, the Coricancha was stripped of its gold fittings — an estimated 700 gold plates were peeled from its walls — and the gold image of Inti was distributed among Pizarro's soldiers as gambling proceeds before being sent to Spain as bullion.

The Spanish attempted to replace Inti with the Christian God through the conversion and re-dedication of the Coricancha, which became the Church of Santo Domingo — built directly on the Inca temple's precisely fitted stone foundations, which survive to this day as the most visually striking evidence of the palimpsest quality of colonial Andean cities. Inti Raymi was banned in 1572 by the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo as part of a broader campaign to suppress indigenous religion. The festival was revived in 1944 in Cusco as a cultural rather than strictly religious celebration, and it is now performed annually on June 24th at the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above the city, drawing tens of thousands of spectators and participants.

The word inti entered Spanish from Quechua during the colonial period and appears in historical and archaeological literature as the standard term for the Inca sun deity. It was adopted as the name of Peru's currency unit from 1985 to 1991 — the inti replaced the sol (Spanish for 'sun') in a moment of post-colonial cultural reclamation before hyperinflation led to its replacement by the nuevo sol in 1991. The celestial object and the deity it names share their word in Quechua without distinction, a linguistic fact that the Inca theologians considered not a confusion but a precision: the sun was Inti and Inti was the sun and there was no requirement to separate them.