Ancient Underground Tombs And Lightening God In Peru – Complex Concepts Of Death And Renewal Revealed

AncientPages.com - Every ancient culture had some form of afterlife beliefs and these were reflected in their burial customs.

As previously mentioned on Ancient Pages, Sumerians for example, respected death and when life came to an end, they took the burial of the dead as seriously as people in other cultures.

Ancient Underground Tombs And Lightening God In Peru - Complex Concepts Of Death And Renewal Revealed

Left: Peru - Right: Lightning god Illapa

According to the Sumerian belief, after death, people would take a journey to the Underworld, a gloomy and unpleasant realm.

Vikings were always motivated to fight because they believed courageous warriors who died in battle were allowed to enter Valhalla where the mighty God Odin was awaiting their arrival.

Ancient Egyptians deeply believed in the afterlife and a complex ritual set of burial customs was necessary in order to ensure an afterlife.

Mummification was an important part of this ritual but also all vital internal organs had to accompany the deceased on his (her) journey to the underworld in order to be reborn. However, the heart of the deceased was never among the organs chosen for preservation in canopic jars. This precious organ was the source of wisdom and the seat of memory and emotions of the human being, according to the Egyptian beliefs.

Burial customs and afterlife beliefs vary among ancient civilizations, but most of our ancestors did no consider death to be the ultimate end of existence.

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that people in the Andes also had their own burial traditions and complex view of death and renewal.

A team of archaeologists have studied several sites in Peru and discovered that the surrounding landscape reveals peoples’ afterlife beliefs.

“Research in the Andes has yielded evidence for a complex association between settlement sites and mortuary monuments, tied to concepts of death, ancestor veneration and water.

In the Prehispanic Andes, death was not a finite stage; the dead still interacted with the living dependent on the degree of vitality-in-death, known as camac, that the particular dead individual possessed. Camac was a direct measure of an ancestor’s or deity’s oracular ability,” researchers write in their science paper.

Carved Rocks and Subterranean Burials At Kipia, Ancash, AD 1000- 1532

At the site Kipia, Ancash in Peru there are two small settlements, a cosmological center, and a funerary sector of subterranean tombs. While investigating the ancient site, scientists discovered that the various features of this place can be related to the surrounding landscape, which is remarkable since archaeological examples establishing a direct link between site and landscape in the Andes are not common.

Ancient Underground Tombs And Lightening God In Peru - Complex Concepts Of Death And Renewal Revealed

Credit: Kevin Lane, Emma Pomeroy, Milton Reynaldo, Lújan Davila

In the Prehispanic Andes the landscape was innately animated, and Kipia is positioned at the center of its particular physical environment.

In this sense, Kipia was not just a repository for the dead, but more widely a place of communion between the living and the departed, associated to the central huaca-huanca, and the other carved rock-faces.

Huancas are sacred, upright stones, which are either natural or deliberately placed at the burial site. Huancas are very important because they represent “alternatively ancestors or a deity-oracle – or huaca – thereby linking the people to their past, and thus to the landscape.”

Previous research has revealed the Inca were integrated with their view of the cosmos, especially in regard to the way that the Inca observed the motions of the Milky Way and the solar system as seen from Cuzco.

According to Inca mythology, the Inca are the direct descendants of a mythical first Inca, named Manco Capac, who emerged from one of the three openings in the mountain Tambotoco, near Pacaritambo (or Pacariqtambo) (‘tavern of the dawn’), located some six leagues (approximately 33 km) to the south-southwest of Cuzco, Peru.

Manco Capac came to establish the Inca civilization.

Sometimes, Catequil and/or Apocatequil were recognized as two separate Gods and sometimes they represented one and the same

Sometimes, Catequil and/or Apocatequil were recognized as two separate Gods and sometimes they represented one and the same - read more

Even though his figure is mentioned in several chronicles, his actual existence remains unclear.

What is known is that the Inca worshipped Catequil and Illapa who were both gods of lightning.

Interestingly, scientists discovered that the importance of Kipia lies in its role as a local huaca dedicated to the lightening deity in which overt manifestations of life and death cohabited. In turn, Kipia linked into a network of other larger potentially sacred sites, such as the lakes.

“The Andean lightening deity provides the nexus between nearby high-altitude lakes and mortuary monuments linked to concepts of death and renewal,” scientists write in their paper.

AncientPages.com