Pachacamac
Also known as: Pachakamaq, Pacha Camac
Mythological Narrative
The great oracle god of the central Peruvian coast, whose sanctuary south of Lima drew pilgrims for centuries before the Incas, and who kept his shrine even after the Incas built a Temple of the Sun beside it.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## The oracle of the coast
Pachacamac's sanctuary near the mouth of the Lurín River, south of modern Lima, was a pilgrimage and oracle center for well over a thousand years. When the Incas conquered the coast in the fifteenth century they did not suppress it; they built a Temple of the Sun and a house of chosen women on the same site, and consulted the oracle themselves. Hernando Pizarro reached the sanctuary in January 1533 in search of its gold, forced his way into the inner chamber, and had the idol broken before the assembled people, an episode described in his own letter and in Miguel de Estete's account.
## Garcilaso's invisible god
Garcilaso de la Vega argued that the Incas worshipped Pachacamac inwardly as the unseen sustainer of the world, a supreme god like the Christian one, and that the coastal idol was a corruption. This interpretation served Garcilaso's apologetic purpose and is not accepted at face value by historians, who treat Pachacamac first as a powerful regional huaca with a far-reaching oracle network.
## In the Huarochirí stories
The Huarochirí material gives Pachacamac a wife, Urpay Huachac, and two daughters, whom Cuniraya encounters on the shore at Pachacamac after Cavillaca disappears into the sea there. A carved wooden figure recovered at the site in 1938, now in the site museum, has been radiocarbon-dated to the eighth or ninth century CE and may be an image of the god.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Pachacamac.
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