A short distance from the city of Cuzco is one of the valleys with the greatest scenic and cultural richness in Peru. It was formed thousands of years ago by the currents of the Vilcanota River, the same one that in the past was called Willkañuta (house of the Sun) or Willcamayu (sacred river).
The area, called the Sacred Valley of the Incas, extends for more than 100 kilometers (with its ends being the cities of Pisac and Machu Picchu), and has numerous towns (including Ollantaytambo) and impressive administrative centers that testify to its millenary occupation. It is located at an average height of 2800 meters above sea level, and has exceptional conditions, such as a beneficial climate (18º C average annual temperature), rich flora and fauna, fertile land and countless streams that, arising from the snowy mountain ranges that surround it, fall in waterfalls through the highest native forests in the world (4200 meters of altitude), providing it with abundant water and feeding the sacred river.
The Milky Way and the Sacred Valley of the Incas
The Milky Way is a whitish and diffuse cloud that crosses the celestial sphere obliquely and encompasses many constellations. Among them we can mention Orion, the Scorpion and the Southern Cross. It is made up of millions of stars and dark clouds of dust and gas that we can see on clear nights. If the Earth were transparent, we could see that it completely surrounds us.
Known in the Andean world as Mayu or celestial river, it served the Incas as an axis of ritual guidance. The chronicler Cristóbal de Molina said that the Inca priests made an annual ceremonial pilgrimage around the Milky Way during the Winter Solstice:they left Cuzco in a southeast direction, following the apparent movement of the Milky Way, to a place today called La Raya (where the Vilcanota river is born), and where, according to Inca mythology, the Sun was born.
From there, they returned to Cuzco, heading to the Northwest, but now following the direction of the "sacred river" (Vilcanota), which also flows from Southeast to Northwest.
It is in this ritual pilgrimage that the celestial river (Mayu) was related to the terrestrial river (Vilcanota), since in antiquity there was the idea that everything sacred on Earth always had a reflection in the sky.
In agricultural communities today, cosmic forces are believed to substantially interfere with daily life.
Mayu was not just an important guideline, but a reference plane for understanding the Earth's climate. All the knowledge of the time came from the constellations, and there were three classes of them:the "bright constellations", formed by a set of stars imaginarily united to form a certain figure, the "dark constellations", formed by dark spots of the Milky Way ( known today as nebulae), and the "mixed constellations", a mixture of both. The dark constellations are found in the region of the celestial river, or Mayu, where the density and greater brightness of this region make the dark spots of the Galaxy look like shadows of huge silhouettes, usually of animals, which, in Andean thought, were in charge of generate fertility and abundance on Earth.
Due to all this, and in function of these ideas, enormous constructions were built throughout the Sacred Valley of the Incas that delimited ritual spaces, in which the main Andean constellations were recreated in their respective forms (Árvore, Llama, Condor, Perdiz, Bridges etc), as if the valley and its river were reflections of each other.
Therefore, the Sacred Valley of the Incas is not just a name, a phrase, or even a common, normal place. It is actually a feeling, a way of placing oneself in the world, a way of understanding life, a concept.
The architecture of the Valley, as well as its symmetry, seems to reveal that it had the exclusive function of serving as a mirror of the Milky Way for the Incas.
In the figure below we can identify the union of the river with the sea, and how (through imagination) the Milky Way is born to project itself in the sky, and unite again with the Earth at its upper end, giving us the idea of the existence of a whole as a continuous cycle.
In the past, during the Spring Equinox (September 23) a ritual called Mayucati was performed, in which the Incas delivered offerings to the Huatanay River in Cuzco, so that its waters, when united with those of the Vilcanota River, would carry them to Ollantaytambo. Currently, they deliver offerings to the Vilcanota or Willcamayu River (sacred river), as there is a belief that their wishes are fulfilled through rain.
Inca Civilization
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