Viracocha

In surviving accounts compiled from native tradition and colonial chronicle summaries, Viracocha is a primordial being who rose from watery origins — commonly Lake Titicaca or the cave of Paqariq Tampu — during a time of darkness to bring forth light and to create the universe. He fashions the sun, moon, stars and time (commanding the sun to move), makes humanity (in one recorded variant he breathes life into stones; an earlier race of giants was destroyed by a great flood, the Unu Pachakuti, and a remnant such as Manco Cápac and Mama Uqllu were preserved to re-found civilization), and wanders teaching the basics of social knowledge and ritual practice.

Sources record a humanlike form for Viracocha and, in Spanish chronicler-derived accounts, describe him as bearded and clothed in a white robe, bearing a staff and book; he is also said to have wandered disguised at times as a beggar and to have departed by walking across the sea. Modern scholarship and the cited summaries note that the "white and bearded" motif derives primarily from colonial-era chroniclers and later popular works and is treated by many scholars as a post-conquest interpretive overlay rather than an attested native descriptive feature.

Viracocha is credited with cosmogenic and civilizing powers: creating the cosmos, the sun, moon and stars, instituting time, producing and remaking humanity (including destruction of a flawed primordial race by flood and subsequent recreation), and teaching humans the uses and names of plants and the foundations of civilization. He is associated with watery origins (lakes, the sea), storms and the sun, wanders the earth performing miracles and instruction, and is said in tradition to depart across the sea but to be able to reappear in times of trouble. Some modern commentators have also suggested, on interpretive grounds, that the name Viracocha was used as a title or associated with priestly or ruling offices; this is presented in the sources as hypothesis rather than settled native practice.