Anonymous - The Huarochiri Manuscript (Small Works List)

The next entry I pulled from the Small Works List was from what feels like the most popular list on that spreadsheet, the World Literature List 1000 to 1600. I have only pulled one other name at this point on the list but I have consistently been involved with World Lit from around this time period pretty consistently. Kadambari was on the list just before this one as well as Ki No Tsurayuki. The crazy thing is the connection between this text and Guaman Poma. 

 The Huarochiri Manuscript represents a strange node in the make up of this history of this time period, and also happens to be the second indigenous authored text from the same region and the exact same time period. So, let me lay this out for a second. Guaman Poma is one of the only native Incan authors in the historical record. Guaman Poma’s 1200 page letter to King Phillip III was lost for hundreds of years as it was accidentally stored in the Royal Danish Library. Guaman Poma would have written his “letter” in 1615-1616. Guaman Poma takes a more cultural, political and historical approach to his chronicle attempting to correct the record on the Spanish invasion and conquest. Pulling Guaman Poma’s book felt like a moonshot so obscure that I seriously doubted the validity of such an approach to this project. Then I went to the Field Museum and saw a whole exhibit to Guaman Poma and his strange book and I thought what a deeply coincidental and happy accident of history.

The Huarochiri Manuscript feels even more obscure than Guaman Poma but the intersection of these texts is crazy. Huarochiri Manuscript was compiled by a set of anonymous scribes in 1608 in Peru, just a few years before Guaman Poma wrote his document. Guaman Poma would have been aware of this document, he probably knew the people who wrote it, he probably read this document at the time it was compiled. Guaman Poma was so deeply religious in the Catholic persuasion so he might not have enjoyed this text and could have sided with Avila in wanting perhaps persuade his countrymen of his Catholic religion. Guaman Poma, though, would have been horrified by Avila’s treatment of the Indians who helped compile this text.

 The Huarochiri Manuscript is a religious text situated around the religious tradition of the Yaoyo, Yunca, and Incan people of the region of Peru and the western Andes. The Nazca lines would have been connected with these religious practices though not explicitly. The introduction to the only translation of this text to English done in 1991 really helped pull some threads together that I didn’t get from the Guaman Poma introduction and notes. The Huarochiri Manuscript describe the fairly informal religious practice surrounding the worship of Paria Caca, Cuni Raya, and Chaupi Namca and Huallalo. Paria Caca operates as something of an all-god sort of character that revealed himself through 5 avatar like iterations similar to Vishnu’s 10 avatars. Paria Caca also is the name of an actual mountain in Peru as well and so this mountain was the site of religious worship. I am not as clear as to who Cuni Raya was, whether he was Paria Caca’s father or one of the avatars. Chaupi Namca was the female god that was turned to stone somewhere near the sacred site of the Paria Caca mountain and is probably a physical feature of the landscape.

Huallalo was a fire god/demon that Paria Caca defeated 3 different times in 3 different forms. One iteration of Huallalo was that he turned into a giant snake or he released a giant snake to attack Paria Caca when Paria Caca took the form of a man before he became the mountain. Paria Caca used some magic or hit the snake with a stick to stop it and turn it into stone, and this is also a physical feature of the path up to Paria Caca. The stone snake seems to be an obstacle on the walking path up the mountain and locals would come and break off a piece of the stone there and use it as medicine. I wanted to bring up this point because it demonstrates an aspect of this text and the prospect of reading an indigenous religions primary text as part of this project. What is an unusual feature of this document is that it feels like these words were written under duress and some of the details of the writing seem incoherent even to the nature of the writing itself. There are several moments where the writer is writing so someone reading it at the time such as the scaffolding around certain topics and certain chapters where the writer mentions that they have mentioned something before or at a certain point some concept will be further explained in a later chapter. 

 

According to the introduction written by the translator, Avila the Spanish bishop who ordered such a text to be written used this document after its completion to persecute those who helped compile it as it was evidence that they worshipped a non-Christian religion, and also after it was compiled he might be able to use the document to dissuade local adherents to the Paria Caca religious tradition of their indigenous beliefs. This is a truly dastardly thing to do and so some elements of the circumstance or situation this document was drafted under seems deeply suspect and I don’t know if I want to infer a tension even in the drafting of such a document but the backdrop to its construction feels palpable in the document itself.  

 

The other issue that I find with this text is that it is clear that these stories were not written down before this moment and that the work the scribes were doing to collect the stories and formalize them seems like a difficult task as each community probably had a different version of each of these stories, and the writers feel more compelled to do the faith community justice in trying be faithful to the story while also trying to weave together a coherent narrative and this is probably an impossible task with such a wide breadth of religious traditions and histories present.

At some point, after reading many of the stories of Paria Caca specifically, I thought I like this character. Reconstructing actual religious practices would probably be pretty difficult. There is a book in the children’s section at Barnes and Noble called Myth Atlas. My daughter and I have paged through book a few times because she likes the illustrations of the various gods and religious practices recorded here. Because of Scooby Doo of all things, she has become interested in ancient Egyptian images and history. The Myth Atlas goes to includes a wide variety of religious and mythic content and includes one from a South American mythology. That South American mythology is not the Paria Caca myth. It is hard to know how significant a religious practice the Paria Caca, Huarochiri Manuscript based belief system, was in the region or what it influenced before or after this document was written. We get the writing here because Avila forced its compilation and composition. It is at this disastrous intersection of these two cultures that the exigence for such a document arises: just before its destruction this villain, Avila, feels compelled to have what he is erasing off the earth recorded for posterity sake.