Religious Beliefs, Magic and Gender Roles in Inca Culture

Rodriguez, Rosario

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Religious Beliefs, Magic and Gender Roles in Inca Culture

Rodriguez, Rosario

Abstract

This thesis examines the disruption of Inca ritual and cosmological order following the arrival of the Spanish in the Andes. For centuries, the Inca Empire kept balance through a complex system of religious practices, sacred geography, and interdependent relationships with divine figures. However, this equilibrium began to fracture with the intrusion of a foreign power — one that neither recognized the sacred landscape nor looked to coexistence with the gods of the land. The Spanish conquistadors, driven by the pursuit of wealth and guided by the Catholic faith, rejected indigenous forms of worship and cosmological understanding. Their arrival marked not only a political conquest but also a spiritual rupture, a God they introduced displaced centuries of Andean devotion to huacas, sun deities, and ancestral wisdom. Through an analysis of ritual contrast, symbolic interpretation, and the expectations of the Spanish toward indigenous communities, this thesis explores the profound cultural imbalance that unfolded, and the ways in which the Inca worldview both resisted and conformed to these foreign impositions.