Taqui Onqoy

In the 1530s, a handful of Spaniards conquered an immense Andean empire. Thirty years later, some Andean subjects of what was by then an immense Spanish empire resolved not to worship the Spaniards' God. Their resistance was associated with a Quechua ritual phrase, "Taki Onqoy," usually translated literally as "disease of the dance." 1 This movement was suppressed rapidly by Spanish authority andleft no traces except in a few Spanish documents.

Before the 1960s, historians gave the Taki Onqoy only passing attention.2 But in 1964, a brief article in a Peruvian journal touched off at least three decades of close study and interpretation. The sudden interest arose partly from the discovery and publication of new sources. But the fundamental stimulus was a massive surge of interest amongSouth Americans and foreigners in this era in indigenous Andean culture. For the first time, many Spanish-speaking Peruvians, Bolivians, and Ecuadorians began to trace their national identity not to the Spanish conquerors but to the Andean conquered.

The new interest in Andean culture prompted historical questions that had not been asked before with such insistence. Did Andean peoples resistthe new order? Had any authentic Andean identity survived and held its own? Since the mid-1960s, the Taki Onqoy has fascinated historians because it suggested answers to these questions.

Today the Taki Onqoy offers students of history another kind of opportunity: a case study in the historiographical process. As a historical problem, the Taki Onqoy is significant, self-contained, and extremelylimited in its sources. Thus it is not an epic canvas but a miniature scene in which the brushstrokes may be clearly discerned. A study of the available sources and the use to which they have been put may offer insights into how historians select and interpret evidence and what is at stake.

Sources

A generation after the conquest, Spanish priest Cristóbal de Molina preached in Quechua in frontof the cathedral steps in Cuzco. Around 1574 he wrote the Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, a treatise on the old Andean religion.3 The work catalogued the indigenous huacas--the countless divinities, large and small, embodied in the Andean landscape. At the end of the book, Molina brought his story up to date: "It was ten years ago, more or less, that there was disaffection4 amongthese Indians of this land. . . . [M]ost of them had fallen into the greatest apostasies, separating themselves from the Catholic faith that they had received and returning to the idolatry that they committed in the time of their infidelity." 5 Molina did not give a name to this movement but wrote that its adherents "made a sort of song, which they called Taqui hongo." 6

The movement that Molinadescribed was well organized, having been spread by traveling preachers as far as Cuzco, Lima, and La Paz. He attributed the initiative to the fugitive Incas of Vilcabamba, successive heirs to the conquered Inca throne who maintained a foothold just outside Spanish reach. The first to discover the religious movement was Luis de Olivera, a priest outside the town of Huamanga (now called Ayacucho).Molina cited Olivera as his source on its teachings:

[T]hey believed that all the huacas of the kingdom, as many as the Christians had overthrown and burned, had come back to life, and had formed into two sides: some had joined with the huaca Pachacama, and the others with the huaca Titicaca, and all traveled in the air commanding that they give battle with God, and conquer him, and they heldhim to be already conquered; that when the Marquis [Pizarro] entered this land, God had conquered the huacas and the Spanish had conquered the Indians; but that now the world had turned, and God and the Spanish would be conquered this time and all the Spaniards would die, and their cities be flooded, and the sea would rise and drown them. . . .7
The apostates proposed that the gods of the two...