In the mythology of the Qquichuas, and apparently also of the Aymaras, the leading figure is Viracocha.  His august presence is in one cycle of legends that of Infinite Creator, the Primal Cause; in another he is the beneficent teacher and wise ruler; in other words, he too, like Quetzalcoatl and the others whom I have told about, is at one time God, at others the incarnation of God.

As the first cause and ground of all things, Viracocha’s distinctive epithet was Ticci, the Cause, the Beginning, or Illa ticci, the Ancient Cause[1], the First Beginning, an endeavor in words to express the absolute priority of his essence and existence.  He it was who had made and moulded the Sun and endowed it with a portion of his own divinity, to wit, the glory of its far-shining rays; he had formed the Moon and given her light, and set her in the heavens to rule over the waters and the winds, over the queens of the earth and the parturition of women; and it was still he, the great Viracocha, who had created the beautiful Chasca, the Aurora, the Dawn, goddess of all unspotted maidens like herself, her who in turn decked the fields and woods with flowers, whose time was the gloaming and the twilight, whose messengers were the fleecy clouds which sail through the sky, and who, when she shakes her clustering hair, drops noiselessly pearls of dew on the green grass fields.[2]

[Footnote 1:  “Ticci, origen, principio, fundamento, cimiento, causa. Ylla; todo lo que es antiguo.”  Holguin, Vocabulario de la Lengua Qquichua o del Inga (Ciudad de los Reyes, 1608). Ticci is not to be confounded with aticsi, he conquers, from atini, I conquer, a term also occasionally applied to Viracocha.]

[Footnote 2:  Relacion Anonyma, de los Costumbres Antiguos de los Naturales del Piru, p. 138. 1615. (Published, Madrid, 1879).]

Invisible and incorporeal himself, so, also, were his messengers (the light-rays), called huaminca, the faithful soldiers, and hayhuaypanti, the shining ones, who conveyed his decrees to every part.[1] He himself was omnipresent, imparting motion and life, form and existence, to all that is.  Therefore it was, says an old writer, with more than usual insight into man’s moral nature, with more than usual charity for a persecuted race, that when these natives worshiped some swift river or pellucid spring, some mountain or grove, “it was not that they believed that some particular divinity was there, or that it was a living thing, but because they believed that the great God, Illa Ticci, had created and placed it there and impressed upon it some mark of distinction, beyond other objects of its class, that it might thus be designated as an appropriate spot whereat to worship the maker of all things; and this is manifest from the prayers they uttered when engaged in adoration, because they are not addressed to that mountain, or river, or cave, but to the great Illa Ticci Viracocha, who, they believed, lived in the heavens, and yet was invisibly present in that sacred object."[2]