If one visits the Convento de Santo Domingo in El Cusco, Peru, one will find the remains of the ancient Temple of the Sun (Inti kancha) or Gold Temple (Qori kancha). Besides admiring the walls built by the Inkas, there is a copy of the sketch of the gold panel over the altar, drawn by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacutic in 1613. This panel depicted in a concise way the andean cosmology.
It is remarkable how everything was included: between two constellations, the sun, the moon, the evening star and the morning star, there is an ellipse representing Viracocha, the god demiurge that assembles the universe. Below there is the normal world and some sources of change: The seasons of the year, summer symbolized by a group of stars (perhaps the Pleiades) and winter with clouds, meteors like lightning at left and hailstorms at right associated with the small feline quwa. Mother earth “Pachamama” (still today many people perform the rite of burying some coca leaves, part of snacks, or spill the first drops of a drink, as a tribute), is under a rainbow, it has a river and “Apus”, sacred mountains; at its right the symbol of the primordial ocean encompassing everything. At the center, man and woman, at their left “the eyes of all kind of things”, as seeds or energy inside the earth that are the origins of all living beings. At right, a tree symbolizes the ancestors. The grid at the bottom corresponds to the faring terraces.
I wonder what would we draw if we had to illustrate our view of the universe in one of the main buildings of our city today.
The idea of a god creating and ordering things has been substituted by a universe expanding since the big bang. In a remote corner of that universe, and by a very unlikely chance, matter has changed to become complicate structures, living things that have evolved until a species that can speak. Our life still has the influence of the seasons and weather, but it depends also on absurd economic cycles, or what becomes fashionable. So, in that modern version of the Qorikancha altar, besides the agricultural seasons, there would be too screens showing the stock exchange index, CNN news, the most viewed at Youtube, the items most searched for in Google. Poor “mother earth” is not in very good condition, its resources almost exhausted, global warming, dump and waste …
