Inka

The Inka is a figure of dangerous plenty and dangerous power, a mythic lord absorbed into Cashinahua thought from the Andean world and reworked in Panoan terms. He is the first owner of fire and of cultivated food, and the making of proper human life turns on wresting these from him or receiving them from the beings who held them. His sky-village is the destination of the bedu yuxin, the eye-soul, which after death climbs to live in the Inka's image, provided it can pass the perils of the road. Cashinahua narrators draw a sharp line between two aspects of him: inka kuin, the true or proper Inka, and inka pintsi, the Inka ravenous for meat, a cannibal people of mythic-historical time said to have once preyed upon the ancestors. The Inka thus stands at the threshold between the human and the devouring other, at once the source of culture and its most fearsome adversary.

Domains

• fire
• cultivated plants
• sky of the dead

Powers

• holds the first fire
• receives the eye-soul in the sky

Epithets

• inka kuin — the true InkaDeshayes, Patrick & Barbara Keifenheim. 1994. Pensar o outro entre os Kaxinawa. Rio Branco: UFAC. (secondary)
• inka pintsi — the meat-hungry InkaDeshayes, Patrick & Barbara Keifenheim. 1994. Pensar o outro entre os Kaxinawa. Rio Branco: UFAC. (secondary)

Sources

• The Inka is an ambivalent mythic lord: the original owner of fire and cultivated plants, and the master of the sky-village to which the eye-soul travels after death; recordings distinguish the true Inka (inka kuin) from the cannibal, meat-hungry Inka (inka pintsi) who once devoured the Cashinahua.: Deshayes, Patrick & Barbara Keifenheim. 1994. Pensar o outro entre os Kaxinawa do rio Jordao. Rio Branco: UFAC. (secondary); Kensinger, Kenneth M. 1995. How Real People Ought to Live. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (secondary)