Chaupiñamca

Chaupiñamca is the foremost goddess of the Huarochirí world, the female counterpart to Pariacaca and, in the sources, his sister. She presides over human fertility and generation and was worshipped as a stone with five arms at the settlement of Mama, in the Rimac valley. She is one of five sisters, collectively addressed by her name, who represent the great female powers of the land. Her chief festival was the Chanco, at which people danced through the night, some naked, in rites tied to fertility and sexual increase; the manuscript records that she took her greatest pleasure in a particular suitor for reasons of virility. With Pariacaca she frames the twin male and female poles around which the region's worship was organized.

Domains

• human fertility and generation
• women and childbirth

Powers

• grant fecundity to people and to the sexual act
• dwell in a five-armed stone

Epithets

• Chaupiñamca mama — mother ChaupiñamcaFrank Salomon and George L. Urioste, The Huarochirí Manuscript (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991) (secondary)

Relations

• sibling: PariacacaHuarochirí Manuscript, ch. 10 (Salomon-Urioste ed., 1991) (primary)

Sources

• Chaupiñamca is the principal female deity of Huarochirí, a fertility goddess with five sister-aspects, regarded as the sister of Pariacaca.: Huarochirí Manuscript, chs. 10, 13 (Salomon-Urioste ed., 1991) (primary); Gerald Taylor, Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí, 2nd ed. (Lima: IEP/IFEA, 1999), cap. 10, 13 (secondary)