Gold Inca

Cori Inca, the 'Gold Inca' (from Quechua quri, 'gold'), is the beneficent Inca of Shipibo-Konibo mythology. In the mythic Inca cycle of the Ucayali, the Shipibo remember several Incas who once lived among their ancestors; Cori Inca stands as the hero of order and generosity, the donor associated with the goods and disciplines of proper cultural life, while his narrative counterpart, the stingy Yoashico Inca, withholds fire and cultivated plants and thereby provokes rebellion and transformation. Pierrette Bertrand-Rousseau, working from two texts she collected among the Shipibo, analyzed the adventures of Cori Inca as hero of order against Yoashico Inca as anti-hero and founder of upheavals; Peter Roe situates these Inca figures within Shipibo reflections on the Andean past and on outsiders, and Daniel Morales Chocano and Ana Mujica Baquerizo have correlated the Inca-cycle origin mythology with the archaeological record of the Ucayali basin.

Domains

• cultural order
• gold

Powers

• to establish social order and teach the arts of proper living
• to bestow the goods and knowledge of cultural existence on humankind

Epithets

• Cori Inka

Sources

• Bertrand-Rousseau, Pierrette. 'A propósito de la mitología shipibo.' Anthropologica 2(2): 209-232, 1984.
• Morales Chocano, Daniel & Ana Mujica Baquerizo. 'La arqueología y el mito de origen de los shipibo-conibo de la Amazonía peruana.' Investigaciones Sociales 22(40), 2019.
• Roe, Peter G. 'The Josho Nahuanbo Are All Wet and Undercooked: Shipibo Views of the Whiteman and the Incas in Myth, Legend, and History.' In Jonathan D. Hill (ed.), Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.