Mama Ocllo

Alongside Manco Capac in the Inca origin narratives stands Mama Ocllo, the founding queen of Cuzco, revered as both his wife and his sister. Like the founder himself, she is a figure of legend: no contemporary evidence documents her existence, and the traditions concerning her, conventionally set in the thirteenth century, were recorded only after the Spanish conquest by chroniclers working from Andean oral accounts that do not agree in detail. Some versions name her Mama Ocllo Huaco and count her among the four Ayar sisters who emerged with their brothers from the cave of Pacaritambo; the account given by Garcilaso de la Vega instead has her sent with Manco Capac by the sun god from Lake Titicaca to bring ordered life to the peoples of the Andes.

In nearly all versions her role complements that of the founder. While Manco Capac is credited with teaching men agriculture, irrigation, and the duties of settled life, Mama Ocllo is said to have instructed women in spinning, weaving, and the keeping of households — a division reflecting the paired male and female spheres that organized Andean social and religious thought. Textiles held extraordinary importance in Inca statecraft and ritual, and the attribution of their arts to the founding queen marks the weight the tradition gave her.

Her dynastic significance was equally great. As sister-wife of the first ruler and mother of Sinchi Roca, the second, she stood at the origin of the entire royal line and provided the mythic precedent for the marriages between Sapa Inca and coya, the principal queen, that later rulers used to keep succession within the royal blood. The historical Mama Ocllo who married Tupac Inca Yupanqui in the fifteenth century and bore Huayna Capac carried the founding queen's name, a deliberate echo of the original pair.

Through the panaca system, by which each ruler's descendants formed a corporate group maintaining his cult, the memory of the founding couple remained a living institution in Cuzco until the conquest, and members of Chima panaca, the descent group of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, were among those interviewed by Spanish chroniclers. Whatever historical reality may lie behind her, Mama Ocllo's place in the tradition is that of co-founder of the dynasty and of Andean civilization as the Incas conceived it.