The Inca fixed attention on the zenith sunrise-antizenith sunset axis not only because that sector of the celestial environment was so suggestive, but also because they were deeply influenced by the terrestrial half of the environment as well. Imagine a mountainous land in which faraway places are reckoned not by the distance east, west, north, or south of the major population centers, but rather by how far above or below them one is situated. The Inca lived in a vertical world, a space in which the time for human action—for planting potatoes, burning off the scrub, worshiping the gods—depended critically upon where a person was positioned in a vertically based ecology, each tier of which was dependent upon every other one.
If we take nature's verticality and couple it with the opposing, complementary dualities that make up the Andean world view as a whole, we begin to move closer to what time meant to the Incas. The Inca classified natural phenomena not by the divisions into phylum-order-genus familiar to us from Western biology, but rather according to the principle of sexual complementarity. The male-sky-Viracocha interacts with the female-earth-Pachamama in a cosmic dialogue that promotes and symbolizes the regeneration of life. Modern Andean villages are still organized according to the moiety system. Plowing, harvesting, even the work preceding the organization of festal days is doled out according to the dualistic principle.
The seasons are no different. Unlike Vivaldi's Four in the Old World (see page 340) in most tropic zone cultures there are only two: the wet and the dry. Viewed as opposite sides of a coin, they contrast and oppose one another; but taken together, they form a whole made up of complementary halves. In the dry season, the Inca conducted the activities of the state: they took the census, they distributed land, they made war. April, the month just before the harvest when the storehouses lay at their lowest ebb, was the time of transition. It was then, when the sun on its northerly passage arrived at the antizenith, that the temporal coin flipped over. For the next few months, the fields lay fallow. Agriculturally speaking, there was no time. Not until August, when they planted and made sacrifices to the huacas of the poor and the commoners, did nature suddenly reawaken. This was the start of the wet season, a time when Pachamama opened herself and became fertile. Only then could she he penetrated hy the nurturing rays of the sun. Once humans began to plow the land, the union of the principles from above and below could regenerate lifer.
But mid-August is also one of the times of year when the sun reaches the antizenith at midnight in the latitude of Cuzco. Having touched its solstitial marking post on the hill of Quiangalla late in June, it already has started back on a southerly course. In Cuzco, 25-26 April and 17-18 August—agriculturally the two most important dates of the year—also are the calendrical reciprocals of 30-31 October and 12-13 February—the days when the sun crosses overhead. The sight line in horizontal space that connects sunrises and sunsets on these pivotal days can be linked to the cardinal dates in the calendar, the very days when the sun is situated on the vertical axis of Cuzco.
The Inca had discovered the quintessence of vertical complementarity: they recognized in the celestial landscape a set of events that made perfect sense when cast in terms of their ideology. Discovering the significance of the zenith-antizenith principle was as profound for the Inca as the dawning in the Maya mentality that 260 days was the time cycle par excellence upon which all of life's important events and processes converged: the rhythm of Venus, of eclipses, of conception and birth. In the Inca world, the pulse beat of the sun's cycle and the planting cycle coalesce about the vertical solar axis. This coalescence becomes imaged in the form of a horizontal line that cuts across the ceque system from the mountains ringing one end of the valley of Cuzco to the other. The Inca harmony of the world consists of a rhythm we can begin to listen to only by putting ourselves into their shoes, only by walking the sides of their mountains under that strange and different tropical sky.
We have good reason to think the Inca employed the ceque system and its zenith-antizenith time axis as a principle of calendrical and social organization throughout their vast empire. For example, the ruins of their colony of Huanuco Pampa, far to the west, are built up around a central plaza from the corners of which four roads depart. Each quarter-like suyu of the city is split into three distinct segments, reminiscent of the division of Cuzco's ceques into three kinship classes. A series of city gates betrays the principal orientation of Huanuco's buildings, which is generally unlike that in Cuzco. A line through the gates passes directly over the main temple at the center of the open plaza, however it points in the direction of sunrise at the equinox rather than at zenith or antizenith passage. Were the Inca giving those subjects who lived on the periphery of the empire some degree of flexibility in the regulation of their temporal affairs—the way our federal government allows each state of the union to decide whether or not to keep daylight savings time? A careful look at the architecture of Huanuco reveals the hidden imperial presence. Two large stone buildings in the eastern quarter, the only two buildings aside from the main temple made completely of stone, are skewed 10 degrees out of line in relation to all the other structures. They align with the zenith-antizenith direction—Cuzco standard time. This paramount axis also turns up in the architecture of other Inca sites along the coast of Peru, like Inkawasi and Tambo Colorado, where the seasonal cycle and climate are totally different from that in the highlands and where the imperial calendar has no more environmental significance than New England harvest time does in Arizona or the salmon run up the Columbia River for a resident of Miami Beach.
World History
