...At the time of the Conquest, Pachakuti Yamqui described a
choqquechinchay brought to Cuzco by the chiefs of the Carabaya as 'quite dappled in many colors, they say he was the lord of the jaguars."...
The weight of evidence, then, suggests that the constellation
choqquechinchay lay in the Milky Way, somewhere between Scorpius and Sagittarius.
The advent of fire simultaneous with the relative demotion of the moon is further associated in Andean myth (just as in the Popol Vuh) with the advent of agriculture. Here we find the notion that, at the critical moment of the advent of agriculture, the god of the new epoch shows mankind the proper methods of agricultural labor, yet does so "magically," as it is not proper for a god to do the work of men. In the Popol Vuh, Hunahpu and Ixbalamque demonstrate all the procedures of planting the milpa, but do so in a moment's time, magically. The Andean analogue of this event is found in Gods and Men of Huarochiri, when Wiraqocha, "in the most ancient of times," showed the people how to build irrigation ditches and agricultural terraces "simply by speaking."
Now, whereas in the Popol Vuh the advent of agriculture was correlated with the Fourth Age, in the Andes this event corresponds to the Third Age, . . .
In addition, most accounts of the Inca Wiraqocha ascribe to him the characteristics of the god Wiraqocha, as for example that this Inca was bearded.
What confederations did exist before the Inca expansion were confederations of warriors. 37 These were the "intimidators," hereditary groupings holding the monopoly on bronze weaponry.
A picture of this event, or rather the picture that must have inspired the Inca imagination, exists to this day, at Tiahuanaco, on the Gateway of the Sun itself. Flanking the image of Wiraqocha are three rows of what have been referred to as "angels." (See figure 10.2) There are forty-eight of these entities, portrayed either as bird-headed men or as human headed birds, all on bended knee, in supplication to the Creator. Sullivan 1996:313
Finally, the particular way of naming the stars --the "four hundred uncles"--adds a decisive dimension to the tale. In the myth of the "Fall of Quetzalcoatl" the innumerable stars of the underworld were described simply as "Holy Ones" or "subjects" of the underworld god. Here they are specified as the "four hundred." in the Quiche-Maya tradition, the Pleiades are most frequently referred to as the "four hundred boys." (Girard 1979, 77,237.) In projecting the sense of menace to the life of the Sun, embodied in the "warlike" activities of the fixed sphere of stars, the Aztec myth makes specific allusion to the role of the Pleiades in the death of the Fourth Sun. Taken as a purely technical statement, this formulation is identical with the Andean myth of the Llamas predicting the flood. In the Andean case, the "flood" of A.D. 650 was remembered in myth as occurring exactly one month after the day of heliacal rise of the Pleiades.