Not only because of its closeness to heaven, but because of all the gifts that it bestows on its extensive domains, Titicaca was destined to be a sacred lake. We do not know the name given to it by the first men who approached its shores, but it is almost certain that already then they interpreted the blue of those waters as a proof of their brotherhood with the plains of the sky. The gilding of its reeds and the gold that the twilights pour over it would only confirm the special predilection of the gods for Titicaca.
For this reason, it is not surprising that, having sought their origin in the depths of time, the Incas had chosen to be born from its waters. Who best collects the legend, from the mouth of one of his maternal relatives, Garcilaso de la Vega in chapter XV of the Royal Comments of him.
Well, it happened that in ancient times, when it was in these regions of the world, people lived “like wild beasts and animals, without religion or police, without people or houses, without cultivating or sowing the land, without dressing or covering their meat, because they did not know work cotton or wool ”, the sun, pitying them, decided to send someone to give them laws and teach them to live in reason and civility.
And so he put Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, brothers and husbands at the same time, in Titicaca and told them that they could go wherever they wanted carrying a golden rod.
“Half a rod long and two fingers thick, which gave them as a sign and shows that where that bar sank, with just a blow that they hit the ground with it, there our father wanted the sun that they seem like the sun our father to stop and make their seat and cut ”.
The divine couple headed north and they were driving the rod all the way, but it only sank when they reached the Huanacauri hill, in the south of the Cusco valley. So Manco Cápac, establishing himself in the place, decided to summon all the men who roamed those moorlands, and for this purpose he went north and sent Mama Ocllo south. And with all those who started the foundation of Cusco, dividing it into two ayllus, Hanan and Hurin, and then they taught them the cultivation of corn and the art of weaving, civilizing them in this way.
For an anthropologist, this is clearly a myth of legitimation and as such, its symbolic language both conceals and illustrates. He hides, for example, that before the founding of the Tawantinsuyu the degree of culture of the ancient Peruvians was quite high and that the previous inhabitants of Cusco were by no means savage. But he also reveals some data that current studies have confirmed, especially the highland origin of the Incas and their arrival in the Cusco region in the context of the migrations that followed the collapse of the Tiwanaco kingdom.
Be that as it may, that of Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo is, among the founding legends of the Inca, the one that has most captivated the popular imagination. Perhaps because it is simple and luminous, but also because of its relationship with that mysterious mirror of water in which in ancient times the gods liked to see themselves reflected.