In the sacristy of a Cuzco parish church, I first encountered a pair of keros — tall, tapered wooden cups that Quechua artisans painted with an entire cosmology during the colonial period. The crimson lacquer caught the last light from a high window, and across the surface, in mopa-mopa resin pigment that still gleamed after four centuries, a procession of Inca nobles marched in eternal ceremony beneath bands of geometric tocapu symbols.
A Language the Priests Could Not Read
The Spanish colonial authorities believed they had dismantled the Inca religious order by the late sixteenth century. Churches rose on the foundations of huacas, and Quechua nobles were baptized in the names of saints they did not recognize. Yet in the workshops of Cuzco, artisans continued to paint the old stories onto wooden cups — a tradition older than conquest and weighted with suppressed cosmology.
“Tocapu glyphs carried kinship, territory, and ritual obligation. The Spanish saw ornament; Quechua readers saw a map of the universe.”