The Inca, like many ancient states, saw themselves as intermediaries between common people and the divine world. They consciously appropriated indigenous sacred sites, transforming them into Inca sacred sites that they administered. To the Inca cosmology, all of the sacred shrines in the Andes were part of a network of ley lines called "wakas," which converged on the Inca capital of Cuzco. Once they appropriated these sacred centers, commoners had to go through them in order to venerate their ancestors. So in addition to the ethic of reiprocity, the labor owed by commoners to the state was in part justified as maintaining the sacred order. |