Update: Ritual Confusion

As I have mentioned in class, I've been trying to come up with an account of the first corn planting ritual of the season, which seems to occur on August 18, the day of the anti-zenith. Bauer's account has the Inca king with four noblemen and their wives sewing seeds in the field of Sausero, which is near the (long-gone) Arco Punto and the fields in which Mama Huaco and Manco Capac were alleged to have sewn the first seed after defeating the jungle people. He says that they sing haylli (war songs) to celebrate their triumph over the earth, and a white llama with gold adornments is prepared in the center of the field for sacrifice. Guinea pigs are also sacrificed, according to Bauer's piecing together of stories, and the commoners all assemble and watch while everything is happening. Onlookers drink and pour chicha throughout the ritual. Bauer does not discuss the cosmological significance of this date in August; he does not mention the anti-zenith, as Zuidema was quick to point out, and he does not discuss the viewing of the sunset at Quispicancha from the Ushnu in the plaza or the ritual procession along the ceque that leads to Quispicancha (which Mama Huaco apparently traversed long ago). Zuidema also mentioned the Priests of the Sun (children of thunder), as well as the fact that the ritual took place on a field that was not intended for true agriculture.

I am attempting to reconcile these two very different conceptions of the ritual, from Zuidema's intensly astronomical/cosmological, ceque-oriented account to Bauer's ceremony-oriented, war-over-nature account. Brigitte and I are teaming up to get to the bottom of this (with Prof. Erickson's help), and I fear that we will either have to pick one account and stick to it (and accept that we are missing parts of the story), try to mesh multiple stories (at the expense of losing some factuality), or find a new ritual to study that has a better written record from which to draw information.