The Incas and other Andean people believed that the origin of sun and the moon emerged from the two islands of Lake Titicaca.
People say that the sun came from a rocky outcrop on the island of Titicaca (now known as the Island of the Sun) and the moon from the nearby Island of Coati (Island of the Moon).
In pre-Incan times, people made complex offerings on these islands, and the Incas built large temples on them after conquering the region.
Several chroniclers also note that the first Inca and his sister/wife emerged from Lake Titicaca, emphasizing the connection between these rulers and the sun.
To understand why this great lake became associated with the beginnings of the Andean cosmos we must now examine how Andean peoples traditionally viewed their own origins.
Many Andean kinship groups, or ayllus, traced their lineage back to mythical ancestors who came from a sacred place in the landscape.
This place, believed to be the origin of these ancestral relatives, was a special kind of huaca, called a paqarina.
While these could take various forms, they were generally caves, lakes, or springs.
Members of an ayllu visited their mythical place of origin on special occasions to make sacrifices to perpetuate their lineage.
The larger and more powerful kinship groups built complex temples at their origin sites, such as the one the Incas constructed near the cave where Manco Capac, the mythical first Inca, is said to have emerged.
The Incas rooted the concept of paqarina, related to the primordial emergence of mythical ancestral relatives in unique places of the Andean landscape, in their understanding of the origin of the cosmos.
People recognize Lake Titicaca as the largest lake in South America and an important paqarina significant enough to be considered the point of origin of the cosmos.
The discovery of materials from pre-Incan and Incan sacrifices on both the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon suggests that they made offerings to both celestial bodies for millennia.
By the time the Incas expanded their empire to the Lake Titicaca region, many believed that the Inca king and his wife were the human descendants of the sun and the moon.
Consequently, the origin myths related to the sacred islands of the lake may have begun to change.
In this later phase of the Lake Titicaca myth, people transformed it so that instead of simply explaining the origin of the cosmos, the Inca (analogous to the sun) and his sister/wife (analogous to the moon) emerged from these sacred islands. The Cuzco elites used this association to assert their ruling rights.
