Manco Cápac and the Golden Staff
| Category: | Latin American Legends |
|---|---|
| Props: | A walking stick or hiking staff (optional) |
| Notes: | An Inca origin story from Peru and Bolivia, told to the Spanish chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega (himself half Inca) and written down in 1609. Works well on a hike: pause to push a hiking staff into the ground. |
High up in the Andes Mountains of South America, there's a huge lake, so high up that the air is thin and cold, and so big that it looks like a sea. It's called Lake Titicaca. And the Inca people say their story began there.
Long ago, they say, the people of the mountains lived scattered and wild. They didn't know how to farm, or weave cloth, or build houses. They lived in caves, and ate wild plants and roots, and fought each other over scraps.
Inti, the Sun, looked down at them and felt sorry for them. So he sent two of his own children down to Earth: a son named Manco Cápac, and a daughter named Mama Ocllo. They rose up out of the waters of Lake Titicaca, shining like gold.
Inti gave Manco Cápac a staff of solid gold, about as long as your arm. 'Walk north,' said the Sun. 'Wherever you stop to eat or rest, push this staff into the ground. Most places, the ground will be too hard and it will stop. But one day, you'll find a place where the staff sinks all the way into the earth and disappears. That's where you'll build your city. And from there you'll teach the people to live well.'
So Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo set out walking. They walked north, over the high, cold plains. They walked through valleys and over rivers and across mountain passes. Every time they stopped, Manco Cápac pushed the golden staff into the ground. Every time, it struck rock and stopped.
They walked for days. They walked for weeks. Their feet ached. The nights were bitterly cold. Some days, they wondered if they'd ever find the place. But they kept walking, and they kept trying the staff, every single time.
At last, they came over a high pass and looked down into a beautiful green valley, ringed by mountains, with rivers running through it. They walked down into it, to the foot of a hill. Manco Cápac lifted the golden staff, and pushed it into the earth.
And it slid in. Down, and down, and down, until the whole staff vanished into the ground.
'This is the place,' said Manco Cápac.
They called the city Cusco, which means "the navel," the center of the world. Manco Cápac went out to the people of the valley and taught the men how to farm, how to plant corn and potatoes, how to dig canals to carry water to the fields, how to build terraces up the sides of the mountains. Mama Ocllo taught the women how to spin and weave, and how to make cloth from llama and alpaca wool.
The people came down from their caves and built houses, and then temples, and roads. And from that little city in the valley grew the Inca Empire, the greatest empire in the Americas, stretching for thousands of miles along the mountains. The Inca kings who ruled it called themselves the Children of the Sun, because they said they were descended from Manco Cápac.
Today, Cusco is still there, a city in Peru. You can walk on streets built on top of Inca walls, made from stones so perfectly fitted together that you can't slide a knife blade between them. And on Lake Titicaca, people still tell the story of the brother and sister who rose out of the water, and walked, and kept trying, until the golden staff sank into the ground.
Storyteller tips: the heart of the story is that they kept trying the staff at every single stop. If you're telling it on a hike, push your hiking staff into the ground at each rest stop afterward.