1673 Engraving of a Great Burnt Offering at the Peruvian Feast of Capac Raymi
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a great burnt offering at the Peruvian feast of Capac Raymi appears in this excerpted leaf from the Peru chapter of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a towering blaze sends flames and black smoke into the sky as birds tumble through it, while men in feathered headbands raise their arms and point toward the fire. In the foreground, two kneeling men bend over a slaughtered animal, and at right, two men carry square panels painted with a serpent and small figures. Beyond them, figures on the plain beneath a grove of palms can be seen—two of which are carrying another slaughtered animal.
The scene appears to show the feast of Capac Raymi, the greatest of the Peruvian festivals, described in the text below. Countless lambs and sheep are said to have been burned as offerings on fragrant wood along with silver and gold, beside three carved images of the sun and three of thunder. The text names the sun images Apointi, Cheriunti, and Intiquaoqui, or Father Sun, Son Sun, and Brother Sun. At the same feast the young king was consecrated—the high priest pierced one of his ears and wrapped his upper body in sacred cloths while lesser priests whipped him with slings and smeared his face with blood. The same page tells of soothsayers who learned the future from the devil and of women seers who shut themselves in a house and drank themselves senseless on chicha mixed with the herb vilca before answering questions. The reverse continues the feast, during which all strangers were sent out of Cusco. On their return they received small maize cakes made with the blood of white rams, which runners called chasquis carried to every temple in Peru. It then turns to the Peruvian confessors, who are said to have read a hidden sin in the entrails of a slaughtered animal much like the one the kneeling men examine here, and to the king, who confessed only to the sun and bathed in a running river so that it would carry his sins away to the sea.
Arnoldus Montanus (ca. 1625–1683), a Dutch minister and schoolmaster, compiled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld from earlier chronicles and travel accounts without ever crossing the Atlantic. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs issued it in 1671 with a wealth of engravings. John Ogilby's English adaptation followed the same year, and Die Unbekante Neue Welt, the German edition attributed to Olfert Dapper, followed in 1673. Its illustrations were drawn by artists who had mostly never seen the Americas either. They mix reported detail with European invention, and they shaped how a generation of European readers pictured the New World.
CONDITION
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