"The Incan Rite of Situa" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Shamanic Qabalah: A Mystical Path to Uniting the Tree of Life & the Great Work"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 6
The Incan Rite of Situa
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to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
Each
year, as the southern hemisphere's spring approached, the Inca capital of Cuzco
held one of its most important annual rites: a citywide purification ceremony
meant to physically drive sickness, misfortune, and evil influence out of the
city before the new agricultural cycle began. It's often described today as
falling on a fixed date, September 6th.
The
actual ceremony, called the “Situa” (or Citua), never worked that way at all;
it followed the moon, not a settled day on anyone's calendar, and
reconstructing exactly what happened during it means relying almost entirely on
the accounts of the Spanish chroniclers who arrived generations after the Inca
Empire's own calendar-keepers were silenced.
The Situa was never fixed to a specific Gregorian date the way modern calendar entries sometimes imply. According to the documented Inca ceremonial calendar, the festival was held during Qoya Raymi, the ninth month, timed to the first new moon following the September equinox, which in the southern hemisphere typically falls around September 23rd. Because the Inca calendar tracked lunar cycles rather than a fixed solar grid, the actual date the purification began would have shifted from year to year, sometimes landing in late September, sometimes drifting closer to October, depending on the moon's own timing that particular year. A single “September 6th” listing flattens what was, by design, a moving observance tied to the sky rather than a spreadsheet.
The
ceremony itself is unusually well documented for a pre-conquest Andean rite,
but that documentation comes with an important caveat: nearly everything we
know about the Situa was recorded decades later by Spanish chroniclers, Cristóbal de Molina,
Polo de Ondegardo,
the mestizo historian Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,
and the Indigenous chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala,
writing under Spanish colonial administration, often with explicitly religious
motives of their own, cataloging Inca “idolatry” for a colonial audience even
as they preserved genuinely valuable ethnographic detail. Their accounts
largely agree on the ceremony's core structure: llamas and alpacas, chosen
specifically for white coloring, were sacrificed to the gods; participants
bathed ritually in river water; large torches called panconcos were lit;
and a specially prepared maize bread called sanku, its dough frequently
mixed with sacrificial blood, was distributed and eaten by the assembled crowd.
Warriors performed a symbolic mock battle, driving the personified sickness of
the city outward from the central plaza toward the empire's four quarters,
where runners carried the expelled disease onward in relay toward the empire's
outer rivers and borders.
It's
worth being honest, too, that some of the same chronicler accounts describing
this purification ceremony also record considerably darker practices attached
to the broader September ceremonial period, including references to blood
offerings thrown into rivers and, in a few colonial accounts, child sacrifice
connected to related state rites. These claims come from the same limited,
colonially filtered source base as the rest of our knowledge of the ceremony,
and modern historians treat them with real caution given how thoroughly Spanish
chroniclers had their own incentives to emphasize the more shocking aspects of
Inca religious practice to help justify the conquest itself. The honest
position is neither uncritical acceptance nor blanket dismissal, but the same
evidentiary caution this column tries to apply to every source, ancient or
modern, colonial or otherwise.
None of this necessarily complicates what made the Situa genuinely significant: an entire imperial capital, organized around the explicit civic goal of collectively expelling illness and misfortune before a new planting season, built around real, coordinated public ritual rather than private superstition. Some Andean communities today still mark elements of the ceremony symbolically, even though it isn't formally practiced in its original imperial form. Getting the date and the sourcing right doesn't diminish that legacy. It just means describing a real Inca institution as the moving, moon-timed, imperfectly documented rite it actually was, rather than a tidy entry on a fixed Gregorian calendar.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the living
Andean spiritual traditions that descend from the same region as the Situa,
we're recommending a book that bridges that lineage directly into Western
esoteric practice.
Shamanic
Qabalah: A Mystical Path to Uniting the Tree of Life & the Great Work
By
Daniel Moler | Llewellyn Worldwide
Daniel Moler writes from genuine, hands-on training in Peruvian curanderismo, the living Andean shamanic healing tradition still practiced today in the same region the Inca once governed from Cuzco, and Shamanic Qabalah fuses that direct training with Hermetic Qabalah into a single, coherent working system. Rather than treating Andean and Western esoteric traditions as separate cabinets of curiosities, Moler builds an actual template for readers to move between the Tree of Life and Peruvian shamanic cosmology as a unified practice. Moler's own background, noted by researcher and author Graham Hancock as worth serious attention, gives the book real experiential grounding rather than armchair synthesis; this is someone who has trained directly within the living tradition rather than reconstructing it purely from historical chronicles. That distinction matters enormously for a subject like today's, where the deepest layer of what actually happened during ceremonies like the Situa is mediated through centuries of colonial retelling.
This
is advanced syncretic work rather than a beginner's introduction to either
Qabalah or Andean spirituality specifically, and readers wanting a dedicated
historical study of Inca religion will want to pair it with an academic source.
But for readers of this magazine curious how the living descendants of the
tradition behind today's post continue to shape genuine contemporary practice,
Moler's book is a rare, direct bridge.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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