INTI
A pre-Columbian sun mask, thought to represent the sun god, Inti. The Incas and their predecessors held the sun deity in great awe. Solar eclipses were thought to be the result of the sun god's anger.
Conceived as a divine ancestor of the Inca royal family, Inti was a uniquely Inca deity and the cult focus of many state rituals: in Inca ideology the emporer was regarded as teh "son of the sun". Inti himself was usually represented as a great golden disc surrounded by sun-rays and possessed of a human face. Reverence for this deity centered on the great sun-temple or Coricancha at Cuzco, where Inti's shimmering solar image was flanked by the elaborately garbed mummies of dead emporers and surrounded by walls covered insheets of sacred gold - the "sweat of the sun". The mythological connection between gold and Inca ideology was particularly apparent in the Coricancha's temple-garden, where metalsmiths cast gold and silver representations of every form of life known to them, from a butterfly to a llama.
