Panakas

Panakas are the sacred (huaca) compounds of which there were 12-13 located in Cuzco in which the royal mummys of the preceding Incas were housed and honored by their own royal entourages and households between their necessary attendance in all civil-political rituals.

The Inca's religious beliefs did not hold that these persons ceased to have souls at the end of breathing. In many ways it was observed that the royal mummys continued to have a sort of life. At any rate they were preserved and ritualistically fed and honored and paraded in rituals and ceremonial pilgrimages. It was not uncommon for indigenous Americans to believe that life of the body and the continuation of the soul did not cease with the cessation of breathing. Theirs was a sort of transmigration in various and sundry ways defined within each of the 500 or more ethnic and linguistic groups inhabiting the continents prior to colonization. The Incas were honored in such a way because they were believed to be the sons of the sun (Inti). The political mandate to rule depended upon this system and that guaranteed the exalted status of the mummys and their entourages along with their preservation (until the Spanish Catholic priests seized them and destroyed them along with almost every other aspect of native culture during their campaigns often labeled the extirpation of idolatry).