Peru

Pachakuti is a kind of event rather than a single date. Pacha is world, time, and place together, and kuti is the return or turn, so pacha kuti is the overturning of the world, a cosmic era brought to an end by flood, earthquake, or the collapse of an order, and replaced by a new one. The concept is forward and backward looking at once: the Inca read past world-inversions as precedent for future ones.

The name entered politics directly. The ninth ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who consolidated the empire in the fifteenth century, took the title "he who overturns the world," so that the cosmological term named a conqueror. Colonial sources then had to absorb an overturning of a different kind. Guamán Poma's illustrated chronicle records the Andean version of successive worlds ended by catastrophe with a few survivors carrying knowledge forward, and the Relación de antigüedades describes earlier ages destroyed and remade. Catherine Allen's fieldwork shows the concept still active among Quechua speakers as a way of naming large historical rupture.

The comparative value is the mechanism. A pachakuti is how a story about total destruction stays also a story about continuity, because the turning-over brings a new age rather than an ending. The event is treated in Pachakuti and the system in Andean Eschatology (Pachacuti), and the southern flood against which the Andean scheme sits is Trentren and Caicai: the Mapuche Flood. Most traditions keep the end and the renewal as separate moments. The Andes names the hinge between them, and then made the name royal.