The Inca Enigma: Symbolic Ontology and Ritual Reason in the Andean World (A Philosophical–Anthropological Essay with a Hermeneutic Orientation)

Abstract This essay offers a philosophical reflection on the Inca worldview and the contemporary difficulties involved in understanding it through modern analytical categories. It proposes a reading of the Inca world as a fully operative symbolic ontology, in which knowledge, politics, nature, and spirituality are not separated. From a hermeneutic and ethno-anthropological perspective, the text examines how Andean cosmology articulated a ritual reason and a spatial metaphysics embodied in Qosqo, the ceque system, and communal practices. Rather than constituting an enigma left by the Incas, the so-called “Inca mystery” is interpreted here as a modern difficulty in understanding non-dualist forms of thought, where knowledge is exercised through participation rather than analytical detachment. Note on this edition This is the English-language version of the Spanish original “El enigma incaico: ontología simbólica y razón ritual en el mundo andino,” available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18509637.