Mama Quilla — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

Evidence dossier 294 — Mama Quilla. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Mama Quilla
• Original script: —
• Pantheon: Incan
• Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
• False forms on record: 1
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 294 of 548

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Mama Quilla — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.

Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form mamaquilla is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.

What the fallback status forbids is promotion: mamaquilla may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Exhibit 3 — struck from the record: mamaquila. Origin: the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds. Grounds: rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write.

Exhibit 4 — the physical record. The physical center of her cult was the Coricancha in Cuzco, whose curved western wall still stands beneath the Santo Domingo convent; excavations and the chroniclers' descriptions fix the moon chapel opposite the sun's — silver-clad, with her silver image facing the Punchao (the sun's golden boy-idol). The Spanish melted her silver into bullion, but the temple's plan survives in the foundations. Beyond Cuzco, moon imagery — crescents and full-moon discs — appears on colonial-era qirus (ritual cups) and in textiles that kept pre-conquest canons. Eclipse and moon observations are embedded in the architecture of state ritual sites such as the Coricancha itself, aligned to both solar and lunar standstills as modern archaeoastronomy (e.g., work associated with Dearborn and others at Cuzco) has argued.

Exhibit 5 — the continuing record. Mama Quilla's most durable legacy is lexical: killa/quilla, 'moon,' is also the Quechua word for 'month' — her cycles are still how millions count time, and the lunar-timed agricultural calendar remains the skeleton of Andean ritual life. Her festival, Killa Raymi or Coya Raymi (the 'moon festival,' associated with women and with September in the modern revival), is celebrated again in Ecuador and Peru as a festival of femininity and planting.

The Convention's Own History

Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.

The Protocol's Position

Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.

The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.

The Verdict

Case closed on Mama Quilla: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form mamaquilla rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /mamaquilla/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, mamaquila first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, Book 13 (1653), Polo de Ondegardo, On the Errors and Superstitions of the Indians (1550s), Murúa, Historia general del Piru (1616).

The Register Continues

This is one of 548 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.

Continue the register — previous entry: Mamaqucha (read it) · next entry: Mamaragan (read it).

The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.