Thus history is seen as the slow but inexorable turning of a wheel where top becomes bottom, then bottom becomes top once more.  This cyclic view of history is not unique to the Andes; but it is encountered in the analytic discourse of philosophers and in the symbolic language of myth in many other world traditions.

The psychological dimension of Andean folklore

The nature of a rigidly stratified Andean society, its fate in mythic time, the plight of the peasant caught at the bottom, and comments on the injustices such a society creates are thus all revealed in Andean folklore.  On another level, however, Andean folklore, like that of all countries and all times, embodies deeper and more universal psychological realities telling us of the human experience in general.

In the case of the nak’aq, for example, we encounter a personification of the anxieties and tensions that arise from the many perils a person faces throughout his life.  Thus, like the bandits, murderers, and maniacs of popular legend (along with the more supernatural members of their threatening cohort), the nak’aq makes comprehensible in a single, clearly depicted figure a cluster of often nebulous but disturbing feelings that would otherwise remain elusive.  The nak’aq, therefore, clothed in the fragments of Andean social reality, is only a single manifestation of the same kinds of psychological impulses that have given rise to such legendary figures as witches, werewolves, vampires, and a host of other such monsters.

The myth of Incariy is likewise an Andean manifestation of a far more universal theme.  And this theme in turn embodies underlying psychological realities.  For example, Welsh traditions say that King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are not really dead but are rather slumbering deep inside a mountain waiting only to be aroused to drive the Saxon invader from the land.  Also, the famous emperor known as Barbarossa was believed by medieval Germans to lie in slumber until returning to save his people.

Underlying the recurrent theme of the returning hero is what appears to be an eternal hope that miseries and injustices will eventually be righted, even if only in some far-off future time, by a powerful figure revered from the past.  In this way, what is suffered now is better endured, and what was lost will be restored.

Legend deals with historic time, while myth deals with what might be called mythic time, since it is involved with things whose origins are in the dim past and with their fate in some undefined future.