The Quechua world is submerged, so to speak, in a cosmic magma that weighs heavily upon it. It possesses the rare quality of being as it were interjected into the midst of antagonistic forces, which in turn implies a whole body of social and aesthetic structures whose innermost meaning must be the administration of energy. This gives rise to the social organism known as the ayllu, the agrarian community that regulates the procurement of food. The ayllu formed the basic structure of the whole Inca empire. The central idea of this organization was a kind of closed economy, just the opposite of our economic practices, which can be described as open. The closed economy rested on the fact that the Inca controlled both the production and consumption of food. When one adds to this fact the religious ideas noted in the Quechua texts cited by the chronicler Santa Cruz Pachacuti, one comes to the conclusion that in the Andean zone the margin of life was minimal and was made possible only by the system of magic the Quechua constructed through his religion. Adversities, moreover, were numerous, for the harvest might fail at any time and bring starvation to millions. Hence the whole purpose of the Quechua administrative and ideological system was to carry on the arduous task of achieving abundance and staving off shortages. This kind of structure presupposes a state of unremitting anxiety, which could not be resolved by action. The Quechua could not do so because his primordial response to problems was the use of magic, that is, recourse to the unconscious for the solution of external problems. Thus the struggle against the world was a struggle against the dark depths of the Quechua's own psyche, where the solution was found. By overcoming the unconscious, the outer world was also vanquished. These considerations permit us to classify Quechua culture as absolutely static or, more accurately, as the expression of a mere state of being. Only in this way can we understand the refuge that it took in the germinative center of the cosmic mandala as revealed by Quechua art. The Quechua empire was nothing more than a mandates, for it was divided into four zones, with Cuzco in the center. Here the Quechua ensconced himself to contemplate the decline of the world as though it were caused by an alien and autonomous force.