The Wayfinders (13 page)

Remarkably, despite this public concern and
hysteria, in 1974 little was known scientifically about the plant. The
botanical origins of the domesticated species, the chemistry of the leaf,
the pharmacology of coca chewing, the plant’s role in nutrition, the
geographical range of the cultivated varieties, the relationship between the
wild and cultivated species — all these remained mysteries. It was widely
acknowledged, of course, that coca was revered in the Andes as no other
plant. In the time of the Inca no holy shrine could be approached if the
supplicant did not have coca in the mouth. Unable to cultivate it at the
elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco, the Inca replicated the plant in
gold and silver, in ritual fields that coloured the landscape. To this day
no significant event occurs in the highlands without a reciprocal exchange
of the energy of the leaf with the essence of Pachamama, the feminine earth
essence. No field can be planted or harvested, no child brought into the
world, no elder led into the realm of the dead without the mediation of the
sacred plant.

To the dismay of certain elements in the U.S.
government, our team conducted the first nutritional study of the plant in
1975, and what was discovered proved to be astonishing. The plant had a
small amount of the alkaloid, roughly 0.5 to 1 percent dry weight, a modest
concentration that was benignly absorbed through the mucous membrane of the
cheek. But it also contained a considerable range of vitamins, and more
calcium than any plant ever studied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
which made it ideal for a diet that traditionally lacked a dairy product. It
was also suggested that the leaves produced enzymes that enhanced the body’s
ability to digest carbohydrates at high elevation, ideal for the
potato-based diet of the Andes. This scientific revelation put into stark
relief the draconian efforts that are underway to this day to eradicate the
traditional fields. Coca was not a drug, but a sacred food that had been
used benignly by the people of the Andes as a mild stimulant without any
evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for more than 4,000 years.

With coca as my lens, the richness of the
contemporary pan-Andean world came slowly into focus. The arrival in Peru of
the Spaniards in the sixteenth century unleashed a cataclysm, but out of
that terrible encounter emerged a remarkable cultural amalgam that to this
day draws inspiration from both Christianity and ancient pre-Columbian
beliefs. The conquistadors did everything in their power to crush the spirit
of the Andes, destroying all religious temples and icons. But every time the
Spaniards planted a cross or built a church on top of a demolished shrine
they simply affirmed in the eyes of the people the inherent sacredness of
the place. For it was not a building that the Indians worshipped, it was the
land itself: the rivers and waterfalls, the rocky outcrops and mountain
peaks, the rainbows and stars. Five hundred years of European domination,
with all manner of injustices, has failed to quell the essential impulse of
the Andes, which is still felt in every hamlet and mountain glen, among the
tussock grasses of the
puna
where alpaca and vicuña graze, and along the
stone-lined streets of every city and crossroads of the long-lost empire.

Between southern Colombia and Bolivia there are
today 6 million people who speak Quechua, the language of the Inca, as their
mother tongue. They are for the most part farmers, and their gifts to the
world have included the potato and tomato, tobacco, maize, quinine, and
coca. To them, the land is literally alive. The mountains are mystical
beings that gather the rain, create weather, bring fertility to the soil and
abundance to the fields, or in their wrath sow destruction and chaos,
unleashing deadly storms or frosts that can destroy in mere moments the work
of a year, as occurred in 1983 when hail in fifteen minutes wiped out the
entire corn crop of the vast Cusco region.

Every community in the southern Andes is still
dominated by a specific protective mountain deity, an
Apu
that directs the destiny of those born in its
shadow. Thus with each step the people even today walk through a landscape
they believe to be sacred. Just as the traditional agricultural economy
remains based on the exchange of labour, so too reciprocity defines the
connection between the community and the land, ritual obligations and
relationships never spoken about and never forgotten. Pachamama and the apus
will nurture a people, as long as they in turn are treated with proper care
and reverence.

When men and women meet on a trail, they pause
and exchange
k’intus
of coca, three perfect leaves aligned to form a
cross. Turning to face the nearest apu they bring the leaves to their mouths
and blow softly, a ritual invocation that sends the essence of the plant
back to the earth, the community, the sacred places, and the souls of the
ancestors. The exchange of leaves is a social gesture, a way of
acknowledging a human connection. But the blowing of the
phukuy
, as
it is called, is an act of spiritual reciprocity, for in giving selflessly
to the earth, the individual ensures that in time the energy of the coca
will return full circle, as surely as rain falling on a field will
inevitably be reborn as a cloud. This subtlety of gesture, in its own way a
prayer, is celebrated on a grand scale in annual community-based rituals of
commitment and engagement.

Much of what I know of the Andes I learned in
Chinchero, a stunningly beautiful valley just outside of Cusco. The town
centre rests upon the ruins of the summer palace of Topa Inca Yupanqui,
second of the great Incan rulers. Exquisite terraces fall away to an emerald
plain, the floor of an ancient seabed that rises in the north to the distant
peaks of the Vilcabamba, the last redoubt of the empire. To the east, the
undulating slopes of Antakillqa, the sacred Apu, dominate the skyline.
Perched at the height of the ruins is the colonial church where, in 1981, I
stood as godfather for a lovely baby boy, Armando, sealing a friendship with
his family that prospers to this day.

Once each year in Chinchero, at the height of the
rainy season, a remarkable event occurs: the
mujonomiento
, the
annual running of the boundaries. The fastest boy in each hamlet is given
for one day the honour of becoming a transvestite, a
waylaka
.
Dressed in the clothing of sisters or mothers, and carrying white ritual
banners, the waylakas must lead all able-bodied men on a run. The distance
travelled is only 30 kilometres, but the route crosses two soaring Andean
ridges. The run begins at 3,500 metres in the village plaza, drops 300
metres through the ruins to the base of Antakillqa, and then ascends about
900 metres to the summit spur before falling away to the valley on the far
side, only to climb once more to reach the grasslands of the divide and the
long trail home. It is a race but also a pilgrimage, for the boundaries are
marked by mounds of earth, holy sites where prayers are uttered, coca is
given to the earth, libations of alcohol to the wind, and the waylaka must
dance, spinning in a rhythmic vortex that draws to the sacred peaks the
feminine essence and the energy of the women left behind in the villages far
below. With each ritual gesture the runners lay claim to the earth. This is
the essential metaphor. One enters the day as an individual, but through
exhaustion and
sacrifice
, a word derived from the Latin “to make
sacred,” one emerges fused to the pulse of a single community that has
through ritual devotion proclaimed its sense of belonging and secured its
place in sacred geography.

Pilgrimage, movement through landscape to the
shadow of the divine, has been a central feature of Andean life since the
beginning of memory. To make offerings, Incan priests climbed to mountain
summits of 6,500 metres, heights that would not be achieved in the European
tradition for 400 years. In the wake of the Conquest these pilgrimages
continued, taking on new resonance and forms with the infusion of
Christianity, but always remaining rooted in ancient notions of landscape
and mystical power. Localized celebrations such as that of the mujonomiento
in Chinchero contain the same thematic elements encountered in the great
pan-Andean pilgrimages that even today draw tens of thousands of people from
communities all over the southern Andes.

A year or so after first running the boundaries
with the waylakas, I travelled with my good friend Nilda Callanaupa and a
large contingent from Chinchero to the sacred valley of the Sinakara, site
of the Qoyllur Rit’i Festival, the Star Snow Festival, perhaps the most
arduous and spiritually illuminating of all Andean pilgrimages. Located some
130 kilometres due east of Cusco, six hours by road to the trailhead, the
destination is a high natural amphitheatre, a verdant basin located at some
4,750 metres, dominated by the three tongues of the Colquepunku glacier
fronting the valley like an altar. According to Catholic belief, a miracle
occurred in the Sinakara in the late eighteenth century when a young boy saw
a dazzling apparition of Christ. A shrine was built upon the site, and the
image of the Lord may still be seen in the stone.

For the Inca, this rock was already sacred, as
was the entire valley. To them, matter was fluid. Bones were not death but
life crystallized, and thus potent sources of energy, like a stone charged
by lightning or a plant brought into being by the sun. Water is vapour, but
in its purest form it is ice, the shape of snowfields on the flanks of
mountains, the glaciers that are the highest and most sacred destination of
the pilgrims. The mountains are known as the
Tayakuna
, the fathers,
and some are so powerful that it can be dangerous even to look at them.
Other sacred places, such as a cave or a mountain pass or a waterfall where
the rushing water speaks as an oracle, are honoured as the
Tirakuna
. These are not spirits dwelling within landmarks. Rather,
the reverence is for the actual places themselves. The rivers are the open
veins of the earth, the Milky Way their heavenly counterpart. Rainbows are
double-headed serpents that emerge from hallowed springs, arch across the
sky, and bury themselves again in the earth. Shooting stars are bolts of
silver. Behind them lie all the heavens, including the dark patches of
cosmic dust, the negative constellations, which to the people of the
highlands are as meaningful as the clusters of stars that form animals in
the sky.

The Inca considered Cusco to be the navel of the
world. The Temple of the Sun, the Coricancha, was the axis from which
radiated, to all points on the horizon, forty-one conceptual lines, their
alignments determined by the rise and fall of the stars and constellations,
the sun and the moon. Along these sightlines, or
ceques
, were
hundreds of sacred sites, each with its own day of celebration, each revered
and protected by a specific community. In this way each person and every
clan, though rooted to a specific locality, was bound to the cosmological
framework of the empire. These shrines, or
huacas
— like the sacred stone of the Sinakara where
Christ miraculously and somewhat conveniently appeared just two years after
the Spaniards suppressed the last great revolt of the Inca — were stations
on holy paths that existed in both a literal and metaphysical sense. During
times of great significance, the summer solstice or the passing of an Inca,
the priests would call for sacrifices. The chosen, children and animals
blessed by the Sun, were called to Cusco from all parts of the empire. Some
were killed in the capital; others were selected to carry portions of the
sacrificial blood back to their communities, where in due course they too
would be killed. The entourages arrived in Cusco by road, but on leaving
they followed the sacred routes of the ceques, walking in a straight
direction over mountains and across rivers, sometimes for hundreds of
kilometres, visiting local shrines, paying homage to the perfection of their
fate. These journeys, as much as the sacrifice of the children, realigned
the people with the Inca and represented symbolically the triumph of empire
over the imposing landscape of the Andes.

Located due east of Cusco, the Sinakara Valley is
charged with metaphysical power. It opens to the west to the flank of
Ausangate, the most important of all Apus. Aligned with Cusco in
cosmological space and time by the ceque lines, it also marks the border
between two of the four quadrants of the empire, known as “Tawantinsuyu,”
the Four Quarters of the World. To the south and east is Collasuyo,
embracing the altiplano of Bolivia, Titicaca, and all the mountains of the
Sun. North and east is Antisuyo, the cloud forests and tropical lowlands,
the one known part of their world never fully conquered by the Inca. Thus
the central opposition in Incan cosmology and thought, upper and lower,
mountain and forest, civilized and savage, is played out in ritual when the
pilgrims arrive at the Sinakara from all points of the horizons to honour
the Lord of Qoyllur Rit’i.

For most of the year the Sinakara Valley and the
sanctuary lie still and alone, visited only by the odd shepherd. But for
three days between the movable feasts of the Ascension and Corpus Christi,
as the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, re-emerge in the night sky, generally in
the first days of June, as many as 40,000 pilgrims converge at the base of
the mountain, some arriving on foot, some by mule, and others in open trucks
and buses. From the small village at the end of the road, the narrow traffic
of pilgrims slowly makes its way up a trail that climbs steadily for nine
kilometres, a route that is marked by stone altars and cairns, the stations
of the cross, where men and women pause to pray and make offerings. Each
carries a bundle of small stones, a symbolic burden of sin to be lightened
one by one as the valley comes near. Above the skyline to the west hovers
the summit of Ausangate. All the communities of the southern Andes are
represented, jungle dancers from Paucartambo, groups from Puno and Titicaca,
the plains of Anta, Cusco, and the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba. Mules and
donkeys carry food and supplies; all people must walk, even the crippled,
who drag their broken bodies up the trail, inch by inch, foot by foot.