The Wayfinders (14 page)

At 4,750 metres the air is cold even with a
bright sun, yet the Sinakara, reached after several hours, feels warm from
the presence of so many devotees. The atmosphere is festive and profound, a
pageant of colour, prayer, dance, and song. Ritual banners and flags
decorate the hillsides, which appear to vibrate in the wind. Along the
valley floor each community stakes its ground, and blankets and ponchos of a
dozen hues form a quilt that spreads on both sides of the small stream that
nourishes everyone. Jungle warriors, or
chunchus
, wear headdresses
festooned with parrot feathers and tunics dyed crimson with
cochineal
. The mountains are embodied in the
pablitos
,
or
ukukus
, masked men from all the highland communities, hundreds
of tricksters dressed as bears and charged with keeping the peace,
controlling the crowds and performing the most essential of all the rituals.
These symbolic embodiments of mountain and jungle meet in mock struggles,
theatre set pieces that recall ancient battles, real and imagined, and the
constant tension between the two oppositional poles of Andean existence. As
the men dance and bluff, pose and posture, the women gather inside the
sanctuary, which glows with the light of thousands of candles, many the
height of a tall child. At dusk, a pall of smoke hovers over the meadows.
There is a constant cacophony of brass bands, flutes, harps, and drums, the
high falsetto voices of the dancers, and the explosion of fireworks. For
three days and nights no one sleeps. The very ground shakes with the
movement of the dancers and the slow throbbing tone of the ritual
processions.

Beneath the gaiety and devotion, there is an
intensely serious purpose to the ritual. Mountain deities can be wrathful or
beneficent. Ice and snow are both a source of power and a miasma of disease.
The glaciers are fearful domains, not because of any physical danger, though
pilgrims do die of cold and exposure each year, but because they are the
abode of the
condenados
, souls cursed until the end of time.
According to Incan mythology the ukuku is the offspring of a woman and a
bear, a supernatural creature uniquely empowered to confront and defeat the
condenados. Thus it falls upon them, with their high-pitched cries and
masked faces, to perform the most dangerous and solemn act of the Qoyllur
Rit’i. Like Christ himself they must bear the burdens of the cross. As
processions of pilgrims carry the statues of saints through the valley, the
ukukus after a moonlight vigil lift the crosses from their village churches
and carry them 800 metres up the flanks of Colquepunku, where they implant
them in the glaciers to be charged by the energy of the mountain and the
earth. Then, before dawn on the morning of the third day, roped together by
whips, they climb back to the ice to retrieve the crosses as, far below,
thousands of pilgrims kneel in silent prayer. All eyes are on the summit, in
homage to the apus.

To the west, Ausangate is the first mountain to
glow with the rays of dawn. The light moves slowly down its flanks and
gradually fills the lower valleys. Once the sun comes up, the crosses come
down and make their way on the backs of ukukus through the Sinakara and out
through the pass, into the trucks that will bring them back to the villages.
The men also carry from the mountain blocks of ice, which in a sense
completes the devotional cycle: The people go to the heights of the mountain
to make prayers and pay homage to the divine. In the form of ice, the
essence of the mountain returns to the valley to bring life, fertility to
the fields, well-being to the families, and health to the animals. It is a
living dynamic relationship between people, the mountains, and the gods, a
reciprocal trinity of trust and renewal, a collective prayer for the
cultural survival of the entire pan-Andean world.

The vitality and authority of the Qoyllur Rit’i
Festival, the symbolic resonance and meaning of its rituals, the lessons it
conveys to the young anticipate a hopeful future even as they provoke a more
profound understanding of the past and the legacy of the Inca.

When I returned to Cusco from the Sinakara, I
joined another friend, Johan Reinhard, godfather of my youngest daughter, on
a journey down the sacred valley to visit Machu Picchu. A mountaineer and
high-altitude archaeologist, Johan has climbed some 200 Andean peaks of
5,000 metres or higher, searching for evidence of pre-Columbian ritual
burials and sacrifices. He made history in 1995 when, near the summit of
Ampato at an elevation where most people can barely breathe, he uncovered
the “Ice Maiden,” the perfectly preserved mummified remains of a young girl
sacrificed some 500 years ago. Johan, more than anyone I know, understands
the relationship in the Andes between land and culture through time. When he
comes upon a ruin for the first time, his eyes go immediately to the skyline
and the sacred peaks. By seeking clues in geography, in the orientation of
mountains and rivers, in the movement of celestial bodies, in the
configuration of the archaeology of tomorrow in the landscape of today, he
was able to solve the mystery of the most legendary archaeological site in
South America.

When in 1911 Hiram Bingham discovered Machu
Picchu, he famously described it as a “Lost City.” In truth, the complex was
always an integral part of the Incan Empire, clearly linked to the network
of roads that reached back to Cusco and extended for 40,000 kilometres,
binding together the longest empire ever forged in the Americas. Situated on
a strategic spur high above the Urubamba River, Machu Picchu was perfectly
positioned to guard the approaches to the Sacred Valley while at the same
time dominating the eastern lowlands of Antisuyo, the source of coca,
medicinal plants, and shamanic inspiration. It was a ritual centre,
certainly, established as the royal estate of Pachacuti, the first of the
three great Incan rulers who forged an empire that endured for less than a
century. Studies of the canals and waterways leave little doubt that Machu
Picchu was built from a single architectural plan that was itself conceived,
as Johan determined, within the framework of Incan cosmology, and rooted in
ancient Andean notions of sacred geography. Those who designed the complex
climbed every surrounding peak and built high survey platforms to observe by
day and night the position of mountains and the movement of constellations.
Theirs was not a simple task of engineering. The mountain deities influenced
and inspired every aspect of Incan life from the fertility of the soil and
the predictability of the rains to the success of armies and the well-being
and fecundity of the Sun King and his sister Queen.

The two most sacred mountains of the Inca were
Ausangate, as we have seen, overlooking the valley of the Qoyllur Rit’i, and
Salcantay, due south of Machu Picchu. The actual Apu of Machu Picchu is
Huayna Picchu, the iconic sugarloaf peak that dominates the site. The sacred
centre of Machu Picchu is the Intihuatana, a curious carved stone that
Bingham called the “Hitching Post of the Sun.” Johan was the first to notice
that the Intihuatana echoed the shape of Huayna Picchu, and that the play of
light on the stone throughout the day also replicated the ebb and flow of
shadows on Huayna Picchu. Just a few steps to the south of the Intihuatana,
a low altar is carved in stone. At the summit of Huayna Picchu is a twin
altar of identical shape. A direct north-south bearing from the summit,
Johan observed, bisected the Intihuatana and the two altars, and continued
south to pierce the heart of Salcantay, the major peak of the entire region.
Huayna Picchu, the Intihuatana, and Salcantay were configured in a perfect
north-south alignment. When the Southern Cross rises to its highest point in
the sky, it sits directly over the summit of Salcantay. The Southern Cross,
enveloped by the Milky Way, was one of the most important constellations of
the Inca. This revelation brought Johan’s attention back to the Urubamba
River, which to the Inca was the earthly equivalent of the Milky Way. Like a
serpent, the Urubamba coils around Machu Picchu as it falls away to the
Amazon. In myth, it was the avenue along which Viracocha walked at the dawn
of time when he brought the universe into being.

But where is the Urubamba born? On the flanks of
Ausangate, which dominates today the site of the Qoyllur Rit’i. Just as the
melting snows of Salcantay brought life to Machu Picchu, so the ice and
snows of the glaciers overlooking the Sinakara bring inspiration to the
people of the Andes today. Five hundred years after the Spanish Conquest,
these ancient notions of sacred geography continue to define and nurture
social existence, to link the living with the dead, the past with the
future, just as they did in the time of the Inca.

IF IN THE SOUTHERN ANDES
these original intuitions may be sensed in
ritual, distilled from the crucible of five centuries of Christian influence
and domination, there is one place in South America where the pre-Columbian
voice remains direct and pure, unfettered by any filter save the slow
turning of the world. In a bloodstained continent, the Indians of the Sierra
Nevada de Santa Marta were never fully vanquished by the Spaniards.
Descendants of an ancient civilization called the Tairona and numbering
perhaps 30,000 today, the Kogi, Arhuacos, and Wiwa long ago escaped death
and pestilence to settle in a mountain paradise that soars 6,000 metres
above the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia. There, over the course of 500
years, they were inspired by an utterly new dream of the earth, a revelation
that affirmed the existence of eternal laws that balanced the baroque
potential of the human mind and spirit with all the forces of nature. The
three peoples, separated by language but closely related by myth and memory,
share a common adaptation and the same fundamental religious convictions. To
this day they remain true to their ancient laws — the moral, ecological, and
spiritual dictates of the Serankua and the Great Mother — and are still led
and inspired by a ritual priesthood of
mamos
. They believe and
acknowledge explicitly that they are the guardians of the world, that their
rituals maintain the balance and fertility of life. They are fully aware
that their common ancestors, the Tairona, in 1591 waged fierce but futile
war against the invaders. In their mountain redoubt, lost to history for at
least three centuries, they chose deliberately to transform their
civilization into a devotional culture of peace.

When the mamos (or priests) speak, they instantly
reveal that their reference points are not of our world. They refer to
Columbus as if his arrival were a recent event. They talk of the Great
Mother as if she were alive — and for them she is, resonant and manifest in
every instant in their concept of
aluna
, a word that translates as
water, earth, matter, generative spirit, life force. What is important, what
has ultimate value, what gives life purpose is not what is measured and seen
but what exists in the realm of aluna, the abstract dimension of meaning.
The nine-layered universe, the nine-tiered temple, the nine months a child
spends in its mother’s womb are all reflections of divine creation, and each
informs the others. Thus a
liana
is also a snake, the mountains a model of the
cosmos. The conical hats worn by Arhuaco men represent the snowfields of the
sacred peaks. The hairs on a person’s body echo the forest trees that cover
the mountain flanks. Every element of nature is imbued with higher
significance, such that even the most modest of creatures can be seen as a
teacher, and the smallest grain of sand is a mirror of the universe.

In this cosmic scheme people are vital, for it is
only through the human heart and imagination that the Great Mother may
become manifest. For the Indians of the Sierra Nevada, people are not the
problem but the solution. They call themselves the Elder Brothers and
consider their mountains to be the “heart of the world.” We outsiders who
threaten the earth through our ignorance of the sacred law are dismissed as
the Younger Brothers.

In many ways the homeland of the Kogi, Arhuacos,
and Wiwa is indeed a microcosm of the world and thus metaphorically its
symbolic heart. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the highest coastal
mountain formation on earth. Geologically unconnected to the Andes, which
form the Colombian frontier with Venezuela to the east, it floats as its own
tectonic plate, triangular in outline, 150 kilometres to each side, attached
to the South American continent but separated from it by rift valleys on all
sides. Drained by thirty-five major watersheds, with a total area of more
than 20,000 square kilometres, the massif rises within 50 kilometres from
sea to summit ice. Within its undulating folds and deep valleys may be found
representatives of virtually every major ecosystem on the planet. There are
coral reefs and mangrove swamps on the coast, tropical rainforests on the
western flanks, deserts in the north, dry scrublands to the east, and
soaring above all in the clouds and blowing rain, the alpine tundra and the
snowfields where the priests go to make prayers and offerings. Close to the
equator, with twelve hours of daylight and twelve of darkness, with six
months of rain and six months without, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a
world in balance and harmony — exactly, the Indians maintain, as the Great
Mother intended it to be.

According to myth, the mountains were dreamed
into existence when the Great Mother spun her thoughts and conceived the
nine layers of the universe. To stabilize the world, she thrust her spindle
into its axis and lifted up the massif. Then, uncoiling a length of cotton
thread, she delineated the horizons of the civilized world, tracing a circle
around the base of the Sierra Nevada, which she declared to be the homeland
of her children.