Ekeko

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At noon on the twenty-fourth of January, in the steep streets of La Paz, a shopper stops at a stall hung with a thousand small things. She buys a bundle no larger than a fist: a sheaf of miniature banknotes printed like real ones, a house the size of a matchbox, a tin truck, a folded paper diploma with her own name on it, a grain of rice made to stand for a sack of rice. She waits for the stroke of the hour, because the wish bought at exactly midday is held to carry farthest. Then she takes the bundle to a yatiri, an Aymara ritual specialist working from a low table at the edge of the fair, who passes it through the smoke of burning herbs and tips a splash of alcohol to the ground for the earth, and speaks over it. An hour’s walk away, at the cathedral on the Plaza Murillo, a priest is blessing the same kind of goods with holy water at the same hour. The blessed miniatures are then pinned to a little figure — a fat, smiling, mustachioed man in a knitted cap, a lit cigarette burning in a hole in his mouth — so that within the year the small things will summon the large ones. The figure is Ekeko, and the whole apparatus of abundance turns on him.

The name, and the seed of the thing

Ekeko is the household god of abundance, prosperity, and good fortune of the Aymara, the people of the high Titicaca basin and the Bolivian and Peruvian altiplano. In their own language he is Iqiqu; the Quechua of the same country call him ekjakjo; the Spanish spelling Ekeko is the one that traveled. The name goes back, by most reckonings, to an older Eqaqo or Ekhako, a lord of fortune and plenty of the region the Inca would later call Qullasuyu, the southern quarter of their empire. A gloss often repeated in the guidebooks makes the name mean “dwarf,” and the figure’s short, squat body seems to invite it; but the etymology is popular rather than secure, and is better left as one folk reading among others than passed off as the word’s true root.

He is not an Inca god, and the distinction matters. The sun of the imperial cult and the creator behind it belonged to a state, a priesthood, and a gold-sheathed temple at the center of a capital; when that empire fell, its state powers fell with it. Ekeko was never a god of empire. He is Aymara and domestic, a power of the house and the household economy, and tradition and most scholarship trace him behind the Inca altogether, to the older horizon of Tiwanaku — the monumental city on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca whose great phase runs across the second half of the first millennium and whose culture had waned some centuries before the Inca rose, leaving the Aymara as its heirs. Bolivian researchers who have looked for his ancestry — Ernesto Cavour among the collectors of the small stone and metal figures, Carlos Ponce Sanginés among the archaeologists — have pointed to squat anthropomorphic statuettes, some humped, some with the grain and the phallic emphasis of a fertility charm, as the pre-colonial kin of the colonial Ekeko. In the mythic background stands Tunupa, the Tiwanaku wanderer and shaper of the land, a creator-and-trickster figure of the altiplano with whom the little luck-god shares a family resemblance.

To understand Ekeko one has to understand the illa. In Andean thought a small effigy — a stone shaped like a llama, a miniature of a house, an amulet the size of a thumb — is not a toy or a token but a seed: the generative double of a full-size thing, its concentrated life, so that to hold and honor the miniature is to draw the abundance it stands for. A carved stone llama kept in the corral is the illa of the herd, and it is understood to make the herd increase. This is the deep logic beneath the whole January fair, and beneath Ekeko himself, who is at once the giver of the plenty and, in his oldest form, an illa — the small carried thing that summons the large one. The whole grammar of Alasitas — one buys the little to get the big — is the illa made into a public rite.

A Bolivian figure of Ekeko, the household god of abundance, loaded with miniature sacks, foodstuffs, banknotes, and household goods. Phdela, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The laden man

Ekeko is imaged as a short, plump, cheerful man in the dress of the altiplano — a poncho, a chullo, the eared knitted cap — mustachioed and open-mouthed in a grin, arms a little spread. What makes the figure unmistakable is what hangs on him. He is loaded, from shoulder to knee, with the miniature inventory of everything a family could want: small sacks of grain, bundles of food, dried goods, coca, and salt; toy kitchenware, pots, tools; folded banknotes and coins; a little house; a truck or a car; sacks of coins; and, in the versions made for a modern household, a paper university diploma, a passport, a cell phone. He is not a god one prays to for the soul. He is a god of the coming year’s provision, and he wears the provision on his body like a walking storehouse.

The modern statuettes carry one further detail: a small round opening at the mouth, made to hold a lit cigarette. The cigarette is offered to Ekeko for his pleasure, and it is also read. Set it burning and watch: if it draws well and burns clean down, the omen is favorable and the god is content; if it goes out or smokes badly, the reading is poor. The offering and the divination are the same small act, and they belong to the wider Andean grammar of feeding a power tobacco and alcohol and reading its response — the same grammar by which Pachamama is given the first splash of every drink.

His day, and his season, is the fair called Alasitas — the name from an Aymara word for “buy me.” It opens on the twenty-fourth of January in La Paz and runs, in the UNESCO description of the practice, for “two or three weeks,” with parallel fairs across the Bolivian altiplano; the Peruvian Aymara of Puno keep their own Alasitas, held there in early May. For those weeks the city fills with stalls of miniatures, and the miniatures are exact: not generic toys but scale models of the specific thing desired, down to counterfeit dollars and euros, tiny bricks and bags of cement for a house not yet built, model degrees in a named profession.

The ritual has a precise order, and it is worth setting down because its coherence is the whole point. First the object of the wish is sought out and bought in miniature — the thing itself, reduced. Then the miniature is taken to be consecrated. The consecration is the work of Andean ritual specialists: the Aymara yatiri, the amawt’a, in some quarters the herbalist kallawaya, who — as the UNESCO inscription puts it — begin the fair by asking “permission from the ancestral Andean deities with an offering to the Ekeko,” and who bless a person’s miniatures with smoke, coca, and the ch’alla, the libation of alcohol tipped to the earth. What passes in the specialist’s own reading of the signs belongs to the specialist and to those who consult him; it is named here at the distance the public record keeps, not opened as a procedure. And the same goods may be, and very often also are, carried to the Catholic Church: “at mid-day on 24 January,” the Alasitas record notes, “the Catholic Church joins in the celebration by blessing the gifts at the main cathedral in La Paz.” Andean ritualist and cathedral bless the same objects within an hour of each other, and the buyer sees no contradiction in seeking both.

Once blessed, the miniature is given — either laid on Ekeko himself, pinned into his load, or handed as a gift to another person, since the belief holds that the recipient of the little version receives the real object in the course of the following year. That is the engine of the whole fair: the small begets the large; the seed carried and blessed and given draws down the harvest. It is not a confused superstition dressed up as commerce. It is a working theology of plenty — the illa-logic made civic — and it lives openly beside the Mass rather than under it.

Miniatures on sale at the Feria de las Alasitas in La Paz, Bolivia, on 24 January. PsamatheM, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The siege, and the moving of the fair

The date is not arbitrary, and its origin is a hinge of Andean-Catholic history. The older abundance-and-harvest fair of the region fell in October, in the rhythm of the agricultural year. It was moved to the twenty-fourth of January in 1781, during the great indigenous uprising in which the Aymara leader Túpac Katari laid siege to La Paz. In the extremity of the siege the Spanish governor, Sebastián de Segurola, re-established the fair and shifted it to January “as a gesture of gratitude towards Our Lady of Peace” — Nuestra Señora de La Paz, the city’s Marian patron — for the city’s survival. The move fused an Aymara rite of plenty to a Catholic date of thanksgiving, and the fusion held. What resulted is not a pagan festival with a Christian veneer, nor a Christian one with a pagan stain, but a single event addressed at once to Ekeko and to the Virgin — the living syncretism of the altiplano, rendered here as the working reality it is.

A popular legend carries the same siege into the god’s own origin story. The Bolivian writer Antonio Díaz Villamil set the Ekeko’s beginning in the year of the siege, in the tale of Paulita Tintaya, an Aymara servant, and her lover Isidoro Choquehuanca. In the telling, Isidoro leaves Paulita a small Ekeko figure for her protection; through the hunger of the blockade he manages to reach her, leaving food beside the little statue week by week, so that Paulita and her mistress are kept alive. The provision that appears beside the figure is the whole meaning of Ekeko compressed into a story: the god who fills the house. The legend is literary and comparatively recent, and is best held as such — a modern retelling that gives a well-loved shape to a much older cult, not a chronicle of the god’s actual descent.

That older cult had to survive a long suppression to reach the fair at all. Under the colonial campaigns the Spanish church called the extirpación de idolatrías — the extirpation of idolatry, their term and their frame, not the tradition’s — the open veneration of Andean powers was hunted as idol-worship, the shrines broken and devotion punished. A small domestic god of plenty, worn on a shelf and fed a cigarette, was exactly the kind of thing the extirpators meant to root out. Ekeko did not vanish; he went quiet. The cult survived domestic and half-hidden through the worst of the campaigns, and re-emerged in colonial dress — the poncho, the little European-styled hat, the banknotes — folded into the new January date and the Virgin’s thanksgiving, kept in the house where no inquisitor’s hammer could easily reach it. He is one of the powers that outlasted the effort to erase him.

The stone that went to Bern, and came home

One object made the god’s colonial afterlife into an international incident. A stone statuette long known as the “Illa del Ekeko” — carved in the older Pucará style associated with the Titicaca region — was taken from near Tiwanaku in 1858 by the Swiss naturalist and diplomat Johann Jakob von Tschudi, who by the persistent legend obtained it in trade for a bottle of cognac. It passed down in his family and came, in 1929, to the Historical Museum of Bern, where the small stone figure sat among the antiquities for the better part of a century, a fragment of the altiplano lodged in the Swiss capital.

Bolivia asked for it back. The formal claim was lodged in February 2013, the government arguing that the piece was the Illa del Ekeko, a figure of national and cultural weight, and that it had left the country improperly. The Bern museum did not simply concede: it questioned the identification, suggesting the statuette might represent a water deity rather than Ekeko — a genuine scholarly doubt, since a small ancient Andean stone figure does not come labeled. The diplomacy ran through 2014; the Bolivian foreign minister pressed the case in Bern in the spring, and at the end of October the museum agreed. In November 2014 the statuette was removed from the Bern collection and returned to Bolivia. Whether the object depicts Ekeko or a lord of the waters, its journey home turned it into something else again: an emblem of cultural restitution, of a formerly colonized country reclaiming a sacred thing carried off in the age of the naturalist-collectors. That decolonial thread runs through the modern story of Ekeko in a way it does not run through the imperial sun-cult — a small god, but one whose repatriation carried real national feeling.

A living god, and his souvenirs

In 2017 the practice around him gained a formal standing: UNESCO inscribed “Ritual journeys in La Paz during Alasita” on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, describing a rite that “begin[s] on 24 January and last[s] two or three weeks,” in which participants procure the good-luck miniatures “associated with Ekeko, the city’s beneficent god of fertility,” have them consecrated by the Andean ritualists or blessed by the Church, and — crucially — transmit the whole practice “naturally within families,” children walking the fair beside their parents. The listing records what is plainly true on the ground: Alasitas is a mass civic event, kept across social classes, handed down as ordinary inheritance rather than preserved as folklore.

The same modernity that made him heritage also made him a commodity. The miniatures have run far past grain and tools into the desires of a globalized altiplano: fake dollar bills by the wad, model passports and foreign visas, luxury cars, apartment blocks, university degrees in the professions that promise escape. The fair has commercialized and touristified heavily; Ekeko himself is molded by the thousand as a souvenir and a mascot, sold to visitors as a fat little good-luck man, detached from the yatiri’s smoke and the cathedral’s water and the season that gives him meaning. It is easy, from outside, to file him there — beside the troll dolls and the lucky charms, a kitsch figurine with a cigarette gimmick.

That filing is the one thing to refuse. The souvenir Ekeko is a reception, and a thin one; the god is not the souvenir. He is a functioning household deity, honored now, in the present tense, by living Aymara and Quechua families who buy the miniature of the thing they need, carry it to a ritual specialist and often to a priest as well, feed him a cigarette and watch how it burns, and give the small thing away so that the large one will come. The plump laden man on the shelf is not a relic of a broken faith; he is the working center of a theology of abundance that survived the extirpators, absorbed the Virgin’s January feast, sent a stone ambassador to Switzerland and brought it home, and still opens every year at the stroke of noon. Where the empire’s gods needed a temple and a state to stand, Ekeko needed only a house and a fist-sized bundle of the year’s desires — and so he is still standing, cigarette lit, waiting for the smoke to draw well.

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