Pachamama

← Encyclopedia

Before the cup is raised, the first of it goes to the ground. In a highland kitchen, at a market stall in Puno or Oruro, on a truck-stop bench or at the black mouth of a mine, someone fills a glass with chicha — the cloudy beer fermented from maize — and tips the first splash into the dirt before drinking the rest. The spilled drops are neither waste nor accident. They are the ch’alla, the small libation by which the earth is given the first of the drink because the earth is thirsty and must drink first. Cane spirit, wine, a bottle of soda opened at a bus stop: the opening measure belongs to the one who owns the ground. The gesture costs a second and is made, across the central Andes, countless times a day.

The one being fed is Pachamama. She has no temple and has never needed one, because she is not lodged in anything that could hold her: she is the ground itself — the soil, the field, the pastured slope, the mountainside — and a house is not built for what one is standing on. She was here before the empire that the Inca built, she outlasted its fall, and she has never stopped being fed. Where the gold Sun-temple was stripped and the mummified kings hunted down, the small daily debt to the earth had nothing a conqueror could pull down, and so it simply went on.

The mother of pacha

The name is a compound of two words shared by the two great living languages of the Andes, Quechua and Aymara. Mama is “mother,” and past the literal sense it names the generative feminine principle — the power that brings forth and nourishes. Pacha is the harder and larger word. It carries at once world, earth, and ground, and also time, era, and the totality in which things happen; scholars reach for “cosmos” and “spacetime” and “world-moment” to render a term that folds the spatial and the temporal into a single thing (Pacha in Inca mythology). To call her Pachamama is therefore not quite to say “Mother Earth” in the flat modern sense of soil and planet. She is the mother of the fertile pacha itself: of the living ground that is the dirt underfoot, the field that yields, and the turning of the seasons and the years at once. Andean speakers hold the word wider than the English translation admits — closer to Mother of the World and of Time.

She belongs to the middle world. The Andean cosmos is ordered in three: Hanan Pacha, the world above; Ukhu Pacha (or Uku Pacha), the inner world below; and between them Kay Pacha, “this pacha,” the here-and-now of people, animals, and plants. Pachamama is the great power of Kay Pacha, the horizontal and present member of the order — not the height of the sky nor the depth beneath, but the surface on which the living stand and plant. She is a waka (huaca) in the Andean sense: a place or presence where the sacred concentrates and can be addressed. In her case the waka is not a spring or a worked stone but the whole face of the ground.

How she reaches the written record is worth stating plainly, because the Andes kept no alphabetic writing before the conquest; the record was the knotted cord, the sung and walked memory, and the landscape itself. She surfaces in the chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and those must be read critically, for they were written after the conquest, by Spanish and mestizo and indigenous hands, often to describe in order to condemn. The Cuzco priest Cristóbal de Molina, called el Cuzqueño, who spoke Quechua and set down the festivals and prayers of the Inca cult in his Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas (written in the 1570s), records the earth addressed among the powers of Tawantinsuyu; later writers rank her alongside Wiraqocha the Creator, Inti the Sun, Illapa the Thunder, and Mama Quilla the Moon. The Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, whose Historia del Nuevo Mundo was completed in 1653, documents Andean earth-veneration at length, and the indigenous chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala treats the Andean world-order in his Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno of about 1615. Read against one another and against the living practice, they agree that the earth was fed; they are less exact about what, precisely, she was.

That imprecision is itself a scholarly matter. Some students of the Andes caution that a single, unified, pan-Andean “goddess” — one Pachamama presiding over the whole range from Ecuador to Argentina — is partly a colonial and modern tidying of what may have been many local earth- and place-powers, each ground with its own mother, gathered under one name by chroniclers and later by the nation-state (La Pachamama en la época incaica y post-incaica, in the Revista Española de Antropología Americana). What is not contested is the shape of the relationship on the ground, then and now.

She does not stand alone. Her constant companions are the mountain-lords, the male powers of the high peaks: apu in Quechua, the word meaning simply “lord,” called wamani in the Ayacucho country and, among the Aymara, achachila or mallku — one pan-Andean kind of presence under regional names. The apus own the snow that becomes the rivers; they watch the weather and the herds; they are addressed in parallel with her, and no offering to the earth is complete without a word to the mountains above it. On the island of Amantaní her pairing is written into the land itself, as will be seen. The Quechua and the Aymara hold her across the old span of the empire — southern Peru and highland Bolivia above all, reaching into Ecuador, northern Chile, and the northwest of Argentina.

Ayni, and the return

The principle that governs the whole relationship has a name: ayni, reciprocity. Nothing in the Andean world is given for nothing, and nothing is taken without a return. Pachamama gives the maize and the potatoes, the water, the grass that feeds the llama and the alpaca, the animals themselves, the plain fact of a living. In exchange she must be given back — fed, thanked, kept in balance. Her offerings are not bribes and not sentiment; they are returns, the settling of an account that runs continuously between the ground and the people who eat from it. If the giving flows only one way the balance breaks, and a broken balance is felt as failed crops, sick herds, hail, sickness, or worse. She is generous and nurturing, and for the same reason she is exacting: neglected or offended, the earth that feeds can also withhold. The devotion owed her is therefore overwhelmingly practical and in the present tense — not a creed to be professed but a debt to be kept current.

The ch’alla at the rim of the cup is the smallest form of the payment (the daily libation of chicha). The gravest and most formal is the offering bundle, known in Quechua as the haywarisqa — the thing handed over, the presentation — and in plain Spanish as the pago a la tierra, the payment to the earth; across much of the southern Andes it is called the despacho, the dispatch sent to her. It is assembled with care on a sheet of paper or a woven cloth, layered rather than heaped. At its heart are coca leaves, and the elementary unit of the whole is the k’intu: a fan of three chosen, unbroken leaves, held to the mouth and breathed upon — the breath, the samay, carrying the intention into them — and then offered. To the coca are added maize and seeds, animal fat and wine, sweets and small sugar figures, sometimes a dried llama fetus and other elements, each carrying a meaning in the finished pattern. When the bundle is complete it is burned or buried, so that the earth may take it in as food is taken in — consumed, and gone into her.

The bundles are not made by just anyone. They are laid by ritual specialists — the Quechua paqu and the Aymara yatiri, women and men understood to be marked for the office, sometimes by a survived lightning-strike, and trained to read the coca and to speak to the earth and the mountains on a household’s behalf. What passes between the specialist and the powers — the divinatory reading of the leaves, the shaping of a life bent to this work — belongs to those who hold it, and is named here at the distance the public record keeps rather than opened as instruction. The point that matters for the shape of the religion is that the mediation exists at all: the earth is addressed by those who know how to address her, and the knowing is a vocation, not a technique.

A bundle prepared and set alight as a payment of thanks to Pachamama; the smoke carries the offering to the earth. Casi metro y medio, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The month the earth opens

August is her month. In the coldest, driest weeks of the southern winter, before the ground is broken for planting, the earth is said to open — to be hungry, and in her hunger quick to take offense and quick to receive. This is when the offerings intensify and when the danger of neglect runs highest, and the month gathers to a head on the first of August, kept across the Andes as the day of Pachamama. On and around that day the ground is fed first: a hole is opened so that she can receive directly, the first food and the first drink are given to her, and the coming agricultural year is secured by squaring the account before it begins. Lighter observances fall on the first Friday of each month, and again at Carnival, on the Martes de ch’alla — the Tuesday when houses, fields, vehicles, and mines are sprinkled and thanked (the August and first-Friday rites). The logic of the month is the whole religion in miniature: the earth is a body with appetites and moods, and the human task is to feed her well, and on time, and before taking.

Local authorities make a payment to the earth during Carnival at Orurillo, in the Peruvian altiplano — the Martes de ch’alla, when the ground is fed and thanked. BERNARDO VALENTIN, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mother Earth and Father Earth

The complementarity that pairs her with the mountain-lords is written, on one island, into the ground itself. On Amantaní, in the Peruvian waters of Lake Titicaca, the land rises to two summits, and the two are named Pachamama and Pachatata — Mother Earth and Father Earth. Each is crowned with an ancient temple, and the ruins on both summits are of two ages: Inca, and older, from the Tiwanaku horizon that shaped the Titicaca basin centuries before the Inca came. The temples stand generally closed through the year and open for a single January feast, when the island’s people divide, each half gathering at its own summit, and a race is run between the peaks; a victory for Pachamama is read as the promise of a good harvest to come. The naming holds the Andean world’s balance in plain sight: the feminine and the masculine of the earth, mother and father, set on facing heights and honored together, the surface below and the lords above made one landscape. She is not, in this world, a solitary goddess presiding from a height. She is one half of a pair, and the ground on which the pair is met.

What could not be pulled down

When Pizarro’s men took Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 and executed him the following year, and the Spanish went on to strip the gold from the Coricancha and, through the seventeenth-century campaigns the church called the extirpación de idolatrías, to hunt down the wak’as and burn the offerings, they meant to end exactly this kind of devotion. The word idolatry is theirs and marks their frame, not the tradition’s: to the Andean, a spring or a peculiar stone or a peak was a place where the sacred gathered and could be addressed; to the extirpator it was an idol to be smashed. The shrines that had a fixed form — the effigies, the ancestral bundles, the temples — could be broken, and many were.

Pachamama could not be reached in the same way, and the reason lay in what she was. There was nothing to smash: no image, no sanctuary, no single place. She was the ground the extirpator himself walked on, and the ch’alla that fed her needed no building and left no ruin. Where the monumental cult of the empire was pulled down, the household debt to the earth bent and continued — and it continued in part by folding into the Catholic year that ran alongside it. Through the colonial centuries her veneration drew together with devotion to the Virgin Mary: the Mother of God and the mother of the earth pulled toward one another until offerings and Marian feasts could shelter one within the other, and the earth-cult survived in plain sight. That braiding endures. In the altiplano the earth-mother and the Virgin — the Virgin of Candelaria above all, whose great festival fills Puno each February — are woven into one field of address, and worshipers move between “Mama” and “the Virgin” without feeling a contradiction. The two are not, on the ground, two religions; the same communities that carry the Virgin in procession still feed Pachamama in August, and neither is felt to displace the other. Where the sober history of the conquest and the extirpation belongs in full is with the empire it broke; here it is the pressure the earth-cult survived, and the measure of how little of her there was to break.

Fed today

She is not a survival spoken of in the past tense, and she is not confined to the village. In the twenty-first century her name entered the language of the state. Ecuador’s constitution of 2008, approved by referendum, became the first in the world to grant enforceable rights to nature — and it named nature Pacha Mama, binding the recognition to the Andean principle of sumak kawsay, the good way of living. Two years later Bolivia, under its first indigenous president, passed the Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (Ley 071 of December 2010), which defines Mother Earth as a collective subject of public interest and grants her enumerated rights — to life, to water, to clean air, to equilibrium, to restoration — asserted on her behalf by human representatives; a fuller framework law followed in 2012. Whether the translation of an earth-being into the grammar of legal rights honors her or domesticates her is fairly debated, and debated most sharply by indigenous critics who note that governments built on gas, mining, and export could not easily let a river sue them. What the debate registers accurately is that the name still carries weight enough to be reached for.

Her name travels now in ways she cannot govern. The tourist economies of the Sacred Valley sell “Pachamama ceremonies” to visitors, and a global New Age reinvention markets her as a soft planetary goddess with the debt, the danger, and the coldest hungry month all filed away. These are receptions, and thin ones, worth naming and setting aside because they are not the thing. The thing is smaller and much older and still going on. On the first of August the offerings go into the opened ground across the highlands; before the next glass is drunk in a market town the first of it will strike the dirt; the paqu and the yatiri will lay another bundle to be burned or buried. Millions of Quechua and Aymara keep the account current with the earth they stand on and the mountains that own the water. Pachamama, who was never lodged in anything that could be pulled down, is fed today as she was fed before there was an empire to fall — first, and by right, and in the present tense.

→ Related: Inti · Viracocha · Mama Quilla · Illapa · Cusco · Coricancha · Lake Titicaca · Pachacamac · The Inca · The Quechua · The Aymara