Apu

The healer kneels in the dark with a handful of coca leaves and calls. In the Q’eros villages of the Vilcanota range in southern Peru, people say the answer comes within twenty or thirty minutes: a rush of cold air, the flutter of a bird somewhere in the blackness, a voice that has no body behind it. Whoever has come down from the heights is not to be looked at. “Close your eyes, son,” the healer tells the patient. A mountain has entered the room, and a mountain is not something to stare at.

Apu is the Quechua word for lord, and across the Andes it is the title of the great mountains: the snow peaks and ridges that stand over every village as its guardians, its landlords and, when provoked, its hungry neighbours. The peak is not a throne on which some god sits. For the people living beneath it, the peak is the lord, a being with a temper, a family and a history that also happens to be several kilometres of rock and ice. Other valleys use other words for the same beings. In Ayacucho they are wamanis, in Huánuco awkillu.

There is no single Apu. Every mountain of consequence is one, and they are ranked. Around Ayacucho the snow-capped Rasuwillka, at 4,954 metres, stands at the top of a pyramid of lesser wamanis, each governing a smaller share of the land, and the taller and more visible a peak, the wider the country that owes it respect. The Q’eros sort their mountains into three grades: awki or collana for the mighty ones, payan below them, and cayao for the small hills close to the houses. Smaller and gentler mountains are women. Larger and steeper ones are men. They marry, raise children and take lovers. Antipukara, called the son-in-law of the village, is married to Phalchani and keeps storms away. Ñañantiyoq is the female guardian of the village of Quico, and with her three sisters she looks after its people, its harvests and the fertility of its animals. Over all of this looms Ausangate, the great snow mountain, whom one Q’eros man called a great altomisayoq, a master healer, and the guardian of his whole family.

When an apu chooses to walk among people it rarely looks like a mountain. It comes as an elderly man with a white beard, or as a soldier, a policeman or a landowner. A spirit that wants to be obeyed in the southern Andes dresses as the kind of man who has always been obeyed there. At other times it arrives as a condor, an eagle or a pigeon. During one healing, a shaman in the dark saw only a white pigeon.

What the apus rule is nearly everything a herding and farming people depends on. They control the weather. They own the wild animals and the domestic ones, the plants and the stones, the minerals and precious stones in their flanks, and they decide whether animals, crops and people bear young. Mountains across the Andes were honoured to keep the water flowing. The Q’eros describe their apus as healers and as the guardians of shamans, and the bond between an apu and a healer can be intimate enough to begin with a sexual union during initiation. They also carry their own history. The Q’eros say that Ausangate, Wamanlipa and Wayruruni took part in the War of the Pacific, fought between 1879 and 1884.

The price of all this is attention. Offerings to the apus follow a careful plan. For the offering called haywakuy, the healer lays out a sheet of white paper as a plate, adds cotton for the upper world, and builds a small body for the patient out of coca leaves, breathing on them three times. The left side of the bundle belongs to the pachamamas, the earth mothers, and receives chickpeas and maize. The right side belongs to the apus: llama fat, incense and yellow maize. Before any of it begins, the coca leaves are read to learn what is wrong and who must be fed.

An apu left unfed is a dangerous landlord. It can take a person’s soul, or eat a person, draining the vitality out of them. Mockery is enough to offend one; in a Q’eros story a stone came down on those who laughed at a mountain. The apu Ankashchaki was once a predator that carried children and animals away into underground cities where time ran differently, so that one girl came home an old woman. Only offerings made again and again turned him gentle.

None of this is new. At Ñawinpukyo in the Ayacucho valley, a circular building with three concentric stone rings was put up between roughly 400 and 620 AD with its single doorway aimed straight at the snows of Rasuwillka, and its floor was left scattered with the bones of sacrificed camelids. The Inca took the practice to extraordinary heights, literally. More than two hundred mountains across their empire received ritual offerings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and thirty-four of those summits rise above 6,000 metres. On Llullaillaco, at 6,739 metres in the west of Argentina’s Salta province, Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti excavated three children in 1999: a girl of about fifteen, a girl of six and a boy of about seven, left on the summit with gold and spondylus-shell figurines, a headdress of white feathers and fine cloth. It was a capacocha, one of the most important ceremonies of the Inca calendar, meant to seal a relationship of exchange with the gods, the ancestors and the huacas.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the Andean chronicler who finished his illustrated history of Peru in 1615, lists the mountain powers quarter by quarter. The people of Condesuyo fed Coropuna with gold, silver, children of twelve, flamingo feathers, coca and shell. In Antisuyo the peaks Sawasiray and Pitusiray received two children and what he calls white rabbits. The Canchis buried gold, silver, a boy and a girl of twelve on the mountain Canchi Circa. He calls these mountains uacas and idols rather than apus; in his pages apo is still a title, as in capac apo amaro, the mighty lord serpent. He also records the moment the old order felt its end coming. Huayna Capac, the Inca ruler, found the huacas silent when he questioned them and ordered the lesser ones destroyed. The great mountain Pariacaca answered him at last: there was no longer any place for it to speak or to govern, because the strangers called Viracochas would come to rule. The Inca went away saddened.

Pariacaca was wrong about one thing. The mountains kept governing. An apu’s power is the power of whatever lies downhill from it: water, rain, hail, the herds on its pastures, the metal in its veins, the health of the children in its shadow, and in Q’eros the calling of the healers who speak with it. Its limit is that it lives inside an exchange. An apu is fed or it goes hungry, and a hungry one takes what it is owed, but it can be pacified by patient offering, as Ankashchaki was. It answers to a hierarchy of its own, where the elder speaks to the younger. And the power of the old uacas was never simple ownership of people. Huayna Capac could order the lesser ones destroyed, and it was the great mountain that told him who would rule next.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an apu in Andean mythology?

An apu is a sacred mountain of the Andes that is treated as a living person and a lord. The word apu means lord in Quechua, and communities in Peru regard their great peaks as guardians who control weather, herds, crops and health. Around Ayacucho the same beings are called wamanis, and in Huánuco awkillu.

Is Apu a single god?

No. Apu is a title shared by many mountains, and each important peak is its own apu. They are ranked by height and power, with snow peaks such as Ausangate or Rasuwillka above the smaller hills near villages. In the Q’eros communities of the Vilcanota range, smaller mountains are considered female and larger, steeper ones male.

How do people make offerings to the apus?

Offerings are made through ritual bundles and gifts that repay the apus for their protection. In the Q’eros haywakuy offering, a healer builds a bundle on white paper with cotton and coca leaves, and places llama fat, incense and yellow maize on the side meant for the apus. The healer reads coca leaves first to learn what the problem is and which apu must be fed.

What happens if an apu is offended?

An offended or neglected apu can send illness, accidents or infertility, or take a person’s soul. Q’eros accounts describe apus that eat people or drain their vitality, and one apu, Ankashchaki, carried children away into underground cities until repeated offerings calmed him. Even mockery of a mountain is said to bring punishment.

Did the Inca worship mountains?

Yes. The Inca made offerings on more than two hundred mountains, including thirty-four summits above 6,000 metres. On Llullaillaco, at 6,739 metres, archaeologists found three children left in a capacocha ceremony, and the chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala, writing in 1615, lists offerings of gold, silver and children to mountains such as Coropuna.

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