Pachamama

Also Known As: also Mama Pacha; Camac Pacha / Kamaq Pacha, “the earth that animates”; Mamapacha in the extirpation records
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Incan Mythology, Andes Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds the fertility of the ground itself, granting or withholding the maize, potatoes and herds that Andean life depends on.
Role in Mythos: She is the earth as a living mother who must be fed before she gives, addressed at every sowing and every harvest.
Relation to Humans: Farmers speak to her directly, pouring maize beer and burying coca, fat and food in the ground so that the year will not fail. She is also called on by women in childbirth, and the same reciprocity that feeds her is understood to bind her.

Before dawn on the first of August, in the high country between Cusco and Jujuy, someone digs a hole. It is not deep. Into it go coca leaves, a splash of maize beer, cooked food, sweets, sometimes wine, sometimes fat that has been burned until the smoke goes greasy and bitter and clings to everybody’s coat. The hole is called a mouth. The ground is cold enough that the offering steams.

That gesture is the oldest continuously documented religious act in the Andes, and the being it feeds is not quite what the English name suggests. Pacha in Quechua does not mean soil. It carries world, ground, time, an era, the whole of what surrounds a person, and mama is mother, so the compound stretches wider than Mother Earth: mother of the ground and of the age you are standing in. The Spanish had no word for it and settled for madre tierra, and the shorthand stuck so hard that four centuries later it went into two national constitutions.

The conquistadors walked straight past her. The soldiers who wrote the first accounts of Peru catalogued the gold in the Coricancha and the figures of women they found there, and said nothing about the earth cult at all, because it had no temple to loot and no priesthood to interrogate. It happened in fields. Agustín de Zárate, writing in 1555, is among the first to put it plainly, reporting that they held the sun for a father and the earth for a mother. López de Gómara noticed the same year that when Andean people swore an oath they touched the ground and looked up at the sun. Cristóbal de Molina the Almagrist had already recorded, in 1552, the odd and precise formulation that the people did reverence to the earth because they said it had a mother, and that they had made her an image and shrines of her own.

The name itself surfaces in the 1560s, in the reports of Juan Polo de Ondegardo, who was the first to write it down and who noted that among the chosen girls of the empire, some were given to the Sun and some were given to Pachamama. From him it passes almost word for word into Martín de Murúa and later into Bernabé Cobo, which is worth knowing: much of the colonial record on her is chroniclers copying chroniclers. Murúa preserved a distinction the others flattened, separating camac pacha, the worked and fertile ground, from pacha mama, the earth that has never been cultivated. Kamaq means the one who animates. The earth was not simply alive. It was the thing doing the animating.

The rites Ondegardo describes are recognisable to anyone who has stood at a corpachada in the Puna. At ploughing, sowing and harvest, of maize, potatoes, quinoa, yucas and sweet potatoes, they offered burnt fat, coca, guinea pigs and lambs, and did all of it drinking and dancing. Beforehand they fasted from meat, salt and chilli. Pregnant and menstruating women were kept out of the planted fields, the fertility of one being held dangerous to the fertility of the other. And in the ordinary way of things, a man about to drink would flick the first drops off his fingers toward the sun, the fire and the ground, asking for peace and a quiet life. That flick is still performed across the Andes every day, by people ordering a beer.

She had furniture. In the middle of a field the Andean farmer set a long stone upright, called chichic or huanca, and Pablo José de Arriaga, hunting idolatries in 1621, learned that it was also called chacrayoc, the lord of the field. Cobo understood what he was looking at and said so: the stone served as her altar and as her statue, and the more fertile the plot, the greater the respect it was given. Ondegardo logged one of her shrines on the seventh ceque of the Antisuyu, a flat place called Ayllipampa, where the goddess Earth was offered small women’s clothing. Miniature garments, buried in a field, so the ground would keep giving.

What the earth produced out of the ordinary went back to her. A doubled ear of maize, a potato grown into an impossible shape, the first fruits of unploughed land: these were called zaramama and llallahua, kept in a corner of the house, wrapped, worshipped, and above all not eaten, even in a hungry year. Arriaga describes the best of them as dolls built from maize stalks and dressed like women, in the anaco and lliclla with silver pins at the shoulder, credited with the power to bear more maize the way a mother bears children.

The Inca state took her up too, without ever centralising her. At the August festival of the Citua, four days of sacrifice, the fourth was given to the Moon and the Earth alone, and Cristóbal de Molina the Cusqueñan wrote down the prayer, one of the very few pieces of Inca liturgy to survive in Quechua: Pachamama, hold your son the Inca upon you, keep him quiet and at peace. Another version calls her by a second name and asks her to take him into her arms and hold him by the hand. The emperor, ruling from a city of stone walls, asked the ground to carry him like a child.

Her cosmology is thin because it was never a story. She has almost no myth cycle. Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, sketching the Andean universe in 1613, drew her as a circle and three mountains with a river coming down to water the fields, and gave her a single genealogical moment, naming her as the mother of Manco Capac’s line. That is nearly all the narrative there is. She has no adventures, no rivals, no death.

That is exactly why she outlived everything else. The extirpators could burn a mummy and pull down a sun temple. They could not confiscate a field. The cult had no institution to decapitate, and it survived inside Catholic practice, often folded into the Virgin, and came out the other side still eating coca and fat.

Her power is fertility, plain and specific: crops, herds, the safe delivery of children, which Hernando de Santillán in 1572 recorded as her particular office, saying that women in labour made sacrifices to her because she was their special advocate. Her limits are the other half of the same arrangement. She is owed. She is understood to open her mouth in August, hungry after the dry season, and what she gives afterwards is answerable to what she was given first. She is also relentlessly local, attached to this plot, this stone, this household, which means devotion in the abstract does not reach her. And the newest chapter of her story has a date and an author: in 2008 Ecuador wrote the rights of Pachamama into its constitution, and in 2010 Bolivia passed a Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, turning a goddess who was fed in a hole in the ground into a legal person with standing in court. She is still being negotiated with. The terms have simply moved indoors.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pachamama?

Pachamama is the earth mother of the Andes, worshipped by Quechua and Aymara peoples across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and northern Argentina. Her name combines pacha, meaning earth, world, time or cosmos, with mama, mother, so it means something broader than Mother Earth. She governs the fertility of crops, herds and human birth.

What offerings are made to Pachamama?

Coca leaves, maize beer, burnt fat, food, sweets and drink are buried or burned for her, traditionally at ploughing, sowing and harvest. Colonial records from the 1560s list burnt fat, coca, guinea pigs and lambs offered while drinking and dancing, and much the same is offered today at the August ceremonies. The everyday version is the ch’alla, flicking or pouring the first drops of a drink onto the ground before drinking.

Why is Pachamama celebrated in August?

August is when Pachamama is said to be hungry and thirsty after the dry season, and to open her mouth to be fed before the new agricultural cycle begins. The first of August is the main day of offering across the southern Andes. The timing is old: the Inca festival of the Citua fell in August, and its fourth day was dedicated to the Moon and the Earth.

Does Pachamama have a physical form?

No source describes her as a figure with a face or body. The Inca made their other gods in gold and silver, but the chroniclers record the Earth represented in clay, and above all as a long stone set upright in the middle of a field, which served as both her altar and her image. A 1613 Andean diagram draws her as a circle with three mountains and a river.

Is Pachamama still worshipped today?

Yes. She is one of the few pre-Hispanic Andean deities to receive open, widespread offerings in the present day, largely because her cult lived in fields and households rather than in temples the Spanish could destroy. Ecuador named the rights of Pachamama in its 2008 constitution and Bolivia passed a Law of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010.