Pachamama

The hole is not deep, and it is not a grave. Someone opens it in the middle of a tilled plot before the sun clears the cordillera, and the earth that comes out is cold enough to steam. Into it go whole coca leaves, each one breathed on first. Then cooked food, then chicha poured until the soil goes dark around the rim, then fat burned on a flat stone until the smoke turns greasy and bitter and gets into everybody’s coat. In the north of Argentina the hole has a name that explains the entire religion. It is the mouth of the Pacha.

Pacha does not mean soil. In Quechua it carries ground, world, an era, the whole extent of what a person is standing on and standing in, so the compound with mama reaches a good deal further than Mother Earth ever will in English. That width is part of why the invaders could not see the cult at all. The soldiers who wrote the first accounts of Peru inventoried the gold of Cusco and the figures of women they found in the Coricancha and said nothing whatever about the earth. There was no temple to sack and no priesthood to interrogate. It happened in fields.

The first line that gets close arrives in 1555, in Agustín de Zárate’s history, where Atahualpa answers the friar Valverde by saying that he knew of nobody who had created anything except the sun, whom they held for a father, and the earth for a mother. Three years before that, Cristóbal de Molina, the one called the Almagrist, had written the odder and more exact thing: that they worshipped the Earth because they said it had a mother, and had made her an image and shrines of her own. Francisco López de Gómara, also writing in 1555, sorted the whole business by trade. The fisherman worships a shark. The hunter worships a lion or a bear or a fox. The farmer worships water and earth. All of them, he says, hold sun, moon and earth for their chief gods and count the earth the mother of all things, and when they swear an oath they touch the ground and look up at the sun.

The name itself belongs to Juan Polo de Ondegardo, a lawyer with an unusual appetite for detail and the first chronicler known to have written it down. Among the girls taken out of every province at eight or nine and raised in the house of the chosen, he records, some were given to the service of the Sun and some to the service of Pachamama. In his report on how the Inca state worked he lists her among the powers with land and flocks set aside for them: the Creator, the Sun, the thunder they called Chuquilla, and the Pachamama, each with herds whose wool was shorn and carried to Cusco for the sacrifices. What Polo wrote, Martín de Murúa reproduced almost word for word two decades later, and Bernabé Cobo copied again a century after that. A great deal of the colonial record on her is chroniclers reading chroniclers, and Murúa’s late version quietly introduces a split the earlier reports do not have, filing the worked and fertile ground under camac pacha and reserving pacha mama for ground that has never been broken.

Polo also logged the calendar of it. At breaking ground, ploughing, sowing and harvesting 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 off the sown fields, the one fertility being held dangerous to the other. And in the ordinary run of an afternoon, a man about to drink would flick the first of the chicha off his fingers toward the sun, or the fire, or the ground, and ask for peace, life and contentment. The flick outlived the empire. It is still performed daily across the Andes by people who have just been handed a beer.

She had furniture. In the middle of the plot the farmer stood a long stone upright, and Pablo José de Arriaga, hunting idolatries in the highlands in 1621, learned its names: chichic, or huanca, and also chacrayoc, the lord of the field, because the field was thought to have been the stone’s and its increase to be the stone’s business. Cobo understood precisely what he was looking at and wrote that it served as her altar and as her statue, and that the more fertile the ground, the greater the respect the stone was given. Anello Oliva, an Italian Jesuit writing around 1630, supplies the practical logic: stones like that were believed to hold the moisture in the soil. He also mentions what else was set at the edge of a plot to keep thieves out. Armadillo shells. Anyone who looked at them expected to fill with leprosy, and nobody went in.

Whatever the ground produced out of the ordinary went back to her and was not eaten. A doubled ear of maize, a potato grown into an impossible shape, the first fruits of land that had never been sown. Cristóbal de Albórnoz calls the stone and silver copies of them mamaçara and mamapapa; Murúa and Cobo record the misshapen potatoes as llallahuas, adored and kissed and danced around. Arriaga’s account is the fullest and the strangest. The finest of the maize ones were dolls built out of maize stalks and dressed as women, in the ánaco and the lliclla with silver pins at the shoulder, and the whole point of them was that as a mother they had the power to conceive and bear much maize. There were potato equivalents, the axomamas. Oliva says the best cobs hung in the house, and however hungry the household got, nobody would go near them.

Her shrines sat where you would expect. Walking the ceque lines that radiated out of Cusco, Polo put one on the seventh line of Antisuyu, called Yacanora: a flat place named Ayllipampa where a field lay, which they said was the goddess Earth called Pachamama, and to which they offered small women’s clothing. Miniature garments, buried in a field, so the ground would keep giving. Albórnoz logged another called Cusicancha pachamama, a house where Tupac Inca Yupanqui had been born.

José de Acosta, reaching in 1590 for something a Spanish reader could hold, wrote that they adored the Earth, whom they called Pachamama, in the way the ancients had celebrated the goddess Tellus. The state festival was the Citua, held in the month of August they called Coya Raymi, four days long, opened by putting the strangers and the sick and the dogs out of the city while four hundred armed men ran to the four quarters shouting at the diseases to leave. The fourth day belonged to the Moon and the Earth alone. Cristóbal de Molina, this one the Cusco priest and a fluent Quechua speaker, took down the words, and they are among the very few pieces of Inca liturgy that survive in the language they were spoken in. Pachamama casillacta quispillacta capac ynca huahuayquicta marcari atalli. Mother Earth, runs his own translation, hold your son the Inca upon you, quiet and at peace. At the April Capacocha the same prayer carries one more name in it, Kuirumama, and the priests gave part of the sacrifice to the sky and part to the ground. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, listing what the Inca courts punished, puts her among the things it was a crime to insult, alongside the sun, the wak’as and the willka.

Her cosmology is thin because she was never a story. Garcilaso de la Vega grew up in Cusco speaking Quechua and wrote nine hundred pages about his mother’s people, and gives her one clause: they worshipped the earth and called her Mother, because she gave them her fruits. Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, sketching the Andean universe on a single page in 1613, drew her as a circle and three mountains with a river coming down to water the fields, and allowed her one genealogical moment, naming Apotampo and Pachamamaachi as the parents of the founding Inca, with two trees standing for them as root and trunk of the line. Read straightforwardly, Pachamamaachi is the great Pachamama, though the reading is an inference from the name rather than anything the chronicle spells out. She has no adventures, no rivals and no death.

Nobody drew her face. Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, writing up the civil wars, says the principal idols were Pachacama, the Sun and the Moon, cast hollow in gold, and then makes the exception that tells you everything. Except the Earth, which was made of clay.

Her power is fertility, and it is specific rather than cosmic: crops, herds, and the safe delivery of children. Hernando de Santillán, reporting in 1572, says the earth was held the special advocate of women in labour and that when they were about to give birth they sacrificed to her. Arriaga, fifty years later, says the reverence at sowing was above all the women’s, that they spoke to her aloud and asked her for a good harvest, and poured chicha and ground maize for her, by their own hand or through a specialist.

Her limits are the other half of the same bargain. She is owed, and what she yields is answerable to what went into the hole first, so a good season is a settled account rather than a windfall. She is also relentlessly local, attached to this plot, this stone, this household, which means she cannot be venerated in the abstract and cannot be reached from anywhere else. The thing that looks like weakness is why she lasted. The extirpators could burn a mummy and pull down a sun temple. They could not confiscate a field.

The newest chapter has dates and authors. In 2008 Ecuador wrote her into Article 71 of its constitution, which begins by declaring that nature, or Pacha Mama, where life reproduces and is realised, has the right to integral respect for its existence. Two years later Bolivia passed Law 071, the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which makes Madre Tierra a collective subject of public interest and states in its third article that she is held sacred within the worldviews of the indigenous originary peasant nations and peoples. Neither text says much that Polo de Ondegardo would have failed to recognise. The negotiation has simply moved indoors, and it now has lawyers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pachamama?

Pachamama is the earth mother of the Andes, venerated by Quechua and Aymara peoples across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and northern Argentina. Her name joins pacha, which in Quechua covers ground, world and era, with mama, mother. She governs the fertility of crops, herds and human birth, and was one of the powers the Inca state maintained land and flocks for.

When was Pachamama first written down?

The Spanish lawyer Juan Polo de Ondegardo is the first chronicler known to have recorded the name, in reports written in the late 1560s and early 1570s. Earlier writers describe the cult without giving it a name: Agustín de Zárate in 1555 reports that the Andean peoples held the sun for a father and the earth for a mother, and Cristóbal de Molina the Almagrist wrote in 1552 that they worshipped the Earth because they said it had a mother.

What was offered to Pachamama?

Polo de Ondegardo lists burnt fat, coca, guinea pigs and lambs, offered at breaking ground, ploughing, sowing and harvest, with drinking and dancing throughout and a fast from meat, salt and chilli beforehand. The everyday version was to flick the first drops of chicha off the fingers toward the sun, the fire or the ground while asking for peace, life and contentment. Miniature women’s clothing was buried at her shrine at Ayllipampa outside Cusco.

Does Pachamama have a physical form?

No source describes her as a figure with a face or a body. Gutiérrez de Santa Clara notes that unlike the gold idols of the Sun and Moon, the Earth’s image was made of clay, and Bernabé Cobo says a long stone set upright in a field served as both her altar and her statue. The only picture of her is a diagram drawn by Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui in 1613, showing a circle and three mountains with a river running down from them.

Is Pachamama recognised in law today?

Yes. Ecuador’s 2008 constitution names her in Article 71, which grants nature, “or Pacha Mama”, the right to have its existence and its vital cycles respected, and Bolivia’s Law 071 of 21 December 2010 recognises the rights of Madre Tierra as a collective subject of public interest. Bolivia’s text uses the Spanish term rather than the Quechua one, but its third article states that she is held sacred within indigenous worldviews.

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