Pachamama, the Andean Mother Earth
Pachamama was the Andean earth goddess and the source of agricultural fertility in the religion of the Inca Empire and of its modern Quechua and Aymara successors. Unlike the principal celestial deities of the Inca pantheon, such as Inti and Viracocha, Pachamama had no state temple and no large priesthood, and her cult was carried out in the fields, in the household, and in the small village shrines of the highlands. Farmers honored her at the beginning of the planting season, when offerings of coca leaves, llama fat, chicha, and small animal sacrifices were poured into the earth or burned in ritual bonfires, and they thanked her at harvest time with rites called haywarikuy. The custom of pouring a small libation of chicha onto the ground before drinking, known as challa, is widely understood as a survival of pre-Hispanic veneration of Pachamama, and the cult of the earth has shown the greatest continuity of any Inca religious practice into the present day in rural communities of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
The historical evidence for the cult of Pachamama comes from colonial-era chronicles, particularly those of Pedro Cieza de León (1550s), Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), Bernabé Cobo (1653), and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615), and from the modern ethnographic work of scholars such as Joseph Bastien, Catherine Allen, and Frank Salomon, who have documented the persistence of earth veneration in the Andes well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Pachamama in the Inca Pantheon
In the Inca pantheon, Pachamama occupied a middle position. She was not the focus of an elaborate state cult, but she was universally recognized as the source of agricultural fertility, and the major agricultural festivals of the year combined invocations of Pachamama with those of the sun and the rain. The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, whose mother was an Inca princess, identified Pachamama as the wife of Pachacamac, a creator deity whose cult was centered at the oracle of Pachacamac on the central coast of Peru, although the identification of the highland earth goddess with the coastal creator deity is not generally accepted by modern scholars. The name Pachamama is sometimes translated as “World Mother” or “Mother World,” from the Quechua words pacha, meaning world or earth, and mama, meaning mother.
The Incas also recognized a more general category of terrestrial spirits, the huatias and the huanacauri, whose cult was tied to specific localities and was integrated with the cult of Pachamama at the level of household and village ritual. The distinction between the worship of Pachamama as a universal earth mother and the worship of the local earth spirits is preserved in the colonial chronicles and in modern ethnographic accounts, although in practice the two were often combined in single ritual performances. The cult of Pachamama was, in this sense, both universal and local: she was venerated throughout the empire, but the particular offerings and the particular times of worship varied from one region to the next.
Ritual Offerings and the Agricultural Cycle
The cult of Pachamama was closely tied to the agricultural calendar. At the beginning of the planting season, in August or September, farmers throughout the Andes performed rites called challa or haywarisqa, in which offerings of coca leaves, llama fat, chicha, and sometimes the blood of a guinea pig were poured into a small hole in the earth, called a cocha, or burned in a ritual bonfire. The offerings were typically accompanied by prayers for a good harvest and by the symbolic feeding of the earth, in imitation of the way a household might be fed. The chronicler Cobo, writing in the 1650s, recorded that the offerings were performed with great care and that the ritual specialists of the villages, the yatiris and the paqos, played an important role in determining the appropriate time and the appropriate form of the offering.
The second major ritual of the agricultural year was the harvest festival, in which the first fruits of the season were offered back to Pachamama in thanksgiving. This festival, called haywarikuy in Quechua, involved the offering of the choicest ears of maize, the first potatoes of the harvest, and the first chicha of the season, and it was accompanied by feasting, dancing, and the performance of community labor projects. In some communities, a llama was sacrificed at the harvest festival, and its blood was poured into the earth.
Pachamama was also honored at times of crisis. Drought, frost, hail, and the appearance of pests in the fields were all understood as signs of her displeasure, and the appropriate response was to make additional offerings, to perform a special ritual called pago a la tierra, or to consult a diviner about the cause of the crisis. The chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala described in detail the ceremonies performed during droughts, when the people would process to the highest huacas to invoke the rain.
Household Worship and the Building of Houses
In addition to the agricultural rituals, the cult of Pachamama was an important part of household religious life. The foundation of a new house was typically marked by the burial of a ritual offering, called the tinka or the chayo, in the foundations of the building, and the offering typically consisted of coca leaves, llama fat, chicha, and a small animal sacrifice. The same offerings were made when a new field was first put into cultivation, when a new irrigation canal was opened, and at the beginning of any major construction project. The custom of burying ritual offerings in the foundations of buildings is widely understood as a survival of pre-Hispanic veneration of Pachamama.
The cult of Pachamama in the household was typically conducted by the head of the household, often in cooperation with a yatiri or a paqo, who was consulted on questions of ritual timing and of appropriate offerings. The yatiri chewed coca leaves to divine the appropriate form of the offering, and the ritual typically involved the symbolic feeding of the earth, the offering of chicha in a small cup, and the burning of llama fat and coca in a small bonfire.
The Persistence of Pachamama in the Modern Andes
The cult of Pachamama has shown the greatest continuity of any Inca religious practice into the present. In rural communities of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the offering of coca, chicha, and llama fat to the earth remains a common practice, and the challa of pouring a small libation onto the ground before drinking is widely observed. The August ritual of pago a la tierra is still performed in many highland communities, and the first-fruits offering of the harvest is still made in the form of small bundles of maize and potatoes placed on a stone or buried in the earth. In some communities, the cult of Pachamama has been combined with the Catholic devotion to the Virgin of Candelaria, the Virgin of Copacabana, or other Marian figures, in patterns of religious syncretism that the anthropologist Joseph Bastien has documented in detail.
The persistence of the cult of Pachamama in the modern Andes has been the subject of substantial scholarly and ethnographic work. The American anthropologist Catherine Allen, in her studies of the communities of the Sonqo district in the Cusco region, has documented the persistence of pre-Hispanic ritual practice in combination with Catholic devotion, and the ethnographer Inge Bolin has described the persistence of Inca-style agricultural ritual in the highland communities of Peru. The Bolivian anthropologist Henry Stobart has documented similar practices in the highland communities of Bolivia. The persistence of the cult suggests that, despite the destruction of the Inca state religion in the sixteenth century, the religious traditions associated with the earth have remained an important element of Andean life well into the modern period.