Andean cosmology · a storybook in 6 pages
Three worlds joined by reciprocity with the earth and the mountains, as Q'ero paqos in the Peruvian Andes describe them.
As Q'ero paqos describe it, the cosmos holds three worlds: hanaq pacha above, home to the condor and the ancestors; kay pacha here, the everyday world of the puma; and ukhu pacha below, the inner world of the serpent and the dead. The worlds interpenetrate rather than stack.
Pachamama is Mother Earth, held as a living being who feeds the Andean world and must be fed in turn. Coca leaves, food, small woven bundles are set out for her — an offering, never a payment.
The high peaks are apus — mountain spirits understood to hold real power over the people and land below them. A paqo may speak to an apu directly, asking for protection or guidance, the way one might ask a respected elder.
Ayni means reciprocity: a give and take that runs between people, and between people and the mountains and the earth. As the tradition holds it, nothing is owed for free and nothing is taken without something given back — in work, in food, in ceremony.
One way ayni is kept is the despacho: a small bundle of symbolic things — grains, sweets, flowers, a thread — assembled by hand and given to the earth, burned or buried, in thanks or in request. It is an offering, not a spell.
In 1955 an anthropologist made sustained contact with Q'ero communities, and decades later Western teachers began offering workshops and certificates in 'Q'ero shamanism.' Much of what English-language readers meet first comes through those teachers, not from paqos speaking for themselves.