Mountain Lords of the Andes
To Andean eyes the snow peaks are living lords. Apu is Quechua for 'lord', and every great mountain has one, ranked by height and reach: a low hill may answer for a single village's herds, while a glaciated giant commands a whole watershed. Around Cusco the most revered are Ausangate, 6,384 meters, and Salcantay above the Sacred Valley. Meltwater from their glaciers feeds the fields below, and the increase or ruin of the llama and alpaca herds is reckoned to the mountain's account.
The Inca state took the peaks into its official cult. Mountain shrines fill much of the Instrucción that the churchman Albornoz compiled to hunt out Andean holy places, and the greatest rite of all, the capacocha, sent richly dressed children up beyond the snowline to be offered on the summits with figurines of gold, silver and shell. Archaeology has borne the chronicles out: in 1995 Johan Reinhard found the frozen girl known as Juanita on Mount Ampato, and in 1999 three almost perfectly preserved children were recovered from Llullaillaco in Argentina, at 6,739 meters.
The faith is unbroken. In the Cusco region ritual specialists called paqos present despacho offering bundles to the mountain lords on their clients' behalf, and travelers add a stone and a pinch of coca to the cairns at high passes. Each year before Corpus Christi, tens of thousands of pilgrims climb to the Sinakara valley below Ausangate for Qoyllur Rit'i, the festival of the Snow Star — nominally in honor of an apparition of Christ, while the rite keeps its roots deep in the old veneration of glacier and mountain lord.
