“These people, the ones who lived in that era, used to spend their lives warring on each other and conquering each other. For their leaders, they recognized only the strong and the rich. We speak of them as the Purum Runa – ‘people of desolation’.”
The Huarochiri Manuscript, Chapter 5.
The significance of the markings on the rocks by the banks of the Rio Mala must be in the context of the people, the communities, the rituals and the beliefs of the people living around or passing through. And in the absence of written records, for most of Peru, we are left to surmise what we can from pottery shards, burial goods, the ruined villages. But in the case of the Rio Mala, we have a wealth of further clues in the Huarochiri Manuscript.
Some time around 1608, a catholic priest organised the collection and recording of myths and ritual practices from people in the district of Huarochiri, which spreads from the coast to the high passes of the Andes and from Lima south as far as Cañete. The Rio Mala runs through the centre of the District.
The Huarochiri Manuscript begins with the adventures of the gods, their brothers and sisters, their lovers and their children. Their activities are rooted in the landscapes and communities that had existed before the Spanish invasion. Water, water rights and water management are a constant theme.
“The native people of Cupara village survived just by channelling some water from a spring to their fields, and they were suffering greatly for lack of water at that time… They used to irrigate their fields by channelling the water downhill to fill some small reservoirs. In those days there was a native woman of that village named Chuqui Suso, a really beautiful woman. This woman was weeping while she irrigated her maize plants because they were drying out so badly, and because her water supply was so very scarce.”
Chuqui Suso persuades Paria Caca, the god who is now personified and visited in the form of a snow-capped twin peak mountain at the head of four valleys, to create a new irrigation canal. She then decides to remain at the head of the channel, turned into stone. She becomes the focus of religious celebration at the time of the annual canal cleaning and has become a shrine and god in her own right.
The manuscript continues the story of Chuqui Suso after she has been transformed into a rock, a shrine and a goddess.
“In the old days, in the month of May when the canal had to be cleaned (as is done today, too), all these people went to the woman Chuqui Suso’s dwelling; they went with their maize beer, ticti, guinea pigs, and llamas to worship that demon woman… It’s said that when they finished that, and accomplished everything else including their canal-cleaning, the people came home dancing and singing. They’d lead one woman along in their midst, reverencing her as they did the huaca and saying, “This is Chuqui Suso!” As this woman arrived at their village, we’d see some people awaiting her, laying out maize beer and other things and greeting her: “This is Chuqui Suso!” On that occasion they say people celebrated a major festival, dancing and drinking all night long.”
Canal cleaning remains an important community event today, not just because keeping the canal flow regular is an essential and practical measure, but also as a focus for community gathering and working together. It is a community building and community bonding exercise.
Through the Manuscript, we can see how the Spanish invasion and the religious repression that followed affected people.
“In fact that’s why, when the late lord Don Sebastián was still alive, during Corpus Christi and the other major Christian holy days, a woman used to proclaim, “I am Chuqui Suso!” and give maize beer from a large gold or silver jar with a large gourd to everyone in rank order, saying, “This is our mother’s beer!” Then she would also hand out toasted maize from a large hollow gourd … people from Huaro Cheri and from all the other communities used to go there. “They’ve cleaned Chuqui Suso’s canal. Come on, let’s go have a look!” they’d say… neither the alcalde nor anybody else would ever try to stop them …. On the contrary, they dance and drink right along with them until they get drunk. And as for the Catholic priest, they fool him, saying, “Padre, I’m back from cleaning the canal, so I’m going to dance, I’m going to drink.”
The community was formed of different peoples with their own histories, rights, and privileges and rituals. There were times for ritual, managed by a yanca, who observed the passage of the sun with an aligned wall to determine the date. There were gifts and sacrifices of llamas and guinea pigs, coca leaves and ticti, sacred maize, to huacas, shrines, at these times, with dancing, chants and competitions.
The gods are born out of eggs on the mountain tops, they throw down lightning and hail fighting other gods, they release torrential floods “of yellow rain and red rain” to punish villages that do not respect them, And they remain in the landscape, often as stones and mountains. But all this was changing.
“But that one man who’d given Paria Caca a drink in Yaru Tini hung onto the tree as he’d been told, and was spared. When Paria Caca was finished sweeping everything away, he said to him, “Brother, now you’re alone by yourself. You must stay here forever. Later, when my children come to worship me from this spot, a quartet of guest huacsas [shrine attendants] will provide coca leaf for you to chew in perpetuity.”
““As for your name,” he added, “you shall be called Capac Huanca [lordly stone].” And he froze the man into stone. When Señor Doctor Avila came to the very spot where Capac Huanca dwelled, he in fact broke the huaca with some other people’s help. After he broke it, he heaved it downhill.”
It was amongst this Señor Doctor Avila´s papers that the Huarochiri Manuscript was rediscovered, over three hundred years later in Madrid, and translated from the Quechua by a German ethnologist in 1939. Avila was curate at St Damien de Checa, one of the new villages created by the Spanish to corral the people and make it easier to take their labour tribute and taxes. Such a position gave him access to forced native labour and ‘donations’ of crops and other local produce. As was common for such priests, he set up several illegal businesses in gunpowder, textile and charcoal manufacture.
When he had been ten years at St Damien, some of the parishioners launched a lawsuit against him. Many of the accusations were of economic abuse – forcing villagers to take down the roof timbers of their ancestral village before the re-settlement, so that he could use them to build a house in Lima, for example. But there were also allegations about his moral conduct. He was accused of having sexual relations with married native women, fathering an illegitimate son, and allowing, even encouraging, the locals to continue making precious offerings of silver to their traditional shrines, huacas, which he then took for himself.
Avila spent some time in prison awaiting trial, but managed to obtain signed statements recanting from many of his accusers. Out of prison again, but still under investigation, he asked the Ecclesiastical Chapter of Lima to authorise an inquiry into “idolatries”. He personally led the ecclesiastical judges to three huacas, and then with the help of two assistants provided by the Jesuits, began a campaign of destroying ritual objects, burning the mummified bodies of ancestors, and extracting public confessions from “penitents”. It was in this period that he organised the collection of legends that is the Huarochiri Manuscript.
When he wrote his autobiography years later, he painted the accusations of the St Damien people as a response to his determination to root out idolatry. But in fact his destruction of the huacas was his defence. When a new hard-line Archbishop came to power in Lima, he took the chance to stage a massive public display in the main square of Lima, the Plaza de Armas, to demonstrate his personal war on indigenous religion. In the so-called auto-da-fe, cartloads of mummies and other religious objects were burnt, and believers were whipped and publicly sentenced.
He remembered this professional triumph himself 35 years later in a preface to a book of his sermons. There was “…a great pile of idols, some dried corpses whom they worshipped, faces and hands of mummies that had been preserved and handed down for more than 800 years from one generation to the next. All this made more than six loads of two quintals [600 kilogrammes by weight].”
The indians from four leagues [twelve kilometres] around had been ordered to attend. Avila met up with various worthies at the town hall and proceeded on horseback “…in front of us were all the city officials and on every corner they blew their horns…the Corregidor rode on my right side and the Mayor on my left…”
“We arrived at the Cabildo [the seat of government in the main square] and the Virrey and the Archbishop were standing in the window with some church dignitaries. There was a good pile of firewood on one platform, and the idols and mummies on the other, and in the centre there was a pole, with many clerics seated around.”
“I took up a surplice and went up to the pulpit. As I stood there they brought out Hernando Paucar from the jail, took off his blanket and hat, and tied him to the pole. I started to preach in the local language, explaining to the indians how I detested idolatry and what a great sin it is, and then in spanish I related what we had found and what the indian had done…a notary read out the sentence which was two hundred lashes, removal of his hair and perpetual banishment to Santiago de Chile. They whipped and shaved his head and put him back in the prison, and we burnt the idols, the corpses and their ornaments…..”
Four days later an ecclesiastical judge absolved Avila of all charges against him, and gave him a new position as Visitador (travelling judge) of idolatries.
Within a year he had taken his repressive campaigns to the communities and landscapes described in the Huarochiri Manuscript, claiming later to have destroyed five thousand “idols” in that first year. In 1611 together with some Jesuits he climbed the ancient rocky staircase to Paria Caca, the mountain, demolishing whatever they found there and erecting a cross.
“They travelled with Dr Avila to Yampilla, about a league from Huarochiri, and destroyed a shrine, and climbing a hillside took apart another, formed of seven great rocks, each devoted to a particular divinity, and there was a priest there to take care of them with the task of fulfilling the obligations of one to the others, and finally the company undertook to destroy the idols called Xamuna and Pariacaca, famous throughout the region. It took a few days to reach the peak where they found the last, climbing up steps cut into the rock by the Indians. They put a cross up in place of the idol and returned.”
His reason for collecting the tales in the Manuscript, then, was to help him identify and destroy sacred places, huacas, in the landscape of the district. This son of Peruvians who had joined the Spanish catholic church made a long career out of witch-hunting. It gave him prestige in the culture of the colonial people of seventeenth century Lima. It also brought him wealth, since like Pizarro and the invaders he took for himself the gold and silver, the offerings to the pagan shrines.