Light at the Edge of the World (6 page)

Turning abruptly, Adalberto led us through the stone wall and along a chalky trail that ran through plantings of maize and coca to a settlement that had existed for untold
generations, a cluster of stone huts in the shade of frail trees and a temple where the elders awaited. Each of them spoke in turn, and after some deliberation, their voices met in a decision to allow us to proceed.

As we moved about the mountains over the next fortnight, collecting plants by day, reading and talking with Adalberto and the elders by night, the patterns of life in the Sierra slowly came into focus. Much of what we learned came from the writings of the great Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who had lived among the Kogi and Ika in the 1940s. Without his insights, gleaned over the course of months of fieldwork, the baroque world of the Sierra would have remained to us utterly incomprehensible. For beneath the veneer of everyday life, of fields being planted, crops being sold, children being taught, lay a complex of sacred laws and expectations, a body of beliefs astonishing in their complexity, profound in their implications, luminous in their potential.

According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the Kogi and Ika draw their strength from the Great Mother, a goddess of fertility who dwells at the heart of the world in the snow and ice of the high Sierra, the destination of the dead and the source of the rivers and streams that bring life to the fields of the living. At the first dawning when the Earth was still soft, the Great Mother stabilized it by thrusting
her enormous spindle into the centre, penetrating the nine levels of existence. The Lords of the Universe, born of the Great Mother, then pushed back the sea and lifted up the Sierra Nevada around the world axis, thrusting their hair into the soil to give it strength. From her spindle, the Great Mother uncoiled a length of cotton thread with which she traced a circle around the mountains, circumscribing the Sierra Nevada, which she declared to be the land of her children. Thus, the spindle became a model of the cosmos. The disk is the Earth, the whorl of yarn is the territory of the people, the individual strands of spun cotton are the thoughts of the sun.

For the Indians of the Sierra, everything begins and ends with the loom, and the metaphor of thread in the cosmic cloth. Constantly on the move as they gather food and various resources, the Indians refer to their wanderings as “weavings,” each journey a thread woven into a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each seasonal movement a prayer for the well-being of the people and the entire Earth. When the people of the Sierra plant a field, the women sow lines of crops parallel to the sides of the plot. The men work their way across the field in a horizontal direction. The result, should the domains of man and woman be superimposed one upon the other, is a fabric. The garden is a piece of cloth.

The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence. The Indians acknowledge this in the architecture of their temples, simple structures with high conical roofs supported by four corner posts. On the dirt floor, positioned between the central axis of the temple and each of the four posts, are four ceremonial hearths that represent the four lineages founded at the beginning of time. In the middle is a fifth hearth, representative of the sun.

The orientation of the temples and the hearths within them is precise and critical. On the summer solstice, as the sun rises above the mountains, a narrow beam of sunlight shines through a hole in the roof and falls on the hearth that lies in the southwest corner, then moves across the floor until, just before dusk, it reaches the hearth in the southeast corner. On the winter solstice, the beam of light passes through the hole in the roof to touch the northwest hearth in the morning and passes over the floor to strike the northeast hearth at dusk. On both the fall and spring equinoxes, the beam of light slices a path equidistant between north and south; with the sun high in the sky, the central hearth, the most sacred of the five, is bathed in a vertical column of light. At that moment, a waiting priest lifts a mirror to the sun; as the light of the Father fertilizes the womb of the living, the mirrored light forms a cosmic
axis along which the prayers of the people may ascend to the heavens.

Thus, over the course of a year, the sun literally weaves the lives of the living on the loom of the temple floor. The strands of the warp are laid down on the solstice, and the cloth is completed on the equinox, at which time the priest begins to dance at the eastern door of the temple, slowly moving across to the western entrance, while in gesture and song drawing a rod behind him. On reaching the western door, the priest pulls forth the imaginary rod, and the fabric of the sun unfolds: a new cloth is dreamt into being, the divine weaver soars over the loom, and life continues.

For the Kogi, the equilibrium of the world spun into being at the beginning of time is completely dependent on the moral and spiritual integrity of the Elder Brothers. The goal of life is knowledge, not wealth. Only through insight and attention can one achieve an understanding of good and evil, and an appreciation of the sacred obligations that human beings have to the Earth and the Great Mother. With knowledge come wisdom and tolerance, though wisdom is an elusive goal. In a world animated by the sun's energy, people invariably turn for guidance to the sun priests, the enlightened
mámas
who control the cosmic forces through their prayers and rituals, songs and incantations. Though they rule the living, the mámas have no
special privileges, no outward signs of prestige, but their pursuit of wisdom entails an enormous burden: the survival of the people and the entire Earth depends on their labours.

Those who are chosen for the priesthood through divination are taken from their families as infants and carried high into the mountains to be raised by a máma and his wife. For eighteen years, they are never allowed to meet a woman of reproductive age or to experience daylight, forbidden even to know the light of a full moon. They sleep by day, waking after sunset, and are fed a simple diet of boiled fish and snails, mushrooms, grasshoppers, manioc, squash and white beans. They must never eat salt or food not known to the ancients, and not until they reach puberty are they permitted to eat meat.

The apprenticeship falls into two phases, each of nine years duration, symbolic of the nine months spent in a mother's womb. During the first phase, the apprentices learn songs and dances, mythological tales, the secrets of Creation and the ritual language of the ancients. The second nine years are devoted to the art of divination, techniques of breathing and meditation that lift them into trance, prayers that give voice to the inner spirit. The apprentices pay little heed to the mundane tasks of the world, but they do learn everything about the Great
Mother, the secrets of the sky and the Earth, the wonder of life itself in all its manifestations. Knowing only darkness and shadows, they acquire the gift of visions and become clairvoyant, capable of seeing not only into the future and past but through all the material illusions of the universe. In trance, they can travel through the lands of the dead and into the hearts of the living.

Finally, after years of study and rigorous practise, of learning of the beauty of the Great Mother, of honouring the delicate balance of life, of appreciating ecological and cosmic harmony, a great moment of revelation arrives. On a clear morning, with the sun rising over the flank of the mountains, the apprentices are led into the light of dawn. Until then, the world has existed only as a thought. Now, for the first time, they see the world as it is, in all its transcendent beauty. Everything they have learned is affirmed. Standing at their side, the máma sweeps an arm across the horizon as if to say, “You see, it is as I told you.”

 

WHEN I FIRST travelled down the spine of the Andean Cordillera, past the remnants of temples and enormous storehouses that once fed armies in their thousands, through valleys transformed by agricultural terraces, past narrow tracks of flat stones, all that remains of the 14,000 miles (22 500 km) of roads that once bound the
Inca Empire, it was difficult to imagine how so much could have been accomplished in less than a century. The empire, which stretched over 3,000 miles (4800 km), was the largest ever forged on the American continent. Within its boundaries lived nearly all the people of the Andean world. There was said to be no hunger. All matter was perceived as divine, the Earth itself the womb of creation.

When the Spaniards saw the monuments of the Inca, they could not believe them to be the work of men. The Catholic Church declared the stonework to be the product of demons, an assertion no more fantastic than many more recent attempts to explain the enigma of Inca masonry as being of extraterrestrial origin. There was, of course, no magic technique. Only time, immense levies of workers, and an attitude toward stone that most Westerners find impossible to comprehend.

In the early spring of 1975 , I visited the sacred valley of the Urubamba for the first time. As I walked the ruins of Pisac, a redoubt perched on a high mountain spur, I saw that the entire face of the massif was transformed by terraces which, when viewed from afar, took on the form of a gigantic condor, wings spread wide as if to protect the fortress. The river far below had been channelled by the Inca, lined for much of its length with stone walls to protect fields from flooding and to maximize agricultural production
in one of the most fertile valleys of the empire. The faint remains of other terraces marked every mountain-side. The entire landscape had been transformed, a stunning engineering feat for a people who knew nothing of the wheel and had no iron tools. As I sat in the Temple of the Moon, surrounded by some of the finest Inca masonry in existence, I recorded these notes in my journal and later incorporated them into the book
One River
:

These notions of the sanctity of land were ancient in the Andes. The Spanish did everything in their power to crush the spirit of the people, destroying the temples, tearing asunder the sanctuaries, violating the offerings to the sun. But it was not a shrine that the Indians worshipped, it was the land itself: the rivers and waterfalls, the rocky outcrops and mountain peaks, the rainbows and stars. Every time a Catholic priest planted a cross on top of an ancient site, he merely confirmed in the eyes of the people the inherent sacredness of the place. In the wake of the Spanish Conquest, when the last of the temples lay in ruins, the Earth endured, the one religious icon that even the Spaniards could not destroy. Through the centuries, the character of the relationship between the people and their land has changed, but not its fundamental importance.

 

ONE AFTERNOON NOT long ago, in the small Andean town of Chinchero just outside of Cusco, I sat on a rock throne carved from granite. At my back was the sacred mountain Antakillqa, lost in dark clouds yet illuminated in a mysterious way by a rainbow that arched across its flank. Below me, the terraces of Chinchero fell away to an emerald plain, the floor of an ancient seabed, beyond which rose the ridges of the distant Vilcabamba, the last redoubt of the Inca, a landscape of holy shrines and lost dreams where
Tupac Amarú waged war and the spirit of the Sun still ruled for fifty years after the Conquest. Two young boys played soccer on the village green, a plaza where once Topa Inca Yupanqui, second of the great Inca rulers, reviewed his troops. On the very stone where I rested, he, no doubt, had stood, for this village of adobe and whitewashed homes, this warren of cobblestones, mud and grass, had been built upon the ruins of his summer palace.

For four hundred years, the Catholic church, perched at the height of the ruins overlooking the market square, had dominated the site. A beautiful sanctuary, it bears today none of the scars of the Conquest. It is a place of worship that belongs to the people, and there are no echoes of tyranny. Within its soaring vault, in a space illuminated by candles and the light of pale Andean skies, I once stood at the altar, a newborn child in my arms, a boy swaddled in white linen, as an itinerant priest dripped holy water onto his forehead and spoke words of blessing that brought the infant into the realm of the saved. After the baptism, there was a celebration, and the child's parents, my new
compadres
, toasted every hopeful possibility. I, too, made promises, which in the ensuing years I attempted to fulfill. I had no illusions about the economic foundation of the bond. From me, my compadres hoped to secure support: in time, money for my godchild's education, perhaps the odd gift, a
cow for the family, a measure of security in an uncertain nation. From them, I wanted nothing but the chance to know their world, an asset far more valuable than anything I could offer.