CLOSE RELATIONS

Because ancestor veneration is generally the purview of kin groups, there is often an intimate relationship between cult images (ancestors) and their makers and users/handlers (descendants). Indeed, the colonial documents suggest that effigies, especially mummy bundles, were treated essentially like esteemed family members. And like close relations, endeavoring to satisfy their need for attention and nourishment operated under an implicit accord of reciprocity. Care for them obliged continued goodwill.

For one thing, ancestors demanded food, drink and sacrificial offerings. Mallqui and huaca ceremonies were periodic, sometimes large-scale corporate affairs around the sowing and harvest seasons. Typical offerings included coca and chicha maize beer. It also was customary to dispatch guinea pigs and llamas in front of them; sometimes blood would be splattered on the ground, idols, clothes and the surroundings. Other sacrifices included textiles, metal objects, shell, coca, animal fat, and ground powders. The time of the ceremonies frequently meant a number of prohibitions: abstention from sex as well as certain foods, such as salt or chili peppers. Trumpets were used to announce the ancestors and ceremonies; drums, dancing, and chants, which extolled their deeds and virtues, also enlivened ancestor festivities.

Another way to please ancestors was to offer and dress them in new wrappings— often of the finest textiles (Arriaga 1968: 27). It is an Andean anthropological orthodoxy that cloth is a basic unit of exchange within and between families and kin groups and a

Source of identity and cultural affiliation. But wrapping another also connotes basic familial concerns and care. It is this affection—their “cuyaspa, or the love they bear [their idols, ancestors]” —which Arriaga (1968: 18) targeted in his attacks on native Andean faiths.

The wrapping of conopas, idols and mallquis expressed Andean devotion to ancestors (Arguedas and Duviols 1966: 256; Arriaga 1968: 11; Duviols 1967: 30, 398; Millones 1979: 249). Such practices extended personal qualities to the object, but also emphasized its need to be nurtured. Rewrapping ancestors was not simply a dedication of fine cloth, or a gift of labor and investment. It was an obligation, an inherited responsibility from forebears, for they had hitherto provided food and clothes (e. g., Duviols 1986: 70,105).

The Paracas mummy bundles (ca. 400 BC-AD 200) are notable because so much cultural investment went into them; they were “hills of cloth” (Paul 1990: 116). It seems reasonable to suggest that the layering of cloth wrappings resulted from the contributions of certain groups at different points in time; but they also commemorated social relationships by ossifying, in textiles, a specific set of interpersonal obligations fulfilled. Thus the bundle—here a person as well as monument—is prone to grow. Curiously, the making of a mummy bundle is not much different, then, from the reiterative construction of early Andean ceremonial architecture, such as the U-shaped centers of the central coast or the central hearth structures of the Kotosh Religious Tradition. They take form through episodes of directed growth, incremental layering, and corporate commitment.

Effigies also performed consultations and oracular functions (e. g., Duviols 1986: 142). For other cultures, ancestors are convened because, as elders and wise beings, they are highly appropriate guests for overseeing decision-making events, such as for transmission of property (Ghana) and for consultation in war (Maori). In the Andes, ancestors’ guidance and favor were sought especially concerning matters of water and fields. There was protocol and hierarchy in consultations; worshippers needed to receive the approval of household elder gods before apical ancestor figures could be consulted (Salomon 1991: 17). Consultations appear to be a key theme in some Recuay ceramics featuring a large central figure surrounded by lesser ranking attendants (e. g., Lau 2000: fig.4) or in the Chimu model previously described. Supernatural advice and backing must have been highly desirable for descendants.

One final characteristic of Andean ancestor images is that they are commonly found in groups. As might be expected, ancestor effigies form their own collectives. We have already seen ancestral pairings on buildings and monoliths and sarcophagus groups along cliffs. It is said that the effigies of Inca kings were placed at opposite ends of a room in Coricancha (the Temple of the Sun), all facing a golden image of the sun (van de Guchte 1996: 258). Mummy bundles shared space in chullpa tombs (e. g., Marcoy 1875: 78). It has been suggested that the physical position of the effigies parallelled descent lines (Zuidema 1973: 21). Clusters of chullpas across the Andes were quite literally necropoli: dense communities of the dead. By colonial times, when officials outlawed celebration of idols and mummies in the open, families set out furtively to the caves and chullpas to be with their restless, gregarious forebears.