Spirits and Spoils: Matter, Memory and the Living Culture of Human Remains in the Andes and the Amazon

Abstract

The precolonial societies of the Andes and the Amazon and their ancestral memory among living cultures have always shown a central interest in the concept of death, to which innumerable material and immaterial testimonies bear witness. Huge necropolises, cemeteries inhabited by heirs, urban ceremonial centres, remains, and booty constantly reused in altars testify to a daily and indestructible relationship with all that dies. Underlying this pervasive, persistent, and millenary cult is the idea that the dead do not leave the living but wait for them in another region of time, accessible through the care of the loot, their memory, and collective ceremonies. From the Paracas and Nasca tombs, which build an entire cosmovision around a burial, to the demonstration of the earthly and spiritual power of the Moche rulers, to the Inca mummies ritually led in procession according to the rules of the calendar, the signal of eternal time constantly penetrates the diachrony of life, celebrating its flow that oscillates between births and deaths. Periodic visits to cemeteries to eat and talk with the dead, the recovery of skulls to recall ancestors in votive form, and the constant symbolic recreation of the cosmos keep alive the memory of spirits eternally alive and redeemed from their mortal spoils.

There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away.

Jorge Luis Borges

1. Introduction

On 5 October 2015, a Go competition took place in London between the world champion Fan Hui and AlfaGo, a computer programme developed by the company Deep Mind. After five games in which the algorithm challenged its opponent several times, the machine won. For the first time, a programme that can learn and decide for itself displaced the cognitive skills, intuition, and imagination of the best human mind engaged in the same task. In less than 5 years, the applications of artificial intelligence in the world of automation exploded. From orthopaedic prosthetics that improve movement to algorithms that compose music, invest in the stock market, control jet engines, or predict cancer diagnoses, every area of human activity has been overtaken by the presence of a machine. Since 2017, companies offering digital immortality have also entered the market in the form of applications that are able to use a person’s data after their death and interact with other users forever. Humanity in the new millennium seems destined to live with programmes such as Etern9, Lifenaut or Eternime¹ that challenge the definition of consciousness and erase the boundaries of life [1]. Death has become a traffic accident in the globalised twenty first century, which can be replaced by an eternal and immaterial algorithm. What drives the Western civilisation to break all norms in order to achieve immortality? What are the effects of abolishing time, diachrony and the idea of a border?

The emergence of a technosphere² that permeates human action and planning in the new millennium raises key questions about the value and meaning of death for present and future Western society [2]. However much the living is able to interact with algorithms that transcend the difference between biological and digital through avatars indistinguishable from the original, one difference remains. A programme that learns by itself and incorporates emotions and aspects that its biological original ignores is not born and does not die. It learns and transforms but does not become a venerable ancestor over time. The definition of a life process implies, by definition, its end. But the dead are essential to the Living. The immaterial spirits and the material remains remind us that human time is this, that the living are also indebted to them and that there is a responsibility to leave a message for those who come after. Remembering the dead in matter or in mind gives meaning to the biological chain in which the present is a microscopic link coming from the ancestors and heading towards posterity. Through this radical memory, individuals look to their children and grandchildren with the knowledge that their unique experience contributes to a more significant phenomenon called life.

If humans began to interact as if the dead were alive, if they forgot their own end, if they replaced it with an everlasting and perfect avatar, this sense of belonging to an ongoing process would disappear. Evolution would come to an end and with it, the space-time coordinates that form cosmologies and whole cultural systems. Today more than ever, the identity of a people, like that of an individual, needs the memory of death. Tangible and intangible cultural heritage, like its natural counterpart, describes unique endemism whose diversity is essential for the recombination of ideas, monuments, languages and cultures³. Eliminating this diversity endangers evolutionary differentiation processes and, thus, any cultural continuity [3]. With the disappearance of a language or a monument, ideas and testimonies of exceptional value are lost and the components of the cultural fibre that keeps the fabric of life going. Consequently, protecting the material and memory of human remains by cultures from the past or the present takes on a significance that goes beyond the individual cultural phenomenon and is intended to spread universal values.

2. Pre-Hispanic Andean and Amazonian death

In the cultural declension of the celebration of death, every human – and to some extent animal⁴ – tradition delimits the space and event of death by signalling it in a way that can be communicated to others [4]. Death is a memorable, celebrated, and monumental event because it conveys an exemplary warning. In many cultures of the past, this aspect is found in a visible way: from the funerary architecture of Cheops to the Famedio of Milan’s Monumental Cemetery to the shrine of El Alamein, the demarcation between the world of the living and that of the dead is clear and sometimes grandiose. In the Andes and the Amazon world, this notion constructs cultural landscapes of eternity from a shared vision and infinite local variations. The theocratic Nasca capital of Cahuachi⁵ on the desert coast of southern Peru, for example, stands on a 24 km² necropolis that evolved from an arc of progressive burials thousands of years old [5]. The geological, historical and ethnic interpretation of the transformation of the territory through what Mannoni would have called “global archaeology”⁶ reveals the diverse and constant expression of a society that aimed to maintain the public functions of sacred space, even to the point of constructing buildings that could only be inhabited by the deities and spirits of the dead [6].

The pre-Hispanic funerary cultural landscape, which houses the development of such a system, shows a society defined by the preservation of its own ancestors, which was maintained over time until the cemeteries of today. In Nasca and Paracas, thought of the first century AD, death is a true cult elaborated through complex burials layered around modified and mummified bodies. Especially on the coast and agricultural plateaus, burial in the earth affirms a principle of silent germination that takes place far from the light. The presence of miniaturised objects in graves, reminiscent of the seminal creatures of the Ucku Pacha – the Andean Inframundus – evokes the idea of the seed from which new life will emerge. The heads, in particular, are reused in votive form, symbolising the pars por toto⁷. They appear as offerings at the base of buildings or as recurring emblems in iconography [7]. An entire cosmovision developed around the care of mortal remains thus bridges the world of the living and that of the ancestors. On the North Coast, in Moche societies in the first centuries of the Christian era and in Lambayeque⁸ from the twelfth century onwards, ceremonial centres interpret the presence of the eternal world in the diachronic world through the expression of authority [9]. Sovereigns, rulers, and priests are given otherworldly significance through pompous burials that reflect the strength of spiritual power over political and social power. From Sipan to Chornancap to Túcume and Sican, each centre constructs its own mythic narrative that establishes the relationship with the past and gives direction to the present. The symbols of government become those of the ancestral world, and the territory is recognised and organised as a diachronic projection of an eternal system.

The world of the Chachapoya in the Amazonian Andes of Kuelap and Abiseo⁹ takes up this idea and houses the dead in a funerary architecture that hovers in stacks above the abyss and is always visible from the settlements of the living [10]. In this way, a constant relationship is established between the diachronic and horizontal life of the earth’s inhabitants and the vertical life of those observed from above. The dead are not really dead. They have only temporarily migrated to another place, leaving behind remains that serve to regulate life cycles and maintain social order. The mummified remains of the Incas carried ritually in public processions throughout the year mark a rhythm in the calendar. At the same time, their appearance illustrates the lineage of the Panacas, the royal families that administered certain parts of the territory¹⁰. The human remains, accompanied by a procession, recall the spirits that animated them during their lifetime and that express an authoritative presence during the ceremonies through the simulacra of their bodies [11]. To maintain a political system, it does not matter whether the authority appears in the flesh or is periodically animated by a mummy. It is the power of their narrative that generates meaning and gives direction to the course of history. All social actors participate in the construction of this collective imaginary that defines, around the ceremonial spaces of eternity, the periodic incursions of the spirits into the world of the living.

3. The ancestral memory of living cultures

The periodic alternation between sacred and profane time, diachronic and perpetual space and time of life and experience of eternity shapes the entire pre-Hispanic conception of landscape and shapes much of the historical record and contemporary ethnography. Underlying this view, from the páramo to the cloud forest, from the lagoons of the Alto Andes to the dry forests of the coast, is a two-dimensional, cyclical notion of existence. The constant rebirth of the biotic network of geoclimatic cycles can be observed in every ecosystem, as can the bistagional alternation of the neotropics. This repetitive phenomenon, which links numerous megadiverse ecosystems, gives rise to just as many cultural endemisms in which animism takes on cosmo-centric, cyclical and reticulated aspects. In the absence of a single visible centre, the ecological cyclicality between land, water and air systems is recognised and codified by myriad traditions of living cultures. Life seems to oscillate constantly between a diachronic and an eternal reality: between the course of rivers and the motionless mirrors of lagoons, between the accelerating transformation of the forest and the motionless presence of the mountain and between the continuous sighing of the ocean and the fossil silence of the desert. In this eternal pendulum between irreversible biology and static eternity, two thresholds define the transition between perceptions of the world: birth and death. In order to exist, it is necessary to cross both and to create, through symbols, forms and monuments, the space in which the ancestors dwell. According to Muñoz [12] who defines the parameters of the ethnography of the dead, their spirits are invoked through the remains that are regularly cared for, visited, displayed and revered in every indigenous society past and present.

The material presence of the remains is an indispensable element of the intrusion of the sacred into everyday life. At some moments, the dead live, eat and dance together with the living. In the village of Machu Picchu, for example, inundated by a globalised tourist economy that causes environmental and cultural damage from which it is difficult to protect heritage, the cemetery is one of the few joyful environments. The families of the deceased organise regular visits to the grave, offer the deceased’s favourite food and spend long lunches chatting, eating and restoring affective relationships that are important for their personal stability. This phenomenon occurs in rural and mountainous areas as well as in cities. The mega-metropolis of Lima is home to 11 million people, and in the southern area, corresponding to the Lurin River valley and the great ceremonial centre of Pachacamac, there are the Jardines de los recuerdos: vast expanses of tropical English meadows dotted with small gravestones and gathering places. In northern Peru and in rural areas along the coast, bones are constantly on the move: the looting of graves is common to reuse the remains, relics and especially the skull on the altars of the master curanderos. From Trujillo to Lambayeque to Piura, the use of skulls on an altar determines the appearance of the spirit of an ancestor, just as a stone reminds us of the sacred mountain from which it came or a ceramic of the temple it represents. Altars delineate the chessboard of sacred space where invisible and dominant energies such as music bend the human will, dispel a disease, resolve a trauma and accompany the living on the path of healing. The collection of bones and skulls, as pars pro toto, is an eternal Andean memory.

Narvaez Vargas, reconstructs the Lambayeque collective imagery and visual mythography, identifying the pre-Hispanic origins of contemporary ethnography; spirits heal because they do not get sick, and the deities are boneless [8]. The liquid body of Kon, for example, flies across the landscape by sheer force of will. The Pachacamac of Lima has neither skin nor bones. Humans communicate with them through cartilage: with their ears and eyes, they receive messages, and with their nose and mouth, they transmit them, as the huge repertoire of Andean expressions proves. When they die, their bones emerge and bear witness to their human condition. The spirit and the heart, on the other hand, migrate into the realm of the spirits. That is why it is so important to preserve the bones. Their presence on contemporary altars, such as Inca processions, re-establishes the contact that death has temporarily interrupted but that a ceremonial context can restore.

Mortal remains are also reused to create sacred spaces and places of prayer. In Chiclayo, the Casa de las Animas preserves the remains of a flooded cemetery. The population goes there every day to light a candle, leave an offering or gather for prayer at the beginning of the day.

The millenary persistence of this skull cult, of skulls and more generally of the ceremonial use of bones, extends northward into the Piura area. Polia’s comparison between the archaeological record of Ayapate and ethnographic memory shows how the dead continue to exert influence through their material presence and as emissaries of an invisible world [13]. The location of Chiclayo and Piura between the ocean and the Amazon makes it possible to observe a pre-Hispanic heritage in motion between ecosystems. This flow reveals a coexistence between the natural and supernatural worlds that stretches from the coast to the Andes to the Amazon. Animals, products, ideas and especially bones are constantly moving through the bio-corridors. Some graves, for example, are emptied or enriched with remains from contexts far removed in time and space. Bones from ancient necropolises migrate to cemeteries in other regions and become ambassadors of interregional cults.

In Amazonia, where everything renews itself, the only permanent remains are fossils. They were formed 20 million years ago when the eastern Andes dammed Lake Pebas, and today they nourish the myths of those fossilised ancestral figures that populate the cosmo-visions of the forest peoples. Like human bones, these lithic remains of the Neotropics point the living to the need for regeneration and dialogue with the omnipresent and omnipotent world of spirits. The biotic network in the Eastern Andes is so abundant and persistent that it becomes necessary to forget one’s dead in order to make room for the newborn. Among the Jivaro, for example, the dead are actively forgotten by the living, who displace their name and history from individual and collective memory. Thanks to this active displacement, a cyclical identity is created that can be reborn with the same characteristics [14]. It is a daily and indestructible relationship that keeps the forces of the cosmos in balance. At the apex of this unsurpassed megadiverse biotic network are the master plants that have planned and directed the movement and distribution of food resources and the movement of animals for millennia. The master plants are the first to promote a regenerative concept of life, not only in their size but also in their influence on the cultural expressions of the Amazonian ethnic groups. The millennia-old herbal medicine associated with the ayahuasca mixture teaches first to die and then to be reborn [15, 16]. Aya - Huasca means the vine of death in Quechua¹¹.

The contemporary Andean cosmovision, heir to the Inca mummy cult, mallqui, considers the deceased as a seed connected to the ancestors. The mallqui seed tree feeds on the nutrients and underground water provided by the root system and is destined to restore life through its fruits [17]. Transitioning between death and eternity and sharing in the fertility of the cultivated fields involves a journey into the underworld to reach the ancestral origin in a lagoon or mountain. Following Huarochiri¹² tradition and contemporary records [18], the spirit moves to familiar places for 5 days and is veiled by relatives [19], then embarks on a journey to the underworld to return to the origin of life. The Awajun, for example, surround the ground around the body with ashes to ensure that the spirit does not leave the body during this time and leave visible footprints.

In the water cycle, the river of life originates in the lagoons of the highlands and flows down to the sea, the mother lagoon, where it dissolves and dies. The sea water [20, 21], attracted by the constellation of the Lama, passes through the celestial river Mayu, the galaxy, and flows back to the lagoons in the form of rain¹³. The journey through the life of the river and the eternity of the sky is similar. However, the characters are different depending on the quality of life, social status and the work done in life. Once we reach the underworld, the line between human and animal spirits blurs. As Millones¹⁴ points out, animals also play a central role in the underworld [22]. The ancestral guide of the deceased is the swift and powerful hummingbird that accompanies them on their journey through a lime and reversible universe. While on the coast and in the Andes, the dead are escorted by animals; in the Amazon, they become so directly. The body of a Shuar, for example, is transformed into parts: The lungs become butterflies, the shadow a deer, the heart a bird and the liver an owl [17, 23].

The idea of dismemberment, prevalent in Sechinese, Nazca and Moche iconography and recounted in ancestral transformation myths, reveals a deep respect for the rules of nourishment and regeneration that imply the sacrifice of the dying. Only by overcoming the limits of bodily integrity and accepting its dissolution is it possible to cross the threshold of death to enter another landscape.

4. Conclusions

When one dies, is it forever? Perhaps not. According to the Huarochirí myths, it is only a temporary state: those who are petrified return to life after serving their sentence, and those who are killed are reborn multiplied by the number of pieces they were cut into. Spirits also return to life. For some, death, which did not exist in the past, was invented to right the wrongs of living communities. For all, however, it is a threshold that demarcates the space of a perpetual and indestructible relationship with that which is reborn. Perhaps the expression “forever” only points to the perpetual cycle of regeneration of living forms maintained by that pervasive, persistent, and millennial cult that sets the boundaries of life. The dead do not abandon the living: they wait for them in another region of time, which they reach through the care of remains, memory and collective ceremonies. The world of the Andes and the Amazon nurtures a continuous symbolic recreation of the cosmos, inhabited by spirits eternally redeemed from their mortal remains. The signal of this eternal time penetrates the diachrony of life, celebrating its pendular motion that oscillates between births and deaths.

In this hybrid and multiform system, humans possess only the bones that the gods lack. The heads are seeds that are reborn as plants and microcosms in the symbolic vision of the ascending return to the mountain of the ancestors. When offered on an altar or at a sacrifice, the hydrogeological system is reactivated, and the cosmic order is restored.

To be human is to have bones. Body parts are transformed into animals, and their identity is reborn. Perhaps they are not fully alive either, because in life they deal with spirits and in death they always return to earth. Crossing the diachrony of profane space and the eternity of sacred space, the characters form a hybrid and living theatre where one dies and is fearlessly reborn again and again. This experience is had every day, in the eternal cycle of day, awakening and sleep. In the dream, the soul detaches from the body, as in death, and is free to cross the earthly entrance to the underworld to navigate the subterranean rivers that mirror the heavenly ones.

When we wake up in the twenty first century in such a different cultural universe, the advance of knowledge and the ancient warning of Tertullian take on a whole new meaning. Antonaros points to the point of no return for a desperate humanity adrift on a vast platform left to its own devices. One has to look over one’s shoulder, to one’s ancestors, and remember that dying is what makes one human. Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento¹⁵. The teaching of the Amazonian Andean spirits and remains lies in the dynamic balance between the course of human life and that of sidereal eternity. It is useless and arrogant to think of a transcendence. It is even less intelligent to project a digital immortality that is incapable of dying.

The ancestral relationship between the eternal spirits and the mortal remains is the vector of a relationship that not only enables the living to relate to the departed but also makes the forms of eternity visible and repeatable. Here immortality is reversible. It is not a digital abstraction of an artificial arrow of time but a visible phenomenon that can be measured by all in the cycles of nature. The cosmic vibration reflected in the water cycle passes through reality in various states and returns as part of a diverse and coherent system. The ritual of ascending to the temple or sacred mountain opens the gateway to death and eternity; in turn, the descent of water reveals the gateway to birth and the return to life through fertility. So too, the journey of water in the celestial river of the Milky Way becomes rain in the lagoons. One-half of the journey on earth makes living beings mortal. The other half, through the celestial river, makes them immortal. Even though finding and climbing this river requires major cognitive transformations, this path is alive and active in the sacred landscapes of the Andes and the Amazon. Indeed, there is a river whose waters confer immortality, and in the not-too-distant future, in some region, there will be another river whose waters take that immortality away.

Further references

In addition to works noted in this chapter, the following scientific papers may be of interest.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.