Pachamama Rituals

Descriptions in colonial chronicles

Daniela di Salvia analyzed sixteenth and seventeenth century Peruvian chronicles on the cult of the Andean Mother Earth she calls Pachamama. In her reading, the chroniclers record offerings to the earth around sowing and harvest. Passages she quotes from Polo de Ondegardo (1567) and Martín de Murúa describe people pouring chicha on the earth and throwing coca or other things on it, asking that it do them good. Pablo José de Arriaga (1621) wrote that women spoke to the earth at sowing time, asking for a good harvest and pouring chicha and ground maize.

Di Salvia also notes that Murúa distinguished fertile earth, called camac pacha, from never-cultivated earth, called pacha mama. She argues that the chronicles become more detailed over time, and she treats them as ethnohistorical sources. They were written by Spanish and mestizo authors, so they carry the viewpoint of their writers.

Interpretation and syncretism

Lynette Yetter argues that the rendering of Pachamama as Mother Earth comes from chroniclers such as Alonso Ramos Gavilán and Bernabé Cobo, and that the Quechua and Aymara word carries a wider meaning. Her paper, which is interpretive rather than a field study, discusses the 1582 exchange of patron saints at Copacabana, Bolivia, and proposes that the Virgin Mary was combined with Pachamama in local understanding. Other scholars may weigh the same evidence differently.

A 2025 discourse analysis by Vanessa Calvimontes Díaz summarizes the same trajectory as a shift from a telluric deity in ancestral myths, to a protective mother syncretized with the Virgin Mary in colonial times, to a political symbol in modern Bolivia. The article also reports a view that the figure may originally have referred to time as much as to land.

What the sources do not establish

The sources reviewed here do not trace a continuous line from specific colonial-era offerings to a particular present-day ceremony. They also do not date the August cycle. The contemporary description below comes from fieldwork in 2015 and 2023 in one Argentine highland area, and its authors state that the offering form is also found elsewhere in the Andes.

Pachamama and the word pacha

Boos and Salvucci explain that pacha is an Andean cosmological concept: the here and now of the universe, the living environment in the present. Pachamama names the maternal aspect of pacha that rears humans, animals and plants. The same authors note that Pachamama can also punish disrespect, and that in August she is described as very hungry and able to eat people and animals.

Yetter reports that Pachamama is a word shared by Quechua and Aymara, that the suffix mama means mother, and that pacha can refer to the space and time of the world, including kay pacha (this world) and pachakuti (the turning of an epoch). Calvimontes Díaz cites ethnographers who call the figure ambiguous, because she includes several worlds and can both nurture and harm.

Ritual and relational terms

In the Laguna Blanca area of Catamarca, Argentina, offerings buried for Pachamama are called corpachadas. Boos and Salvucci gloss the Quechua word as hosting, inviting or entertaining. They also describe the ch'alla (spelled challa in their text) as spilling a little of a drink on the ground before drinking, and the chaku as a collective vicuña capture and shearing, an activity with its own offerings.

Ayni is glossed by Yetter as reciprocity, and the Boos and Salvucci article describes reciprocity, care and affection as the basis of the relationship between people and their surroundings. The authors also use the terms mutual rearing (uywaña in Aymara) and mutual consumption. The terms despacho and k'intu, often used in popular descriptions, are not defined in the sources reviewed for this page.

Offerings to the earth

Boos and Salvucci describe corpachadas as offerings of food, alcohol, cigarettes, coca leaves and other items that are buried on different occasions. Participants describe the purposes as asking permission, asking for the multiplication of animals, paying, entertaining and thanking Pachamama, understood as the living Andean environment. Offerings are also made at the start and end of the community vicuña chaku, to ask permission and to give thanks.

The 1 August ceremony in Laguna Blanca

In Laguna Blanca, a village of about 200 residents above 3,300 meters, 1 August is the day of a community offering. Residents say August is the coldest and driest month, when Pachamama is hungry and fragile, so she is fed. According to the authors, families first make an offering at home early in the morning. A public offering follows in the plaza, which the community has organized for about two decades. Fieldwork in 2023 recorded participation by residents, migrants from valley cities, caciques of local Indigenous communities, municipal and provincial officials, journalists and tourists.

This is one village in one province, described at overview level. The article does not claim that other Quechua or Aymara communities in Peru, Bolivia or Ecuador follow the same sequence, and ritual details differ by place and family.

Everyday gestures and cycles of exchange

Boos and Salvucci, drawing on other Andean scholars, describe rituals such as the corpachada and the ch'alla as expressing a relationship of shared substance between people and their environment. They describe offerings as contributing to a circulation of vital energy, within a cycle of generation, destruction and regeneration in which Pachamama eventually consumes those she rears. These are interpretations by anthropologists of how participants understand the practice.

Purposes described in the sources

Colonial authors quoted by di Salvia record offerings tied to sowing, harvest and the fertility of fields, and Santillán is quoted as describing the earth as a special advocate of women in labor, with sacrifices made to her at childbirth. In the Argentine study, residents describe offerings as a way of asking for protection, with one resident saying the household offering is made so that the earth and the airs do not harm the family. The authors also report offerings to ask permission for, and give thanks after, collective vicuña shearing.

Reciprocity as an organizing idea

Yetter cites historian Kenneth Mills for colonial-era testimony that, if the earth was not nourished by offerings, people would lose their land and water sources. She presents this as an expression of ayni, and interprets Copacabana's 1582 change of patron saints through it. This is her reading, and the testimony concerns beliefs reported in colonial records, not outcomes that were tested.

The sources describe the claimed uses as agricultural, protective, relational and communal. None presents the offerings as a treatment for a disease, and this page does not describe them as one.

No outcome research on the rituals

No randomized trials, systematic reviews or other controlled studies of Pachamama offerings or of participation in them were found. On 2026-10-06, PubMed searches on Kallawaya medicine in Bolivia, coca leaf chewing in Peru and Bolivia, and Andean ritual drinking returned ethnographic, laboratory and observational papers, but none that measured health outcomes of the rituals. The evidence base for this page is therefore historical and ethnographic.

Andean traditional medicine research

A 1996 laboratory study tested extracts of more than 100 samples of 60 Kallawaya medicinal plant species from Bolivia for toxicity and for protection of cultured T-lymphoblastoid cells from HIV. It reported a therapeutic index above 25 for eighteen species, with activity mostly in aqueous extracts. This was a cell-culture result about plant extracts, not a clinical finding and not research on ritual.

An earlier ethnographic paper by Bastien describes Kallawaya Andean ideas of the body as a topographical and hydraulic model, with hot and cold, wet and dry categories, and discusses whether those categories were adopted from Spanish humoral theory or are pre-Columbian. It describes a medical worldview and does not test any practice.

Coca chewing studies

Coca leaves are among the items offered, so studies of habitual coca chewing are sometimes cited near this topic. A 2025 pilot study of 20 Peruvian miners at about 4,000 meters, ten habitual chewers and ten non-chewers, found lower serum cortisol in chewers, and the authors call it exploratory. The study concerns chewing during work and does not address leaves placed as offerings.

Substances named in offerings

The Argentine ethnography lists alcohol, cigarettes and coca leaves among offerings, notes that bones are burned so the smoke and smell reach Pachamama, and mentions household preparations including rue tea and a drink of rue with aguardiente. The sources reviewed do not assess the health effects of these substances in ritual quantities or contexts, so no frequency or severity of harm can be reported for the rituals.

Findings on habitual coca chewing

Two Peruvian observational studies concern habitual chewing, not offering. A 2019 case-control study in Huancavelica with 100 chewers and 100 non-chewers reported gum alterations (odds ratio 42.67) and right masseter muscle pain (odds ratio 17.47), with no association with dental wear or fracture. A cross-sectional study of 50 chewers and 50 non-chewers aged 60 to 80 reported bitterness, numbness and mouth dryness among chewers, with less clinical attachment loss but more inflammatory cells in gingival biopsies. Both samples were small, and only the abstracts were read for this page.

Care boundaries and respect

The ritual is described by practitioners as relational and cultural, and the sources do not present it as medical care. Anyone with a health concern should not delay or replace necessary medical care because of participation in a ritual. Boos and Salvucci also report that some tourists at the 2023 public ceremony filmed continuously and began offering before being instructed, which illustrates a concern about conduct by outsiders.

Public ceremony and politics

Boos and Salvucci describe the Laguna Blanca ceremony as also a political space during a dispute over a proposed open-pit gold mine: the cacique of one community offered water while stressing its importance for life and opposing the project, and not all communities took part. They cite other authors who argue that the heritage framing of Pachamama offerings has strengthened Indigenous political identity in some communities.

Calvimontes Díaz reports that Pachamama is claimed as a symbol of environmental and Indigenous struggle in Bolivia, but is also instrumentalized by official discourses that can contradict her founding values. These are analyses of discourse and do not settle disputes between governments, companies and communities.

Tourist and New Age versions

In Laguna Blanca, households that host tourists make an offering with guests, and the public ceremony draws visitors. Local speakers thanked tourists, and several residents said tourism could be an alternative to mining. Boos and Salvucci cite other scholars on appropriation of Indigenous spirituality in New Age settings in Peru and on political use of the rituals for tourism promotion and green image-making in Jujuy. Their own observations show tourists with varied motives, not only New Age interest.

The authors cite a colleague who criticizes outsiders who relate to the place without local manners of respect, and they argue that the offering can serve as mediation between residents and visitors. Practices sold as Pachamama ceremonies outside Andean communities were not themselves studied in the sources reviewed here.