Originally posted on Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The National Geographic‘s Gold: The True Cost of a Global Obsession …
… contains a very picturesque story:
“Juan Apaza is possessed by gold. Descending into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes … the miner has already made his “payment to the Earth”: a bottle of pisco, the local liquor, placed near the mouth of the mine; a few coca leaves slipped under a rock; and, several months back, a rooster sacrificed by a shaman on the sacred mountaintop. Now, heading into the tunnel, he mumbles a prayer in his native Quechua language to the deity who rules the mountain and all the gold within.
“‘She is our Sleeping Beauty,’ says Apaza, nodding toward a sinuous curve in the snowfield high above the mine. ‘Without her blessing we would never find any gold. We might not make it out of here alive.'”
La Rinconada, Peru, courtesy of Wikipedia
According to the Wikipedia,
In the religion and mythology of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, apus are the spirits of the mountains that protect the local people in the highlands. The term dates back to the Inca Empire.
Meanings of Apu
The word “apu” has several possible meanings, depending on context:
- A god or supreme being. The spirit of the sacred mountain; the most powerful of all nature spirits.
- The sacred mountain that is home of the ancestors.
- A light being that exists within special mountains. These spirits live in both the middle and upper worlds, and can intercede for humanity.
Apus of Cusco
The twelve sacred apus of Cusco are: Ausangate, Salkantay, Mama Simona, Pikol, Manuel Pinta, Wanakauri, Pachatusan, Pijchu, Saqsaywaman, Viraqochan, Pukin, and Senq’a.
Other Apus are: Akamari, Illampu, Lady of Illimani, Machu Picchu, Pitusiray, Putucusi, Tunupa, Wakac Willka, Wayna Picchu, and Yanantin.
To which “light being that exists within special mountains” Juan Apaza dedicated a bottle of pisco, coca leaves, and the sacrificed rooster, the National Geographic does not say. Yet this convergence of the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the secular, metal extracted from the heights of the Earth to be secured within vaults in its depths, bears vivid witness to the enduring power of gold on the human imagination.
And as Napoleon, once challenged that his methods were “nothing but imagination,” rejoined: “Imagination rules the world.”
(from Napoleon Bonaparte, by John SC Abbott, (Project Gutenberg, p. 44).
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