Abchanchu

The Abchanchu, called also Anchanchu, belongs to the Aymara oral tradition of the altiplano, the plateau that extends about three thousand eight hundred meters around Lake Titicaca, between Bolivia and the south of Peru. There is no jungle in its territory: there is frozen puna, bare rock, ravines and a cold that bites as soon as the sun sets. It inhabits the most desolate caves and grottos of that height, and at night it travels the mountain paths. The sign that it walks near is the wind: the whirlwinds that rise suddenly on the plain without apparent cause are attributed to its passage, and the traveler who sees them knows that it is advisable to quicken the pace. Its name appears also among the Peruvian Aymara, with variants in the story.

His method is not the ambush but trust. The Abchanchu presents himself as a helpless old man who asks for help in the middle of the road, and that is his most repeated form; he also takes the figure of a rich Aymara woman, with gold teeth, that of a seductive stranger or that of a monstrous animal. When the walker stops to help him or lets himself be accompanied, the spirit drinks his blood. Whoever does not die bled dry remains ill, and goes wasting away for weeks without anyone knowing how to name the evil. The lesson of the tale is clear and very typical of a land of enormous distances: in the unpopulated area one should not trust the stranger who appears out of nowhere, however harmless he may seem.

What distinguishes the Abchanchu from any other blood drinker in the world is its second occupation: it is the gatekeeper of the underground mineral world. Before opening the earth one must pay it, and the payment has a precise form. A llama is sacrificed to it, which is burned with dry dung because in the altiplano there is no firewood, and one dances in its honor to the sound of the siku, the Andean pan flute, with ceramic masks crowned by taruca horns, the deer of the Andes, that represent it. Without that homage the vein does not appear, or the mine claims lives. That domain relates it to El Tío, the lord of the mines of Potosí whose name comes from the uru god Tiw, and to the Peruvian Muki, the underground dwarf attracted by gold.

Against the Abchanchu force does not serve. When someone falls ill after an encounter on the path, those who intervene are the traditional healers, the yatiris and the amautas, and they do so with a rite called ch'iyara misa, the black table. It is not an offering of purity but of repugnance: decomposed food and waste that imitate its own excrement are presented to it, to satiate it with that which corresponds to it and thus separate it from the sick person. That the remedy consists in giving it garbage and not incense says much about how this spirit is understood: it is not honored as a god nor expelled as a demon, it is paid what is its own so that it leaves.