Yatiri Encounters of the Bolivian Altiplano

The Specialists of the Sacred Geography

In the Aymara tradition of the Bolivian and Peruvian altiplano, the yatiri is the specialist most often translated into English as “shaman” or “wise one,” though neither term renders the role accurately. The yatiri is, in the simplest summary, a person who knows — knows the appropriate addresses to make to the apus and achachilas, the great mountain ancestors of the high Andes; knows how to read the coca leaves; knows how to mediate disputes between persons living and the persons who are places. The yatiri is not, strictly, a religious figure in the European sense, nor is the practice he or she conducts a “religion” detachable from the broader fabric of Aymara life. The yatiri’s encounters with non-human beings are not, in their original framework, paranormal. They are the visible operation of a world that is more populated than secular modernity admits.

Encounters reported and analysed by yatiris and their clients form one of the longest continuous records of what Western frameworks would describe as paranormal experience anywhere in South America. The practice survived the Inca expansion, the Spanish conquest, the long Catholic missionary effort, the republican secularising state, and the twentieth-century pressures of urbanisation and Pentecostal Christianity. It survives now into the digital era, with practising yatiris operating in El Alto and La Paz at the same intersections from which the office workers of those cities consult them.

The Achachilas and the Animate Mountains

Aymara cosmology recognises the great peaks of the cordillera — Illimani, Mururata, Sajama, Illampu, and the volcanic peaks of the Cordillera Real and Oriental — as conscious beings in active relationship with the human communities of the altiplano. These are the achachilas, the ancestral grandfathers, who must be addressed, fed, and considered as parties to any significant communal undertaking. The yatiri’s principal ritual role is to mediate this relationship: through the q’oa offering of llama foetus, sweets, herbs, and silver, burned at carefully chosen sites at carefully chosen hours.

Yatiris speaking of their encounters with the achachilas have produced a remarkably consistent body of testimony across several centuries of recorded ethnography. The achachilas appear, by repeated account, in dreams as elderly men in dark woolen clothing, sometimes mounted, sometimes on foot. They speak in Aymara. They issue instructions, often quite specific, regarding offerings to be made, journeys to be avoided, persons to be warned. The yatiri who fails to relay these instructions, or who interprets them poorly, suffers consequences. The relationship is reciprocal and demanding, not metaphorical.

The Dead and the Daily Round

Beyond the achachilas, the yatiri’s practice deals routinely with the dead. The Aymara distinction between the almas of the recently deceased and the more distant ancestors is operational in ritual life and grounds a cluster of practices around the year’s annual cycle. November 1 and 2, corresponding loosely to the Catholic All Saints and All Souls but rooted in pre-Columbian observance, are the days on which the dead return to their families and must be received with the t’antawawas — bread effigies — and the meals they preferred in life.

Yatiris consulted during this period frequently report direct encounters with returning dead, and they relay messages whose accuracy is, by the consensus of their clients, generally striking. The anthropologist Joseph Bastien, whose 1978 study Mountain of the Condor drew on extended fieldwork among Aymara communities of the Kallawaya region of northern Bolivia, recorded numerous specific instances in which yatiri-conveyed messages from the dead contained details unknown to the yatiri but recognised by the family. Bastien’s methodological caution did not prevent him from describing the pattern as remarkably difficult to dismiss.

Diagnosis and Healing

A substantial portion of yatiri practice consists of diagnosis and healing through the coca leaf, in which the practitioner reads patterns in the fall of leaves cast onto a cloth. The technique is widely practised across the Andes and is treated by clients with serious confidence; the leaves’ patterns are read for information about illness, theft, infidelity, missing persons, and impending events. Studies of coca divination, including those of the Bolivian anthropologist Xavier Albó, have noted both its embeddedness in the wider Aymara framework of relational thought and the genuine puzzle of its frequent reported accuracy.

Healing in this tradition involves not only herbal preparations but also formal acts of restoration of the patient’s ajayu — the soul-substance that may have been lost through fright, accident, or hostile intervention. The ajayu is understood as a substance that can leave the body, drift, and need to be retrieved; the yatiri performs the retrieval through prescribed ritual sequences. From a Western framework, the practice resembles aspects of soul retrieval traditions documented globally. From within Aymara understanding, it is a technical procedure with a specifiable ontology.

Encounter Reports and Contemporary Research

A small number of contemporary researchers have attempted to document yatiri encounter reports in formats accessible to non-Aymara audiences. The Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and her collaborators have published extensively on Aymara epistemology, treating yatiri practice as a distinct mode of knowing rather than as folklore awaiting reduction. The anthropologist Catherine Allen, working primarily with Quechua-speaking communities across the border in Peru, has documented closely related practices and the encounters they involve.

The encounters themselves resist easy translation. Yatiris speaking with foreign anthropologists often describe interactions with achachilas, with the dead, and with subsidiary beings of the landscape — anchanchu, the deceptive humanoid spirits of springs and ruins; saxra, the malevolent forces inhabiting deserted places — in matter-of-fact tones that initially read to outside ears as either metaphorical or fantastical. Sustained acquaintance reveals neither: the practitioners are speaking literally about beings whose existence they have no reason to doubt and considerable cumulative evidence to affirm.

The Practice in the Twenty-First Century

The yatiri tradition has survived, transformed, into the present. In El Alto, the working-class city above La Paz, practising yatiris maintain consultations within walking distance of the cable-car stations that connect the altiplano to the colonial capital below. Clients include indigenous Aymara migrants, mestizo professionals, foreign tourists, and increasingly, urban Bolivians of Aymara descent reconnecting with traditions their parents or grandparents had set aside.

The Bolivian state, since the constitutional reforms of 2009, has accorded formal recognition to indigenous medical and ritual traditions, and yatiris now operate within a legal framework that did not exist in their grandparents’ lifetimes. Whether this institutionalisation will preserve the tradition or alter it beyond recognition is a question Aymara observers themselves debate. For the moment, the achachilas continue to receive their offerings on the high passes. The yatiri continues to read the leaves. The encounters continue, by every account, to occur.

Sources

• Bastien, J. Mountain of the Condor. St. Paul: West Publishing, 1978.
• Albó, X. Achacachi: Medio Siglo de Lucha Campesina. La Paz: CIPCA, 1979.
• Rivera Cusicanqui, S. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010.
• Allen, C. J. The Hold Life Has. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.