Condor

Andean cosmology divides the world into three: hanan pacha above, kay pacha here, and ukhu pacha below. Each has an animal. The condor belongs to the upper world, the puma to this one, and the snake to the world underneath, and the three appear together often enough in Inca and pre-Inca work that the grouping is a standard reading.

The condor's job in that scheme is transport. It carries messages and offerings upward to the apus, the mountain lords, and to the sun, and it is the form a soul may take on the way. The bird's actual habits support the reading better than most such correspondences do: it soars for hours without a wingbeat at altitudes where nothing else flies, and it is visible from the valley floor as a shape that belongs to the peaks rather than to the ground.

It is older than the Inca. Condors appear on Moche ceramics and among the Nazca geoglyphs, and the bird is common in Chavin and Paracas work. The Inca inherited it rather than invented it, which is the pattern for most of what the empire is credited with.

The bird's modern position is uncomfortable. It is a national symbol in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and it is close to extinction in parts of that range, poisoned and shot as a supposed threat to livestock that it very rarely is.

In the yawar fiesta, the blood festival, a captured condor is tied to the back of a bull and the bull is released into a ring. The bird claws at the bull's head, the bull bucks, and after some minutes the condor is untied and released, sometimes to a feast in its honour. The rite is documented in the southern Peruvian highlands and is the subject of Jose Maria Arguedas's novel of the same name.

The reading given locally is not subtle and is not hidden. The bull is Spain, brought with the invasion along with bullfighting; the condor is the Andes. The condor is on top, and the condor walks away. It is a colonial rite about the colony, performed within the calendar of Catholic patronal festivals, which is where a great deal of Andean religion has lived since the sixteenth century.

The bird's survival matters to the meaning. A yawar fiesta in which the condor died would say something different, and the released bird is treated as carrying the community's petition back to the mountains.

The practice is now restricted in Peruvian law, since the Andean condor is protected and the capture, however brief, is legally and biologically costly to a bird that breeds slowly. Local authorities and conservation bodies have negotiated substitutions in some districts. That argument, between a threatened species and a rite that is itself a form of cultural survival, has no clean resolution and the atlas does not offer one.