Alchemical Peru

Summer 2022 Trip Notes

Over sixteen years ago, I walked into a friend’s backyard in Santa Monica. A couple of weeks before I’d had an experience of wings growing out of my back during meditation, something I was still struggling to make sense of (read Star Sister for the full story). A guy with condor eyes walked over to me and said, “Hey, your wings are a little stuck… Want me to help you with that?”

So of course I went with him to Peru. And the mountain spirits there gave me a seed of consciousness that I somehow managed to tend all these years, despite gringa and baby and moving so much.

Then a year ago, a little black dog came into my life and told me her name was Inka, Queen of the Jaguars. “Am I going back to Peru?” I wondered. Why yes, I realized, as life became a series of confirmations and fait accomplis until I found myself at 15,000+ feet beside two lakes named for jaguars at the foot of Ausangate. There, ridiculously, I asked for yet another sign that this Apu was my connection, and a black dog walked out from behind a boulder and put its head on my lap. “Daughter,” Ausangate chuckled, “Did I not send you Inka?”

Later, after another seed of consciousness was bestowed upon me, I began to shake and speak in tongues. More chuckling. More gratitude.

I was not happy when my tickets home disappeared, though. “I have a baby!” I whimpered at the LATAM functionary, who would have been surprised to see my four and a half foot, nine-year-old son described that way. The extra day in Cusco put me in her Monastery loggias, ringed by massive paintings of Christ, Mary, and, late in the progression, priests with cape-draped arms dropping sinister around the holy.

But in a windowed room on the second floor was a painting unlike all the others. It was dominated by three enormous black birds, the middle of which carried Christ’s haloed and beatific head, a radiant symbol of the upward evolution of consciousness, as assisted, in the Altomisayok tradition, by the Apus, who take the form of large birds, especially condors.

Directly above Christ’s head was a chalice in which a serpent swam, symbol of the Incan amaru, the spirits who dwell in the underworld and help us link to and clear the deep trauma in our subconscious minds and, ultimately, our blood. And beneath Christ was a flame-ringed crucible in which a smaller man with a smaller halo—no hell-tormented soul here—smiled up in gratitude for the alchemical process in which he gratefully partook.

The presence of this Incan initiatory map in the midst of the Catholic stronghold gave balm to my soul. Ausangate explained, “See how they strove for the light? See how much beauty there is always, though it may seem dark?”

The next day there were more airport snafus, but then I was home with my own blessed trinity—and grateful for it all, but especially the ongoing connections I have with Ausangate, the Nustras, and the Pachamamas here and in Peru.

If you want to be connected with the Earth and Mountain spirits around you, too, all you have to do is start connecting. Make an altar, outside if you can, and tend it: Bring it flowers, food, wine, chocolate—any small gifts you might bring to any friend you were hoping to cultivate—and start the conversation, always trusting your imagination and intuition. This will not only strengthen your personal connection to the consciousness around and within you, but it will strengthen the field for all of us.

Love,

Stella