Advertisement
Published: September 22nd 2006
Edit Blog Post
The Sacred Baths
All modesty flies out the window as Peruvians bathe with sacred water. Señor de Huanca, pronounced WANKER- so really it’s the SIR OF WANKERS!! Hehe. Is a very important religious day here in Cusco- and well, really, all over Perú and even into other South American countries. The official day is the 14th of September, where thousands of Peruvians make the pilgrimage trek up one of the mountains deep in the depths of the Andes. In the rocky center of the mountain is a monastery and within this monastery is a rock. And on this rock there is supposedly an image of Jesus. Hmmm…
Elvis and his family make this pilgrimage each year: they take with them any documents they feel need to be blessed, the kids take school projects that they want good marks for. Small candles are bought and rubbed over the body of every family member-
I am still a little confused on the finer details of the Wanker history: it seems to change with every person you talk too. But, somewhere back in the Inca times, there once was a magnificent rock situated high up in the mountains- the rock had special significance for the Incas, they would travel there and pay their respects to the elements
of the Mother Earth. When the Spaniards arrived and saw that this was an important monument of worship for the Incas, they, like everything else in Perú, decided to convert it into something with Catholic origins. And so, they hired a painter and he painted a resemblance of Jesus on the rock’s face- turning an Incan Earthly worship site into a Catholic worship site. It is a site where people go to make their peace with God, whoever it maybe, and ask for good fortune for the coming year.
Because of our work commitments Elvis and I couldn’t make the trek with the family: so we decided to catch the bus up the following Sunday. It was an incredibly early start for a Sunday morning: and it seemed that the working population of Cusco had also decided to head to the mountains the same Sunday. Arriving at the bus station, it was an amazing people fight to board buses: it literally was a stampede, the ideas of human civility flew out the window as old people were being pushed out the lines, woman with babies were being squashed… people with children were shoving their children through the windows. For
Can you see it? Can you see it?
Yes the painted Jesus rock is up there somewhere??????????? a good five minutes I stood there, gob smacked- the behaviour was atrocious! I just couldn’t believe it. Elvis was telling me his plans for us to get on the bus and score ourselves seats- it was like that this was all normal for him.
It was the shouts of taxi drivers that caught my ear….
“WANKER, WANKER, WANKER, WANKER,” they were shouting. It made me giggle and wonder how far they would get in shouting that out in Australia???
As the bus pulled up and Elvis made ready to execute his seat obtaining plan, I took a stand and told him that there was no way that I was going to behave like a crazed animal trying to get a seat. An old couple and a mum with a baby agreed with me, so we decided to split a taxi between us, which ended up only costing a couple of dollars extra than the bus fare. AND the taxi took us almost to the top of the mountain!!!
It was quite an interesting day for me, I didn’t get to see the rock with Jesus’ painting, but I did watch Elvis make his devotions:
we lit our candles and said a prayer to whichever deity. The priest even blessed me with a rose dipped in sacred water.
There is a water system up the top of the mountain, I don’t know it’s origins, but it is said to be very sacred water: and to bathe in this water will bring good fortune. It was quite a funny sight, all these Peruvians bathing under the fountains of water… some old women were absolutely starkers, their wrinkly saggy boobs bouncing around as they bathed. Being the only western woman around for miles, I opted to keep my clothes on and just bathe my head in the sacred water. Elvis filled a bottle of sacred water to bring back home to bless the house. All the religious antics were a tad beyond this little heathen girl: but it was still fun and interesting to watch and participate.
How many people can say that they were blessed by a priest of Wankers?
Candice.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.076s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 5; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0407s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb