Yanantin and Masintin in the Andean World: Complementary Dualism in Modern Peru

7: On Good and Evil; Life and Death

105 CHAPTER SEVEN On Good and Evil; Life and Death Ithought about my experience with the Lanzón the rest of that day and into the next. I couldn’t get over the reaction that I, a “rational Westerner,” had experienced sitting there in front of it—that combined sense of awe and dread that was like nothing I had ever felt before. Amado referred to the Lanzón as something that cuts in order to heal. It seemed that just as with the tinkuy battles, the discomfort I felt in front of the Lanzón was part of an intentional process that, while uncomfortable, was intended to have a positive outcome. Burger (1995) noted the following about the Lanzón: Its upturned mouth, enlarged upper canines and elongated sharpened nails on its hands and feet dispel any doubt about its ferocity. Yet the pose of the deity seems to depict him in the process of preserving the balance of the cosmos. The reconciliation of opposites and the maintenance of cosmic harmony were probably believed to hold the key to the stability of Chavín society, as well as the continued fertility of crops and animals. (p. 150) chapter seven 106 All this got me thinking, got me wondering, about the two core dichotomous pairs that we human beings deal with—that of “good and evil” and “life and death.” The next day, as we wound our way out of Chavín, I asked Amado and Juan Luis for their perspectives on these issues. Amado began. “According to the beliefs of the Andean cosmovision, there is no such thing as good or bad,” he said. “What happens is there is negative and positive, there is male and female. Always that duality. And when a person looks at it from a two-dimensional world, either of them is possible to change at all times. Whatever is positive can be negative in a moment. Whatever is negative can be positive in a moment. It’s not like heaven is heaven and hell is hell. In the Andean cosmovision these things can be changed very quickly.” He smiled knowingly at me. “This part is very delicate, because while it is very easy to say, for a person who is just opening their mind to this kind of thing, it can be a shock to hear. It’s a little bit hard to explain how that specifically works. And yet that is what I experience. In a healing, for example, I change heavy energy to positive just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Perhaps I even have the ability to turn positive energy into negative just like that. But because I am aware of what that can create, I don’t do that.” “Is ‘negative’ energy the same as ‘evil’ energy?” I asked. “For us, ‘evil’ is nothing more and nothing less than trickster apus. Because when you are arriving to the essence of a human being, of a mountain, of an animal, or of any being, it is not their limitation, it is not their judgments, it is not their fears that we know now as ‘devil.’ But it can present itself in appearance as that in order to challenge you. You have to have both. You have to have that which you know, and that which you don’t know.” “What do you mean by that?” I asked. “In other words, you have to acknowledge the trickster energy but not be illusioned by it. Instead, you must acknowledge the essence of it.” “The essence of it?” “The essence of that trickster energy is not what we usually perceive at first. Usually we perceive the surface part of it—what one might think of as ‘evil’—and that is what we stick with. Often, a lot of people get lost in the reaction of it, and that reaction creates a blockage that keeps you from accessing it deeper. So, out of fear, out of irritation, you react to it. On Good and Evil; Life and Death 107 But the essence is much deeper. It is something that you have to journey into further.” He saw my confused look. “What I mean is, for example, if [another shaman] does some sorcery work against us, we don’t react, because reacting is just playing into the surface part of that trickster energy. When we are facing that trickster energy, our first response is...