☽︎Sky and Signs

The Andean sky

In the Andes the sky is a calendar. Farmers look at the Pleiades before dawn in June to learn how the rains will come, Inti Raymi celebrates the return of the Sun at the solstice, and in the Milky Way, the great river of the sky, dark figures of animals appear: the llama, the serpent, the toad.

The Andean sky in 2027

The Pleiades and the rain

Around the feast of San Juan on 24 June, farmers in southern Peru and Bolivia climb up before dawn to look at the Pleiades, called Qollqa, the storehouse, in Quechua. If they look large, bright and full of stars, they expect good rains and plant their potatoes early; if they look pale, they plant later. In 2000 Benjamin Orlove, John Chiang and Mark Cane showed in Nature that the method has a basis: in El Niño years thin, almost invisible high clouds dim the Pleiades in June, and those years usually bring less rain months later. A forecast centuries old turned out to be an observation of the Pacific climate.

How it is calculated: the first dawn on which Alcyone, the brightest star of the Pleiades, stands 5 degrees above the horizon of Cusco while the Sun is 12 degrees below it.

Qoyllur Rit'i, the snow star

Every year tens of thousands of pilgrims climb to the sanctuary of Sinakara at the foot of the Ausangate glacier, at more than 4,600 metres. Qoyllur Rit'i means snow star in Quechua; the feast joins devotion to the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i with the Andean veneration of the mountains, and UNESCO inscribed it as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. It takes place in the days before Corpus Christi, sixty days after Easter Sunday, so it moves with Easter, between mid-May and late June. Many link the name, snow star, with the Pleiades, which return to the morning sky in those weeks.

Inti Raymi and the Andean New Year

Inti Raymi was the great Inca feast of the Sun at the June solstice, when the Sun stands farthest north and turns back; the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega described it in his Royal Commentaries. Since 1944 it has been re-enacted every 24 June in Cusco, at the Qorikancha, the Plaza de Armas and Sacsayhuamán. In Bolivia 21 June is Willka Kuti, the return of the Sun, or Machaq Mara, the Aymara new year: since 2009 a national holiday as the Andean-Amazonian New Year, and at Tiwanaku thousands wait with raised hands for the first rays.

The Milky Way: the river and its animals

The Milky Way is Mayu, the river. In the communities near Cusco people see not only figures made of stars but also dark patches in the river of light, dust clouds that hide the stars behind them: the serpent Mach'acuay, the toad Hanp'atu, the tinamou Yutu, the fox Atoq and, at the centre, the Llama, Yacana, whose eyes are the two bright stars Alpha and Beta Centauri, Llamaq Ñawin. Beneath her a young llama suckles. That is how the anthropologist Gary Urton recorded them in Misminay, and already the Huarochirí manuscript of around 1600 tells that Yacana comes down at midnight to drink the water of the sea so that the earth does not flood.

The dark figures can only be seen far from lights, on moonless nights. In the dry season, from May to August, the Llama stands high in the night sky across the southern hemisphere.

Pachamama in August

On 1 August, in the Andes of Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and north-western Argentina, the earth is said to open: the farming cycle ends, and she is fed with coca leaves, chicha, maize and sweets, in the ch'alla and in offerings prepared by the yatiris. The whole of August is Pachamama's month.

Andean traditions are alive and differ from one valley to the next. This page summarises what researchers and the communities themselves have recorded, without claiming to speak for them.

More: tonight's sky live · Easter and Corpus Christi

Sources: B. S. Orlove, J. C. H. Chiang, M. A. Cane, "Forecasting Andean rainfall and crop yield from the influence of El Niño on Pleiades visibility", Nature 403 (2000); G. Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky (1981); the Huarochirí manuscript; UNESCO. The dates are calculated.