Viejo Gringo Reports #1: Grisly Museum

 Andean Sanctuaries Museum (Museo Santuarios Andinos) – Arequipa, Peru

This odd museum at the center of Arequipa, Peru near the Plaza de Armas is run by the Catholic Church.  It is odd because it focuses on the archeological remains of a 12-14 year old girl – now kept in a cooled glass case - sacrificed by the Incas to appease their gods.  The girls’ creepy mummified body is in the final room of the museum. Other rooms contain other mummies of sacrificed children as young as 6. Why would the Catholic Church do this?

She's smiling!

The Catholics admit what they cannot hide, that they built a cathedral or church over Incan religious sites or destroyed them, especially around Arequipa and Cuzco, in their conquest of Peru.  This was their attempt to destroy or replace local paganism.  Yet they have also practiced a form of ‘syncretism’ for years – adapting to local religious or pagan customs by trying to incorporate them into Catholicism.  How does human sacrifice fit in? 

Droughts, floods, failing harvests, lost battles – all had to be atoned for or warded off by sacrifices carried out by Incan priests.  This one took place, along with two other children, on the high, frozen slopes of the Ampato Volcano. It is the only one located anywhere in Peru by archeologists. In their religion, the mountains were gods and the higher you went, the holier the ground became.  For hundreds of years the body lay frozen until the volcano began to erupt.  The name this girl was given was “Juanita’ – perhaps a reference to one of the archeologists who dug her up, Juan in Spanish.  She was a high-born girl, perhaps connected to royalty, buried with exquisite pottery, high-end textiles and clothing, metal artifacts and dressed in an elaborate headdress, clothing and jewelry.  It’s a bit like the burial of an Egyptian pharaoh.   

There are reasons why the Catholic University of Santa Maria latched onto this.  One, it shows their pure interest in the science of archeology.  Catholicism has always tried to incorporate scientific ideas they could live with, like the false Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.  They even made nods to versions of evolution.  This gives their wholly imaginative religion some scientific props, hiding its archaic theoretical nature.  

Two.  This event both denigrates and incorporates the idea of human sacrifice by the Quechua Incans.  Most visitors will be appalled by the idea of human sacrifice as a really primitive form of magical thinking.  Yet the video shown before the tour celebrates and justifies this sacrifice to the Incan gods as a form of holy commitment by this young girl.  It was an honor we are to believe.  By the way, the audience for this one was a group of young college-age women.  

The Incan religion is exposed as partly barbaric in this museum.  Yet Catholicism has a replacement for this holy example – Jesus.  Jesus also ‘sacrificed’ himself as a martyr for the good of humanity, not just the Incas.  This time instead of an Incan priest drugging a ‘holy’ girl with fermented corn liquor – chicha – then bashing her skull in with a club, we have a young man being crucified on a cross by a Roman judge.  Christ purportedly didn’t want to be killed, but martyrdom is a goal of religious types and even non-religious ones, as we know.

The Catholic love of ‘relics’ – bits of saints' bones and spatterings of blood, the cross symbol as a form of holy torture, is here transformed into a similar format – a mummy with all the relics buried with her in her volcanic tomb, which was a hole in the ground. What this museum does is both sanctify and abjure her death, then replace her with Jesus for the Peruvians.  Though that second part you are not supposed to guess.  Syncretism, you see.  It's kind of like Incan paganism and Christian Catholic thinking share something key in common.  

Prior blogspot posts on this subject, use blog search box,  upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Religion,” “Peru.”

Kultur Kommissar / May 14, 2025 - Please celebrate and read books by B. Traven, a German Marxist who wrote about class struggle in Mexico.  He IS the viejo gringo.