The Material

6. Sonqo: the heart as the place of thought

sonqo (also sunqu) — heart.

And in Quechua, the heart thinks.

The vocabulary

The whole psychological vocabulary is built on this word. From the colonial dictionaries and from the living language:

Memory, decision, judgement, desire — all are located in the chest.

What it means, and what it does not

It does not mean they did not know where the head is. It means the system does not separate thought from feeling — and therefore has no reason to place them in different organs.

“Judgement” in this scheme is not cold calculation. It is a stance toward something, and a stance always has an emotional dimension. So it belongs where you feel.

The practical consequence

The question “what are you thinking?” and the question “what are you feeling?” are the same question in this vocabulary.

And a decision taken only logically, without “sitting” in the chest, is considered unfinished — not wrong, but not yet yours.

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7. Animu: the force that leaves

Here linguistic honesty is needed before anything else.

The problem of the word

The term you will hear today across the Andes is animu — and it is a loanword from the Spanish ánimo.

The pre-Hispanic terms recorded in the colonial dictionaries are others: camaquen (from the root camay of chapter 2) and upani.

That is: the word is Spanish, the content is not. An indigenous concept found a Spanish vehicle and survived inside it. This is characteristic of the whole Andean world after the conquest.

What it is

A vital force that inhabits the body but can leave it.

Characteristics, as recorded in modern ethnography:

• It leaves from terror, from sudden shock, from a fall
• It leaves in deep sleep — which is why you do not wake someone abruptly
• It can be held by a place (chapter 21)
• Its absence causes wasting, pallor, anorexia, sadness, lethargy
• In children it is fragile, and so children are particularly protected

And alongside it: kawsay

kawsay — “life, being alive”. Used also as a noun for vital force in general.

In contemporary neo-Andean vocabulary the phrase kawsay pacha, “the living universe”, appears — and here it should be noted that this phrase as a technical term is recent, even if the words are old.

The structural connection

Note the consistency with chapter 2:

If nothing has life but is animated by relation, then it is perfectly consistent that the vital force can be detached — because it was never your property.

You do not lose something of yours. A relation is interrupted.

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8. Wind, hot and cold

Wayra

wayra — wind. And as in many systems, the wind is simultaneously a natural phenomenon and a pathogen.

Mal viento or wayra as illness: sudden affliction by “bad air” at specific sites — canyons, ruins, graves, places where something has happened, transitional hours (dusk, noon).

The symptoms are sudden: headache, nausea, facial distortion, weakness. And it is particularly dangerous for children, pregnant women and the weakened.

Note the common structure: the danger is not random. It is linked to place and time. You suffer something because you were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, without protection — that is, because you entered a relation you did not regulate.

Hot and cold — with the same caveat

There is an extensive and living system of classifying foods, illnesses and treatments into hot and cold.

And the same question applies: how much of it is pre-Hispanic?

The thesis that it is a Spanish import — Hippocratic-Galenic quality theory, transferred through the Iberian peninsula — is serious and has been argued: modern systems vary greatly from region to region and are not internally consistent.

The opposite position points out that there is a genuine Andean thermal polarity, independent: altitude, day and night, upper and lower, sun and water.

The most likely answer is “both”, with the two systems so fused that they can no longer be separated.

I will not give the detailed table of “which food is hot” for the same reason.

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9. Sami and hucha — and what we actually know

Here the greatest accuracy of the whole document is needed, because here lies the greatest distance between what circulates and what is documented.

What circulates

A clean dualist energetic system: sami = light, good, vital energy; hucha = heavy, dense, dysfunctional energy. With processing techniques (saminchakuy, hucha mikhuy — “the eating of heavy energy”), with energy centres in the body, and with a hierarchy of initiates (pampamisayoq and altomisayoq).

What the sources say

In the colonial dictionaries, hucha does not mean “heavy energy”.

In the great dictionary of Gonçález Holguín (1608) and in related sources, hucha means sin, fault, debt, obligation, matter, legal case, issue to be settled.

It is, characteristically, the word the missionaries chose to translate “sin” — precisely because it already had the sense of the open account. That is, it connects directly with the ayni of chapter 3.

Sami means luck, happiness, blessing, good fortune; and it has a specific material use, for the foam or essence of chicha (maize beer).

What happened

The systematised form taught today was shaped from the 1980s onward, through the encounter of Andean paqo — mainly from the Q’ero communities — with anthropologists and Western students, and spread internationally in the 1990s and 2000s.

A central role was played by the work of anthropologist Juan Núñez del Prado — son of the anthropologist who led the 1955 expedition to the Q’ero (chapter 27) — and of a series of Western authors who disseminated it.

How to take it

Neither as fraud nor as antiquity.

It is living practice, taught by real Andeans, with real techniques developed in a real context. It has genuine roots: ayni, the idea of the open account, the processing of weight.

It is also a contemporary synthesis, with a clear date, and not “the ancient system of the Inca”.

And the critical point: Andean continuity does not require this claim. Chapters 2, 3, 10, 17 and 21 describe things with much deeper and more secure documentation.