beneficial ancestor

[from alison l. spedding, Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality: The Coca Field as a Total Social Fact]

In symbolic terms, then, coca is a woman, and may be interpreted as a female ancestor, counterpart of the achachila (whose name means ‘dear grandfather’) who is invoked at crucial stages in the cultivation of coca.  After the coca has been picked, the process of drying converts it into a beneficial ancestor, parallel to the dried corpses of the ancestors whose cult was so important in the Andes until the extirpation campaigns of the seventeenth century.  The green matu corresponds to the recently dead, the fresh corpse who is said to be ‘hot’ (junt’u) and ‘stinking’ (thuksa).  The matu easily heats up and ferments, and has a penetrating, bitter, and almost nauseating odor…

(It) was used as a ritual offering – the counterpart of the living victims, human and animal, who were offered to (the 'idols').  The matu is stored in the same room of the house where corpses lie in wake, and a person who has matu, like one whose relative has recently died, is obligated to stay home to dry it and cannot go to work.  One young woman said, of her mother and sister who were drying coca, “They’re holding a wake for the dead.”

Once the coca has been dried, however, all anxiety disappears… It has been converted into the beneficial ancestor who is a source of good luck and prosperity… Coca leaf, when chewed, has the ability to protect one from all kinds of malignant spiritual influences, from the witchcraft of one’s neighbors, from the mountain spirits who may attack sleeping travelers, from the kharisiri who extracts from living victims the fat that in Andean thought represents their life force.  It is chewed incessantly in funerals and wakes when one is in the presence of the contaminating and malignant recently dead.  It represents a positive channel between the chewer and protective ancestral forces, and forms part of almost all offerings in Andean religon (whether included in the offering itself, and/or chewed by the participants as part of the rite.)