Andean Mysticism

Definition

Andean Mysticism is a New Age movement that offers a return to a millenary indigenous tradition by way of a critique of the ways in which hierarchies and social divisions are produced in modern society. This critique is expressed via a performative approach that persuades its participants to relinquish their jobs and/or their social positions and live in alternative communities instead.

Key Information

A core aspect of the indigenous tradition recuperated by Andean Mysticism is communion with Pachamama– Mother Earth – an entity central to the beliefs shared by pre-Colombian prehistoric communities of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. For the followers of Andean Mysticism, this ideal of communion is associated with overcoming the divide between the individual and nature that marks the experience of modernity. Hence the beliefs of Andean Mysticism include the possibility of reestablishing this communion with nature, ruptured by the conquest of the Americas, European...