Hundreds of Bolivian devotees arrived Friday on the municipal cemetery of La Paz carrying human skulls adorned with flowers for the Ñatitas festival, a custom rooted within the Andean region, but not recognized by the Catholic church.
According to Bolivian belief, devotees ask Ñatitas for health, money, love and other favors.
Mama Azapa is one in every of the Ñatitas, and in contrast to many others, her skull has braided hair. “She is my protector,” Elena Martínez, who identified herself as an “amauta,” or Quechua priestess, said.
During the festival, people throw coca leaves and flowers at them and put cigarettes of their mouths. Some skulls are even wearing sunglasses and hats. Some are kept in golden, glass urns and others in shoe boxes decorated with flowers.
The festival is a mixture of Andean ancestral worship and Catholic beliefs. Experts say it was common in pre-Columbian times to maintain skulls as trophies and display them to symbolize death and rebirth.
Anthropologist Milton Eyzaguirre, a researcher on the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, explained that in Andean culture death is linked to life.
“The deceased are underground, within the earth, that’s the reason they’re related to plants which might be about to be born,” he said.
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