Juan Núñez del Prado

He is an anthropologist first. He studied at the University of Cusco and specialised in the religious culture of the Incas and their living descendants, following his father Óscar Núñez del Prado, whose 1955 university expedition to the Q'ero communities of Paucartambo brought them to wider attention and recorded the Inkarrí myth. In 1979 the son took the step the father had not: from studying the tradition to being initiated into it.

His principal teacher was Don Benito Qoriwaman, a healer and altomesayoq, with whom he worked for more than ten years. He also studied with Andrés Espinosa, Melchor Deza, Manuel Qispe and Mariano Apaza. He is not himself Q'ero and holds no village lineage, and it is worth being plain about that, because the tradition is often sold abroad with an ancestry its teachers do not have. His position is a different one and not a lesser one: an initiate who can also explain, and one of the main routes by which this material reached students outside Peru. He now teaches alongside his son Ivan.

The Andean path he teaches works with offerings, with the mountains, and with the handling of energy. A despacho is an offering built by hand from specific materials and then burned or buried, made for a stated purpose. The apus are the mountains themselves, addressed as beings with whom a relationship is kept up. The rest is practical: exercises for taking in light energy and releasing heavy energy, and a graded series of initiations. There is no plant medicine in any of it. Ayahuasca belongs to the Amazon and not to the Andes, and the two get confused often enough that it is worth saying.