01 · THE PÁRAMO

High in the páramo sleeps the Black Lagoon

Las Huaringas, Huancabamba, Piura. A highland of mist where water is born cold, dark and still.

You do not arrive at the páramo: you enter it. Mist closes the horizon and the wind lowers its voice. This is the space of silence. Here, water does not run. It waits.

◆ living tradition · — documented fact

02 · THE ENCANTO

The Negra releases. The Shimbe restores.

Tradition holds that the Negra unburdens what harms, and the Shimbe — the White — bestows what protects. Two waters, one rite.

“Night, in the Andes, is the time when the past returns: the ‘encantos’ awaken […] To evoke the ‘encantos’, to establish visionary contact with them, is only possible when the doors of their world open — and this happens at night.”MARIO POLIA · “LA MESA CURANDERIL Y LA COSMOLOGÍA ANDINA”, ANTHROPOLOGICA 8, 1990 — TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH

It is said the lagoon tests those who come: it asks for its pago — its offering — and forgives no one who takes from its shores.

The records describe continual pagos made to the lagoon, “so that it does not grow angry.”

03 · THE MESA

The night the mesa opens

The rite begins around eleven at night and is lifted at six. Tuesdays and Fridays, usually.

On the ground, the maestro lays out his artes: colonial swords, chonta-wood staffs, shells, perfumes, chunganas — seed rattles. Each object has its place and its task. The mesa is not an altar: it is a map of power, set by hand.

San Pedro — huachuma — is taken: a teacher plant with more than 3,000 years of ritual use. Then comes the bath in the lagoon’s freezing water. Tradition calls it florecer — to flower: to open, the way the cactus opens its flower at night.

With the first light, the mesa is lifted.

04 · THE SEGURO

A bottle that holds what protects

The maestro prepares it by hand: plants from Las Huaringas, coins, hair, perfumes. An amulet of protection, carried close.

At the heart of the seguro goes the mamayacu, the mother-water. Each lagoon keeps its own; the records — from Polia to the UNESCO dossier — name the Negra's as the most powerful.

Every Elyxie piece guards water from the Black Lagoon inside its crystal sphere. It promises nothing: it accompanies. A contemporary seguro, made with the same care given to everything that matters.

05 · THE LIVING LAGOON

The water that descends to give life

The páramo works like a sponge. Here the Quiroz and the Huancabamba are born: water for millions across northern Peru.

The communities and maestros of Huancabamba keep watch over this land. Today they back a Regional Conservation Area of 16,300 hectares, still underway: refuge of the spectacled bear and the Andean tapir.

The lagoon is still up there, quiet, keeping its water. A small measure of that stillness now lives inside a crystal sphere, close to the chest of whoever wears it.