[1] Her shrines are hallowed rocks, or the boles of legendary trees, and her artists envision her as an adult female bearing harvests of potatoes or coca leaves.

[4] As Andean cultures formed modern nations, the figure of Pachamama was still believed to be benevolent, generous with her gifts,[5] and a local name for Mother Nature.

Tawantinsuyu is the name of the former Inca Empire, and the region stretches through the Andean mountains in present-day Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Colombia and northern Argentina.

According to Mario Rabey and Rodolfo Merlino, Argentine anthropologists who studied the Andean culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, "The most important ritual is the challaco.

[7] In the current language of the campesinos of the southern Central Andes, the word challar is used in the sense of "to feed and to give drink to the land".

The ceremony culminates at a pond or stream, where the people offer a series of tributes to Pachamama, including "food, beverage, leaves of coca and cigars.

The Pachamama queen who is elected is escorted by the gauchos, who circle the plaza on their horses and salute her during the Sunday parade.

[2] Since the late 20th century, a New Age practice of worship to Pachamama has developed among Andean white and mestizo peoples.

Believers perform a weekly ritual worship which takes place on Sundays and includes invocations to Pachamama in Quechua, although there may be some references in Spanish.

[9] According to scholar Manuel Marzal, in modern day Peru, the cult of Pachamama has, in some cases, taken on Christian characteristics or been reinterpreted within a Catholic religious framework.

"[12] Along similar lines, Pope John Paul II, in two homilies delivered in Peru and Bolivia, identified homage to Pachamama as an ancestral recognition of divine providence that in some sense prefigured a Christian attitude toward creation.

On February 3, 1985, he stated that "your ancestors, by paying tribute to the earth (Mama Pacha), were doing nothing other than recognizing the goodness of God and his beneficent presence, which provided them food by means of the land they cultivated.

"[13] On May 11, 1988, he stated that God "knows what we need from the food that the earth produces, this varied and expressive reality that your ancestors called "Pachamama" and that reflects the work of divine providence as it offers us its gifts for the good of man.

"[14] Marzal also states that for some Andeans, Pachamama retains an "intermediary role" between God and man within a primarily Catholic framework similar to that of the saints.

[17] In October 2019, native Amazonian artworks were displayed in the Vatican gardens, and in a Roman church, ahead of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region.