Its names
One cactus, called by one Andean word in many spellings, and by the Spanish after a saint.
Wachuma, Achuma, Chuma, Cuchuma, Huacuma
Huachuma is the Andean name, in use long before the Spanish came. It was spoken for a long time before anyone wrote it, and the people who wrote it down heard it through more than one language, so it comes in many spellings. Wachuma and Achuma are the ones met most often. All of them name the same plant.
The name covers a group of closely related cacti, which the Huachuma page sets out. Someone who serves it in ceremony is a huachumero.
Aguacoya, Agua Colla
In northern Peru and in Ecuador the cactus is also Aguacolla, a name with spellings of its own. Its first half reads as agua, the Spanish for water.
Saint Peter
San Pedro is Spanish for Saint Peter, and it is the name most books use. In Christian telling Saint Peter keeps the keys of heaven, and the story told most often is that the Spanish named the cactus for him because it was felt to open heaven's gates. Whoever first said it, the name has held since the Spanish came to the Andes, close to five hundred years.
Spanish gave it other names besides. Gigantón, the giant, is one of them. In Arizona it is San Pedro on the nursery label, and growers call the one most nurseries sell PC, short for predominant cultivar: a single clone, in the United States since about the 1930s.
Chavín de Huántar, Peru
The oldest clear sign of the plant in ceremony is carved at Chavín de Huántar, high in the Andes of northern Peru, where a temple stood in use from about 900 to 200 BC. One of the figures carved around its circular plaza carries a Huachuma upright, like a staff. The plant was part of ceremony there more than fifteen hundred years before the Spanish named it.
Trichocereus pachanoi, Echinopsis pachanoi
Botanists file the best known of the group as Trichocereus pachanoi, and some as Echinopsis pachanoi; which genus it belongs in is still argued. The second word is a man's name. Abelardo Pachano was the Ecuadorian agronomist who showed the plant to the botanists Britton and Rose on their 1918 journey through the highlands, and their 1920 description of it carries his name.
Among the people who serve it, the old plants have names of their own. They are called grandfathers and grandmothers, and only their side branches are cut.
