Each year in Cusco on the Sunday before Corpus Christi thousands of people gather at the foot of an icy glacier called Qolquepunku (silver door) to honor the miraculous appearance of the white Christ child of Qoyllur Rit'i (starry snows). Although it takes place at a high, remote shrine, the festival of Qoyllur Rit'i attracts pilgrims from all walks of life. Runa, or Quechua-speaking peasants, come by the thousands. But so do hundreds of mestizo schoolteachers, policemen, storeowners, truckdrivers, merchants, and middlemen. They, along with numerous foreign tourists, Peruvian university students, and international film crews, are readily accepted by the more traditional pilgrims. These runa, for their part, see the presence of such as testimony to both the power of their miraculous Christ and the increasing-and they believe, well-deservedpopularity of his cult. It has been said of religious pilgrimage that it is a ritual which serves to annul, or temporarily cancel out, the hierarchical divisions of daily social life (Turner and Turner I978). The confluence of runa, mestizo, cholo, and gringo pilgrims to Qoyllur Rit'i can seen to fulfill such a function, if looked at from a certain, historically specialized, vantage point.' Thus, for the increasing number of both foreign and national (i.e., Peruvian) tourists who now attend this feast, participation in the Christ of Qoyllur Rit'i's festival is an unparalleled leveling experience. For them, the fiesta is a unique occasion to sleep outside, to suffer the cold and frost, to be a runa, and to attempt to come to grips with the obviously powerful forces of nature-the glaciers and high grasslands-that constitute the shrine's sacred surroundings. This experience of momentary liminality (or, as I would prefer to call it, ahistoricity) is made all the more powerful for these outsiders by a historiographic ideology according to which Qoyllur Rit'i's feast provides them access not only to a timeless nature, but to an ancient, authentic culture whose non-Western, precolonial roots these Peruvian and foreign tourists have come to idealize as a less complex, less coercive, less historically compromising way of life.