Peru Shamans Read Power and Quakes From Lima’s Bare Hilltop

On San Cristóbal above Lima, Peruvian shamans gather each year to ask the gods for calm—and to forecast turmoil. With ayahuasca, flowers, coca leaves, and ritual objects, they predict leaders’ fates, wars’ endurance, and disasters, translating anxiety into ceremony.

A Hilltop Where the Future Gets Spoken

San Cristóbal sits above Lima like a dry lookout, treeless and blunt, the city unfolding below in dense layers of concrete, tin roofs, and traffic. Yesterday, a group of shamans climbed its slope dressed in traditional Andean ponchos and headdresses to perform an annual ritual of prediction—part prayer, part reading of omens, part public performance of uncertainty.

Before the ceremony, they met to drink hallucinogenic concoctions derived from native plants, including ayahuasca and the San Pedro cactus, which they believe give them the power to predict the future. On the hill they spread blankets and placed yellow flowers, coca leaves, swords, and other objects—an altar assembled from symbols that carry both tenderness and threat. Amid incense, they asked for positive energy for the new year.

After dancing in circles and playing ancestral instruments, they turned their attention outward, naming international relations, ongoing conflicts, and world leaders as if the globe were close enough to hold in the palm. The ritual asked for peace in the Middle East, an end to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and the fall of Venezuela’s president—requests so large they risk sounding naive, until you remember how often distant decisions arrive in Latin America as migration waves, food prices, and political pressure.

Politics as a Kind of Weather

This year, the shamans predicted that Nicolás Maduro would be removed from office and tied that vision explicitly to the United States. Shaman Ana María Simeón said, “We have asked for Maduro to leave, to retire, for President Donald Trump of the United States to be able to remove him, and we have visualized that next year this will happen.” The sentence carries an old regional realism: even when the desire is Venezuelan, the imagined mechanism is American.

They also predicted that global conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, will continue. In the same breath, they asked for peace—an insistence that prayer is not prediction alone, but an attempt to influence the moral atmosphere around decision-makers. Their prayers, performed amid flowers and incense, are intended to encourage leaders to make good decisions, as if choices can still be redirected before they harden into history.

The ceremony did not separate the political from the geological. The shamans also predicted natural disasters, including earthquakes and climatic phenomena, folding together two forces that repeatedly shape Latin America: unstable institutions and unstable ground. On a continent that knows both coups and quakes, the combination does not feel metaphorical. It feels like lived probability.

Accuracy, Memory, and the Need to Ask

The group’s record is mixed, a fact that sits beside the ritual rather than undermining it. Last year they warned that a “nuclear war” would break out between Israel and Gaza, a prophecy that did not materialize as nuclear conflict while a ceasefire is currently in place. But in December 2023, they correctly predicted that former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, imprisoned for human rights abuses, would perish within twelve months. Fujimori died from cancer in September 2024 at age eighty-six.

In Peru, Fujimori’s death was never just a biological event; it was a closing chapter in an argument about justice, authoritarianism, and memory that still divides families. That the shamans “got it right” in that case adds weight to the ritual’s public appeal, even when other predictions miss. Accuracy matters, but meaning matters too: the ceremony gives the city a language for fear, a calendar for uncertainty, and a place to put questions that otherwise churn silently.

When the dancing ends, the hill goes quiet, and the smoke dissolves into Lima’s sky. The predictions remain, carried back down into the city’s daily negotiations with power, prices, and the next tremor—proof that in Peru, as elsewhere in Latin America, the future is never only tomorrow. It is also the past refusing to stay still.

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