Wherever I look around me, in the vast ocean of Hindu mythology, I discover Piety … Morality … and as far as I can rely on my judgement, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory the world has ever produced.
Stuart spoke out strongly against missionary attempts to convert Hindus to Christianity. He thought it simply impertinent, and his intention always was that his collection should be seen in England to persuade the British to honour this great world religion. Stuart would, I’m sure, be pleased that after 200 years his sculpture of Shiva and Parvati, made around 1300 to welcome worshippers to a temple in Orissa, is still on show to the public – and he’d be delighted that many of those who now come to see it are British Hindus.
Although the stories of Hinduism are increasingly taught in British schools, some of us not brought up as Hindus struggle to master the complicated theology that embraces many deities in many manifestations. Yet it would be hard to stand in front of this sculpture and not grasp immediately one of the central insights of this great religious tradition: that God may perhaps best be conceived not as a single isolated spirit but as a joyous loving couple, and that physical love is not evidence of fallen humanity but an essential part of the divine.
69
Sculpture of Huastec Goddess
Stone statue, from Mexico
AD 900–1521
There is an old adage that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal. When we want to translate complex ideas from a lost culture with no written language, the situation is no better: we usually need to work our way through layers of later interpretation by people with quite different ways of thinking, and with no words designed to express alien thoughts.
To get anywhere near an original understanding of this object, we have to go through a filter of two later cultures with two different languages, and even then we’re not quite sure where we stand. It is an object that has always intrigued me, and I am less and less sure that I understand it. It is the statue of a woman, from what is now northern Mexico, but which around 1400 was the land of the Huastec people.
The story of the Aztecs and how the great Aztec Empire was conquered by the Spaniards in the 1520s is widely known. We hear much less, though, about the people that the Aztecs themselves had conquered to build their empire. One of the most interesting peoples subjugated by the Aztecs were their northern neighbours, the Huastecs. We know that the Huastecs lived on Mexico’s northern Gulf coast, in the area around modern Veracruz, and that between the tenth and fifteenth centuries they had a flourishing city culture. But around 1400 this prosperous world was overwhelmed by the aggressive Aztec state to the south, and the Huastec ruling class was effectively liquidated. There is very little now that would enable us to reconstruct the world and the ideas of the Huastecs: there is no trace of any Huastec writing, and the only written evidence we have are Aztec accounts of the people they conquered, as transmitted through the Spanish after they in turn had defeated the Aztecs. So if we want the Huastec to speak to us directly, we have to go to the objects they left behind. These are their only documents, and among the most eloquent of them are groups of highly distinctive stone statues.
This statue of a Huastec woman in the Mexico gallery at the British Museum presides over a group of companions – three sandstone sisters, all carved to the same design. Our statue is about 1.5 metres (5 feet) high, so more or less life-size, but she’s not at all lifelike. She looks as though she’s been shaped by a giant pastry cutter – the contours of the body are straight lines, the surface is flat – you might almost imagine she is a huge gingerbread woman. When you step to the side, you can see that she is carved out of a very thin piece of sandstone. Edge-on, she is less than 10 centimetres (4 inches) thick. She folds her hands over her stomach and her arms are held out from her sides, making two triangular spaces. In fact, she is really just a series of geometric shapes. Her breasts are perfect hemispheres, and below the waist she wears a rectangular skirt that falls flat and undecorated to the plinth. This is a lady of straight lines and hard edges, clearly not somebody you would choose to mess with. But she does have two humanizing aspects: her small head is unexpectedly animated – she seems to be looking up and to the side towards something – and her lips are open, as though she may even be speaking. And below her breasts are the only surface details on the entire body – curved lines of sagging stone flesh, signs certainly of maturity, possibly of maternity, which lead many people to believe that she may be a mother goddess.
We know virtually nothing about the Huastec mother goddess, but we do know that for the conquering Aztecs she was the same being as their own goddess Tlazolteotl. You might imagine that all mother goddesses have a pretty straightforward job description – ensuring fertility and seeing everybody safely into adulthood – but, as the cultural historian Marina Warner points out, it is often much more complicated:
It’s important to see that all mother goddesses are not the same. A lot of times the mother goddesses are related to the spring, to vegetation, to that kind of fertility – not just human, animal fertility. Then in terms of fertility you enter the area of extreme danger, because of the great threat of death to either mothers or children in childbirth. That’s been a constant in human history until fairly recently. There is also a very strong sense that this contact with the danger of perpetuating life will actually brush you very close to pollution. In Christianity that’s very strong. Augustine said, ‘We are born between faeces and urine,’ and he was very worried about the animal aspect of human parturition. Mother goddesses on the whole have to help human beings confront this anxiety – there’s a danger of pollution, that death and birth can be mixed up together.
Childbirth and infancy are always messy affairs. To achieve even a minimum level of hygiene means devising systems for coping with filth – and mother goddesses have to deal with filth on a cosmic scale.
So it isn’t at all surprising that the name Tlazolteotl literally means, in the Aztec language, ‘filth goddess’. She was a figure of fertility, vegetation and renewal, the ultimate green goddess, transforming organic waste and excrement into healthy new life, guaranteeing the great cycle of natural regeneration. This is a goddess who gets her hands dirty, and, according to Aztec myth, not just her hands: another of her names is ‘eater of filth’ – she consumes dirt and purifies it. So, if we can read our goddess in the same light as the Aztecs, this is, perhaps disconcertingly, why her mouth is open and her eyes are rolling upwards.
Just as Tlazolteotl was held to consume actual filth and thus restore life and goodness, so she did the same in moral terms. She was, the Aztecs told the Spaniards, the goddess who received confessions of sexual sin:
One recited before her all vanities; one spread before her all unclean works, however ugly, however grave … Indeed all was exposed, told before her.
To the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, this seemed an uncanny parallel to Christian views on sexual sin and confession. We have to wonder how far the Spaniards are seeing the Aztec, and through them the Huastec, goddesses in terms of their own traditions, especially of Mary. But the Christian tradition had removed Mary from any connection with sex, and the Spanish were disturbed by Tlazolteotl’s inherent engagement with what they saw as filth. Sahagún deplores the fact that she is also ‘mistress of lust and debauchery’, and the Aztecs in their turn despised their Huastec subjects as hopelessly licentious.
It is hard to come to any view about our statue’s meaning, and some scholars even question whether she is a goddess at all. What more can the evidence of the statue tell us?
Her most striking feature is a huge, fan-shaped headdress, about ten times the size of her head. Although part of it is broken off, you can see that, like the rest of her, it is conceived as an assemblage of geometric shapes. In the middle, resting directly on her head, is a plain oblong slab; sitting on that, an unadorned cone. Both are framed in a great semicircle of what look like stone ostrich feathers. They may be feathers or pe
rhaps barkwood, but the original paint that would have told us has long gone. A headdress like this must have been a totally unambiguous statement of who this figure was. Maddeningly, it is a statement that we cannot now read with any confidence.
The Huastec expert Kim Richter gives us her more secular understanding of the statue:
I’ve argued that the sculptures represent the Huastec elite, who dressed up with these fancy costume elements that were actually common within the international elite of Meso-America. I’ve linked the Huastec headdresses to similar types of headdresses found in other regions.
I think it’s the fashion of the day but also so much more … it’s not unlike, for example, a Gucci bag today. You see it in wealthy people all over the world – it’s a symbol of status and it symbolizes the connections between these different regions of the globe today, and these headdresses had a very similar function. They showed to their own people that they were part of this larger Meso-American culture.
Kim Richter may be right, and these statues may simply be representations of the local elite, but I find it hard to believe that these geometric naked female statues are aristocratic family likenesses, even of the most ritualized sort. We know that groups of them stood high up above their communities, on artificial mounds where people could congregate for ceremonies and processions, but it is hard to be certain about anything in the face of our statue. And, sadly, there is nobody now who can tell us. Kim Richter says:
I don’t think the sculptures really have much meaning to local people there today. So when I was in the field and I spoke to indigenous people, they were interested and curious, and they wanted to learn more, but they didn’t know anything about these sculptures. I heard a report that in one of the sites the farmers would shoot at sculptures and use them as target practice.
This object reveals more about what we don’t know than what we do. Our statue’s physical presence speaks to us with peremptory directness, but of all the objects in our history, she is perhaps the hardest to read confidently through the filters of the historical record. With the next object, I will also try to reconstruct a lost spiritual world, but there is much more evidence to go on. It involves investigating one of the last places on earth to be settled by human beings – Easter Island – with some of the most instantly recognizable sculptures in the world.
70
Hoa Hakananai’a Easter Island Statue
Stone statue, from Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Chile
AD 1000–1200
Rapa Nui – Easter Island – is the most remote inhabited island, not just in the Pacific, but in the world. It’s about half the size of the Isle of Wight, approximately 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the nearest inhabited island and 3,200 kilometres (2,000 miles) from the nearest landmass. Not surprisingly, it took human beings a long time to get there. The people of the southern Pacific Ocean, the Polynesians, were the supreme open ocean voyagers in the history of the world, and their ability to move in double-hulled canoes over the vast expanses of the Pacific is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. They settled both Hawaii and New Zealand, and between 700 and 900 they got to Rapa Nui, bringing to an end one immense chapter of human history – for Easter Island was probably one of the last places on Earth to be permanently inhabited.
It was another thousand years before European sailors matched the Polynesian feats of navigation, and when they reached Rapa Nui on Easter Day 1722 they were astonished to find a large population already established. Even more astonishing were the objects that the inhabitants had made. The great monoliths of Easter Island are like nothing else in the Pacific, or indeed anywhere, and they’ve become some of the most famous sculptures in the world. This is one of them. He’s called Hoa Hakananai’a – the name has been roughly translated as ‘hidden friend’. He came to London in 1869, and he has been one of the most admired inhabitants of the British Museum ever since.
It is a constant of human history that societies devote huge amounts of time and resource to ensuring that the gods are on their side, but few societies have ever done it on such a heroic scale as those of Rapa Nui. The population was probably never any more than about 15,000, but in a few hundred years the inhabitants of this tiny island quarried, carved and erected more than a thousand massive stone sculptures. Hoa Hakananai’a was one of them. He was probably made around the year 1200, and was almost certainly intended to house an ancestral spirit: he is a stone being, which an ancestor may from time to time visit and inhabit.
Standing below him you are immediately conscious of the solid basalt rock he is made out of. Although we see him only from the waist up, he is about 2.7 metres (9 feet) high and dominates whatever gallery he’s in. When you’re working hard stone like this and have only stone tools to chip away with, you can’t do detail, so everything about this giant had to be big – and bold. The heavy rectangular head is huge, almost as wide as the torso below. The overhanging brow is one straight line running across the whole width of the head. Below it are cavernous eye sockets and a straight nose with flaring nostrils. The square jaw juts assertively forward and the lips are closed in a strong frowning pout. In comparison to the head, the torso is only sketched in. The arms are barely modelled at all and the hands disappear into the stone block of a swelling paunch. The only details on the body are the prominent nipples.
Hoa Hakananai’a is a rare combination of physical mass and evocative potency. For the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, this is the essence of sculpture:
I see sculpture, the setting up of a stone, as a basic human activity. You’re investing that stone with some sort of emotive power, some sort of presence. That way of making a sculpture is a religious activity. What the Easter Island sculpture does is give just the essence of a person. Every sculptor since Rodin has looked to primitive sculpture, because all the unnecessary elements are removed. Anything that is left in is what stresses the power of the stone. We are down to the essence; its size, its simplicity, its monumentality and its placement – those are all things that matter.
The statues were placed on specially built platforms ranged along the coastline – a sacred geography reflecting the tribal divisions of Rapa Nui. Moving these statues would have taken days and a large workforce. Hoa Hakananai’a would have stood on his platform with his giant stone companions in a formidable line, their backs to the sea, keeping watch over the island. These uncompromising ancestor figures must have made a haunting – and daunting – vision to any potential invaders and a suitably imposing welcome party for any visiting dignitaries. They have also been credited with a whole range of miracle-working powers. The anthropologist and art historian Professor Steven Hooper explains:
It was a way of human beings who were alive relating to and exchanging with their ancestors, who have very great influence on human life. Ancestors can affect fertility, prosperity, abundance. They are colossal. This one in the British Museum is relatively small – there is one unfinished in a quarry in Easter Island that is over 70 feet tall – how they ever would have erected it goodness only knows! It does put me in mind of medieval cathedral-building in Europe or in Britain, where you have extraordinary constructions involving enormous amounts of time and labour and skill … it’s almost as if these sculptures scattered around the slopes of Easter Island, large sculptures, are equivalent to these medieval churches. You don’t actually need them all, and they are sending messages not only about piety, but also about social and political competition.
So there was a populous island, effectively organized, practising religion in a carefully structured, competitive way. And then, it seems quite suddenly around 1600, the monolith-making stopped. No one has a very clear idea why. Certainly all islands like this are fragile ecosystems, and this one was being pushed beyond what was comfortably sustainable. The islanders had gradually cut down most of the trees and had hunted land birds almost to extinction. The sea birds, above all the sooty terns, moved away to nest on safer offshore rocks and islands. It must have seemed as i
f the favour of the gods was being withdrawn.
Where the people of Constantinople confronted crisis by looking back to an old religious practice, the inhabitants of Rapa Nui invented a new one, turning to a ritual that, not surprisingly, was all about scarce resources. The Birdman cult, as it has been called, focused on an annual competition to collect the first egg of the migrating sooty tern from a neighbouring islet. The man who pulled off the feat of bringing an egg back, unbroken, through the sea and over cliffs, would for a year become the Birdman. Invested with sacred power, he would live in isolation, grow his nails like bird talons and wield a ceremonial paddle as a symbol of prestige. Surprisingly, we can tell this story, and the change in religious practice, through our sculpture. Rather than being abandoned along with the other monoliths, Hoa Hakananai’a was incorporated into the Birdman cult, was moved, placed in a hut and now entered a new phase of his life.
The back of Hoa Hakananai’a, with symbols of the birdman cult in low relief
All the key elements of this later ritual are present in our statue, carved on his back. They must have been added several hundred years after the statue was first made, and the carving style here could hardly be more different from that of the front. It is in low relief, the scale is small, and the sculptor has tried to accommodate a large range of disparate details. Each shoulder blade has been turned into a symbol of the Birdman; two frigate birds with human arms and feet face each other, their beaks touching at the back of the statue’s neck. On the back of the statue’s head are two stylized paddles, each with what looks like a miniature version of our statue’s face at the upper end, and between the paddles is a standing bird which is thought to be a young sooty tern, whose eggs were so central to the Birdman ritual. This carving on the back of the statue could never have been very legible as sculpture. We know it was painted in bright colours, so that this cluster of potent symbols could be easily recognized and understood. Now, without its colour, the carving looks to my eyes feeble, fussy, diminished – a confused and timid postscript to the confident vigour of the front.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 39
