by Peter Watson
He further concludes that the abstract motifs may have ‘belonged’ to elite groups, who understood, or claimed to understand, the ‘language’ of the motifs and this ability unified that elite and helped keep it separate from, and above, the common people, in an ‘ideology of inequality’. In fact, he says, there may have been an ideological struggle between the more zoomorphic understanding and the more abstract and supernatural ideas.
What links all these otherwise disparate ideas is food: the specialist diet associated with sacred cenotes; the arrival of domesticated maize; the Earth-monster mouth; the changing iconography of food bowls. It may be, then, that what we are witnessing here is a gradual and perhaps fragmented Olmec ideological adjustment to the development of maize agriculture. It was slow but its arrival resulted in more wealth for the community and more disparities in wealth. This is reinforced by the carvings of massive heads, likenesses of actual individuals who stood out, and figurines which show signs of ceremonial skull deformation, a common form of status marker.
Old shamanistic ideas continued but new concepts appeared, notably the development of art, monumental art, the idea of more complex gods which, in their fantastic being, embodied the attributes of more than one animal or plant, and a new approach to time, for there is evidence about now of a rudimentary ritual calendar.16 This would make sense if maize agriculture was beginning.
David Grove says there is no real evidence for warfare between the different Olmec centres and concludes that the political situation ‘may have been one primarily of cooperation rather than competition’.17 He also says that the Olmec people ‘do not seem to have conceived of, or to have worshipped, a group of formal deities. Instead, the ruler, through his access to natural forces, mediated with those forces and controlled them. The supernatural creatures depicted in a variety of Olmec art forms represent aspects of those forces (rain, water, etc.) and not specific “Olmec deities”.’18
This is an important comparison (and contrast) with what was happening in the Old World, where the pastoral nomads worshipped natural forces (wind, rain, lightning), with shamanistic elements, but gave their main god a name (Tengri) and a gender (male), and came into (aggressive) contact with the essentially female Great Goddess of fertility. At that stage, if Grove is right, the Olmec ideology of inequality, and their incipient agricultural deity, comprised a transitional world, also shamanistic and also at least partly the worship of natural forces. But these parallels and similarities are misleading. As we shall see, they led in very different directions.
KAYPACHA
Chavín de Huántar is located high in the Peruvian Andes. Its culture flourished between 900 BC and 200 BC and so it broadly overlapped the time period of the Olmec, if a little later. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the Andes comprise a harsh environment but are not without their attractions, in that many of the insects and diseases that thrive in the tropical rainforest are absent there, defence is easier to arrange, and a number of animals and edible plants have adapted to the environment.
In South America before the Chavín phenomenon, as it is called, several urban cultures emerged. Those at Aspero and Caral in Norte Chico (~3000 BC) have already been described. Others occurred at Salinas de Chao, with its eighty-foot pyramid dated to 2000 BC, El Paraiso in the Chillon Valley near Lima, with its U-shaped platforms and plaza, dated to 1800 BC, and Huaca Florida, a few miles inland of El Paraiso, and Sechin Alto in the Lower Casma Valley, each with enormous pyramid mounds and plazas and dating to 1700–1650 BC.No one really knows what system of beliefs operated in these enormous ritual structures but Donald Lathrap argues that these sacred sites operated as symbolic vertical axes between the living and the spiritual worlds. The U-shape was then a focusing arrangement, he says, designed to absorb the sacred energy of the opposing forces of left and right. But no one really knows.
Apart from these U-shaped structures, the early cultures of the Andes shared other features which would find full expression at Chavín. Partly this had to do with their similar location, in mountainous areas where between only 2 per cent and 4 per cent of the land was suitable for agriculture. This meant, among other things, that irrigation – though often critical – only ever consisted of small canals that could be managed, probably, by single extended families. No extensive bureaucracies were needed, as happened in several areas of the Old World. Allied to this, maize, although it is present, is nowhere dominant in subsistence systems, often being used, as was referred to above, in chapter eleven, for beer in ritual contexts, and not as the basis for bread.
In religious iconography, the jaguar and other felines (pumas, for instance) are ubiquitous, often shown in snarling or in other ferocious forms, and there is considerable evidence of ritual decapitation, of the dedicatory burials of (unflawed) children, three-to-five years old (buried below buildings), and hints – more than hints – of cannibalism. Feline figures have been found, for example, at Pacopampa, Punkuri, Cupisnique and Huaca de los Reyes, and ‘trophy heads’ at Cupisnique, Waira-jirca and Kotosh. At Punkuri a painted clay relief shows a severed head ‘oozing blood’.19 At Pacopampa, the temple plazas – the central realm (between the sky and the underworld) – is represented as Kaypacha, a term for ‘the world inhabited by human beings and jaguars’. Besides the jaguar, iconographic motifs also stress the eagle and the serpent, or snake. At Pacopampa, for example, jaguars, serpentine figures and avian forms are found together.20 Here, therefore, we again have animals representing the three ‘realms’ of heaven, Earth and underworld, though without the maize element that we see in connection with the Olmec. This is what you would expect since so little of Chavín land was suitable for agriculture.
Another great achievement of these early cultures was the domestication and exploitation of cotton. We saw in an earlier chapter how, in Norte Chico, cotton was domesticated in order to manufacture fishing nets but as the centuries passed weaving and dyeing skills developed in the Andes to a higher level than anywhere else in the world, Old or New. Cotton preserved for more than 2,000 years in the Andes has been shown to contain at least 109 hues in seven natural colour categories, and to be so fine the Spanish took it for silk when they first encountered it. Different strains of cotton were developed, which flourished at different altitudes, and the weaving techniques, which were basically symmetrical and angular, were copied as decoration in other materials such as pottery. Anthropomorphic figures, snakes, birds of prey and snarling feline motifs were much in evidence, in bright colours, reflecting the links between the human world and the spiritual world. In these early societies, the community – or ayllu – came before the individual and, to judge by the spread of motifs on cotton and pottery, the same beliefs were widespread in South America and very long-lived.
Textile styles took a lot of trouble to appear animated. They were, so far as we know, displayed horizontally, rather than vertically and rarely – if ever – used as garments. Were they danced on, as part of a trance-inducing ritual?21 Chavín textile knots may well have given rise to the quipu of the Incas (see chapter twenty-three).22
And then, in 1991, Chavín de Huántar itself was discovered.23 This was the work of the Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, in the remote Pukcha River Basin in the foothills of the Andes. (Chavín, incidentally, could come from the Carib word for feline, chavi, though the Quechua term chawpin means ‘in the centre’).24 The main building was a stone-built temple pyramid with carved stelae, monoliths and many articles of pottery, decorated with a wide variety of forest animals: felines, lizards, cayman, birds of prey plus a number of part-animal/part-human figures, all executed in the same distinctive style. No less remarkable than the discovery itself was the fact that the designs were similar to those found miles away on the north coast of Peru, and elsewhere in the Andes, on the arid Paracas Peninsula, and as far south as Lake Titicaca.
In all cases, the animals in Chavín art were tropical animals. Why should that be? Tello’s answer was that Chavín was the ‘mother culture’ of A
ndean civilisation. There are ethnographic accounts of shamans making long forays to acquire supernatural wisdom, and even today highland and coastal shamans and healers among the Jivaro or Achuara travel enormous distances to tropical forests which are viewed as a source of medicinal plants and sacred knowledge. Later archaeologists no longer accept that account uncritically but the ‘Chavín phenomenon’ remains at the centre of the South American trajectory towards civil-isation. Daniel Morales Chocano, of San Marcos University in Lima, Peru, has excavated at Pacopampa (north Peru, near Cajamarca) and finds that, between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago (3000–500 BC), the South American forests were much less extensive than today, the climate was drier, provoking the manufacture of ceramic bottles that would not have been needed in a wetter climate. In these circumstances, people would have been pushed outwards from the Amazon area in all directions.25
Chavín lies in a small valley that is 10,000 feet above sea level, between the arid Pacific coast and the tropical rainforest of the great Amazonian Basin. The location was chosen, presumably, because the local farmers had easy access to several very different ecological zones, each within easy walking distance.26 In the valley bottoms there were irrigated maize fields, potato gardens higher up, on the slopes, and grazing llamas and alpacas on the grasslands at high altitudes.
The terrain around Chavín is well suited to high-altitude farming and camelid herding (llamas chiefly, but also vicuña and guanaco). Domesticated camelids only became common outside their natural territory during the Chavín horizon. This shift is probably due to the adoption of llamas as pack animals and their maintenance in small herds for long-distance caravans. (Llamas can carry 20–60 kilograms for 15–20 kilometres a day and, because they follow a lead animal, one driver can control up to thirty of them.)27
To begin with, at ~850–450 BC, Chavín was no more than a small village with a shrine, a crossing point for various trade routes between the Andes and the coast. Marine shells were found scattered right across the site, as were pieces of pottery from far and wide, together with a few bones of puma and jaguar. Richard Burger, one of the main excavators at Chavín, argues that these bones were not indigenous to the area but that they were imported for use in ritual apparatus.
After about 450 BC, however, a major change took place at Chavín. For about sixty or so years, the entire population crowded into the temple area, along the river banks. No one knows exactly why this was but it may have been because of a change in ideology, when Chavín became a centre of pilgrimage. This conclusion is drawn because many exotic objects were found at the site, objects drawn from many different locations in the Andes, some of which at least were offerings, together with some everyday objects of use that were brought by travellers and left there.
After this, the town rapidly quadrupled in area until it occupied more than 100 acres, where as many as 3,000 people may have lived. It was now known as a religious ritual centre – a shrine in ‘Western’ terms – on a par, says Richard Burger, with Jerusalem or Rome of later ages and faiths. Many exotic artefacts were made there and just as many imported, the most notable being pink Spondylus shells brought in from the Ecuadorian coast 500 miles away. Some of these shells were decorated with feline motifs.28
The temple at Chavín takes the form of a U-shaped structure. Most of the buildings are about forty feet high, open to the east, where the sun rises, but also to the forest, which most of the animals depicted in Chavín art inhabit. The main temple appears to have been rebuilt several times (fifteen phases, in five stages) until it consisted of a maze of interconnected courts and passages and galleries and small rooms, ventilated by vertical shafts.29 These galleries, as they are known, had no natural lighting, so must have been lit by resin or grease torches. They are connected by short, narrow staircases and they were built, says Burger, with the intention to create a sense of confusion or dis-orientation, ‘in which the individual is severed from the outside world’.30 The innermost area contains a mysterious white granite monolith contained within a cruciform chamber almost in the middle of the structure. This monolith is long and slender, about fifteen feet high, is located vertically in its slot, and for that reason is known as the ‘Lanzón’ (for ‘lance-like’). One theory is that it was erected before the rest of the building, which was constructed around it.
The Lanzón is carved into an anthropomorphic figure, the chief feature of which is a snarling feline-style mouth, with great fangs. Its left arm is held by its side but the right arm is raised, displaying claw-like nails. Its elaborate headdress is decorated with yet more snarling felines in profile. ‘A girdle of small feline heads surrounds the waist.’31
The overall shape of the figure – long and slender, essentially vertical – and its position, built into the floor and ceiling, suggests to modern archaeologists at least that it symbolised the deity’s role as a conduit between the underworld, the Earth itself, and the heavens. In fact, Tullo found another cruciform gallery – this one much smaller – immediately above the main one and the two chambers were so close (just one stone block separated them) that he raises the possibility that this arrangement served as an oracle, divinations being made in the smaller chamber and evoking a response from the Lanzón.
In fact, it seems likely that there were two principal gods at Chavín. The Lanzón was one, known also by its different name, the ‘Smiling God’, with its feline head, clawed hands and feet, while the second was the so-called ‘Staff God’, a figure found carved on a separate stela discovered inside the temple (a staff god was mentioned in chapter 15, regarded as the oldest image of its kind in the Americas). This shows a man with a downturned, snarling mouth, a serpent headdress, and holding two staffs, each of which is also adorned with feline heads and jaguar mouths. Richard Burger believes that the Chavín religion was concerned with at least two things. One was an attempt to reconcile the dichotomy between the humid jungle and the high, dry, cold mountain landscape, and the other was the essentially shamanistic idea of transformation, between the human form and animal forms, especially that of the jaguar.
This is further supported by a number of carvings found on Chavín reliefs in the temple complex, one of which shows what Brian Fagan calls ‘a jaguar-being resplendent in jaguar and serpent regalia’.32 In Chavín art, raptor birds, harpy eagles in particular, are depicted as ‘were-jaguars’ or the ‘jaguar of the skies’ roaming in search of human heads.33 Moreover, this figure is shown holding what is recognisably the San Pedro cactus, a well-known hallucinogen and a substance still used today by tribal shamans when exploring the spirit world. As was noted earlier, San Pedro cactus contains mescaline, which helps send the shaman on mind-altering voyages. It grows naturally at Chavín, just a few hundred yards from the temple.
The belief that Chavín priests could transform themselves into jaguars in order to ‘contact and affect the behaviour of supernatural forces’ was widespread, with a lot of evidence to support it. Hallucinogenic snuffs and beverages catalysed these changes and their consumption was an integral part of Chavín ritual. This role of psychotropic substances is well attested by its widespread representation in Chavín art forms and, as Richard Burger puts it, ‘these depictions can be interpreted as providing the mythical antecedent and divine charter for the use of these substances and, ultimately, for the religious authority of temple priests.’34 Small snuff holders in gold, fashioned into animal forms, have been found at Chavín, as well as effigy vessels in the form of coca chewers, underlining the use of coca leaves during Chavín times.35
Furthermore, Burger says, the role of hallucinogenic snuffs in shamanic transformations is clearly expressed in the tenoned heads fitted into the walls of the Old Temple. These represent different stages ‘in the drug-induced metamorphosis’ of the religious leaders ‘into their jaguar or crested-eagle alter egos’. Sculptures show faces with almond-shaped eyes, bulbous noses and closed mouths; they have an unusual hair arrangement – a sort of knot at the top – and wrinkled faces, ‘as if they were
experiencing the onset of nausea’. This is often the experience of entering trance.
Fig. 12 Head of a mythical priest almost fully transformed into a feline state; the strands of mucus running down from the nostrils signal the involvement of hallucinogenic snuff in this process. Compare with figure 3.
A second group of tenoned heads, Burger says, ‘portray strongly contorted anthropomorphic faces’, gaping round eyes, with mucus dripping from their nostrils, ‘either slightly or in long flowing streams’ – their features and hairstyles suggest that the same group of individuals is being shown (see figure 12 above). As he wryly adds, ‘The depiction of nasal discharges in prominent public contexts is alien to Western religious traditions.’ Yes, it is, but its significance was known to the early Spanish chroniclers of the New World, more than one of whom observed the Muisca of Colombia putting (hallucinogenic snuff ) powders into their noses, which made the mucus run ‘until it hangs down to the mouth, which they observe in the mirror, and when it runs straight down it is a good sign’.36 The flow of mucus caused by the irritation of the nasal membrane by psychotropic substances ‘is the most conspicuous external index of an altered mental state’.37 Gary Urton, Dumbarton Oaks professor of pre-Columbian studies in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, says the nose was regarded as a major orifice of the body on Chavín iconography.38
A third group of tenoned heads combines human features, such as eye and ear shapes, together with large fangs and other non-human features, while in a fourth group the face is totally transformed into a feline, a raptorial bird, or a hybrid of the two. In some of the sculptures, these phases are linked. Thus in one the face has one bulging eye and one almond-shaped eye; another shows the head of a jaguar with mucus hanging from its nose.
The prominent role of hallucinogenic snuff in this process is further supported by the discovery of small stone mortars at Chavín, and at a number of other sites, such as Matibamba. These mortars are too small, and their depressions too smooth, for them to have been used for grinding grain, on top of which they are carved into the form of jaguars or raptorial birds. Bone trays, spatulas, spoons and tubes have also been found in similar contexts, items often represented in Chavínart,allof which supports an hallucinogenic snuff ritual complex.
