The mysteries of Chavin
Mysteries, it seems, will never end. Till a friend called me up to tell me about a splendid exhibition featuring it at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, I had never heard the name Chavin. He told me that it was an ancient archaeological site — the full name is Chavin de Huantar, after a village — up in a high valley in the Peruvian Andes. I decided to look it all up. The Andes, I knew just a little about: that it is the longest and one of the highest mountain ranges in the world — some 4500 miles long, in fact — stretching from the north to the south of the South American continent, all along the West Coast; that the classical pre-Columbian Inca site of Machu Picchu was located in it; and that it served as the locale of that chilling film, Alive, that documented the harrowing trials of the victims of an air crash in the ice-bound Peruvian Andes. But Chavin? I knew nothing.As I read, I learnt that a whole culture is named after the place, "one of the most ancient civilisations of South America", going back to several centuries before the beginning of the Common Era. Not a great deal has survived of it but parts of a remarkable temple — objects from which are at the centre of this exhibition — built at a height of close to 10,000 feet above the sea-level, somewhere around 300 BC, still exist. There are naturally no written records that have come down but it would seem that the temple that was constructed there by unknown hands served as the centre of culture, located as it was ‘at an unparalleled crossroads between the mountains, the jungle, and the sea’.
Controlled and managed as it must have been by a powerful priestly class, claiming to have the ability to mediate between some remote, all-powerful God and common mortals, it was designed around the idea of the great mystery of it all. There was an old temple there first, built in a U-shape, encompassing a circular plaza and consisting of several subterranean galleries used probably for obscure religious rites, and possibly as a dwelling place for those involved in the rituals at the temple. This old temple was, then, expanded to incorporate a new temple with still more dark, pitch-black labyrinthine galleries, arranged like a maze, through which the visitors — devotees to be certain — must have had to pass to reach the centre. It has been surmised that before the devotees reached the centre, they must have been completely disoriented, their state heightened by the consumption of the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus. And then, they must have caught a vision of what was at the heart of it all: the great Lanzon.
The Lanzon — the name is of recent coinage, drawn from Spanish, meaning a ‘lance’ — which has survived, is a tall, somewhat tapered, monolithic pillar or obelisk, of white granite, some 15 feet in height, which is believed to have been the principal deity of the Chavin people. Protruding from the lower chamber into the one above, it is elaborately carved, with intricate geometric patterns, but taking overall the shape of ‘a human-feline hybrid with claws, writhing snakes for hair and eyebrows, fangs curved sideways in a smile, and one arm raised while the other is lowered’. It is to the Lanzon that all obeisance was directed, all homage rendered, for it was an oracle, endowed with the power to speak, ‘thanks’ — as modern texts dealing with Chavin say —‘to a hole in the roof of the chamber’. When the Lanzon ‘spoke’, one can imagine the heightened ‘visual and psychological’ impact upon the devotee. Already, on the way to the central, secret chamber, he or she must have taken in the sight of low-relief sculptures on slabs, lintels and columns featuring ‘jaguars, snakes, condors and caimans’, with human faces added to them here and there.
To the voice of the speaking Lanzon, must have been added other mysterious sounds coming from opening and closing sluices on the subterranean canals of water of two streams: "a thunderous, mystical, roaring noise in the temple interior". Clearly, there was an element of theatre in the entire set-up. The devotee must have been completely awestruck.
Differently, quite differently, has the Lanzon been interpreted. Some believe it to have been ‘a symbol of trade, fertility, dualism, and humankind’s interaction with nature, or any combination of these’; others see it as an axis mundi, the world axis that connects heaven and earth; still others regard it as ‘a mediator of opposites, a personification of the principle of balance and order’.
But, seen from the standpoint of the rituals that might have been conducted at the foot of the lance-like deity, Tello — the Peruvian archaeologist, who excavated the site less than a 100 years ago — conjectured that a depression that is to be found on the deity’s head may have been used to pour the blood of the sacrificed victims from a tunnel above.
Clearly, Chavin was large and remarkable. Spread over some 12,000 sq m, the place — now declared as a Unesco World Heritage site — was a great monument in itself: massive structures with ‘significant interior and subterranean space, pyramidal platforms, courts, and sunken plaza spaces’, most of them aligned on a common axis. The architecture bears witness to extraordinary skills: remarkable engineering, quality masonry and fine sculptural stone art. There is evidence that the builders were able to divert sunlight deep into some subterranean chambers and galleries. Objects unearthed from the site are most impressive too, considering the times in which these were made: painted textiles, resist-dyed printing, ritual articles made of gold-and-silver alloy, heddle looms, stone sculptures, and ceramic vessels.
Combining primitive religious beliefs and practices and great sophistication at the material level, Chavin continues to remain a puzzle, a mysterious place. As a modern-day traveller to the site observed, "one has to be close to the gods to undertake such extraordinary feats". Rather imaginatively, the exhibition at Zurich was titled, "Chavin: The Arrival of the Gods in the Andes".
