Since time immemorial mankind has made trademark images of their society, and the originality of these images became their identity, their sign of uniqueness. In Peru, a couple of hundred miles south of the capital Lima, a series of river beds cut through a flat, arid coastal desert, pouring mountain torrents into the Pacific Ocean and creating fertile oases along their courses. This is the Nazca-Paracas region. About 2500 years ago, the fertile valleys became the seedbed of a civilization whose craftsmen excelled in pottery, weaving, stone and wood craft, leaving behind remarkable artifacts as testimonial of their sophistication.
The Nazca left a heritage of the gods they worshiped. These gods were the totality of their universe, reflecting the Nazca spiritual environment as an imaginative rendering of their stream of earthly life on weavings and finest polychrome pottery.
Their trademark image was the stunning depiction of a jaguar sticking it’s tongue out lapping human blood from a sacrifized decapitated head. In abstract depictions, the jaguar’s body transforms into soaring birds of prey and flying snakes; the face, like a mask, decorated by ceremonial objects; the eyes an awesome hypnotizing gaze.
Mannheim’s Reiss-Engelhorn Museum created an innovative concept of ethnographic exhibitions. It includes large-sized photographs, original tomographies of pottery, prize-winning taxidermy of wildlife scenes combined with sound effects of bird voices and ancient musical instruments, as well as magnified drawings of those complex Nazca images that make them comprehensible.
An die Mächte der Natur – to the powers of nature – is both a rewarding educational experience as well as an oblation to those gods whose subjects were Nazca citizen. Objects from Mannheim’s own rich collection, loans from Munich and Würzburg, and private contributions, make up the artistic evidence of a rare culture, to the point that you experience its identity, and grasp the marketing power of their images. The remote Nazca culture suddenly comes alive.
Nazca objects have been treated until now as fascinating yet incomprehensible artifacts. Nazca pottery, textiles and wood were preserved by the high salt content of the sand they were buried in together with the corpses of their owners. The Nazca obviously believed in life after death. Dressed in their finest clothes, surrounded by their arms, insignias, ceremonial objects, food and drink, the buried Nazca citizen were sent on a voyage to the unknown.
Digging out those bodies and identifying their belongings has not only been the task of archaeologists. A vast amount of objects was unearthed by grave robbers, or huaqueros , who haunt the desert rims of valleys for cemeteries that may stretch for miles, digging at night and under perilous conditions what they believe might be the grave of a king that would strike them rich.
Historically speaking, when Europe was going through the Roman Civilization and its decline, Nazca, on this remote speck of the planet, under no other influence than its immediate neighbors in the north, the Moche civilization, as well as their Sechin, Chavin, and Paracas ancestors, reached the cusp of a culture whose trademark was the iconographic depiction of their world as a Ganzheit – a totality -: the jaguar, fish and sea mammals, snakes, plants and exotic birds all incorporated into their mythical vision of their world. And the vision of their world was infinite.
For a European it is difficult to comprehend such complex iconography. We have no other means than interpreting the iconography intuitively. Most of the plants, sea life, birds and mammals have been identified, yet we still lack the thorough understanding of their combined meaning to the Nazca.
Peru is a wild, violent country on shifting continental plates. Life against obstacles posed by nature inspired the Nazca images. The might of nature forced man to look up in awe for answers to questions of how to establish harmony with nature in order to survive in a constantly changing, unpredictable environment.
Answers to these questions can be found in some Nazca artifacts, such as an obsidian knife whose handle is crowned by the mandible of a young orca decorated by a blood-lapping jaguar whose tail turns into an exotic bird diving into the void.
The human blood letting – probably some young man or woman’s blood most likely by being decapitated – flushed the knife and the jaguar lapped the blood transforming him into a bird of renewal. It was a way to appease the gods whose powers were unaccountable.
The sacrificial decapitation and blood letting fertilized not only the people’s imagination – as it does today’s viewers: it made you experience the powers of nature whose eternal thirst for blood must be quenched in order to contribute to the eternal cycle of life and death and thus reconstitute nature.
The weltanschauung of the Nazca must have been, like in few tribes still living close to nature, one of the unity of nature, man and nature being one. Man was able to imagine himself as the supreme metamorphosis of the constantly changing powers of nature.
The Nazca culture flourished for centuries in a prosperity that allowed them to devote their revenue to skilled artists who left these treasures of their imagination behind for our enlightenment.
By showing these objects in Mannheim, Germany, the Nazca may have found their epiphany. In the careful selection of their artifacts, the vision of the Nazca world can be grasped. And their trademark images remain, after 2000 years, powerful symbols to remind us of the need to keep embracing nature as a whole.
And, as a whole, this collection should be viewed at the new museum of ethnographic art quai Branly, still under construction.
Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, 2003,
Mannheim
My thanks to Dr. Henning Bischof, and Dr. Michael Tellenbach