Today I'm in a town called Chiclayo, along the north coast. Its main claim to fame is a nearby set of ruins of fantastic proportions, dating back to the early to mid-first millenium of the common era. The site - a cluster of tombs next to a set of pyramids, all still being excavated - was found in the late 80s, apparently after a nearby archeologist noticed a surge of unusual items on the black market. Graverobbers had apparently found and started raiding the site, followed by nearby inhabitants. The archeologist managed to stop the graverobbing partly by employing many of the locals as excavators, a brilliant bit of social engineering that would probably be called socialism by most of the political class in America.
Anyway, the most significant find at the site was the tomb of a man since dubbed the Lord of Sipan. He is thought to have been the ruler of his particular civilization, on account of the fact that he was adorned with and his tomb was stuffed with, among other things, elaborate necklaces, earrings, headgear, breastplates, staffs, pottery, his wife, his concubine, animal sacrifices, and one or two human sacrifices to top it all off. Interestingly, one of the human sacrifices - apparently meant to be his guardian in the underworld - had his feet lopped off. No word on whether this was done before or after he was himself sent on his way to the underworld, but the speculation is that this was done to discourage running away. I'm not sure how they know this, and I'm also not sure I like the explanation, as it seems a heavy handed, though admittedly practical, solution to the problem. I prefer to think that it pertains to the use, or lack thereof, of the feet in the afterlife, and it seems like it was a symbolic way of binding him to his master.
In any case, I took a tour today and visited the excavation site and the pyramids. There's also a very impressive museum which contains many of the artifacts recovered from the site. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed within the museum, so the link is the best I can do. Suffice to say that the civilization of Sipan had craftsmen and women who I would bet lots of money on if there was such a thing as March Madness for the artisans of human civilizations in eras past. Granted, these were all made for the Big Kahuna, but still, the obvious creativity and intricacy of many of the artifacts was quite extraordinary to behold. Elaborate necklaces made of thousands upon thousands of beads, banners of copper plated with gold, sceptres adorned with miniatures of gods or temples or even the Lord of Sipan himself, very finely wrought lace, and even a necklace made of white shell inlaid with an intricate design of red shell. You can see that in the lower right hand corner of the linked page. More on that in a minute.
Like many premodern peoples, the people of Sipan drew their ideas of deities and the spiritual world from the animal kingdom. So if you look at the pictures you can see representations of a crab-god and an octopus-god, for example. And there were others, including, but not limited to, cat-gods, fox-gods, lizard-gods, spider-gods, and bat-gods. These deities - if that's even the right term - were incorporated into the vast majority of artifacts in one way or another, and the craftsmanship was uniformly painstaking. The idea that the natural world was also the world of the spirit was central to these people, as it was central to the Incans. It's just striking to me how, despite its dominance over the past two millenia, the idea of One God is an anomaly, in the long view of human history. One wonders if that's been such a good thing.
As a brief aside, I must commend to anyone reading this blog a book by Barry Lopez called Apologia. It's very short, illustrated by some evocative wood carvings. In it, Lopez describes a cross-country trip he takes, during which he makes a point of stopping whenever he sees roadkill, and trying to pay it the respect of dragging it off the road and giving it as proper a burial - or at least ceremony - as he can. He observes that, in indiginous cultures past, every single animal killed along the road had a spirit, or was a spirit. We, including I, often forget this in the name of progress and speed, but I imagine our slaughter of the animals that have the misfortune of wandering out in front of our cars and trucks would be regarded with no small amount of horror by even our own indiginous ancestors.
One of the artifacts in particular caught my attention: the shell necklace I referenced above. Our tour guide called our attention to it, making a point of observing that the design on it was not painted on, but rather was that of red shell inlaid into the dominant white shell. The picture gives you some idea. The small description accompanying the display (in Spanish) said that the design is meant to evoke the undulations of a swimming catfish, but a close look brought other things to my mind. I think you can see this in the picture, which is, again, at the very bottom right hand corner on the page. To me, it looks like the double helix of DNA.
No doubt this is nothing more than coincidence, but even if it is, I find it moving in an uncanny sort of way. There is, undoubtedly, a tendency amongst some Western folks like me to romanticize and idealize the lifeways of premodern humans, particularly their obvious and deeply intuitive connection with their natural surroundings. Life for the Sipan people was undoubtedly difficult in countless ways. Even the Lord of Sipan himself apparently died at age 45 of unclear causes, though his bones show evidence of osteoporosis. (The guide speculated that this was largely because the Lord of Sipan was carried everywhere by servants and slaves, who no doubt had excellent bone strength as a result.) And let's not forget the human sacrifices to appease some of these animal-gods I was raving about earlier.
But Western Civilization, in making the ideas of rationality and progress central to its identity, and in marginalizing ideas of intuition and spirituality, is missing something. By its nature it disassembles, breaks down, analyzes, demystifies, and in general operates on the belief that an understanding of all the parts of something will enable an understanding of the whole. Even though I'm a doctor in the tradition of Western medicine, I'm increasingly of the opinion that this belief is nothing short of sheer folly and arrogance. The belief that something can be completely understood - and, by implication, controlled - invariably leads to disaster. The recent oil spill in the Gulf and the nuclear crisis in Japan are just two obvious examples.
So if things cannot and can never be understood fully, what are we to do with the gap between our understanding and the myth of total understanding? I think that's a space best filled with things like reverence, awe, respect, humility, genuflection, ritual, story. I think that premodern humans, understanding (purely in a scientific sense) much less than us, needed those things in order to navigate their world in a way that we don't, exactly. But their closeness to the natural world, the immediacy and spirituality of that world for them, leads me to believe that it's not impossible for the structure of DNA to have made an appearance on a piece of jewelry almost 2000 years before its discovery by Watson and Crick. After all, it's an intricate part of almost all life on the planet.
Enough for now. Hope all is well at home.
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