America's oldest culture?
A thousand kilometers north of Lake Titicaca, at an altitude of more than 3,000 meters, in the Peruvian Andes, there are the ruins of something absolutely disconcerting, close to a village called Chávin:an immense temple. Cieza de León in 1548 and Antônio de Espinoza in 1624 give news of him, who in this regard noted:"This is one of the most famous temples here, a kind of Rome or Jerusalem...", but little by little all the news was lost. of him, and the continuous landslides and landslides buried him, hiding him in the bowels of a wild landscape. When two explorers from the last century, the Italian Raimondi and the French Wiener, discovered a monolith and the second made some schematic notes of the place, they did not imagine that they had come to brush the face of an unknown America. In Chávin de Huantar, in the northern antiplanar and north of the coast of Peru, the oldest pre-Columbian culture known in South America was developed. The tests carried out with the C-14 made it possible to date the discoveries to the 11th century BC. It is without a doubt the oldest culture of pre-Incan Peru. The most characteristic of it is the representation, which is repeated until satiety, in stone, ceramic and metal, of an image of a feline-god. It also seems to demonstrate that the oldest gold jewelery shop originated there.
The Lanzón
Two passages lit up in the ruins and I entered the underground of Chávin's temple. There are three floors of galleries covered in carved slabs, stairs, small rooms. There is good ventilation and the air is fresh. Most of the galleries are not open to visitors, as some compartments are used to store strange stone sculptures. A narrow, cross-shaped corridor houses one of the most famous monuments of American archeology - the Lansón.
What strange religion created this fierce idol? An anthropomorphic character over four meters tall, a wide mouth with protruding canines, cruel eyes, snake-shaped eyebrows and hair, a flat nose with open nostrils - mystical mixture of the sacred animals of American religions:feline, snake and bird of prey. The idol's head is huge, taking up almost a third of the volume of the granite sculpture. The right hand is raised showing the huge nails. A belt with feline motifs (mouths open, teeth showing), bracelets on the arms and legs, on the head, a kind of miter also decorated with the face of felines.
Two snake-shaped cords run down her back, intertwining in a braid. It's a hideous specter, illuminated by yellow light from spotlights. Upstairs was a sacrificial room. The blood of the victims (human?) ran down a groove in the miter to a cavity above the monster's nose, then spilled, nose down, into the mouth - or rather, the muzzle, which is broad, aggressive and fierce. The religion associated with such a deity could not have been benign.
At the time of the Inca, the sanctuary was in ruins and semi-abandoned. The famous Inca Trail passes far from Chávin. Perhaps that is why the origins of this culture are lost in the darkness of the first Formative period.