Chavìn - Peru's enigmatic temple in the Andes

Peru is located in northwestern South America in a land of rich natural diversity and varied landscapes. The Andes mountain chain of South America meanders through Peru from north to south like a wide ribbon. The massive mountains range over 6,000 meters high. Their eastern Andean slopes rise from impenetrable eastern rainforests and deliver their streams to feed the Amazon as it flows onwards through Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean. West of the mountain chain, alongside the Pacific Ocean, lies one of the driest deserts on earth. Peru. This land was staged for an extraordinary cultural history, far away from the old world, separate and unique. Around 3,500 BC, the inhabitants of the river Oasis throughout the coastal desert started to form larger social groups and began practicing intensive irrigation. In the course of this formative process, these early societies constructed the first monumental ceremonial buildings, as early or earlier than many places around the globe. Inhabitants were also present high in the Andes, developing along different paths. At 3,200 meters altitude lies Chavin de Huantar, perhaps the most impressive and mysterious prehistoric temple complex in Peru, at around 900 BC. An early apex of Andean human ingenuity and creativity occurred in this site. Even the Spanish conquerors of the 16th century AD were impressed by these stone ruins and their importance to local people. When archaeological research began in Peru in the 1920s, Chavin was soon seen as the place of origin of the first large and highly organized Peruvian culture, Chavin, the mother culture of the Andes. Visitors to Chavin are fascinated by the site's intriguing mysteries. The ruler-priests of Chavin had the monumental temple complex built without the help of metal tools. The temple construction includes extremely heavy stone blocks, detailed stone reliefs, and mysterious stone sculptures. The rough terrain of the area challenges anyone who would build here, with threats of torrential rivers, earthquakes and landslides. It's puzzling that such monumental constructions would happen in such a steep and difficult valley. The construction of Chavin was supposed to show we are mighty, we have supernatural powers and perform miracles. The temple is located at Atinque, a Quechua-language term for the sacred place where two rivers meet. Chavin sits right where the smaller rapid, Vaquetza Stream, flows into the wider Mosna River. The constructors of Chavin were masters of taming water. Numerous partly walkable underground canals strategically allow Vaquetza water into the site and out again, sometimes even forced upwards under pressure in parts of the channels. The imposing central building of 140 by 70 meters is still visible today. It's divided into two main components of up to 16 meters in height. The U-shaped northern temple, with a sunken circular plaza, and the larger southern temple, with a larger sunken square plaza flanked by two side platforms. John Rick and colleagues from Stanford University and Peru have been studying the temple's chronology for years. Today, the very complex growth of the temple has been reconstructed across several long construction periods. To expand the temple complex in the southeast, the constructors even redirected the Mosna River, meddling with nature in a big way. The architectural project ended between 900 and 550 BC, the so-called black and white phase, a time in which all the site's carved stone reliefs were made. The principal temple buildings of Chavin cover an area of more than 150,000 square meters. It seems that in the Chavin tradition, everything old must be preserved to validate the present. That is why the temple's architecture still reflects an older, as well as a younger, main axis. The older main axis stretches from the principal stone idol, the so-called Lanzón, through the circular plaza to a conspicuous platform on a horizon hilltop. When standing in the middle of the circular plaza, one could watch the sunrise exactly over this platform on December 21st, the winter solstice. A second main axis was constructed during all rebuilding and new constructions of the black and white phase. It runs through the large plaza, the small plaza, and the same platform on the valley's eastern hilltop. The religious tools of the Chavin priests probably included those found in all early agricultural societies of the old and new world, mastering the calendar, analysis and interpretation of the movements of sun, moon and stars, definition of planting and harvest times, and many more astronomical calendrical predictions. Sacrificial offerings discovered in Chavin are of extraordinary quality, especially the ceramic vessels found by Dr. Luis Lumbreras, a Peruvian archaeologist in the Ofrendas Gallery near Caon Plaza. Based on the finds, it seems likely that many elite individuals may have visited Chavin. They came from great distances, including the Pacific coast. Their level of privilege enabled them to undertake the strenuous and dangerous two-week journey over the Andes, experiencing nature's forces first-hand. New and unusual for coastal dwellers would have been snow-covered mountains, cold high plains, icy winds, sliding hillsides, and torrential rivers. Upon arrival in Chavin, they were about to undergo another barrage of experience. The temple led its visitors into a different world. Water currents, a variety of deafening sounds, light, and the use of psychoactive drugs were deliberately controlled and orchestrated, and strange supernatural creatures were presented in the stone art and perhaps other media. In this way, visitors entered into a whole new state of perception and insights about a different world. First, the visitors were brought into the large main plaza. Here, the first rituals of a completely strategized, multi-phased religious initiation took place. The interplay of elevated terraces and sunken plazas, as well as monumental facades, is still an impressive architectural sight today. Although difficult to see in the faded stones today, the black-and-white phase is due to the systematic use of near-white granite and sandstone construction on the south of the later axis, and velvet-black limestone on the northern side. Today, the main facade has been damaged by a major looter's incursion. It once was the central background for ritual and ceremonies. The audience viewing from the lower plaza appeared and felt small, distanced, and uninvolved. About ten meters above ground level on the building's facades, there was a surrounding band of weird, unfamiliar, and threatening stone heads. One of them still holds its original position on the west wall of the largest temple. They seem to depict the transformation from human to a fierce, fantastic animal with many feline elements. As further proof of the dual principle, the impressive, reconstructed black-white portal, with its two decorated columns, stands in front of the eastern temple face. It does not, however, lead to an inner temple, but is a terminus to the primary axis from the east, and perhaps a starting point for a procession way around the temple. The complex, heavily damaged reliefs on the round columns, and on the ten-meter-long lintel spanning them, are an introduction to the symbolic imagery of the Chavin religion. The symbols are hard to understand without the original priest's instructions. Both massive basalt columns are engraved with depictions of hybrid human-animal creatures, perhaps male and female. This duality is supported by the figure's attributes – a spear for one, a spear-thrower for the other – two complementing devices. The half-white, half-black lintel shows the so-called falcon frieze, a procession of alternating mythical raptor depictions converging from the sides. Stairs lead westward into the circular plaza in front of the northern temple. The plaza was first encountered and exposed by the Peruvian archaeologist Luis Lumberas in 1972 with spectacular results. The plaza is 21 meters in diameter and seems to have held only a relatively small number of people. Further stairs lead up from the plaza into the mysterious underground tunnel-like gallery system of the temple. Some of the galleries were used for cult practices. In them, archaeologists found not only sacrificial offerings but also the stored sacred trumpets made of the shell of a tropical conch. The plaza itself is still impressive today with its careful and precise design and construction and the wealth of graphic stone reliefs. In this intimate context, visually shielded from the outside world, a small circle of cult members were privileged to experience a further series of rituals. Apparently, ranking temple visitors assembled in the circular plaza to participate in sacrificial offerings with the help of the priests. The participants in these rituals perceived their exclusive experience as even more intense and surreal because they evidently ingested psychoactive preparations. One such drug was extracted from the endemic sacred San Pedro cactus, which is also depicted on the reliefs. The drug is called huachuma in the Quechua language and contains mescaline and has an LSD-like effect. The 2.5-meter-high Telo obelisk might have stood in the middle of the plaza. Made of white granite, it depicts both the male and the female reptilian creature along with many other aspects of the Chavin mythology in a virtual encyclopedia of Chavin imagery. This may be where the principal rituals took place. Offerings of valuable ceramic vessels were thrown down a stepped entrance in the plaza floor to smash at the bottom of one of Chavin's underground canals. In orchestrated fashion, perhaps at the signal of a high priest, the offerings were flushed away with roaring water currents. After all these ritual offerings, only an even more select group were conducted to crest the stairs to a still more sacred place and the last part of the journey. Another world was about to dominate their perceptions. In the unsettling darkness of the galleries, a more dramatic step of the journey was taken away from the ordinary and natural and towards the divine and supernatural. The labyrinth of narrow passageways, niches, chambers, shafts and stairs has been designed to make the visitor lose his sense of direction after a couple of steps in the dark. Many of the walls may have been plastered. One gallery leads deep into the temple's heart, to the central god-like sculpture, the Lanzón. In a narrow space, at the intersection of two passages, stands the 4.5 meter high statue. It is the only principal ancient cult figure still in its original place in Peru. To encounter the Lanzón in this narrow, dark gallery, probably accompanied by the din of shell trumpets, must have been a terrifying and a very intense experience. When exterior sunlight was suddenly redirected by polished coal mirrors through long light ducts, it fell dramatically on the face of the Lanzón, emphasising its carved image. Possibly, from a gallery above the Lanzón, priests might have poured liquid such as blood down the Lanzón through a channel into a hollow like a circular plaza on top of the Lanzón, and from there, down its face. Priests were able to derive divine prophecies from this, making the Lanzón an oracle. More than 2,000 years later, in 1616, the Spanish friar Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa told his king of this most famous sanctuary of the Andes' indigenous people. It was as important to them as Rome or Jerusalem to us. They made pilgrimages there to bring offerings and sacrifice. Many said their prayers to the idol god at this place. That is why they came there from all over the country. Around 550 BC, a cataclysmic incident, unknown to us, maybe an earthquake, seems to have damaged the temples, perhaps even more deeply shattering the world view and credibility of Chavin. The gods were no longer in accord, and Chavin had lost its importance.