Chavin de Huantar: Do You Want To Meet a God?

Ask the average person about pre-Columbian South America and you would almost certainly hear about the Inca. This mountain kingdom which carved itself a loose empire that runs the length of the Andes looms large in the modern consciousness.

But this can be deceptive. The Inca were hugely successful, but they were a comparatively recent empire, one which overlaps with Pizarro and his conquest of South America in the 16th century. 

Nor were the Inca a particularly successful empire in terms of longevity, their heyday lasting only a hundred years or so. Their rise may have been meteoric, but their fall was just as abrupt, and if truth be told they were collapsing under their own weight even before the Spanish arrived.

It is true that the monumental architecture of the Inca is unsurpassed in South America, that the sites they left to history at Machu Picchu, Cuzco, Ollentaytambo and Choquequirao are unrivalled across the continent. But they were not the first, the longest lived, or even the most interesting kingdom in Peru. There are far stranger things in the Andes than the Inca.

There are many kingdoms far less well known or understood. There are the Chimu with their enormous fortress city of Chan Chan, and the cloud dwellers of Chachapoyas with their huge citadel at Kuelap.

There are the Moche with their death pits, arenas for captured slaves to fight and die, or be sacrificed to their bloody gods in huge numbers. There are the Chico Norte, a truly ancient kingdom which may predate anything else on the planet.

And, on a high mountain pass above the modern city of Huaraz and the Cordillera Blanca made famous by Touching the Void, there is perhaps the strangest of all. Here those seeking to pass from the desiccated coastline to the lush, tropical interior could seek the wisdom of a literal god.

And the god is still there.

The Chavin and their Lanzon

First impressions of the site are impressive even to this day. The remains of a huge curtain wall greet travelers at the end of a long climb from into the high Andes from the coast. The wall itself offers no obvious entrance: this is a place of secrets, and secret initiations.

The site itself runs alongside the headwaters of the Marañón River, principal water source of the mighty Amazon. The location, on the only major pass between coast and jungle for hundreds of miles, ensured that all who sought to travel such a route must encounter this place.

The Chavin, the ancient culture who built this place, dominated the region for thousands of years. Evidence of occupation of the site can be dated as far back as 3,000 BC, but it was millennia later that the great temples and plazas of Chavin de Huantar were built, two thousand years before the Inca.

The principal temple itself in enormous, a vast pyramid of stone with a huge flat top, facing a sunken central plaza and surrounding it on three sides. Here the public ceremonies were held in front of a great doorway, fashioned half from white granite, half from black limestone.

The Chavin decorated this great temple with ornate carvings which include their particular deity, known as the Lanzon. This Andean god, with fiercely bared teeth and bulging eyes, stands holding two sea shells considered rare and sacred. Such shells have been found at the site, far from the sea and testament to the reach of the Chavin culture.

But this is only a depiction of the Lanzon, for the public gathered in the plaza below this “new” temple. For this great building is not the only structure at Chavin de Huantar: partially beneath and to the side of the plaza lies the “old” temple, and here the god himself rests to this day.

This was not a public space. This was a place of private revelation, or secrets and magic, where the chosen could enter and commune with the god himself. The Lanzon has answers for those who dare enter, though not all will understand what they are told.

Initiates would be gathered at a small, circular plaza just off the main plaza. Here they would ascend a flight of stone steps and enter into the old temple, where they would meet with the Lanzon and hear his wisdom. And millennia later, we can only partially understand what this entailed.

The old temple is a maze of dark passages, partially underground and with narrow vents to the surface. Archaeological finds at this and other Chavin sites suggest that these vents may have served an important function: hidden actors may have used them to force psychoactive smoke into the passages below.

There is also evidence that other substances with similarly disorienting properties may have been fed to those who sought to enter the temple of the Lanzon. Sea shells carved into musical horns may also have been sounded into the vents, their discordant bellow echoing through the chambers below as the visitor breathed in the holy smoke and groped their way forward in the darkness to the heart of the labyrinth.

Here stands the Lanzon itself, a huge stone stela in a special chamber much higher than all the others in the old temple. This is not merely a statue, this was a real god to the Chavin, a living being inhabiting their Andean temple complex.

Shaped like a plunging dagger, this god of stone has the same tusked teeth and staring eyes of the carvings far behind in the plaza. But here it is much closer, and in the dark and smoke it can seem to move.

There are several ways by which a visitor can come across the Lanzon. From the side it appears terrifying, a monstrous form staring down at you. From the front it appears as a narrow figure stabbing down into the ground, all teeth and curled mouth.

Perhaps it is this which explains the mystery. Those who came across the Lanzon may have exited after and told the holy men of the place what they had seen, begging an explanation of their encounter. Certainly the temple complex at Chavin de Huantar was a rich place, as the grave goods from the elite burials found there show.

And so it was for a millennium or more, with visitors to the place seeking out the cacophony of seashell horns and the sweet smoke of the temple interior, meeting with the living god within and relying on the priesthood to help them understand their experience. We do not exactly know what brought about the end of the Chavin, but by 500 BC their culture was in decline, replaced by those of Huaraz further down the mountain to the west.

No photos are allowed of the Lanzon today, and the replica in the nearby museum, robbed of context, lacks much of the gravitas of the original. But then, it would: it is only a replica, not the original living god who lurks within the old temple of Chavin de Huantar.

Top Image: A colossal stone head at Chavin de Huantar depicting a man turning into a jaguar (PsamatheM / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Written by Allthathistory