JOIN USIt is scandalous.” With a sheepish grin pasted on her porcelain skin, a woman in blue muttered as she hurried down the ramp of Lima’s Rafael Larco Herrera Museum. Her giggle broke the monotony of the crisp Peruvian air. The ancient pink, orange, red bougainvilleas were clinging to the white walls of the historical building, and a cat napped inside a giant cement vase.
Our eyes did not meet; the woman in blue and I shared no smiles. But I gauged her ‘scandalous’ giggle. I had read about the Larco Museum in Time magazine — of its unusual collection of erotic pottery as a must-do in the Peruvian capital. Sex-themed pottery dating to pre-Columbian times. Anal sex, female-to-male fellatio, kissing and fondling, male masturbation, copulating frogs, mice and llamas, sexual intercourse between females and mythical animals — all these were moulded exquisitely in clay thousands of years ago and later dug out of the earth’s womb. The vessels are not decorative pieces; there are functional, hollow clay pots for holding liquid, and a spout, typically in the form of a phallus, for pouring liquid. Such explicit sexual imagery belongs in the the world’s largest collection of pottery based on eroticism.
History behind glass
“Scandalous,” the woman in blue had muttered. Mesmerising art — that was my first thought as I stepped into the Erotic Pottery Gallery of the private museum, housed in an 18th-century viceroyalty-era mansion. History stood safely stashed in neat, illuminated indentations behind glass panes. Free-standing, three-dimensional figures on top, or as part of the vessel, were found during excavations of burial and religious sites of the Moche, a highly organised, class-based society that dominated Peru’s northern coast for 800 years, until about 800 AD.
With intriguing connotations of sex, the vessels can confound the aesthete and the scholar. A jaguar hunched over a naked man. A skeletal object masturbating alone. A woman breastfeeding an infant during sexual intercourse. There was no depiction of female masturbation and almost no vaginal sex. Scholars have interpreted sex in Moche pottery in the context of pleasure, rituals and the sexual norms of an ancient culture.
At the centre of debate is the common depiction of a couple having sex while the woman
is breastfeeding an infant, and the absence of vaginal sex in the pottery. Scholars agree that the Moche vessels are a clear depiction of the sexual practices of the Moche people, didactic objects conveying methods of contraception, warnings about over-indulgence in sex, and as portrayals of ritual and ceremonial acts.
In 1965, the museum founder Rafael Larco Hoyle (the museum borrows his father’s name) published Checan, a book dedicated to erotic pottery — an abundantly illustrated monograph with select pieces from his private collection of nearly 45,000 artefacts. With the diversity of sexual acts represented in the Moche pottery, Larco Hoyle, the father of Peruvian archaeology, categorised the pottery into four groups. The first group has men and women with disproportionate sexual organs and anthropomorphised penises. To drink from these, the lips had to touch the genitalia. The second group moralises with the depiction of how sexual excesses can lead to destruction, represented by a skeletal subject masturbating alone. The third group is a group of vases depicting religious eroticism, while the fourth group comprises regular copulation between man and woman, with predominance of anal copulation.
There’s a lot of eroticism in the Larco Museum. However, there’s more to it than sex. With ‘Treasures From Ancient Peru’ as its tagline, the museum houses several permanent and temporary collections. Sprawled across three rooms, the Culture Gallery narrates 5,000 years of Peruvian history through stone, wood and pottery. In the Textile Room, the natural white, grey, brown, black of cotton, alpaca and vicufia wool, which were originally used to weave fabric for everyday and afterlife use, graduate to the yellow, green, red, pink, purple and blue of later weaves. The new colours were created from leaves, roots, tree bark, coloured earth and different minerals, while carmine was obtained from cochineal.
Flesh offering
From textile, history at Larco Museum steps into the gory world of sacrifice and the wrath of gods. The Moche of Peru’s northern coast practised ritual-combat ceremony and subsequent human sacrifice. In the combat between the productive members of the society, candidates were selected for sacrifice. Pots, bowls and tall vases stand witnesses to the ancient ritual of appeasing gods with death in which exchange of liquid (water, blood, sacrificial blood) was the central feature.
The morbid sacrificial ceremonies lead into the glitter of gold, silver, copper and alloys, the gleam of the metals blinding. Perched on black mannequin busts, the nose ornaments are large enough to cover the wearer’s mouth. Neck pieces as broad as shoulder. Headgears decked with rows of mother of pearl circles. Crowns with dainty chiselling. Gold masks. Silver hairpins. In another room are funerary offerings that explain the cult of death in pre-Columbian era when death was deemed a milestone to another existence in the underworld. Gold and silver miniatures, funeral masks and a funerary bundle bring death to the forefront of another-life belief.
In Lima’s Rafael Larco Herrera Museum, 5,000 years of Peruvian history is narrated chronologically through artefacts from various regions. Walking through the galleries, I was caught between the intrigue of sex-themed vessels, the cult of death and the dazzle of gold and silver baubles. I sure needed to gulp all this down. I pulled a chair in the Larco Cafe and ordered chicha morada, a traditional purple corn drink.
History wouldn’t leave me alone. It chased me down to the cafe to tell me that hundreds of years ago, local women chewed corn with their mouths loaded with saliva, spat it into a bowl and let the corn ferment. That is how chicha was made. The saliva-fermented non-alcoholic drink stood tall on white linen. In Lima, I drank to 5,000 years of Peruvian history.