Moche Shaman Kings and Curer Shamans

The curer as steward of cultural continuity

Indeed Moche rulers were themselves shamans and as such conducted the rites that focused the various dimensions of human social experience to further the interests of their people and sustain their own power. Thus, structural principles that are manifested in the social arena through the practice of shamanism lie at the core of the cultural tradition which shaped Moche political strategy.

North Coast peoples, like their counterparts elsewhere, shaped the Colonial order to their benefit as far as the new circumstances would allow. While superficially adhering to the state religion, they significantly adjusted its meaning to accommodate ancient Andean precepts. Christian saints adopted attributes of native divinities and Christian festivals marked important stages in the ancient agricultural cycles. Conversely, traditional religious elements assumed different meaning in the new synthesis. Some precolumbian personages and divinities were identified with destructive spiritual forces while the ruined cities, cemeteries, and ceremonial centers of the Moche, Sican, and Chimu became identified as the abodes of dangerous spirits, their stone and ceramic images identified with supernatural power. Importantly, whether expressed through Christian or pre-Christian precepts, religion retained a close connection to all aspects of the natural and supernatural Andean world.

The curer is a traditional medical practitioner, usually male in contemporary North Coast society, who uses a profound understanding of natural remedies to bring relief to the sick. As in all occupations that require a specialized knowledge, the curer usually undergoes an extensive learning period, working with more senior curers to master the qualities and properties of a wide range of healing herbs, minerals, and their physical applications.

There is a fundamental aspect of the curer's skill that sets it apart from mere knowledge of herbs. This is the exceptional and deeply personal ability to identify the cause of sickness through divination and to effect healing in the setting of direct spiritual engagement. In many cases the curer's commitment begins in his youth with recognition of his special ability to experience the spiritual realms. However, the event that seals the commitment is usually a vision in which the curer rejects the devil's offer to give him unusual powers in return for subjection to his desires. By rejecting the satanic overtures the dreamer becomes aware of his ability to subdue the beings that cause sickness and he becomes a true shaman, committed to a lifetime of healing in his community.

Several qualities of the curing practice clearly reveal its shamanistic character and deep structural roots in Andean society. First, although the patient is certainly a chief focus of the healing, the broader community is also deeply involved. The effect of the sickness not only impacts the sufferer. The patient's symptoms also manifest dysfunctional social relations whereby such divisive mechanisms as revenge, jealousy, or disloyalty threaten the wider community. The curer strives to heal sickness so as to allow patients and their acquaintances to confront these wider causes. Consequently the curing ritual, in reality a process that promotes resolution of communal danger, takes place in a group setting. Sickness is seen as a manifestation of the alienating and divisive forces inherent in society. The ritual process detaches patient, officiants, and attendants from their normal social roles and allows them to enter the sacred world. Here, in a narrow sense, the shamanistic curer balances the opposing forces of good and evil to effect healing. However, there is broader significance to the process. In the separated space of ritual community members evoke the essential and generic human bond without which there can be no society. It is in this sense that they bring back an element of sacredness into the real world to support and sustain community cohesion. It is thus very understandable that this social role of the North Coast curer has been especially important during the European centuries in the face of massive pressures on societies undergoing change.

A second important feature of present day North Coast healing is that it is conducted within the formal structure of a religious ceremony. A preparation phase activates the participants and the ritual table. During this phase the curer invokes spiritual help through prayer, song, or special rites, to first vitalize the powerful dualistic forces of the two sides of his ritual table, then, usually through the taking of an hallucinogen, to prepare the entire participating group. In the succeeding healing phase the principal officiant, the curer, divines the cause of sickness and engages spiritual forces for the purpose of healing. The event concludes with the ritual cleansing of all participants. Within this formal structure there are many other standard features. Thus the healing ceremony incorporates ritual chants, dances, and music performed on traditional instruments. Invariably the participants drink a mixture of the hallucinogenic cactus to invoke the sacred world.

The most fundamental shamanistic quality of curing lies in the essential nature of the curer himself. Through the powerful agency of the hallucinogenic cactus, he enters the time and space of the spiritual world where he experiences encounters the supernatural world on behalf of his community. Here we can see the role of Moche kings who would have initiated the same connections with the supernatural world on behalf of their communities. In so doing, they held the world together and made order out of chaos. Not unlike the Pharoahs of ancient Egypt, the Moche shaman Kings would face the dangers of the world and make "the nile flood" in an Andean sense. The curer shaman activated the dual sources of power - good and evil - and attempted to regulate the resulting force with the assistance of the supernatural world. It is within ritual that all of this can be accomplished. So the shaman king commanded power atop a pyramid where he would enter the sacred supernatural world of time and space. Here he regulated the forces of good and evil for the good of his people.

The frequent depiction of curers in elite Moche ceramic art reveals the social importance of this profession. Great rulers like the Warrior Priest of Sipan were extreme practitioners of the shaman's art in the political sphere. Through the ritual of sacrifice they mediated a spiritual balance in the paradoxical tension between holistic and individualizing ideology that they themselves had generated in their quest for power. When they could no longer balance these forces, they fell, and with them fell the great civilization which they had created. In the end ordinary curer shamans, simple heirs of the Moche curers we know through ceramic art and mythic symbolism became responsible for the preservation of a structural balance in the lives of their fellows and thereby perpetuated North Coast society in the face of the great changes that it has experienced through the centuries.

Just as with the Maya, it is probably the case that curer shamans were a folk religion within pre-Moche societies. The shaman kings simply elevated this folk religion to a state religion that supported the political power they possessed. When the Moche world collapsed, it was the folk religion that re-emerged as a principle means for society to deal with chaos and imbalance.

On one hand is the gloriously attired Moche ruler of long ago. In the full glare of public spectacle, he evokes the awesome power of myth, through sacred rituals conducted high on great artificial mountains like the Huaca del Sol. On the other hand is the impoverished villager in his bare earthen patio adjoining a rude adobe house, conducting a healing ceremony for a few poorly dressed patients in the raw, dark night. These vastly dissimilar beings both draw on the power of a single belief system which embodies the vitality of an enduring people. One uses this power to effect social unity in the interests of political gain, the other to achieve physical healing and communal cohesion in the face of overwhelming outside pressure. They employ a common holistic experience to direct opposing cosmic forces toward the balance that assures social order and explains the human universe.