The Myths and Rituals of Moche Power

Almost by definition rituals of religious significance receive much of their influence and power from their association with deeply and broadly held beliefs. We are all familiar with the sacred stories enacted in the rituals of the great religions. In Jewish tradition, the annual festival of Passover recreates the events that immediately preceded the Exodus from Egypt. Similarly, the heart of regular Christian liturgy is the celebration of Holy Communion in which the minister or priest re-enacts the Last Supper of Christ and his disciples. These ceremonies, and many others like them, repeat through formal, prescribed performance, events that are believed to have happened centuries ago, but whose effects transcend time to sustain beliefs that are central to a group of people in the present. Essential to the persisting influence of such ritual is the mutually sustaining interaction between exact repetition of their elements and the constant meaning that they signify. Repetition in this context reinforces continuity and stability.

Just as Judeo-Christian ceremonies ritually enact ancient events that have been permanently recorded as sacred narratives, so Andean rituals enact accounts, or myths, that have been passed through time as oral history concerning the deeds of human and supernatural beings. In the Andean world, ritual, and by definition its attendant myth, carries much more direct social significance than does modern religion in the Western world. Myths are stories that, through symbol and metaphor provide explanations of how human life came to be as it is. They describe the opposing forces innate to the cosmos and stress that these forces remain in symmetrical balance. They express sacred beliefs held by the members of a human group as to its origins and structure, its relation to the wider natural and supernatural universe. These myths vividly portray the dangers resulting from disorder and chaos associated with alternative structures. As such, myths are the crucial importance in sustaining the order internal relations of the group and perpetuating these through established social roles and responsibilities.

Myth serves various social ends that help us understand the political use to which it was put by the Moche ruling group. At the basic level it has meaning only to it immediate group, providing a formalized statement of group values and attitudes and thereby promoting social solidarity. Through ritual enactment, myth helps mask individual and wider social insecurity by repetitive, anticipated activity that renders the future predictable by its conformity with the past. Myth makes permanent the organizational structures by which society is integrated and sanctions this order by involving supernatural agents in the affairs of the living.

While these qualities of myth influence society by promoting stability and continuity, like all social constructions it is susceptible to manipulation. The effect of myth in societies that do not record collective memory is to anchor basic structural principles in time through endless verbal repetition and ritual drama. Such a system gives the prevailing order the authority of long-term tradition and makes it resistant to change relative to that of groups whose rules and practices of social integration are written and thus readily accessible to scrutiny and assessment.

Myth and ritual serve to cloak the rules and strictures of society in the authority of timeless social tradition. But within this context of structural continuity, they possess the flexibility to accommodate major historical events. This adjustment must, of course, occur through the intentional action of the group members who, after all, are the agents who construct and perpetuate myths. It is possible, then, for such human agents to redirect myths and their ritual dramatization to serve their own interests, especially at times of major social flux. By so doing, they assert their own interests within the powerful context of long-term cultural tradition and supernaturally ordained sanction. Here, myth and ritual can become potent political agents for normalizing unequal power relationships while continuing to perpetuate the embedded structures of social life. In this way Moche leaders, by manipulating the associations of basic North Coast myths and officiating as the central figures in their ritual enactment, were able to widen the scope of traditional belief and practice as the core of their formal political ideology.

We can now go further in examining the nature and social significance of Moche myth and ritual. In the absence of direct verbal or written information, the specific meaning of Moche myths is, of course, hidden from us. However, their frequent depiction in art allows us certain glimpses into their world. From the examination of many hundreds of such depictions scholars have isolated a relatively small number of mythic themes centered on the acts of supernatural beings, and the important ritual performances in which human beings enacted them in the social domain.

At the outset we can identify several fundamental features of Moche myth and its ritual enactment. First, a persisting focus is apparent through the several centuries of Moche history. At the core of this focus lay the act of sacrifice. From what are tentatively known as the earliest phases, the symbolism of sacrifice holds a dominant place in elite art and narrative ritual depiction. A second and closely related theme which persists through the course of Moche myth and ritual is combat. Whether portraying struggles between supernatural beings or between Moche warriors, combat held a prominent place in the social belief system of North Coast peoples during this period. The third part of the same ritual complex is the hunt, whose metaphorical and symbolic meaning centers a around the sacrificial theme.

The relationship between these general thematic categories gives us the third basic feature characteristic of Moche ritual. It is clear from their consistent iconographic association that sacrifice and combat, and most probably the hunt as well, were parts of a wider mythic-ritual sequence. In most cases it appears that combat between humans preceded the sacrifice of prisoners, a relationship that can also be assumed in the mythic stories that underlay these actions.