Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…So what is the process of analyzing art through time that try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture? Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over? Well, certainly without the advent of writing, depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them, and there are certain, what we call diagnostic elements. We can pull apart the same sort of thing like in the Greek pantheon, you know by their dress and what they’re holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things they’re holding lightning bolts or tridents or whatever. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them. So that’s how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say, “Okay, here’s a deity here in Chavín culture.” Now we move forward 500 years. Now we’re in Moche and Nazca culture. Where are the deities here? And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures. He’s got circular eyes, he’s got a fanged mouth. He’s got claws on his hands and feet. He’s a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt. And then not so much in Chavín, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they’re like, in the old literature, the Moche will call him the decapitator deity, but then they have these other like, “Oh, here’s the crab deity and here’s the fox deity.” But if you look at them, the crab deity is just that guy’s face coming off of a crab, and the fox deity is that guy’s face coming off of a fox. So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was able to turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted, and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore. And across hundreds of years, thousands of years from Chavín to Moja to Inca, as you’re saying.…

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