Ed Barnhart: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why is the current mainstream belief is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic? Well, there are bona fide pantheons. Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons, and I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the art looking for them, and they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun God, and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, Texas as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology, there’s a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt. He’s got really identifiable traits. He also likes to sever people’s heads off and carry them around, but he’s the fanged deity and he’s there. He shows up in Chavín de Juantar, the capital of that Chavín culture, and he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha, but Viracocha is the fanged deity. When we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this almost Islamic thing where they say you can’t understand the face of Viracocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they’ll make him just a blob, like he’s just unknowable, but he’s at the very top. I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings. If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course, Christianity is monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise, but who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons and Jesus Christ? I don’t even know who the Holy Spirit is, but he’s some sort of supernatural being. But it’s that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That’s where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient Andean art is. 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?…

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