Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…Do we know much about the relationship they had with the fanged deity and their conception of the powers of the fanged deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all-knowing God? Is it something that brings joy and harvest or is it something that you’re supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans to keep at bay? I think he had two sides of the coin. A lot of the Hindu gods are… One aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people’s heads off, and he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity, but then there are other funny things about him. He is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts. When it comes to the Moche, there’s this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men, and some of them show their faces transforming into that fanged deity, he is acting through them. But the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged deity has a little puppy. He has a puppy that’s just dancing around his feet and jumping up on him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he’s in these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and a fanged deity, and there’s a puppy just scratching at the door like, “Hey, you forgot me.” And then finally, one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, “Oh, he really is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy?” Okay.…

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