Starting about 500 BC, a strong and distinctive culture began to surface in 3 small River Valleys on the virtually rainless Coast South of what is now Lima.
In this new society, which produced no known large buildings, ancestor worship seems to have been the overriding theme of how people lived their lives in a supernatural way. It is called the Paracas culture, after the modern name of the Desert peninsula on which its richest burial vaults were found. More than 350 Paracas mummy bundles have been dug up, containing mantles buried with the dead.
These people wove magnificent clothes for their dead. The border figures in their garments represent the manner in which the supernatural powers were understood. Some garments bear minuscule designs that faithfully represent embroidered decorations found on other life-sized garments. Some wear wrap-around dresses of a style worn by women in ancient times; others wear two-part outfits, associated with men. The largest and most beautiful decorated garments were mantles that draped over the shoulders, and fell to the knee. After more than 2,200 years, the ancient colors, still glow with beauty.
So fine is the weaving that threads run up to 500 to the square inch.
Some mantles have the design of feline faces painted on it that recall the Chavin motif. Others are embroidered with such description of supernatural entities which were keepers of the gates in their respective unseen worlds. Some figures are winged men with snakes coiled around their eyes, splitting headed condors gobbling fish, and cat-faced men with knives. Most of the animals and plants that appear were tied to species still found on the South Coast, and many human figures wear or carry items careful enough to relate it to the site and time where it was done.
Their jewelry correspond to specimens formed from thin sheets of gleaming gold, representing the careful way of taking something from the womb of the earth and wear it. These include forehead ornaments shaped like a bird with outstretched wings; hair spangles that were disk or star shapes that dangle from the wing tips of the forehead ornament; slender, feather-shaped headdress plumes; and mouth masks.
Whole communities worked, sitting side-by-side only in the embroidering of these clothes for the death.
Their masterpieces of astonishing virtuosity were done thread by thread with simple tools, too delicate and considered ceremonial, and finished so carefully on both sides that it is almost impossible to distinguish which is the correct side. The central cloth and its framing dimensional border are created by different techniques, both with perfect reversibility, except for a variation of 3 border figures, that instead of being duplicated on the back as if flipped in mirror image, appear in back view on one side of the cloth, thereby designating a "front" and "back" to the textile. So fine is the weaving that threads run up to 500 to the square inch. The central cloth and the border hold different color palettes suggesting that they were created at different times. The triple-layer border were designed with color outer veneers of wool "crossed-looping" that envelop inner cotton cores of looping or weaving. While the cotton is off-white, the wool is dyed in jewel-bright tones. White cotton was grown in Coastal Valleys and wool came from camelids that live at high altitudes in the Andes Mountains.
Some of the dead were warriors and priests able to move between worlds, with especially rich mantles and copper battle-axes and gold ornaments at their sides. They were found buried with other people, men and women, who also had the power to move between the unseen worlds to picture and record the events in their minds and transport the information it in the design of the mantle and garments. As witnesses of the event they were able to communicate it to the different levels of entities in the supernatural world and to the people in the world of the living, about to whom the power went. The garments represented the covering of such power in life and in death. The severed heads brandished by some entities, sometimes sprout flourishing plants that grew without respect to the rules, ended decapitated, and the enforcer retain the power. The snake-like streamers that flow from some entities indicates the supernatural qualities of the event. The rules of good and evil were pretty much understood in all levels and harmony between them was a major thing for the people in the living world, their lives depended on it.
The population did not live according to the manner of other cultures in the World. They surfaced from a very dry ground and had a mission to do. When they depicted clothing, always they added a face, or an animal body to the loose ends of fabrics hanging behind a wearer, considering it a precious carrier of life and harmony between the Worlds.
No comments:
Post a Comment