In a previous article, I wrote about ancient artifacts that we consider highly erotic, but at the time they were created, they represented other basic concepts such as agriculture. Among the artifacts and cultures, we briefly talked about the Mochican civilization and their unique clay figurines depicting sexual positions. This stayed in my mind for a while, so I decided to devote a whole article to the subject.
I mentioned that the Mochican culture was unique. They developed important agricultural and metallurgical advances, not to mention the way they mastered pottery. Existing from 200 to 850 AD Mochicas settled and disappeared way before the Incas, the most known Peruvian civilization, and yet their technological advancement in many areas was superior. But let’s talk about what concerns us. These figurines have caught the attention of people from all over the world due to their explicit content. As I mentioned, they show people engaging in sexual activities in a whole variety of positions. But what did they wanted to convey with this?
Resting inside the walls of the Larco Museum in Lima, the collection of figurines consists of hundreds of pieces that were found in an archaeological site, but according to historians, these are only a few of the many pieces the Mochicas crafted. The site where this civilization flourished was found at an early stage of the Spanish colonization, and naturally, being as conservative as they were, they destroyed these figurines. In an account by one of the Spanish missionaries, he explained how unchaste these sexual practices and depictions were. This explains how we’ve come to believe these figurines or vessels were meant to represent their sexual customs. Some archaeologists during the forties even claimed that the homosexual depictions were used to prevent men from engaging in these practices, but naturally, it’s not that believable.
Recent studies –and by recent I mean during the late twentieth century– have a different theory that sounds more logical. They claim these clay vessels with extremely graphic and notorious phallus figures were actually used to worship agriculture. They believed in the association of rain and agriculture with procreation and fertility, and thus, the phallus and ejaculation were symbols of this natural process. Moreover, pottery was so important for this civilization that it was present in every single moment of their everyday life. Most of these pieces were actually found in funerary tombs, showing the important association of sexuality with life and death.
If you visit Peru, you’ll most likely find replicas of these vessels and so many other depictions of phalluses all over gift shops. So, where does this current fascination for the phallus come from? This is where the story gets a little bit tricky. Naturally, these pieces exhibited in the museum began to attract the interest of many visitors and tourists, to the extent that they would only want to visit the Machu Picchu archaeological site and look at the phallic Mochica pottery. As it happens everywhere in the world, tourism, and the market that emerges from it, focuses on what the public wants to see, and thus, in Peru many saw in the depictions of phalluses a whole new market to promote their tourism.
However, this might have gone too far. If you happen to visit Peru, you might find brochures and websites about an ancient archaeological site called Inca Uyo in the district of Puno. The palace is believed to be an ushno, meaning a place to worship Mother Earth. Right in the precinct you’ll find 86 huge sculptures resembling a phallus, which, according to the story, were placed to turn it into a temple of fertility. Legend has it, ancient Inca women would visit this temple to see if they would ever conceive a child, if they were already expecting, or to know if it was a boy or a girl. They would bring with them an offering of 9 coca leaves and a beverage made with fermented corn. They would mix them, sit on the sculptures, and pour the offering, and the answer depended on the direction where the mixture fell.
This could sound legit, especially if you’re not really a connoisseur of Andean cultures and traditions, but the legitimacy of the story was highly questioned for so many reasons. First of all, it sounded too coincidental that uyo, which for Incas meant “home,” is the word in Quechua for “penis.” The other thing that made people question the veracity of the sculptures is that they don’t really resemble any style seen before in other archaeological sites belonging to the Incan civilization, not even the rest of the remains of Inca Uyo. To make it worse, there’s a man who owns a restaurant right next to the site, who claims that it was his idea to place these sculptures on the site to attract the attention of tourists. The story says that Inca Uyo was certified as a legitimate Inca site during the forties, and there’s no doubt that the temple belongs to the time of the empire. However, there’s no evidence of the sculptures either on the excavation or the discovery records. It’s said that these were found in a warehouse near the site, and if the story of Juan Luis Nuñez Geldres (the owner of the restaurant) is true, this warehouse was actually behind his restaurant.
Many claim it’s possible that these pieces didn’t really belong to the site, or that perhaps they did, but they were not placed exactly as we can see them nowadays. Instead, they might have been adapted and cautiously placed to look like phallus sculptures, and the story of the fertility ritual was invented to make it, let’s say, more interesting and appealing for visitors. The truth is that no one really has gotten to analyze the situation since, as Nuñez Geldres claims, this has made the town more prosperous and has given its inhabitants an economical source. What we could really say is that what started as an ancient cult for the phallus with the Mochicas has turned into a touristic icon that increases visitors’ fascination for Peru and the phallic imagery.
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Further reading:
Archaeological Sites You Must Visit To Understand The Strange Phallic Cult
The Secret Collection Of Phalluses and Chastity Belts From The British Museum
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