And while sex was indeed regarded as a life-bringing rite, it wasn’t limited to the living. According to the Moche worldview, the dead ancestors were in charge of revitalizing the earth by having intercourse with it from the inside. As evidenced by the pottery, different non-reproductive sexual activities (oral intercourse and masturbation) were likely practiced in ceremonies linked to agricultural fertility. Other times, when divinities attempted to go into the underworld, and the dead awoke and visited the world of the living, anal intercourse had to be practiced because the natural order of the world had been inverted.
Telling Their Own Story
While the Erotic Gallery’s exhibition features a tomb, where many of these pottery pieces were first found in the beginning, it is only fitting to talk about it at the end. Ancient Peruvian pottery, through which much of the Andean pre-Columbian history has been reconstructed and understood, has been found buried and hidden in tombs, long forgotten by their survivors (if there still are any). Cultures like the Mochica, Chancay, Nazca, Incas, and many more, left mysteries that will never be solved, but they also left much evidence to help us piece together how they saw the world. Exhibitions such as this help us remember that whatever truth we behold from our own experiences, reality, and world views can be a unique experience depending on who’s telling the story.
As Rafael Larco himself is quoted in the exhibition (from his book Checán):