12
GIFTS TO THE GODS
The treasure of Lake Guatavita: a Muisca gold figure ritually cast into the lake around 1500 CE
Every now and then in the British Museum after hours, the cleaning staff find little offerings of fruit or flowers placed carefully in front of a statue – generally a Hindu statue, Ganesh a particular favourite. They are moving evidence of a habit of making regular small gifts – offerings of thanks or simply of reverence – that is deeply embedded in Hindu practice. It is of course a habit by no means limited to Hinduism: in most religions daily living with gods is inseparable from regular giving to gods – or giving to charity in the name of gods. This pattern of giving affirms a continuing relationship of reciprocal generosity and obligation.
The museum is full of such offerings, expressions simple or extravagant of human hopes, needs and generosity, over millennia and from all over the world. Most of these gifts to the gods were clearly offered by individuals, and some of the most poignant are small models of body parts, cheaply made in clay, metal or wax, presented in the hope of cure, or more often in thanksgiving for health restored. They are moving, but for the most part resolutely anonymous. Behind them lie cults which are often obscure, and lives and stories which we can never know.
We do, however, have much more evidence about how whole societies made gifts to the gods, and why as communities they chose to do it. This seems also to be a universal phenomenon, and this chapter is about two particularly striking examples, both played out in spectacular settings, that may truly be described as theatres of faith – Lake Guatavita, high in the Colombian Andes, and the Parthenon in Athens. They tell us much about the gods that were worshipped there, and, unsurprisingly, even more about those who worshipped them.
During the ceremony, which took place at the lagoon, they made a raft of rushes, embellishing and decorating it with the most attractive things they had.
At this time, they stripped the heir to his skin, and anointed him with a sticky earth on which they placed gold dust so that he was completely covered with this material. They placed him on the raft, on which he remained motionless, and at his feet they placed a great heap of gold and emeralds for him to offer to his god. On the raft with him went four principal subject chiefs, decked in plumes, crowns, bracelets, pendants and earrings all of gold. They, too, were naked, and each one carried his offering. As the raft left the shore music began, with trumpets, flutes and other instruments, and with singing which shook the mountains and valleys, until, when the raft reached the centre of the lagoon, they raised a banner as a signal for silence.
The gilded Indian then made his offering, throwing out all the pile of gold into the middle of the lake, and the chiefs who had accompanied him did the same on their own accounts. After this they lowered the flag, which had remained up during the whole time of offering, and, as the raft moved towards the shore, the shouting began again, with pipes, flutes, and large teams of singers and dancers. With this ceremony the new ruler was received, and was recognized as lord and king. From this ceremony came the celebrated name of El Dorado, which has cost so many lives.
The Golden Man being covered in gold dust in preparation for his ‘coronation’ ceremony on Lake Guatavita, from Freyle’s account of El Dorado
This is the famous account by Juan Rodríguez Freyle, written around 1636, of the ‘coronation’ ceremony of the ruler of the Muisca people, who lived in the north of what is now Colombia and who had been conquered a hundred years earlier by the Spanish invaders. By the time of Freyle’s writing, El Dorado, the gilded man, was already well known to Europeans, the emblem of a fantastical world of wealth, which, if only they could reach it, they would be able to plunder at will. Attempts to do so had, as Freyle said, cost many lives, overwhelmingly indigenous ones, but also of hundreds of European adventurers, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, who in 1595 and again in 1617 attempted unsuccessfully to reach and to rob the kingdom of gold. Returning empty-handed twice, and having against orders attacked the occupying Spaniards, Raleigh was executed at the Tower of London in 1618. What drew him, and fascinated all Europeans, was the gigantic quantity of gold reportedly possessed by the Muisca. What bewildered those who eventually got there was that the Muisca saw gold not at all in terms of monetary value, but as part of a cosmic choreography of equilibrium and exchange – as something which might properly, and best, be given to the gods.
Lake Guatavita in the Colombian Andes, scene of the El Dorado ceremony. Clearly visible is the wedge cut in the rim of the lake in 1580 in an attempt to drain it and recover its gold.
In the British Museum is a small selection of objects once ritually thrown into the lake by El Dorado or his followers, and much later recovered by acquisitive Europeans: they include a few bells (as mentioned by Freyle) made of stone or slate, and some highly wrought figurines of clay and gold. Jago Cooper is head of the Americas section at the British Museum:
Lake Guatavita is one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. It is a small crucible lake in the high cordillera of the Andes of eastern Colombia, at the heart of the area inhabited by the Muisca: an indigenous community who thrived between 600 CE and their first contact with Europeans around the 1530s, and who were some of the finest gold-workers in the world.
You can see the quality of that work in a flat, almost two-dimensional figure of a man, two or three inches high, found at the bottom of Lake Guatavita in the early twentieth century (p. 170). Made from an alloy of gold with some copper, probably around 1500, he looks as though he is wearing a crown, has elaborate earrings and in one hand is holding a gourd used to hold coca leaves for chewing. Slight roughnesses at the edge of the figure, the remains of tiny tubes to carry the metal while it was still in its molten state, show that it was made by the lost-wax technique: a figure is finely modelled in beeswax, left to harden, and then coated in clay; when the clay is heated, the wax melts and runs out, leaving a void into which liquid metal can be poured. When that cools and hardens, the golden statue has been made.
It is a technique of which the Muisca were masters. Indeed we know that in order to have waxes with varying degrees of malleability, which would allow them to achieve the greatest possible precision in modelling, they kept several different varieties of bees. The making of the gold sculpture was not, however, just a feat of skilled craftsmanship: as Jago Cooper recounts, it was also in some measure seen and practised as a religious act:
The Muisca believed that humans are an integral part of an ecology of different relationships in a dualistic world – male/female, dark/light, liquid/solid, wet/dry and so on. They had individual deities, but these deities were essentially just part of a great system of cosmic equilibrium; they represented opposites that had to be brought together by humans, who had the power to mediate with this spiritual world. You could say that balance itself was the ultimate deity of the Muisca and of many other indigenous groups throughout South America.
When in any area of life that balance seemed to get out of kilter – if, for instance, there had been a long drought – offerings could be made in order to restore it. The process of making a little gold figure like this one played out the pervasive dualistic idea: wax melted and disappeared, liquid metal became solid, and a quite new object emerged. It was a process seen as a ritual of transformation and replacement, and the wax-/metal-worker would usually be part priest. The object created was thus by its very nature an ideal offering to help restore the equilibrium of the world, by being gifted to the gods at the portals to their world – buried in caves or under stones, or deposited in lakes.
Although the Muisca did use gold objects and ornaments for themselves, archaeologists estimate that about half of the goldwork they created was made to be offered to the gods, to be buried or placed in water, designed to disappear for ever. So it is perfectly possible that the visible lifetime of these gold objects, some of them complex works of art, might have been just a matter of hours. Our little figurine was probably made in order to be almost immediately consigned to the waters of the lake where, centuries later, it was found. Individuals might privately make gifts of single objects, but in a ‘coronation’ ceremony the act of offering fell to the new leader. Jago Cooper explains what happened:
When a ‘Zipa’, a new chief, rose up, he would be put on a balsa raft, and go out on to Lake Guatavita. This was a very special place for the Muisca, as it was the home of Bachué, mother goddess of all humanity. There the Zipa would immerse himself in a ritual purification, and throw objects like those now in the British Museum into the lake, the ceremony being witnessed by thousands of people. This enormous public offering, probably including objects given by people of all classes, was the trigger for a new equilibrium: to a gift like this, the gods would surely respond by making gifts in return, to the benefit of the Muisca and their new leader.
The most famous piece of Muisca goldwork to have survived, now in the Gold Museum in Bogotá, may well illustrate this ceremony (pp. 178 and 179). On a raft about twenty centimetres long stands a large, sumptuously dressed figure. Around him are twelve smaller characters wearing jaguar masks, and carrying banners and canes. Some may be rowers, ferrying the Zipa to the centre of the lake, where even pieces as impressive as this could be consigned to the water.
As far as historians can judge, the Muisca had no material economic metric by which produce and commodities were exchanged. This was a society without currency: value resided supremely in the creation of peaceful equilibrium between heaven and earth, by surrendering for ever things so glimmeringly attractive and so painstakingly made. Jago Cooper describes the contrast with the invaders:
Europeans, whose religious and economic assumptions were of course radically other, almost immediately began trying to recover for themselves what the Muisca had given to the gods. In 1580 a Spaniard cut a great wedge out of the side of the lake, drained it by about twenty metres, and found huge amounts of gold, which he sent back to the king of Spain. In the 1890s a British company spent twenty years planning and building a large tunnel through which they drained the lake down to the mud. They immediately began excavating, finding many things, but the next day the mud had baked solid as concrete and they couldn’t get anything more out of it. Some of the objects they did recover were sold at auction – our little golden figure among them – and bought by the British Museum in 1910.
Lake Guatavita is now protected by law from future treasure-hunters.
The most spectacular surviving piece of Muisca goldwork, thought to show the El Dorado ceremony. The large figure is probably the Zipa.
Europe too has a long history of offering precious objects to the gods, and, like the Muisca, of depositing valuable metal in water. Swords, shields and helmets are found in rivers or bogs across the continent, clearly put there deliberately as offerings. The custom mysteriously survives in the modern habit of throwing coins into fountains, wells and rivers, with an unspecified expectation that good fortune will somehow result. In Rome, the Trevi Fountain receives thousands of euros every day (the money is gathered and used for charitable purposes). But Europe has no real equivalent of Lake Guatavita. The great communal acts of giving have mostly taken place in cities, focused on the temples of the gods.
In the British Museum stand four large blocks of white marble. They are all roughly the same size, about eighty centimetres high, forty-five across and fifteen deep; they date from around 400 BCE, and are inscribed with neatly chiselled lines of Greek script. They are ledgers, literally carved in stone, created by ancient Athenian ‘accountants’. Their client was effectively the goddess Athena herself, after whom the city had taken its name – an unusual act of homage in the ancient world – and these are records of the treasures kept in her temple, the religious centre of the city, the Parthenon.
These inventories were updated annually. They list objects such as wine bowls, silver cups and drinking horns, incense-burners and trays for offerings, a golden statue of Victory along with its wings, bracelet and crown, and so on. In the Parthenon frieze you can see figures carrying things very like these, as the citizens bring their offerings to Athena. Some objects, the inventories tell us, were gifts of individuals, others of cities, but all were intended to ensure that the goddess was properly, lavishly reverenced in the ceremonies held in her honour. Rather as Lake Guatavita held a particular significance for the Muisca, Athenians had a peculiarly close connection to the Parthenon: so one might imagine that these two acts of giving, on the face of it similar, are in essence the same. But there are significant differences, not least that objects given to the Parthenon could be put on show, and – just as important – they could be removed at a later date. Athenian gifts to the gods were an altogether more tentative – and negotiable – business.
The marble inventories of the Parthenon for 426–412 BCE
Tim Whitmarsh, Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, describes the process:
The Parthenon was a very unusual temple: it was really an instrument of state. In the modern world we tend to think of the distinction between the sacred and the public/political as absolutely clear-cut. Phrases like ‘offerings’ or ‘votive dedications’ make sense to us as religious phenomena. But what is fascinating about the Parthenon and its contents is how they swing between those two categories of the religious and the political.
The inscriptions in the British Museum were part of the rhetoric of officialdom: uniform in size, and employing formulaic phrases that tell us who the officials in charge were at the time, who the treasurers and secretaries were, etc. But alongside their pragmatic function, which is to inventory the sacred possessions of Athena, these inscriptions also served as the projection of Athenian statehood.
Statehood in Greek terms is actually about centralized finance, about the way in which you organize taxation, bringing it together into a central spot. The Parthenon is the product not just of local taxation, but also of taxation of the Athenian Empire, and what is stored in it is really an expression of Athenian wealth and power. Some of the objects listed in the inventory could be used in ritual activities – knives and bowls, for example – but there is little evidence that the Parthenon was actually used for ritual practices. Instead, it was designed, around 438 BCE, as the treasury of the Athenian Empire: a huge store of wealth, which was under the ownership and overview of the goddess Athena, but which was capable of being repurposed as state finance.
The Parthenon, dominating ancient Athens, was not just a temple but a storehouse of offerings and a demonstration of Athenian wealth
The Athenians are apparently making their offerings for a very different purpose from the Muisca; there seems to be little thought here of irrevocable gifts to restore a cosmic balance. In the Parthenon, the surrounding of the goddess with ostentatious splendour was no doubt in part so that she would continue to protect them, but it was also a demonstration of the Athenians’ own remarkable achievements – and power.
Inventories like these reflect only a small proportion of the vast wealth that was held inside the Parthenon. But they are useful, because they allow us to track particular objects year by year. We can see when they were taken away and presumably melted down – with a rapid rise in withdrawals during periods of crisis and danger for the state. Tim Whitmarsh suggests that tablets like those in the British Museum may provide an example:
There is a very interesting moment in one of these inscriptions, where we have catalogues for two successive years: one is from 414 BCE, the other from 413 BCE. They are almost identical – except that in 413 there’s a missing lustral bowl, a silver bowl used for water that would then be sprinkled out in ritual acts. Why this lustral bowl is missing is not clear. No one says it was sold off or it was melted down or anything like that. But this was a very significant date, because it is the time of a catastrophic Athenian expedition to Sicily and the decimation of the Athenian population, a time when the Spartans were fortifying and occupying a key Athenian site. So it was a period of severe loss and great financial insecurity in Athens. This one missing silver lustral bowl may well be the tip of a huge iceberg of objects removed.
This is perhaps the key difference between these two patterns of offering. The gifts to Athena came from a world of money, in which bronze, silver and gold had a real commercial value, which they never entirely lost. In an emergency, gifts made by the community could be taken back from the goddess and used for money, to secure the interests of her city – temporarily at any rate. But Tim Whitmarsh explains that there was a hitch:
The Athenians did draw lines between state finance and sacred finance. And though these lines could be transgressed, there was an understanding that if you took religious items and repurposed them as state finance, that was not a gift on the part of Athena to the state. The Parthenon was the sacred hub of the city, and you could not just take things as freebies. You had to give them back. The goddess had to be repaid.
To make an anachronistic comparison, we might say that the Parthenon was allowed to function in part as a central bank, or the International Monetary Fund – able to use its holdings to make loans in times of crisis, but on the strict condition of repayment in due course. Whereas the Muisca gift was ostensibly irrecoverable and – they thought – for all time, the ancient Greek offering was continually provisional.
A Roman silver denarius of 74 BCE showing the goddess Juno Moneta, whose name gives us the word ‘money’
The intimate connection between the temple of a goddess and the finance of the state was by no means unique to Athens. The public treasury was located in a temple in many cities of the ancient world. In Rome, the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol was the place where the city’s weights and measures, and many significant archives, were lodged. This was not just for safe keeping: in the realms of both history and commerce, the goddess was thought to provide the ultimate seal of authenticity. It was only appropriate therefore that her temple should become the site of the Roman mint. Moneta is today the Italian word for small change. And in English every time we use the word ‘money’ we acknowledge that the sacred and the financial have a long shared history.
In the next chapter, we shall be looking at another important role for the classical temple – this time not as a bank, but as an abattoir.