The Lady of Cao’s face reconstructed after 1700 years
Posted On: Dec 3rd, 2017 at 14:25
Peru
Without comparison the darkest culture I have ever come across in all my years travelling is that of the Moche in northern Peru, whose vast territory stretched for several hundred miles along the desert coast.
Huaca de la Luna (The Pyramid of the Moon) is definitely the most sinister temple I have ever visited, and a sense of its dark past is clearly apparent. My good friend Michael White will certainly recall my attempts to stay overnight atop the pyramid, but we couldn’t formulate a viable plan to get past the guards without having to bribe them! The reason for that was during a visit earlier in the day I could sense the powerful, dark energy of the pyramid and wanted to stay alone overnight to get a more direct feel of the place. The pit where prisoners were held has an especially dark and powerful feeling attached to it. The stories of victims being left in there to bleed heavily from inflicted cuts to their genitals before being hauled out to be sacrificed by throat cutting and then throwing off the mountain behind the pyramid has stayed with me and certainly gives one a sense of what was going on there.
It appears Huaca de la Luna was steeped in sacrifice and torture, so it’s not surprising to see that the face of The Lady of Cao is a little bit unnerving! Her body was found at the El Brujo (The Witch) site, inside Huaca Cao Viejo, both of which are a 25-mile distance from Huaca de la Luna and Huaca del Sol (The Pyramid of the Sun), as the crow flies (37 miles by modern road).
Without knowing anything about the history of the Moche it’s difficult to perceive the feeling when looking into this woman’s face. The Moche were a barbaric, sinister and seemingly warlike culture who appeared to rule with an iron fist, and bloodletting was an everyday occurrence. At least that’s the impression one can get when visiting these sinister places. The Moche, however, were highly advanced in many architectural and engineering feats. Huaca del Sol is the largest adobe brick structure in the world, and is still yet to be excavated. Their irrigation canals were also totally innovative in the south American region, and it’s likely all later cultures (including the Chimu and Inca) adopted their engineering knowledge to build their empires, without which they may not have been possible.
My point is there are almost two versions of the Moche – the one you read about, with great innovation and advances in technology and organisation, and then there’s the one you sense when you visit the sites – a sinister, sacrificing culture who had a thirst for torture and blood. It’s hard to know whether the Moche ruled through brute force and achieved their amazing feats only due to an iron fist and the threat of torture and sacrifice if the population did not comply, or whether they were a happy, cooperative culture who worked together to achieve great engineering feats and only their enemies were the unfortunate victims of their macabre rituals. Most likely it was a combination of the two, but I guess we’ll never know.
