Shamans, Supernaturals & Animal Spirits: Mythic Figures From the Ancient Andes

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Fragments from a Tunic (with modern rearrangement)
Wari culture
Circa AD 1000
Camelid and cotton fiber; interlocking tapestry weave
18½" x 20"
The intricate conglomeration of Wari motifs packed into the exceptionally
wide columns of this tunic has apparently lost the iconographic thread that
would fuse the geometric shapes into a coherent figure.
Only one extremely compressed, genuflecting staff-bearer is discernable within
the visual chaos (detail at right). Yet myriad forms drawn from the Wari symbolic
inventory are recognizable, including bird talons, claws, fanged mouths, bisected
"supernatural" eyes, profile faces, bird and feline heads, parts of staffs, panpipes
and the ubiquitous three-pronged element that may allude to feathers, paws,
hands or the San Pedro cactus.
Presumably this improvisational variety was the point. It is difficult to say whether
this dazzling level of abstraction, in which the staff-bearer icon is shattered into
parts, reflects a distance of time or space from the original source of the imagery.
Some scholars have postulated that the very impenetrability of certain designs
only served to enhanced the mystery of their otherworldly content. Others have
observed that for all their "modernity," such compositions are usually executed
in a lesser grade of tapestry cloth, requiring smaller quantities of camelid hair and
cotton, and thus being of lower status. 1
Yet there is a genius to the complexity of pattern and dynamic application of
vibrant color in this textile that asserts mastery and originality, rather than lack
of familiarity with the visual and symbolic canons.
1 Susan E. Bergh, “Tapestry-woven Tunics,” in Wari. Lords of the Ancient Andes ed. Susan E. Bergh (2012): 163.
Reconstructed of six separate pieces
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