Andean Pan Flutes and the Underworld

I write this post after visiting the Larco Museum in Lima, Peru. The museum houses one of the most extensive collections of pre-Columbian art in Peru, including ceramics from the Inca period and many earlier cultures.

During my visit, I was particularly drawn to the pieces related to music in ancient Peru because of their relevance to this blog. One piece, however, caught my attention more than the others: a skeletal figure playing the pan flute. I dedicate this post to what this ancient ceramic piece can reveal about the relationship between music and the underworld in Mochica cosmology.

The figure belongs to an exhibit dedicated to representations of the underworld in Andean cosmology.

The Larco Museum explains that the antara—also known as a zampoña or Andean pan flute—was used ceremonially and that, in Moche iconography, it appears especially in scenes depicting the dance of the dead and other scenes associated with the

underworld. In these representations, musicians from the world below play the antara in an attempt to establish contact with the world above.

Pan flutes also have a long Andean history of complementary performance. In later and contemporary siku traditions, for example, the musical scale can be divided between the ira and arca, requiring performers to alternate notes in order to produce a complete melody. The museum reads this broader principle of complementarity as part of the encounter between opposing forces.

Music seems to perform a mediating function. The figure belongs to the world of the dead, but his action is directed toward establishing a relationship with something beyond it.

In Moche iconography, the upper world, the earthly world, and the underworld are not completely isolated realms. Rituals performed by human beings bring these forces into contact. The museum articulates this through the notion of tinkuy, an encounter between opposing and complementary forces.

There is, however, another important and perhaps initially unsettling aspect of this piece, which is that the skeletal musician has an erection. This is also why the piece belongs to the part of the museum devoted to erotic ceramics.

The skeletal figure represents an inhabitant of the world below, an ancestor. But being dead does not mean having ceased to act. In the cosmological conception that the museum reconstructs from Moche iconography, the dead remain active and participate in the processes through which life emerges again. The inhabitants of the world below continue to possess vitality and generative force.

The figure is anatomically dead but performatively alive. It has no flesh, yet it plays. It has no living body but retains sexual potency. There is an operative paradox: that which has died remains an active condition for what is born.

For the pre-Columbian societies represented in the museum, death was not understood as an end but as a transition into an existence in the world of the dead. Leaders could become ancestors who remained connected to their communities even after death.

What might this tell us about music itself?

At least in these ritual contexts, music was not merely an object of aesthetic enjoyment or a vehicle for emotion. Musical performance participated in a network of ritual, tradition, memory, and relations with the ancestral dead.

The dead remained present in practices inherited from them, in rituals repeated across generations, and in the memory through which the living continued to relate to those who were no longer physically present. Music gave that relation a material form. Breath entered the instrument, sound crossed space, and absence became capable of acting within the present.

The ceramic figure is not a skeletal musician because death is macabre. He plays because death is still making the world. The antara turns the dead into relation. By playing it, the ancestor ceases to appear as a body isolated in death and becomes an agent capable of establishing contact between worlds.

Ron