The Oculate Being and the Lines Beneath It

Nazca religion addressed itself above all to water, a scarce and precious thing in one of the driest inhabited environments on earth, and its central religious figure reflects that concern directly. Scholars call the wide eyed, fanged figure that recurs across Nazca textiles and painted pottery the Oculate Being, a deity associated with agricultural fertility, rain and the mountain sources of water the Nazca valleys depended on.

The culture's most famous religious evidence is the Nazca Lines, an enormous array of animal, plant and geometric geoglyphs etched into the desert floor across a wide stretch of the south coast of Peru. Scholars read the Lines as connected to Nazca religious life, though not with full agreement on exactly how, proposed variously as ritual pathways walked in procession, as offerings laid out for water deities, or as markers tied to the agricultural and astronomical calendar the Nazca kept. What is not disputed is that the effort the Lines represent, sustained across generations of a culture that flourished from roughly 100 BCE to 800 CE, testifies to religious devotion on a landscape scale rarely matched anywhere else in the ancient world. Shamans are understood to have conducted ceremonies invoking the Oculate Being's favor for rain and a good harvest, in some scholarly accounts using preparations from the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus to reach the visionary states the ritual was thought to require.