Sex, Death, and Sacrifice

Today's adventure featured a visit to Paris' newest museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, completed in 2006 and dedicated to the primitive art of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. Located on the banks of the Seine near the Eiffel Tower, it's an architecturally stunning building that blends in surprisingly well with the neighboring 18th-century townhouses:


The contemporary, user-friendly nature of the museum made it seem more like an American one, and the groups of school kids touring the Branly were enthralled (as were we) by the giant funerary poles and six-foot-tall ceremonial gongs from various South Pacific islands, the African masks, and the unusual musical instruments on display. What the kids did not see was the exhibit on the second floor of artifacts from the ancient Mochica culture of Peru. Apparently the Mochicans engaged in some pretty wild stuff: human and animal sacrifice, forms of 'non-procreative' sex, and death rituals, many of which were depicted on sweet little clay pots with an evil-looking dude called Wrinkle-Face. The graphic displays of sacrificial rituals left us feeling very glad to have grown up in the relatively tame American midwest, where all we had to worry about were a few potentially creepy priests.