RICHARD TOWNSEND (Curator, Department of African and Amerindian Art, The Art Institute of Chicago): Great works of art are the carriers of the religious point of view that expressed the relationship of the human society to the larger and enveloping world of nature.There's a concept of an all-powerful and encompassing sense of divinity that pervades everything. It would not be expressed in ancient times in terms of an external concept of God, but rather there's a more direct and immediate linkage to the earth and to the sky and to the waters and all its beings.
Ancient societies have a concept of the divine that's very closely bound to the animals around them. People have animal spirit companions.In all of this domain of spirituality, communion with the ancestral spirits is something extremely fundamental and important. The ancestors in the afterlife continue to play a very vital role in the life of the community, not only in a family sense, but as intermediaries between the community and the great forces of nature upon which life -- the cycle of life -- ultimately depends.
Then in the middle you're looking at a highly stylized and very elegant claw of a hawk that would be an emblem of chieftainship, of rulership.
The offering of smoke is a visible form of prayer. The smoking of pipes is used to consecrate all kinds of events: treaties, agreements, reunions of all kinds. And they're frequently carved with the figures of animals. Smoke is, as it were, a form of incense that is a visible manifestation of your prayer. And it dissipates and it goes out to that spiritual entity with whom you are establishing a connection.
This is the kind of religion that once held sway over the whole planet, in ancient China and Egypt. This kind of cosmological religion was very much in evidence, each, of course, giving its own interpretation, its own imagery to it.
