From Adad to Jesus to Zeus: Religious artifacts at Yale shine light on centuries-old gods and rituals

During this season when Christians worldwide are focusing on Jesus, Yale University Art Gallery is shining a light on a wide variety of gods, goddesses, muses, deities, bodhisattvas and orishas: Hathor, Zeus, Osun, Enmesarra, Taweret, Xōchipilli, Adad, and yes, Jesus.

A new exhibit at the New Haven gallery collects artifacts from religious rituals spanning 3,000 years, from 1500 BC to 1500 AD, with items from Greece, Rome, Africa, Asia, Mexico, South America and medieval Europe. The items illustrate how these peoples visualized their higher powers and put themselves in a mystical frame of mind to commune with them.

These rituals, as evidenced by the artifacts on exhibit, seemed quite similar in their usage, if not in the physical appearance of their gods and goddesses. The artifacts provided music, scents, food and drink and ritualistic visuals to religious ceremonies.

Intoxicating substances – both the use of them and the worship of those who represent them – are a recurring theme. For example, from 600 to 1000 AD in the Tiwanaku region in the Andes mountains of South America, religious ceremonies began with the ingestion of hallucinogens using a snuff tablet.

An animal-shaped jar, used in Costa Rica between 1000 and 1350 AD served either alcohol or cocoa and made a noise when it was bottoms-up. Dionysus, the Greek god of both wine and religious ecstasy, is seen reclining lazily in a 5th-century BC terracotta, surrounded by carousing worshipers, animals and Pan.

A Greek kylix (wine-drinking cup) is painted with a flute player at an altar. Another drinking cup, from either Mexico or Guatemala from 600 to 900 AD, depicts the god of drunkenness.

Xōchipilli can be seen as a more multifaceted Mexican equivalent of Dionysus. Xōchipilli, seen in a ceramic incense burner from circa 600 to 1200 AD, was the god of music, dance, lust, gambling, hallucinogens, excess and sickness, described in the wall text as “both the cause and cure of disease.”

Although varied among the cultures, sounds were used to summon gods and goddesses. Egyptians in 4th-century BC invoked Hathor with a sistrum, a rattle that shows her disguised as a cow. Another Egyptian item, a limestone lintel of the god Bak-en-Khonsu from 1300-1200 BC, shows that deity’s wife using a rattle similar to the Hathor object. In Roman marble relief, Apollo plays the lyre.

Other Greek terracottas depict the wind instrument aulos. Mexican ceramic wind instruments, used from the 7th to 16th century AD, featured the heads of dieties. A Nigerian copper bell in the shape of a human head — the fearsome-looking god Osun — was used in the 13th to 15th centuries. An ocarina from Costa Rica is shaped like a kinkajou. Metal was used to make ritual instruments in 13th-century Indonesia.

Ancient Babylonian pieces turned religious texts into jewelry. Sacred texts were carved into tiny cylinders worn around the neck as protective amulets: “Adad, superb lord, at whose thunder heaven and earth become silent.” Another piece, a Babylonian tablet, prayed to a god: “May Enmessarra crush the forces of those who wrong you and of your enemies.”

Some items focus on gods with particular functions. An ancient Egyptian goddess, Taweret, symbolized childbirth and fertility and took the form of a two-legged pregnant hippo with long, styled hair. In ancient Rome, the muses, goddesses of literature, science and the arts, were turned into coins, each with Apollo carved on the other side. From 10th-century China, a gilt-bronze Bodhisattva is depicted holding a flaming jewel.

The Christian segment of the show focuses on crosses created to be mounted on poles during processionals and pages from Medieval manuscripts of songs sung during Masses.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF ANCIENT RITUAL is at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. in New Haven, until March 3. A gallery talk, “Musical Processions in Ancient and Premodern Ritual,” will be Dec. 5 at 12:30 p.m. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday. Admission is free. artgallery.yale.edu.