Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  There are, however, many other confirmations of an ethnological and archaeological order.

  In the sixteenth century a Frenchman, Louis Jolliet, reveals the presence of ‘white Eskimos’ in Labrador. Jacques Cartier in 1534, Samuel de Champlain in 1615, some fur-traders182 and trappers (La Verendye, Coudreau, Crevaux, Homet, Fawcett) speak of ‘white Indians’ living to the west of the Great Lakes. In 1630, the wood-runners,183 Jean Nicolet, attempted to make contact with them. In 1738, the Governor of Canada identifies them. They are the Mandan Indians, who live in the regions of North Dakota and Montana. Their physical type is strange. Could they be the descendants of the Vinland settlers?

  In 1850, Dr. Mitchell, director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, declares: ‘The Mandans differ from all the other Indians of North America. They are distinguished by their language and their customs, but also by physical particularities. Many among them have hair tending towards red, and eyes that are light brown or blue’.

  These Mandans unfortunately disappeared last century, following a terrible epidemic of smallpox.

  As early as 1930, the remains of Viking encampments have been discovered by Canadian archaeologists at Brattahlid. But it is in Quebec that the most spectacular results have been obtained.

  5 November 1963, Dr. Helge Instad from Oslo, an expert of the arctic regions, announced the discovery of the vestiges of a Viking village at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the north of Newfoundland. The news hit like a bomb. Guided by the contours and undulations of the terrain, Helge Instad discovered the typical foundations of a Scandinavian house, a blacksmiths workshop, slag, fragments of worked iron, tools, the remains of boats, and even a distaff — all dating from around the year 1000.

  This time, it is necessary to face the facts:

  ‘If judged according to the full range of available evidence’, notes Dr. Instad, ‘the Normans who stayed around 1000 years ago at l’Anse aux Meadows can be identified as the Vinland explorers of the Icelandic Sagas. It is also likely that Leif Erikson built his “large house” here’.

  Some other remains of Viking habitations have been discovered since: notably on the banks of the Charles River, near Cambridge, in the Bay of Brador, in Newfoundland, and near the Payne Lake, northeast of the province of Quebec.

  Previously, in Ontario, some pieces of iron had been unearthed, along with some weapons (including a rounded shield184 and a battle axe) and some tools; in Massachusetts, some wooden spoons and silver objects; and at Fall River, in 1831, the skeleton of a warrior was found, armed from head to toe, unfortunately lost today. (The Indian tumuli of Massachusetts have also furnished some objects of the Scandinavian type, doubtless trophies taken from combat).

  At Newport (Rhode Island), a mysterious stone tower has been found which has not been able to be dated. Some have seen in it a replica of the Church of Saint-Olav of Tunsberg (Norway).

  In 1898, while clearing one of his fields, a farmer in Kensington (Minnesota) discovered a stone bearing an inscription in runic characters.

  Deciphered in 1907, the inscription reads: ‘(We are) eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians, on an expedition from Vinland towards the west. We have camped on the edge of a lake. We left for a day to fish. When we came back, ten (denos) companions were lying on the ground, bathed in their own blood. AVM (Ave Maria), Save (us) from peril …”. On the reverse, a date: 1362.

  From 1908, a polemic of rare violence would be established on the issue of this ‘Kensington stone’ (which would be displayed for a long time at the Smithsonian Institute). Some researchers, such as Erik Wahlgren (The Kensington Stone. A Mystery Solved), assert that it is a forgery: the inscription would have been carved in the last century by Swedish immigrants, very numerous at the time in Minnesota.

  Other experts, such as Hjalmar R. Holand (Westwards from Vinland) will fight with their last breath to demonstrate its authenticity.

  ‘In 1948’, asserts René Guichard in his study on the Vikings, ‘Professor Johannes Bronstedt, director of the National Museum of Copenhagen, was invited to Washington to study the inscriptions borne on the stone. He concludes, after a serious study of the runic signs, that the inscription was authentic.’

  In 1969, two Americans, Alf Mongé and Ole G. Landsverk, have released new hypotheses making appeal to runic cryptography. After having submitted the results of their works to a computer, they have also declared in favour of its authenticity. But they are still far from having convinced the scholarly world.

  The Arrival of White and Bearded Gods

  The decline of Vinland began around 1300.

  King Erik VI of Norway restricts trade with the distant colonies and creates a State monopoly. In the Mediterranean, the freeing of the Muslim yoke opens new pathways. After the sinking of a royal vessel, exchanges between Scandinavia and America will soon be interrupted.

  During this time, in Greenland, the cooling of the climate, scurvy, and increasingly frequent clashes with the Eskimos, lead to the progressive extinction of the Scandinavian community, formerly some ten-thousand men strong.

  In Vinland, the indigenous people (Eskimos or Indians, called Skraelings in the Sagas) become bolder.

  Freshly Christianised, Scandinavia now has another subject of concern: The Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death. Little by little it forgets its pioneers.

  In 1340, the principal establishment of Vinland is overwhelmed by the Eskimos. Departing in 1354, a salvage expedition commanded by the Norwegian Paul Knudson finds nothing on the site but abandoned houses and roaming cattle. A great number of settlers have been killed. The others have left.

  Now in this period, Jacques de Mahieu affirms, the Vikings have already explored and colonised an important part of the South American continent. And this for three centuries.

  Jacques de Mahieu, seventy-one-year-old former Dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Bueno Aires, directs the Institute for the Science of Man in Argentina. For years he has been committed to collecting traces of Viking penetration into the American continent upon the fourfold plane of archaeology, historical tradition, mythology, and anthropology. He thinks that the Scandinavians have gone much further than we imagine: as far as Latin America and Polynesia.

  ‘The white racial element of Pre-Columbian America’, he writes in Le grande voyage du dieu-soleil,185 plays a fundamental role in the development of the great Nahuatl, Maya, and Quechua cultures’.

  Countless chronicles actually speak of the arrival of ‘white gods’ in Latin America and, curiously, situate this arrival between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE.

  The Muiscas of Columbia call themselves the descendants of a ‘white god come from the north’. In Peru, this god carries the name of Huiracocha (Viracocha in the Spanish chronicles). In Mexico, he is called Quetzalcoatl. Among the Incas, sons of the Sun, the eighth sovereign of the royal dynasty, represented in the form of a white, bearded man, will take the name Viracocha.

  Among the Quiché Mayas (Mexico), the god Itzamna is an old man with a sharp nose, god of the rising sun, who passes for the inventor of writing. The Popol Vuh (People’s Book?) recounts that the ancestors of the Aztec sovereign Montezuma come from the land of Dawn, that is to say, the east. It is in 987 that Kukulkan would have arrived in the peninsula of Yucatan (Mexico), where he would have given new vitality to Mayan civilisation, then in full decline. The Tzendales of Chiapas (the southeastern point of Mexico), themselves also Mayans, knew him under the name of Votan or Uotan (Wotan?). Elsewhere, he carries the name of Ollin Tonatiut (Odhinn, Donar, Tiu?).

  ‘The Votan (Odon) of Central America and of Peru’, writes Alexander von Humboldt, ‘is identical to the Scandinavian Wotan (Odin)’.

  In the same period, Bochica, the ‘white god’ of the Chibchas, would have landed in Venezuela.

  Everywhere we discover the same theme of the birth or rebirth of a civilisation under the influence of divinities or of mythic heroes come from elsewhere. And these events are situated more or less at the same
time.

  One fact is certain: the sudden appearance of the Pre-Columbian cultures has posed a problem to scholars for quite some time. Some support autochthony: the Mexican and Andean world developed itself separate from all exterior influence. But for some time now, this thesis has been considered unsatisfying.

  Successively, the Polynesians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Hebrews, and the Phoenicians, indeed the Basques, the Bretons, and the Atlanntes, have all been presented as the ‘founding fathers’ of South-American civilisations. (Without forgetting the ‘extra-terrestrials’, who always have their supporters!).

  The Power and Wisdom of Tezcatlipoca

  It is likely that the coasts of South America were recognised and then explored very early by seafarers from eastern China and southeast Asia. In his book, C. W. Ceram reveals numerous common cultural traits. Between the pyramids of Tikal at Guatemala, and the edifices of Angkor in ancient Indochina, the analogies are particularly strong.

  The ‘Phoenician’ thesis, sustained by Professor Cyrus H. Gordon from the Brandeis Univeristy (L’Amérique avant Christophe Colomb. Laffont, 1973),186 which Frederik J. Pohlmakes references, seems very much to be the most unrealistic. Professor André Dupond-Sommer, a prominent specialist of the Near East, has formally contradicted it.

  The thesis of an ancient association between Egypt and Pre-Columbian America is pure fabrication. 3,500 years separate the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and those of Mexico (the most ancient were constructed in the seventh century CE). Furthermore, the design of the two groups of monuments is completely different.

  That leaves the Vikings.

  Certainly, recourse to ‘civilising heroes’ does not explain the development of Olmec civilisation (Gulf of Mexico); the great periods of classical Mayan culture (Honduras, Guatemala, Yucatan); the first civilisation of Teotihuacan (Mexico); the cultures of Chavin, or those of the Mochica and the Nazca (Peru). However, their influence appears certain, in Mexico, on the Toltec and Aztec civilisation, and upon the culture of the post-classical Mayans (Yucatan); in Peru, on the Tiahuanaco culture and the Inca Empire.

  In all these regions, the ‘white god’ has left traces, distorted by time, altered in the course of invasions and mixing, but still identifiable today.

  Quetzalcoatl (the ‘feathered serpent’) is the wisest of the seven chiefs from the north who invaded Mexico from the ‘land of seven caverns’, at the head of seven armed detachments. Warrior god, ‘Lord of the Sunrise’, the traditions describe him as having white skin, broad forehead, and a majestic beard. Civiliser of the Anahuac plateau, he brings with him a religion, laws, a calendar, new agricultural and metallurgical techniques. He forbids human sacrifices. Under his reign, the Toltec Empire became prosperous.

  But Quetzalcoatl runs into the hostility of the priest caste, reduced to joblessness by the new cult. Quetzalcoatl faces a violent conflict, and as a result he is conquered. Forced into exile, he embarks, with four young nobles following him, on a boat that sets course for the east. They promise to return.

  ‘When the time has come’, he declares to them, ‘I will return to your midst by the eastern sea, accompanied by white and bearded men’.

  Transmitted from generation to generation, this ‘prophecy’ explains the welcome reception that the conquering Spaniards received when they landed in Mexico. Cortès and his conquistadores were honoured as ‘the heroes that we have awaited’. Those among them who were blond, such as Pedro de Alvarado, one of the lieutenants of Cortès, became the object of a cult. Motecozuma II (Montezuma) ordained the provision of all their needs. Later, the Emperor Maximillian was the object of the same veneration.

  In Peru, the civilising heroes known under the name of Huiracocha (Viracocha) had arrived at Arica on the north coast of Peru during the ninth century. He had organised the Aymara culture and founded on the High-Plane187 in proximity to Lake Titicaca, the great solar city of Tiahuanaco.

  The etymology of the name Huiracocha has long remained an enigma. Bertrand Flornoy, in L’aventure inca (Perrin, 1963),188 proposes ‘foam of the sea’. De Mahieu advances the translation ‘white god’ (huitr or witt, ‘white’); koch or gott, ‘deity’).

  In the thirteenth century, internal struggles devastated the High-Plane. The heroes of the civilisation of the sun are defeated. They escape via the Pacific, announcing that one day they will return.

  Shortly after, still in Peru, appears the legendary founder of the Inca Empire, Manko Cápak, first of twelve kings of the dynasty. The foundation of the city of Cusco is attributed to him.

  He was also a ‘foreigner’. ‘According to the myths’, writes Rafaël Karsten (La civilisation de l’empire inca. Payot, 1972),189 ‘the dynasty of monarchs who later called themselves Incas originated from four brothers and four sisters created by Viracocha, and who came from a large cave situated around seven leagues east of Cusco. The myths designate this cave by the name Paqariq Tampu (…) It is likely that there is a grain of historical truth to this. It could be that the Incas effectively drew their origin from four brothers who, departing from a place called Paqariq Tampu, penetrated via Wanakawri into the valley of Cusco, where they established their law and imposed it upon the indigenous population’.

  The Temple of the Sun and the ‘Enclosure of Gold’ of Cusco

  ‘The term inca’, adds Jacques de Mahieu, ‘is neither Quechua nor Aymara. So where does it come from?’ In the old Germanic languages, the ing declension served to designate the members of a single lineage, and we still find it, with the same meaning, in French words such as mérovingien, carolingien, and lotharingien. It is therefore not by chance, nor by error, that the Spanish chronicles write inga instead of inca, as it is done today: the letter ‘g’ does not exist in Quechua’.

  Come from the ‘land of the Rising Sun’, the Incas carried with them the cult of the sun, of which they declared themselves the sons.

  ‘Wherever they extended their authority’, writes Karsten, ‘they also extended the cult of the sun, prudently however, and without employing violence’. It is a matter here of an original contribution, for in the mountainous regions of Bolivia and Peru, we find few traces of it before the Inca period. Having arrived with the foreigners, the new cult would also disappear with them. ‘It is in vain that in our days we would seek survivals’, adds Karsten, ‘made all the more remarkable as we encounter many vestiges of a cult of the sea goddess and other kinds of primordial nature cults’.

  The centre of the solar cult is installed in Curicancha (‘the enclosure of gold’) of Cusco. After having pillaged all the treasures, the Spanish destroyed it entirely.

  In 1523, the last Inca, Huayna Capak, warned his people of the future return of the ‘white gods’. He asked them to serve them. In 1527, Pizarre landed at Tumbes. The same scenes witnessed at Mexico were reproduced. Seeing the face of Huiracocha sculpted on the Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco, some conquistadores believed to recognise the effigy of Saint Bartolemeo. To all those who have blond or red hair, the indigenous give the same name of Huiracocha.

  In the final analysis, Pizarre conquered the Andean Empire with only 177 men!

  ‘The Incan aristocracy’, writes his brother Pedro in his Relacion del Descumbrimiente y Conquista de los reinos del Peru,190 ‘has whiter skin than that of the Spanish, and hair the colour of ripe wheat’.

  Jacques de Mahieu has brought to light other astonishing facts.

  ‘In Peru’, he reveals, ‘the year was divided into four seasons by the solstices and equinoxes, with corresponding festivals. Now the festival of the new Fire is celebrated in June, as in Europe, while the inversion of the seasons would have required it to be performed in December. It is this which demonstrates the northern origin of the rite’.

  Among the peoples of Anahuac (Aztecs, Toltecs), the presence of two calendars, one religious, of 260 days, and the other civil, of 365 days, gives rise to the idea that the second calendar had been brought from outside, at a later date.

  A stele fr
om the island of Apara, on Lake Titicaca; the bearded head from Rio Balsas (in Mexico); the frescoes of the temple of the warriors of Chichen Itza, in Yucatan, portray figures with distinctly European traits.

  Conversely, the Scandinavian tapestry of Ovrehodgal (end of the eleventh century) includes a certain number of animals strongly representing llamas.

  The codices from Mexico are even more revealing. Among those conserved in Paris in the Mexican collections of the Bibliothèque nationale (Aubin Collection), the Tonalamatl represents several individuals with blond hair: the navigator Thor Heyerdahl has personally counted more than a hundred. ‘The fresco of the Temple of the warriors’, summarises Paul Rivet in his study on Les origins de l’homme américain (Gallimard, 1957),191 ‘represents a struggle between the indigenous people and assailants from the sea who have pale skin and blond hair’.

  In Peru and Chile, ancient sepulchres, notably those from the caves of Paracas discovered in 1925 by Tello and Lothrop, have delivered mummified bodies, in perfect state of conservation, of young women with long blonde, light chestnut, and red hair. These mummies have been studied by Reiss and Stübel, Busk, Dawson and Trotter. De Mahieu publishes some photos in the German edition of his book (Des Sonnengottes grosse Reise. Grabert, Tübingen, 1971),192 which is more rich than the French edition in regards to illustrations.

  The Mystery of the ‘White Indians’

  Anthropology also provides its testimony. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny studied the ‘white Indians’ of Bolivinan Beni, as well as the Antis and the Yuracaré, tribes which lived in the same region but which have now vanished. Two missions (1969–70 and 1971–72) by the Argentinian Institute for the Science of Man, directed by de Mahieu, have permitted the identification of another: the Guayaki of Paraguay.

  These Indians live in the subtropical forest of west Paraguay. There are scarcely more than four hundred of them: the race is in danger of extinction. Their physical type is distinguished from all other tribes: tall stature, pale skin, oval cross-section of the hair, strong pilosity, elongated face, etc. De Mahieu sees in them the descendants, very degenerated, of the Scandinavian settlers that were chased from the Andean High-Plane, who, after being displaced in the forests, would have mixed with the Guarani Indians.