Though I don’t want to put undue weight on it, I would be negligent if I failed to mention in passing that the Tukano, and the closely related Barasana, are among a number of Amazonian tribes whose distinctive “men’s cults” are paralleled by virtually identical institutions in Melanesia, on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. As the reader will discover in appendix 1, the same secrecy surrounding male initiation rituals is found in both areas, the same exclusive possession of sacred flutes and trumpets that women are forbidden to see,35 the same belief that there was a time when women dominated men, and the same belief that men, either by trickery or force, had subsequently wrested power from women.
Second, the Tukano origin myth makes it completely clear that the “supernaturals” departed after they had completed their work of preparing the Amazon for settlement by the migrants in the serpent canoe.
Third, we are led to understand that direct contact between humanity and the spirit world would thereafter be broken. However a portal—ayahuasca—through which humans could still travel to the spirit world, and benefit from its teachings, would be left open.
THE LEAP TO THE MILKY WAY
ALTHOUGH ANY MEMBER OF THE Tukano community may drink ayahuasca, the deeper mysteries of the brew are primarily the work of the shaman—the payé—whose responsibility it is to travel through the portal whenever required to negotiate with powerful supernaturals on behalf of his community. Where matters of the greatest importance must be resolved, a group of payé will work together, consuming massive quantities of ayahuasca until they reach a point, lying in their hammocks, where they
feel they are ascending to the Milky Way. … The ascent to the Milky Way is not easily accomplished. An apprentice will hardly ever be able to rise immediately to this … region but rather will learn to do so after many trials. At first he will barely rise over the horizon, the next time perhaps he will reach a point corresponding to the position of the sun at 9 a.m., then at 10 a.m., and so on until at last, in a single, soaring flight, he will reach the zenith.36
In summary, therefore, the shaman’s visionary journey through the ayahuasca portal involves a leap or, after sufficient practice, a “soaring flight,” to the Milky Way. It is not the final goal, however, but a way station. “Beyond the Milky Way” lies the entrance to the Otherworld. As Reichel-Dolmatoff explains:
It is said that the individual “dies” when he drinks the potion and that now his spirit returns to the uterine regions of the Beyond, only to be reborn there and to return to his ordinary existence when the trance is over. This then is conceived as an acceleration of time, an anticipation of death and rebirth.37
HIDDEN HAND
THE TUKANO OTHERWORLD IS DIVIDED into regions or districts and one of these, of particular interest to shamans, is the domain of Vai-mahase, the supernatural “Master of Animals.” It is a strangely geometrical “hill” in the form of a square with its four sides oriented to the cardinal directions.38
Is it an accident that geometry arises spontaneously in ayahuasca visions? And is it an accident that it does so not only among Amazonian peoples in the Amazon itself, but—as my own experiences and multiple scientific studies have proved—among peoples from industrialized cultures as well?39 Whether you drink the brew in the rainforest, or in New York, London, Frankfurt, or Tokyo, it is a plain fact that sooner or later you are going to see geometry.40
Entrance to the “Otherworld” as depicted in Tukano visionary art. (After G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar, 1975, p. 174.)
Is the presence of some deeper enigma hinted at here—an enigma that the ancients had plumbed when they devised their memes and sent them ringing down the ages? Just because our high-tech civilization has demonized psychedelics for the last 50 years doesn’t mean that other societies in the past did so. Indeed it’s likely that these powerful agents of transformation were used by ancient civilizations for profound and far-reaching inquiries into aspects of reality about which our own high-tech civilization remains willfully ignorant.41
We’ve seen that ayahuasca has many different names among the many different peoples who use it across the Amazon, but the word ayahuasca itself is from the Quechua language of the high Andes overlooking the western edge of the Amazon basin. This is the language that was spoken by the remarkable Inca civilization of Peru in the few short centuries before its destruction by the Spaniards. In that language what ayahuasca means is the “Vine of the Dead” or the “Vine of Souls.”
The memes of geometry and cosmic alignments are not the only ones to have propagated from a so far unidentified common source. Intimately connected to them are other ideas that went “viral” in both the Old World and the New, and that therefore somehow transcended the Ice Age separation of peoples.
LEFT: Plan (by Martti Pärssinen) of Fazenda Colorada, Upper Amazon Basin geoglyph site (see chapter 16). TOP RIGHT: Tukano visionary art depicting the entrance to the “Otherworld,” said to lie “beyond the Milky Way.” BOTTOM RIGHT: Detail (rotated) from Fazenda Colorada.
The central focus of all these ideas concerns the mystery of death, and anthropologists have long been aware that the Quechua name ayahuasca is entirely appropriate since “in the indigenous context Ayahuasca is intimately related to death.”42
In parts 5 and 6 our investigation returns to North America, where eerie doppelgängers of the great earthworks of the Amazon haunt the Mississippi Valley. As we’ll see, it’s almost as though what we’re dealing with are the faint surviving traces of an immensely ancient and deeply thought-through system of knowledge and initiation, perhaps arising from direct investigations using vision-inducing plants, in which profound notions of the afterlife destiny of the soul were stitched together with the geometry and cosmic alignments into a single “blueprint” that was then hastily replicated and urgently distributed to the remotest corners of the earth.
Six thousand kilometers as an aircraft flies from the heart of the Amazon to the heart of the Mississippi.
SUN
FROM THE CITY OF MANAUS, at the heart of the Amazon River basin in South America, it’s a journey of about 6,000 kilometers by air to reach the city of St. Louis in the heart of the Mississippi River basin in North America. On the way you’ll cross the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer. Google informs me that the flight time will be about 11 hours, including a stopover in the Dominican Republic.
It wasn’t so simple in the ancient world. Although sections of the journey could have been made by sea most of the route would have been overland through some geographically very challenging parts of Central America and involving, ultimately, much more than 6,000 kilometers.
This is not to say that such a great distance must necessarily have ruled out any communication and interchange between the two regions. On the contrary, it is not in dispute that the peoples of South and North America are more closely related genetically to each other than they are to anyone else, that there are some linguistic connections, and that crops such as maize or manioc that had been domesticated in one region were also grown in the other—though sometimes with a significant time lag. In summary, the evidence confirms that there were contacts but it also suggests that they were random and infrequent rather than regular and sustained.
The two giant river basins of the Americas (note, maps not to scale). The Amazon River basin (left) has a total area of 7.5 million square kilometers. The Mississippi River basin (right) has a total area of 2.9 million square kilometers.
What, then, are we to make of the fact that stunningly similar earthworks repeating stunningly similar geometric themes on a stunningly similar scale to those of the Amazon River basin are also found in the Mississippi River basin?
Are the resemblances coincidental?
Or did they arise during one of the random and infrequent episodes of contact?
Or is there some other explanation?
It’s June 14, 2017, a week before the summer solstice, and I’m chewing over these questions with Santha while we
stand on top of an earthwork called “Monks Mound” at the sacred heart of the ancient Mississippian city of Cahokia.
Looking southwest from this vantage point what stands out, about 8 miles away, are the twin A-shaped support towers and cable ties of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, joining Illinois to Missouri across the Mississippi River, and a couple of miles farther south along the Mississippi waterside the glittering, stainless-steel Gateway Arch of the city of St. Louis. Conceived as “a public memorial to the men who made possible the western territorial expansion of the United States,”1 the arch reaches a height of 630 feet and is claimed to be the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere and the tallest arch in the world.
The contrast between old and new is abrupt—for the ancient mounds and earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, even gigantic sites like Cahokia, have an understated quality. They don’t radiate the brash and boastful self-importance of so many of our modern structures—such as the skyscraper One Metropolitan Square, which at 593 feet high seems to do battle with the Gateway Arch to dominate the St. Louis skyline. Neither do they overwhelm you with their grandeur and their majesty, like the pyramids of ancient Egypt and Mexico. Nor do they wear their mysteries in full view like the great moai of Easter Island. Instead an elegant synthesis between heaven and earth seems to have been sought out. In consequence even Monks Mound, on the 100-foot-tall summit of which we’re now standing, is so seamlessly integrated with its setting that it seems almost as much a work of nature as of man.
Indeed this was precisely the view of Dr. A. R. Crook, director of the Illinois State Museum and a geologist by training, who undertook the first “scientific” investigations of Monks Mound in 1914. His theory, shared by many of his colleagues at the time and perhaps colored by an underlying prejudice that prehistoric Native Americans would not have been capable of building on such a scale, was that the mounds of Cahokia were entirely natural “erosional remnants.” In 1914 Crook drilled twenty-five shallow augur holes into the north face of Monks Mound, found nothing to change his view and—as late as 1921—was continuing to declare, as though it were an established and objective fact, that the mounds were merely glacial and alluvial deposits and thus of no archaeological interest.2
This mattered because other, wiser, scholars were already absolutely certain that the Cahokia complex was man-made and of outstanding archaeological interest and had mounted a campaign to save the mounds from further destruction at the hands of farmers and industrialists. Crook’s claims that they were natural formations were therefore most unhelpful and had to be refuted before further progress could be made.
This challenge was duly taken up by archaeologist Warren T. Moorehead, who joined forces with geologist Morris Leighton to undertake a much more thorough investigation of the mounds in 1922 than Crook had mounted in 1914. After several test pits had been dug on the Fourth Terrace and on the east side of Monks Mound, including auguring to a depth of 20 feet, the results, in the form of artifacts and exposed construction levels, were too conclusive and compelling to be dismissed.3 Even Crook was convinced and thereafter abandoned his position that the mounds were natural features4—a position that today, in the light of subsequent extensive excavations around Cahokia and at Monks Mound, seems absurd.
Nonetheless, there remain many who would seek by one means or another to take Cahokia away from the Native Americans who built it. Since it can no longer be credibly claimed as a natural erosional feature, the fallback position, popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but repeatedly returned to even now, is that the great city, and others like it up and down the Mississippi Valley, must have been the work of some superior “master-race” of white-skinned foreigners who reached America in antiquity and built the mounds with their advanced skills and techniques but were then driven off or wiped out by native “savages.”5
Frequently compounded by rumors of “giants” or “aliens,” such reasoning has already been comprehensively refuted by excavations proving to the satisfaction of anyone capable of logical thought that the mounds, including Monks Mound—that “stupendous pile of earth” as one early explorer described it6—are indeed the work of Native Americans.7
The very name of the great mound, however, demonstrates the effects of the ongoing casual misappropriation of indigenous achievements. It bears that name simply because a group of Trappist monks—immigrants from France—grew vegetables on its terraces for a few years either side of AD 1810,8 but it was built around AD 1050 by the Native American civilization archaeologists call the Mississippians.9
We don’t know what the people of that civilization called themselves and we don’t know what they called Monks Mound. We do know, however, that they thought and worked on a grand scale, as I shall show, and that they made use of the same kinds of geometry and astronomy deployed at Serpent Mound, 420 miles to the east, and in the great earthworks and mounds of the Amazon thousands of miles to the south.
TWO VALLEYS
DESPITE THE PROMISING CLUES OFFERED by ethnographic research into the likely role played by vision-inducing plants and shamanic experiences, the fact remains that we are confronted across huge expanses of the Amazon by such severely limited archaeological data that it’s impossible to give responsible, informed answers to three fundamental questions:
What motivated the creation of the mounds and geoglyphs?
When were the very first structures of this kind made?
Where and how were the requisite design, planning, engineering, and architectural skills developed?
In the Amazon, on all three counts, we simply don’t know. Moreover, our ignorance is compounded by the absence of any detailed geometrical or archaeoastronomical surveys of the earthworks and mounds thus far discovered and by the fact that millions of square kilometers of the rainforest have never been studied by archaeologists at all.
It’s quite a different story in the Mississippi Valley, which is not veiled by vast areas of near-impenetrable jungle and where mounds and earthworks remarkably similar to those now coming to light in the Amazon have been the subject of more than 170 years of intensive archaeological investigation.10 Because they were always in plain view, however, and because they often occupied land that was desirable for agricultural or industrial purposes, the vast majority of the immense prehistoric structures of the Mississippi Valley no longer exist. An estimated 90 percent are gone—either partially or completely demolished and cleared away in the obliteration of North America’s past that began with the European conquest.
So just as archaeologists in the Amazon have only a limited database from which to construct their theories, because the jungle covers so much, it’s also the case that archaeologists in the Mississippi Valley have only a limited database because so much has been destroyed. Still, they’ve achieved a great deal with the roughly 10 percent of the original total of sites that have survived and it may not be too much to hope that their discoveries could shed light on the mysterious counterpart mounds and earthworks of the Amazon.
EARTH ISLAND, SKY WORLD
FROM CHAPTER 16, THE READER may recall Severino Calazans, an Amazonian earthwork with the same 13-acre footprint and the same orientation to the cardinal directions as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Though rectangular rather than square (910 feet from north to south and 720 feet from east to west), Monks Mound has a 14-acre footprint.11
Considered as a pyramid—and it is indeed a form of step pyramid—it comes third in the Americas after the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl at Cholula and the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan,12 both of which are stone-reinforced monuments and significantly taller.
Considered an earthwork, and echoing that early explorer’s report, Monks Mound has been described as “stupendous in many ways. It is the tallest mound, covers the most area and contains the most volume of any prehistoric earthen monument in the Americas.”13 It is, moreover, part of a giant complex with multiple different elements including more than 100 subsidiary earthen mound
s, the archaeological traces of what was once a spectacular circle of huge wooden posts (known as Cahokia’s “Woodhenge”), a spacious central plaza, and an 18-meter-wide, 800-meter-long earthwork causeway running arrow-straight between raised embankments.
Enigmatically, but quite deliberately set to an azimuth of 005 degrees—that is, 5 degrees east of true north—it is this causeway, referred to by archaeologists as the “Rattlesnake Causeway,” that defines Cahokia’s principal axis,14 giving the site a certain ambiguity and adding to its air of mystery. Every mound and earthwork is set out upon the ground in strict relation to it, with clusters of structures, dominated by Monks Mound itself, running south to north and other clusters running west to east.
It’s easy to understand, then, why the first and most powerful impression I get overlooking this massive ancient site from the top of Monks Mound is of its distinct “cardinality.” Exactly as is the case at Giza and Angkor—both of which are aligned within fractions of a single degree to true north—so, too, here at Cahokia. Despite its puzzling 5-degree offset there’s no mistaking where to look for the cardinal directions. Something about the place—something intended and carefully thought through by its original designers—immediately connects you to both earth and sky.
Detail of Monks Mound and some of its immediately adjoining structures.
Running through the Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, and extending northward beyond Monks Mound, the Rattlesnake Causeway defines Cahokia’s 5 degrees east of north axis.
America Before Page 24