2. The Traditions Concerning Tiahuanaco
However, in order to fully appreciate the deep significance and implications of Puma Punkhu, we must now turn our attentions to the second site at Lake Titicaca, and to the second, later and intermediate layer of technological evidence and chronological progression: Tiahuanaco. Here, interestingly enough, we discover many of the traditions that we found associated with megalithic sites elsewhere in the world.
The first of these is evident by the ancient name for Tiahuanaco: Taypicala. Not surprisingly, this means “the Stone at the Centre,”28 giving yet another instance of the ancient “geomantic” practice of finding the center of a region. Indeed, the Inca tradition itself recognized that the ancient name of Tiahuanaco meant the Stone at the Center of the world.29
Even more interesting is the fact that when the first Spanish explorers arrived in the region and asked the local Aymara Indians if the structures at Tiahuanaco and Puma Punkhu had been built by the Incas, they were greeted with laughter. The Aymara explained that their ancestral tradition stated that the structures were built “long before the Inca reign” and that they had literally been built very suddenly, in the span of one night!30 More interesting still, the site was also said to have been built by the first creations of the sun-god, Viracocha, who created a race of giants, who were later overthrown by a worldwide deluge when they had displeased him.31 This is, of course, not the first time we have encountered such traditions concerning these cyclopean megalithic structures, for we have already encountered similar traditions already with respect to Stonehenge in England, Baalbek in Lebanon, and even stone circles in Africa.
The sun-god Viracocha requires a closer look, for once again, as in the case of Vishnu, the symbolism surrounding this god is multi- layered, and indicative of a possible deeper physics, though it should be made clear that, just as Vishnu, Viracocha is also manifested and precisely described in the Andean traditions as a bearded, blue-eyed white man of large stature, and the giver of civilization to the Incas, just as we shall discover Quetzcoatl to be when we turn northward to Mexico.32
As the sun-god, however, Viracocha like Atum in Egypt and Vishnu in India and Indochina, was the great self-generative power in, and of, the cosmos.33 He is carved above the well-known “Gate of the Sun” at Tiahuanaco:
Viracocha’s Image on the Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco?
3. The Image of Vicacocha: A Schematic of a Technology?
There is something peculiar about this image, and it has haunted me ever since I first became aware of it many years ago. In The Giza Death Star, I observed the resemblance of this highly-stylized image to the schematic of a three-stage fission-fusion-fission hydrogen bomb.34 Let us recall the schematic of such a bomb from chapter one, and compare itto the image:
Comparison of Three Stage Hydrogen Bomb Schematic with Viracocha
Of course, such comparisons are suggestive, if not fanciful, but they do give one pause especially considering that Viracocha was a sun-god. Even more suggestive is what happens when one rotates the Viracocha image 180 degrees on its vertical axis:
Viracocha Image Rotated 180o on its Vertical Axis
Upside-down, one cannot avoid the vague impression of the outlines of a bomb.
While such comparisons may be fanciful, there is a further tradition surrounding Viracocha that suggests that the comparison to modern technologies might not, indeed, be so questionable, and that is that Viracocha ushers in five new epochs, each one being heralded by a “new sun”, each epoch being called a pachacuti. This word signifies a literal “‘overturning of the world’ (according to Sir Clements Markham’s translation), and an ‘overturning of space-time’ according to William Sullivan.”35 In other words, if one accepts the hypothesis that the anomalous yields of early h-bomb tests were in part the result of gating of energies from the variable conditions of the geometry of local celestial space-time, the peculiar resemblance of the Viracocha image at the Sun Gate at Tiahuanaco to such devices, and the traditions of such over-turnings of space-time in the epochs or world ages that Viracocha destroys and then re-creates (one recalls Vishnu’s similar role), then the comparison may not be all that fanciful.
4. Traditions Connected Half a World Away
There is one final tradition concerning Viracocha that is also worth mentioning, for it illustrates yet another very bizarre and unusual connection with traditions half a world away in Mesopotamia, for there are traditions which hail the engineering accomplishments of Viracocha and his companions, who are called, suggestively, “messengers,” and “the shining ones.”36 If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should, this precise term, “the shining ones,” was also used in some ancient Mesopotamian texts to describe the Annunaki, the Watchers, the race of “gods” that came to earth and, in some readings of the stories, helped to engineer the human race itself. They were thus designated because of the luminous character of their faces.37
As if this was not enough, there is another strange connection between the traditions of the Incas in the New World, and those of the Old World, for the Incas believed that the soul ascending to heaven after death was accompanied by black dogs, and in Egypt, the soul’s ascension was accompanied by Anubis and Upuaut, symbolized by black dogs.38
5. The Difficulty of Dating Tiahuanaco
Conventional and standard archaeological dating of Tiahuanaco is unusually divided over the date of the site, assigning a terminus ante quem to the second millennium BC, and a terminus post quem to as late as the ninth century AD.39 All standard archaeological models of Tiahuanaco are, however, agreed that the site has nothing to do with the Incas.40 Even on the early dating of Tiahuanaco by conventional archaeology, this would make the site older than the Mayan ruins of Meso-America, and far older than the Inca empire.41
But these termini ante et post quem have always been challenged, even as early as the nineteenth century, by amateur archaeologists who have pointed out a number of problems even for the earliest dating. The French archaeologist Le Plongeon, for example, uncovered a layer of seashells after making some superficial excavations at the site, suggesting that it was once a seaport. He concluded from this that the site may have been antediluvian, a suggestion, notes Witkowski, that “turned out to be surprisingly long- lived.”42 This finding was echoed in the early twentieth century by the German-American Arthur Poznansky, who wrestled with the riddle of Tiahuanaco for almost thirty years.43 Poznansky’s reasons for this conclusion derived from his mapping of the site’s barely-visible remaining canals, leading him to conclude the city had once been surrounded by the lake, and the shoreline higher.44
However, this method of dating by the level of the shoreline soon compounded the difficulty, and the mystery, of the entire Tiahuanaco-Puma Punkhu complex. When one examines the entire vicinity of the sites, there are clear indications that “the end of the ‘Golden Era’ must have had a rather sudden character,” for scattered about it, “there were numerous large stone blocks just abandoned in various phases of cutting.”45 This was not the only indicator of sudden destruction, nor was it the only problem.
The old shoreline was also clearly visible, as if the change came almost overnight. It was plotted on a map and with this came the first surprise It turned out that the old shoreline was significantly inclined to the present level… in the scale of the entire lake the difference amounts to around 1000 feet… It appeared, moreover, that the old coastline doesn’t form a closed loop, but is open on the south; it simply ends, some distance from the ruins. It other words, had the lake’s surface been that much higher, its waters would have spilled over the southern part of the altiplano, towards Lake Poopo; there was no natural barrier. But there must have been something! The only reasonable explanation in this situation was that there must have been a glacier, which could stop the waters. No one knew how long ago such conditions existed, but it was a kind of confirmation that the ruins were indeed quite old.46
The circumstantial evidence for a glaciers was not the only thing p
ointed to Tiahuanaco’s “extreme antiquity,” for also found on the Gate of the Sun — the Gate with the image of Viracocha discussed above — are the representations of elephant heads. And yet another relief at Tiahuanaco shows “quite clear bas-reliefs of mastodons.”47 The youngest known fossils of mastodons in South America are some 10,400 years old.48
To make the dating of the site even more difficult, radiocarbon dating places the site to about 1500BC!49
So on the one hand, the geological and indirect evidence points to a site of great antiquity, to the period of the end of the last Ice Age and to a period when the last mastodons were known in the region, that is, to a period of ca. 10,500 BC (there’s that date again!), while the radiocarbon dating points to something much more recent, and hence, becomes the terminus ante quem for conventional archaeology. Before considering an extremely speculative resolution of this difficulty, however, it is worth looking at more recent moves within conventional archaeology to redate the site to a far earlier period than 1500 BC.
This shift began in ca. 1996–1997 when Dr. Oswaldo Rivera, the Director of Bolivia’s National Institute of Archaeology, and “one of the world’s leading experts on Tiahuanaco,”50 made an announcement confirming his belief that the site was some 12,000 years old.51
Moreover, this new dating was based on an examination of existing structures at the site. But Rivero went on to explain that there was in all likelihood another Tiahuanaco buried beneath the present ruins.52
The implications of all this were and are enormous, for this means that if Tiahuanaco is some 12,000 years old, then Puma Punkhu is even older than that!
6. Back to the Technology of Puma Punkhu
So we return to Puma Punkhu, to observe even more mystifying evidence of advanced technological machining, bearing in mind we are now looking at a technology in use before Tiahuanaco.
Examination of the blocks reveals also the use of one more unconventional technology. In some places one can observe groups (usually rows) of very precisely made holes. The precision is so great that it rules out manual processing. First and foremost, they generally have exactly the same diameter, the sides are very smooth (if the holes are not damaged, of course) and precisely parallel. The deviations in this respect — i.e., differences of the diameter between the top and the bottom of the hole — are on the order of 0.1 mm. This corresponds with drilling by a machine fixed on some mount, for it could not be done by holding the tool in one’s hands, especially working a very hard stone.53
The evidence of such technology is, indeed, overwhelming, but Witkowski is acutely aware that there is a type of “scholarship” that balks at concluding the obvious, and that proposes ludicrous alternative theories. Witkowski’s proposed method of persuading them of the error of their thinking is somewhat novel:
From skeptical scientists, the “debunkers,” we often hear that all the wonders of prehistoric construction were accomplished only (by) very simple stone or copper hand tools, accessible to primitive peoples. I would propose to chain such a scholar to a comparatively hard and large stone block, along with such primitive tools, until he turned it into a block such as one just described.54
Worse yet, Witkowski made a series of very exact measurements of the dimensions incorporated into the various surfaces of the H Blocks, and discovered, to his astonishment, that many of them incorporated a significant number: 3.1418, differing only from the ideal of π by .0002!55
As if that were not enough, other recurring measures resulted in values that were exactly one fourth of the Sumerian unit of measure, the “ell”.56
There is a final thing testifying to the high technology surrounding Puma Punkhu, and this time it comes from Andean tradition itself, and in it, we see the glimmer, perhaps, of a solution to the radiocarbon dating which was at such odds with the geological and indirect evidence for its antiquity. According to those legends, Puma Punkhu, with its large precisely-cut multi-faced stone blocks — some of which were simply abandoned in the middle of machining, as if some sudden catastrophe had overtaken the site — was “destroyed by Viracocha with ‘deadly rays’ before the deluge.”57
In other words, its destruction was deliberate and accomplished by means of a technology, and with an apparent suddenness. One is, perhaps, looking at the South American version of some primordial “Tower of Babel Moment,” when whatever was being constructed there was perceived as a threat to someone else, who intervened, and ended the project.
Moreover, the type of technology is even suggested by those legends; it was a technology involving electromagnetic radiation. Exposure to concentrated radiation would, indeed, massively distort radiocarbon dating efforts, making old things appear far younger than they actually were.
Maybe the comparison of the image of Viracocha on the Sun Gate at Tiahuanaco with a modern three-stage hydrogen bomb is not so fanciful after all.
C. The Axis of the World Across the Pacific
1. The Mystery of Easter Island
For the careful reader familiar with standard explanations of how mankind came to the Americas — the celebrated “land bridge” across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska — the paradox of Puma Punkhu raises significant difficulties. Those difficulties are massively compounded when one considers the context of Tiahuanaco and Puma Punkhu within the context of the Grid system that stretches from South America, across the Pacific — in nearly a straight line as we shall see, or what Witkowski calls “the Axis of the World” — to the Indian subcontinent.
We have seen how local traditions concerning Puma Punkhu and Tiahuanaco conjoin two things: (1) a sudden and deliberate destruction by the means of an implied technology and an implied act of war, and (2) a subsequent catastrophe in the form of a flood.
One finds these two traditions coupled, once again, in the very unlikely place of Easter Island. There, the flood story is cast in the wider context of a lost land that sank under the sea, never to be seen again:
The young man Tea Waka said:
— In the old times our land was large, very large. Kuukuu asked him a question:
— Why it turned small then? Tea Waka replied:
— Uwoke has lowered his stick on it. He has lowered his stick on the Ohiro town. Big waves raised and the land became small. It has been named Te-Pito-o-te-Henua. Uwoke’s stick was broken on the Puku-Puhipuhi mountain.
Tea Waka and Kuukuu talked about the Ko-te-Tomonga-o-Tea-Waka village (the place where Tea Waka has reached the shore). Then the Hotu Matua king came ashore and settled on the island. Kuukuu said to him:
— Once this land was greater.
The friend Tea Waka said:
— The land sunk.
Then Tea Waka added:
— This town is now called Ko-te-Tomonga-o- Tea-Waka.
Hotu Matua Asked:
— Why the land sunk?
— Uwoke did this, he has pushed the land — replied Tea Waka. The land was named Te-Pito-o-te-Henua. When Uwoke’s stick was long, the land has collapsed into the abyss. Puku-Puhipuhi — that’s how the place where Uwoke’s stick was broken is now called.
— The Hotu Matua king said to Tea Waka:
— My friend, it was not Uwoke’s stick. It was the thunder of the Make Make god.58
While at first glance this Easter Island Flood legend might seem rather simplistic, a closer examination reveals some interesting details that parallel the Andean legends of Viracocha, the Flood, and the destruction of Puma Punkhu and Tiahuanaco:
1) The flood is brought about by the deliberate action of a god or gods, in this case, Uwoke, and Make Make;
2) Both gods use some sort of technology to do so, Uwoke a “stick,” and Make Make uses “thunder;” and finally,
3) Note the association of Uwoke’s stick with a mountain, an unusual association, for effectively this means we have the association of a god with a weapon with a mountain. This is a formula that has been seen before, for it is a formula seen in the ancient epics of Mesopotamia describing an
ancient “cosmic war of the gods,” where the same association of mountains with gods with pyramids occurs.59 To put it succinctly, one is in the presence, once again, of more or less the same association and constellation of relationships in Easter Island, and far-off Mesopotamia. And that means that the loss of land spoken of in the Easter Island version of the legend somehow fits into the wider context of a global deluge and a war of the gods.
The end result of this technological intervention was the loss of a “large” land. One cannot help but think how closely this legend resembles Plato’s allegory of Atlantis, where, following a devastating war, the fabled continent is overcome by disasters, and sinks into the ocean.
That such a legend would arise on such an isolated and small island with almost no resources, such as Easter Island, and that it would so closely parallel — even in its “formula” of associating gods with weapons with mountains — Mesopotamian myths and the Platonic allegory, highlights the problem, for the chances of these specific details arising by mere coincidence is almost nil. The problem is further compounded by the fact that Easter Island actually developed a rather sophisticated form of writing, well in advance of anything exhibited or developed in North America, which, if the standard theory of a “land bridge” by which the native populations of the Americas came to the continents, spreading from north to south, is true, meant that the northern tribes had far longer a time to develop sophisticated writing. Yet they did not do so, but the Easter Islanders did!60
It is in fact this script that demonstrates that the original settlement of Easter Island was anything but an isolated affair, or that it was disconnected from civilization elsewhere. The connections to “civilization elsewhere” in Easter Island’s case are, however, quite problematical, for the script connects it to one side of the Pacific, but the construction in evidence on it connects it to the other.
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