The Aymara tell of strange events at Titicaca after the Great Flood. Strangers attempted to build a great city on the lake. An Aymara myth retold by an early Spanish visitor tells of how an ancestor crossed Lake Titicaca and with his warriors “waged such a war on the people of which I speak that he killed them all.”9
After struggling so long and so hard to survive the ravages brought by the last earth crust displacement, these strangers perished, not by the hand of nature, but by the spears and arrows of their own species. Something drove the Aymara to rise in rebellion against the foreigners. Perhaps they were forced to labor on the great city of Tiahuanaco? Did they discover that the strangers were not, after all, gods? Were the Aymara outraged by the prospect of laboring for mere mortals?
The Aymara’s contribution is not confined to a distant myth whispered by the waves lapping at the reeds of Lake Titicaca. When the twentieth-century’s unique wand, the computer, passes over the Aymara language, it reveals an amazing secret. In 1984, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, a Bolivian mathematician, scored a notable first in the development of computer software by showing that Aymara could be used as an intermediate language for simultaneously translating English into several other languages. Guzman’s Atamiri (the Aymara word for “interpreter”) was used as a translator by the Panama Canal Commission in a commercial test with Wang Laboratories.
How did Guzman accomplish, using a simple personal computer, a task that experts at eleven European universities, using advanced computers, had failed to complete? “His system’s secret, which solved a problem that had stumped machine translation experts around the world, is the rigid, logical and unambiguous structure of Aymara, ideal for transformation into a computer algorithm.”10 In addition, “Aymara is rigorous and simple—which means that its syntactical rules always apply, and can be written out concisely in the sort of algebraic shorthand that computers understand. Indeed, such is its purity that some historians think it did not just evolve, like other languages, but was actually constructed from scratch.”11
The Aymara were productive farmers, but is it likely that they would spend their leisure time constructing a language? Such a development is more likely the product of an advanced civilization, one capable of constructing the Temple of the Sun and the Great Sphinx.
Could it have been the survivors of the lost island paradise who gave the Aymara a language so precise and grammatically pure that it would become a tool for the most advanced technology of our own century? What other advances in science might we glean from a language spoken by peasants on the highlands near Lake Titicaca?
MONTEZUMA
After studying the mythology of the Aymara and raking over the remains of their Temple of the Sun, Posnansky concluded that Tiahuanaco, the abandoned city of Lake Titicaca, was originally populated by people from Aztlan, the lost island paradise of the Aztecs.12 The Aztecs ruled a vast empire that stretched the length and width of Central America. In the spring of 1519, they became terrified that their world was coming to an end.
Imagine the following scene from five centuries ago: It is almost sunset. Montezuma, priest, warrior, astronomer, and first lord of the Aztecs, methodically prepares for his evening salutation to the sun. For these few moments the tumultuous empire of the Aztecs is at peace. Darkness approaches quickly as the sun slants behind the mountains that crowd the city of Teotihuacan, in what is now Mexico. Montezuma drapes himself in the comfort of ancient ritual as he prepares to meet the night.13
Two humble fishermen are brought into the hall to be presented to their venerated leader. The shuffle of their feet disturbs the temple’s silence as they move toward him, avoiding his gaze to look back at the creature they drag behind them.
Montezuma’s eyes dart toward the awkward bundle they offer him so nervously. It is a large gray crane, its ashy wings pinned against the fishermen’s mesh net. Montezuma recognizes this important Aztec symbol. It is traditional that on the tense morning of a battle two feathers from the long-legged crane be inserted in each warrior’s hair as a symbol of readiness to fight to the death. A strange, smoky mirror protrudes from the bird’s head. The fishermen quiver, prepared for the worst if Montezuma is angered by his interpretation of this sign.
A smile touches his lips, and the lord of the Aztecs leans back, gathering his ceremonial robes around him. He dismisses the fishermen, showering them with compliments and treasures to reward their capture of this wonderful bird. Montezuma hopes that this unexpected omen means that Blue Hummingbird, the god of war, has been transformed into a crane. Aztec legend dictates that on this day the Aztecs will conquer all their enemies.
As the last hot dust of the Mexican day sifts through the apertures in the temple’s carved stone, Montezuma’s shiver of anticipation is suddenly laced with fear. As he watches the magical obsidian mirror, the scene changes to daytime over the sea and a sandy beach. It is written of this vision, “Up from the waters came the strange bearded men on their hornless deer. They advanced and before them came fire and destruction.”14
Montezuma gazes on a vision of the devastation of his world. The fear gnaws at him as he remembers other vile omens that have haunted the empire in recent years. In 1509, a great light appeared on the eastern horizon.15 Later, three comets and three terrifying earthquakes brought chaos to the Aztecs. Nature’s furies were followed by a strange vision visited on Montezuma’s sister. She saw their precious capital destroyed by bearded men of gray stone who came from the sea.16 Perhaps most ominous of all, for no apparent reason, the lake on which the Aztec capital rested began to flood.
Montezuma has not forgotten that in 1508, the year before the wondrous light appeared on the eastern ocean, the planet Venus, symbol of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, challenged the sun by crossing its path. Could this sign mean that Blue Hummingbird’s hated enemies, the Toltecs, would be returning? Quetzalcoatl was the ancestral king and esteemed god of the ancient Toltecs, the former glorious rulers of Mexico before the Aztecs, and Montezuma’s personal bloodline is traceable to the imperious Toltecs. He is torn by the implication of the omens. How can he welcome the enemies of Blue Hummingbird?
Montezuma’s fear of disaster is tempered with his knowledge of the Plumed Serpent’s reputation as a great god. It is his duty to correctly interpret and act on the omens. Everything depends on it. No battle, however fierce, has ever disturbed his soul like the whisper of doubt that this twilight has brought, when this crane, carrying a strange, dull mirror reflecting disaster, was placed at his feet. The people of the Aztec Empire are restless and nervous. Wild rumors are everywhere, rumors of floating mountains carrying odd strangers.
Montezuma is painfully aware that historical parallels are lining up against him. As ninth ruler of the Aztecs, he stands at the peak of their power and should be exulting in his honored position. Instead he is torn by doubts and fears. The Toltecs also had nine kings before the Plumed Serpent left them and they fell from power. Is he to be the ninth and final king of the Aztecs? The gods must be consulted.
He turns to the skies and the stars. From his astrological calculations and recollections of ancient myths, Montezuma calculates that the Plumed Serpent will return during the next one reed year, 1519.17
Montezuma waits, checking and rechecking his calculations. He now believes that he has narrowed the date of the Plumed Serpent’s return to the very day. Surely, he reasons, the god will come back to his homeland on his name day, Nine Wind Day. On the European calendar that would be April 21, 1519. Montezuma sends spies to the eastern shores to watch for the coming of the god on this sacred day.
AZTLAN
On April 21, 1519, the silence of Mexico’s Caribbean coast was broken by the clang of swords and the shuffle of marching boots across the white beach. From his ship stepped a bearded conquistador named Hernando Cortes, his helmet adorned with “a plume of feathers.”18 The Spaniard pounded a great cross into the soft sand to honor his faith, little realizing that the cross was also the symbol of the Plumed Serpent.1
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The Aztec spies watched in amazement and horror before hurrying back to Montezuma to confirm his prediction. Never in the course of human history has there been a greater case of mistaken identity. On that day, Cortes, with blind luck on his side, began a bloody march that would ultimately end in the annihilation of the Aztec Empire.
The Spanish conquerors believed that Mexico was once an Egyptian colony. It is little wonder, since the Aztecs shared several common mythological themes with the Egyptians. The Egyptians believed that the world was surrounded on all sides, including the heavens, with water. In Aztec mythology, “The sea was thought to extend outward and upward until—like the walls of a cosmic house—it merged with the sky. . . . The sky, therefore, was known to contain waters which might in perilous times descend in deluges, annihilating man.”20
This empire, like that of the Egyptians, had built great pyramids that symbolized the land that saved their ancestors from the Flood.21 And like those of Egypt, the solar megaliths were aligned with the rising sun. It was atop the Temple of the Sun that Montezuma met Cortez. He recounted their conversation in a letter to the king of Spain. Montezuma told Cortes about the island homeland of the Aztecs’ ancestors, saying, “Our fathers dwelt in that happy and prosperous place which they called Aztlan, which means whiteness.”22 Aztlan is described as “a bright land of shining light and whiteness, which contained seven cities surrounding a sacred mountain.”23 Perhaps the blazing lights of Aztlan were actually the southern lights of Antarctica before that land was thrust into the confines of the Antarctic Circle.
Aztlan was said to be “located beyond the waters, or as surrounded by waters; and the first stage of the migration is said to have been made by boat.”24 Once again we have the familiar story. “They believed that two persons survived the deluge, a man, named Coxcox, and his wife. Their heads are represented in ancient paintings, together with a boat floating on the waters, at the foot of a mountain.”25
Throughout North and South America the myth of a lost island paradise haunts the memories of the native people. But they were not alone in their grief for the lost land. Across the ocean the tale was told in India, Iran, Iraq, and Japan, too.
POLAR PARADISE
In 1922, Mahatma Gandhi, about to be sentenced to six years in prison, said to the judge, “Since you have done me the honor of recalling the trial of the late Lokamaya Gangadhar Tilak, I just want to say that I consider it the proudest privilege and honor to be associated with his name.”26
Bal Gangadhar Tilak forged the tactic of passive resistance as a means of overthrowing British rule in India. He was held in such esteem that Gandhi used the title Lokamaya (meaning “beloved leader of the people”) when referring to him. Tilak earned his title while imprisoned in 1897 for seditious writings. The British hoped to curb his role in the rising tide of Indian nationalism by locking him up. The harsh conditions of his Bombay cell took their toll. Tilak’s health waned. Fearing that his death in custody might spark a general uprising, the British moved the “beloved leader of the people” to a safer prison in Poona. Helped by donations of fruit and vegetables, Tilak partially recovered his health. But soon a new hunger overtook him—the need for intellectual stimulation. Relief came from an unlikely quarter: England.
Tilak had published a respected work on India’s oldest texts, the Vedas, and Sanskrit scholars at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were outraged by his imprisonment and treatment. Professor F. Max Muller, the world’s leading authority on the Vedas, was successful in having Tilak’s case reviewed by Queen Victoria. She shortened his sentence and granted him a reading light in his cell. Denied access to newspapers or any other current material, Tilak used this “privilege” to continue his studies of the Vedas.
Upon his release, Tilak retired to the mountains to rest at a favorite family retreat. In 1903, his great work, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, was published. In it he argued that the remains of an island paradise could be found beneath the Arctic Ocean. “It was the advent of the Ice Age that destroyed the mild climate of the original home and covered it into an ice-bound land unfit for the habitation of man.”27
Tilak summarized a key passage in the oldest saga of Iran, the Zend-Avesta. “Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant. The meeting is said to have taken place in the Airyana Vaêjo, or Paradise of the Iranians.”28
Tilak chose the Arctic Circle as the location of the lost continent of Airyana Vaêjo after reading Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, written in 1885 by the founder of Boston University, Dr. William Fairfield Warren. Warren had been impressed by how often the story of a falling sky and Great Flood was to be found intertwined with accounts of a lost island paradise. He also realized that the lost land had many polar features. In Warren’s view, the worldwide nature of these descriptions suggested a common physical explanation. An exciting idea of the ice ages provided part of his answer.
Now if, during the prevalence of the Deluge, or later, in consequence of the on-coming of the Ice Age, the survivors of the Flood were translocated from their antediluvian home at the Pole to the great Central Asia “plateau of Pamir,” the probable starting-point of historic postdiluvian humanity, the new aspect presented by the heavens in this new latitude would have been precisely as if in the grand world-convulsion the sky itself had become displaced, its polar dome tilted over about one third of the distance from the zenith to the horizon. The astronomical knowledge of those survivors very likely enabled them to understand the true reason of the changed appearance, but their rude descendants, unfavored with the treasures of antediluvian science, and born only to a savage or nomadic life in their new and inhospitable home, might easily have forgotten the explanation. In time such children’s children might easily have come to embody the strange story handed down from their fathers in strange myths, in which nothing of the original facts remained beyond an obscure account of some mysterious displacement of the sky, supposed to have occurred in a far-off age in connection with some appalling natural catastrophe or world-disaster.29
Warren conjectured that the island paradise myths and their dramatic accounts of a falling sky and worldwide flood were part of the actual history of traumatized populations who had lost their homeland in a geological upheaval. Again and again in the most ancient records, Warren found evidence that the lost land was near the pole.
For example, in 681 CE the Japanese Emperor Temnu ordered the man with greatest memory in the country, Hieda no Are, to recite the most ancient of myths to a scribe. Hieda no Are was the most respected voice of the “guild of narrators” (katari-be) and he took his task seriously. O no Yasumaro, the scribe, faithfully transcribed Hieda no Are’s words. Their compilation became known as the Ko-ji-ki (“Records of Ancient Matters”) and appeared in 712. Warren believed that the earliest part of the book contained the notion of an original island homeland near the earth’s axis.30 The Ko-ji-ki begins with the “Seven Generations of the Age of the Gods.” Each “generation” consisted of a brother and sister. After the seven generations had been created, two more gods, Izanagi and his sister/wife Izanami, were brought into being. They were charged with the task of creating the world out of the porridge-like chaos that was the primordial earth. Warren summarizes the moment when the two celestial deities create the first world. He says the deities,
standing on the bridge of heaven, pushed down a spear into the green plain of the sea, and stirred it round and round. When they drew it up the drops, which fell from its end, consolidated onto an island. The sun-born pair descended onto the island, and planting a spear in the ground, point downwards, built a palace round it, taking that for the central roof-pillar. The spear became the axis of the earth, which had been caused to revolve by stirring round.31
Warren
concluded that Onogorojima (Island of the Congealed Drop) was an island somewhere near the pole. The central “roof-pillar” represented, in his view, the earth’s axis. A great palace was built on the island, a theme that reappears in the legend of Atlantis. (Later, Izanagi created other islands, including the eight main islands of Japan.)
But why would these people have made their home at the inhospitable pole? Warren answered that at the time the earth was much warmer, its temperature having only recently cooled. Heat was generated from within the planet and combined with surface temperatures to render lands that are now tropical and even temperate far too hot to support life. Only the polar regions were cool enough to invite human habitation.
Warren believed that the polar paradise was destroyed when a critical temperature drop resulted in a worldwide geological upheaval. A huge mass of the earth’s interior collapsed inward, pulling sections of the planet’s crust with it. The ocean rushed to drown the sunken areas. The globe then cooled, suffocating the original island paradise in snow and ice.
Because he believed that the entire island had disappeared beneath a polar ocean, Warren dismissed the South Pole as a possible location since the Antarctic continent still existed as land. Instead, he focused his attention on the Arctic Ocean, which to him represented the true “Navel of the Earth.”
Students of antiquity must often have marveled that in nearly every ancient literature they should encounter the strange expression, the Navel of the Earth. Still more unaccountable would it have seemed to them had they noticed how many ancient mythologies connect the cradle of the human race with this earth-navel. The advocates of the different sites which have been assigned to Eden have seldom, if ever, recognized the fact that no hypothesis on this subject can be considered acceptable which cannot account for this peculiar association of man’s first home with some sort of natural centre of the earth.32
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