skill and technology than the etching of the straight lines. But how widely
separated in time were the earlier and later artists?
Scholars do not address themselves to this question. Instead they lump
both cultures together as ‘the Nazcans’ and depict them as primitive
tribesmen who unaccountably developed sophisticated techniques of
artistic self-expression, and then vanished from the Peruvian scene, many
hundreds of years before the appearance of their better-known
successors, the Incas.
How sophisticated were these Nazcan ‘primitives’? What kind of
knowledge must they have possessed to inscribe their gigantic signatures
on the plateau? It seems, for a start, that they were pretty good
observational astronomers—at least according to Dr Phillis Pitluga, an
astronomer with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. After making an
intensive computer-aided study of stellar alignments at Nazca, she has
concluded that the famous spider figure was devised as a terrestrial
diagram of the giant constellation of Orion, and that the arrow-straight
lines linked to the figure appear to have been set out to track through the
ages the changing declinations of the three stars of Orion’s Belt.3
The real significance of Dr Pitluga’s discovery will become apparent in
3 Personal communications with Dr Pitluga.
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due course. Meanwhile, let us note that the Nazca spider also accurately
depicts a member of a known spider genus— Ricinulei.4 This, as it
happens, is one of the rarest spider genera in the world, so rare indeed
that it has only been found in remote and inaccessible parts of the
Amazon rainforest.5 How did the supposedly primitive Nazcan artists
travel so far from their homeland, crossing the formidable barrier of the
Andes, to obtain a specimen? More to the point, why should they have
wanted to do such a thing and how were they able to duplicate minute
details of Ricinulei’s anatomy normally visible only under a microscope,6
notably the reproductive organ positioned on the end of its extended
right leg?
Such mysteries multiply at Nazca and none of the designs, except
perhaps the condor, really seems quite at home here. The whale and the
monkey are, after all, as out of place in this desert environment as the
Amazonian spider. A curious figure of a man, his right arm raised as
though in greeting, heavy boots on his feet and round eyes staring
owlishly forward, cannot be said to belong to any known era or culture.
And other drawings depicting the human form are equally peculiar: their
heads enclosed in halos of radiance, they do indeed look like visitors
from another planet. Their sheer size is equally noteworthy and bizarre.
The hummingbird is 165 feet long, the spider 150 feet long, the condor
stretches nearly 400 feet from beak to tail-feathers (as does the pelican),
and a lizard, whose tail is now divided by the Pan-American highway, is
617 feet in length. Almost every design is executed on the same
cyclopean scale and in the same difficult manner, by the careful
contouring of a single continuous line.
Similar attention to detail is to be found in the geometrical devices.
Some of these take the form of straight lines more than five miles long,
marching like Roman roads across the desert, dropping into dried-out
river beds, surmounting rocky outcrops, and never once deviating from
true.
This kind of precision is hard, but not impossible, to explain in
conventional commonsense terms. More puzzling by far are the
zoomorphic figures. How could they have been so perfectly made when,
without aircraft, their creators could not have checked the progress of
their work by viewing it in its proper perspective? None of the designs is
small enough to be seen from ground level, where they appear merely as
a series of shapeless ruts in the desert. They show their true form only
when seen from an altitude of several hundred feet. There is no elevation
nearby that provides such a vantage point.
4 Firm identification of the Nazca spider with Ricinulei was first made by Professor
Gerald S. Hawkins. See Gerald S. Hawkins, Beyond Stonehenge, Arrow Books, London,
1977, p. 143-4.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 144.
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Linemakers, map-makers
I’m flying over the lines, trying to make sense of it all.
My pilot is Rodolfo Arias, lately of the Peruvian Airforce. After a career
in jet fighters he finds the little Cessna slow and uninspiring and treats it
like a taxi with wings. Once already we’ve been back to the airstrip at
Nazca to remove a window so that my partner Santha can point her
cameras vertically down at the alluring glyphs. Now we’re experimenting
with the view from different altitudes. At a couple of hundred feet above
the plain Ricinulei, the Amazonian spider, looks like he’s going to rear up
and snatch us in his jaws. At 500 feet we can see several of the figures at
once: a dog, a tree, a weird pair of hands, the condor, and some of the
triangles and trapezoids. When we ascend to 1500 feet, the zoomorphs,
hitherto predominant, are revealed merely as small scattered units
surrounded by an astonishing scribble of vast geometric forms. These
forms now look less like runways and more like pathways made by
giants—pathways that crisscross the plateau in what seems at first a
bewildering variety of shapes, angles and sizes.
As the ground continues to recede, however, and as the widening
perspective on the lines permits more of an eagle’s-eye view, I begin to
wonder whether there might not after all be some method to the
cuneiform slashes and scratches spread out below me. I am reminded of
an observation made by Maria Reiche, the mathematician who has lived at
Nazca and studied the lines since 1946. In her view
The geometric drawings give the impression of a cipher-script in which the same
words are sometimes written in huge letters, at another time in minute characters.
There are line arrangements which appear in a great variety of size categories
together with very similar shapes. All the drawings are composed of a certain
number of basic elements ...7
As the Cessna bumps and heaves across the heavens, I also remember it
is no accident that the Nazca lines were only properly identified in the
twentieth century, after the era of flight had begun. In the late sixteenth
century a magistrate named Luis de Monzon was the first Spanish
traveller to bring back eyewitness reports concerning these mysterious
‘marks on the desert’ and to collect the strange local traditions that
linked them to the Viracochas.8 However, until commercial airlines began
to operate regularly between Lima and Arequipa in the 1930s no one
seems to have grasped that the largest piece of graphic art in the world
lay here in southern Peru. It was the development of aviation that made
the difference, giving men and women the godlike ability to take to the
sk
ies and see beautiful and puzzling things that had hitherto been
hidden from them.
7 Maria Reiche, Mystery on the Desert, Nazca, Peru, 1989, p. 58.
8 Luis de Monzon was the corregidor, or magistrate, of Rucanas and Soras, near Nazca,
in 1586. Pathways to the Gods, p. 36; Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 100.
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Rodolfo is steering the Cessna in a gentle circle over the figure of the
monkey—a big monkey tied in a riddle of geometric forms. It’s not easy
to describe the eerie, hypnotic feeling this design gives me: it’s very
complicated and absorbing to look at, and slightly sinister in an abstract,
indefinable way. The monkey’s body is defined by a continuous unbroken
line. And, without ever being interrupted, this same line winds up stairs,
over pyramids, into a series of zig-zags, through a spiral labyrinth (the
tail), and then back around a number of star-like hairpin bends. It would
be a real tour de force of draughtsmanship and artistic skill on a sheet of
notepaper, but this is the Nazca desert (where they do things on a grand
scale) and the monkey is at least 400 feet long and 300 feet wide ...
Were the linemakers map-makers too?
And why were they called the Viracochas?
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Chapter 5
The Inca Trail to the Past
No artefacts or monuments, no cities or temples, have endured in
recognizable form for longer than the most resilient religious traditions.
Whether expressed in the Pyramid Texts of Ancient Egypt, or the Hebrew
Bible, or the Vedas, such traditions are among the most imperishable of
all human creations: they are vehicles of knowledge voyaging through
time.
The last custodians of the ancient religious heritage of Peru were the
Incas, whose beliefs and ‘idolatry’ were ‘extirpated’ and whose treasures
were ransacked during the thirty terrible years that followed the Spanish
conquest in AD 1532.1 Providentially, however, a number of early Spanish
travellers made sincere efforts to document Inca traditions before they
were entirely forgotten.
Though little attention was paid at the time, some of these traditions
speak strikingly of a great civilization that was believed to have existed in
Peru many thousands of years earlier.2 Powerful memories were preserved
of this civilization, said to have been founded by the Viracochas, the
same mysterious beings credited with the making of the Nazca lines.
‘Foam of the Sea’
When the Spanish conquistadores arrived, the Inca empire extended along
the Pacific coast and Andean highlands of South America from the
northern border of modern Ecuador, through the whole of Peru, and as
far south as the Maule River in central Chile. Connecting the far-flung
corners of this empire was a vast and sophisticated road system: two
parallel north-south highways, for example, one running for 3600
kilometres along the coast and the other for a similar distance through
the Andes. Both these great thoroughfares were paved and connected by
frequent links. In addition, they exhibited an interesting range of design
and engineering features such as suspension bridges and tunnels cut
through solid rock. They were clearly the work of an evolved, disciplined
and ambitious society. Ironically, they played a significant part in its
downfall: the Spanish forces, led by Francisco Pizarro, used them to great
1 See, for example, Father Pablo Joseph, The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru (translated
from the Spanish by L. Clark Keating), University of Kentucky Press, 1968.
2 This is the view of Fernando Montesinos, expressed in his Memorias Antiguas
Historiales del Peru (written in the seventeenth century). English edition translated and
edited by P. A. Means, Hakluyt Society, London, 1920.
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effect to speed up their ruthless advance into the Inca heartland.3
The capital of the Inca empire was the city of Cuzco, a name meaning
‘the earth’s navel’ in the local Quechua language.4 According to legend it
was established by Manco Capac and Mama Occlo, two children of the
Sun. Here, though the Incas worshipped the sun god, whom they knew as
Inti, quite another deity was venerated as the Most Holy of all. This was
Viracocha, whose namesakes were said to “have made the Nazca lines
and whose own name meant ‘Foam of the Sea.’5
No doubt it is just a coincidence that the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who
was born of the sea, received her name because of ‘the foam [ aphros] out
of which she was formed’.6 Besides, Viracocha was always depicted
uncompromisingly as a male by the peoples of the Andes. That much
about him is known for certain. No historian, however, is able to say how
ancient was the cult of this deity before the Spanish arrived to put a stop
to it. This is because the cult seemed always to have been around;
indeed, long before the Incas incorporated him into their cosmogony and
built a magnificent temple for him at Cuzco, the evidence suggests that
the high god Viracocha had been worshipped by all the civilizations that
had ever existed in the long history of Peru.
Citadel of Viracocha
A few days after leaving Nazca, Santha and I arrived in Cuzco and made
our way to the site of the Coricancha, the great temple dedicated to
Viracocha in the pre-Colombian era. The Coricancha was of course long
gone. Or, to be more exact, it was not so much gone as buried beneath
layers of later architecture. The Spanish had kept its superb Inca
foundations, and the lower parts of its fabulously strong walls, and had
erected their own grandiose colonial cathedral on top.
Walking towards the front entrance of this cathedral, I remembered that
the Inca temple that had once stood here had been covered with more
than 700 sheets of pure gold (each weighing around two kilograms) and
that its spacious courtyard had been planted with ‘fields’ of replica corn
also fashioned out of gold.7 I could not help but be reminded of
Solomon’s temple in far-off Jerusalem, also reputed to have been adorned
3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 6:276-7.
4 Paul Devereux, Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places, Blandford Books, London, 1992,
p. 76. See also Peru, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1991, p. 168.
5 The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and Legend, London and Oxford,
1988, p. 657.
6 Macrobius, cited in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, David
R. Godine, Publisher, Boston, 1992, p. 134. See also A. R. Hope Moncreiff, The
Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, BCA, London, 1992, p. 153.
7 Peru, p. 181.
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with sheets of gold and a marvellous orchard of golden trees.8
Earthquakes in 1650 and again in 1950 had largely demolished the
Spanish cathedral of Santo Domingo which stood on the site of the
temple of Viracocha, and it had been necessary to rebuild it on both
occasions. Its Inca foundations and lower walls survived these natural
disasters intact, thanks to their characteristic design which made use of
an elegant system of interlocking polygonal blocks. These blocks, and the
general layout of the place, were almost all that was now left of the
original structure, apart from an octagonal grey stone platform at the
centre of the vast rectangular courtyard which had once been covered
with 55 kilograms of solid gold.9 On either side of the courtyard were
ante-chambers, also from the Inca temple, with refined architectural
features such as walls that tapered upwards and beautifully-carved niches
hewn out of single pieces of granite.
We took a walk through the narrow, cobbled streets of Cuzco. Looking
around, I realized it was not just the cathedral that reflected Spanish
imposition on top of an earlier culture: the whole town was slightly
schizophrenic. Spacious, balconied, pastel-shaded colonial homes and
palaces towered above me but almost all of them stood on Inca
foundations or incorporated complete Inca structures of the same
beautiful polygonal architecture used in the Coricancha. In one alleyway,
known as Hatunrumiyoc, I paused to examine an intricate jigsaw puzzle
of a wall made of countless drystone blocks all perfectly fitted together,
all of different sizes and shapes, interlocking in a bewildering array of
angles. The carving of the individual blocks, and their arrangement into
so complicated a structure could only have been achieved by master
craftsmen possessed of very high levels of skill, with untold centuries of
architectural experimentation behind them. On one block I counted
twelve angles and sides in a single plane, and I could not slip even the
edge of a piece of thin paper into the joints that connected it to the
surrounding blocks.
The bearded stranger
It seemed that in the early sixteenth century, before the Spanish began to
demolish Peruvian culture in earnest, an idol of Viracocha had stood in
the Holy of Holies of the Coricancha. According to a contemporary text,
the Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del
Piru, this idol took the form of a marble statue of the god—a statue
described ‘as to the hair, complexion, features, raiment and sandals, just
8 Tan. Terumah, XI; also, with slight variations, Yoma 39b. Cited in The Jewish
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