Fingerprints of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

  Encyclopaedia, Funk and Wagnell, New York, 1925, vol. II, p. 105.

  9 Peru, p. 182.

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  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  as painters represent the apostle Saint Bartholomew’.10 Other accounts of

  Viracocha likened his appearance to that of the Saint Thomas.11 I

  examined a number of illustrated ecclesiastical manuscripts in which

  these two saints appeared; both were routinely depicted as lean, bearded

  white men, past middle age, wearing sandals and dressed in long, flowing

  cloaks. As we shall see, the records confirmed this was exactly the

  appearance ascribed to Viracocha by those who worshipped him. Whoever

  he was, therefore, he could not have been an American Indian: they are

  relatively dark-skinned people with sparse facial hair.12 Viracocha’s bushy

  beard and pale complexion made him sound like a Caucasian.

  Back in the sixteenth century the Incas had thought so too. Indeed their

  legends and religious beliefs made them so certain of his physical type

  that they initially mistook the white and bearded Spaniards who arrived

  on their shores for the returning Viracocha and his demigods,13 an event

  long prophesied and which Viracocha was said in all the legends to have

  promised. This happy coincidence gave Pizarro’s conquistadores the

  decisive strategic and psychological edge that they needed to overcome

  the numerically superior Inca forces in the battles that followed.

  Who had provided the model for the Viracochas?

  10 The Facts on File Encyclopaedia ..., p. 658.

  11 See, for example, H. Osborne, South American Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1968,

  p. 81.

  12 For further evidence and argument in this regard, see Constance Irwin, Fair Gods and

  Stone Faces, W. H. Allen, London, 1964, pp. 31-2.

  13 J. Alden Mason, The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, Penguin Books, London, 1991, p.

  135. See also Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Orion Press,

  New York, 1961, pp. 132-3, 147-8.

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  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  Chapter 6

  He Came in a Time of Chaos

  Through all the ancient legends of the peoples of the Andes stalked a tall,

  bearded, pale-skinned figure wrapped in a cloak of secrecy. And though

  he was known by many different names in many different places he was

  always recognizably the same figure: Viracocha, Foam of the Sea, a

  master of science and magic who wielded terrible weapons and who came

  in a time of chaos to set the world to rights.

  The same basic story was shared in many variants by all the peoples of

  the Andean region. It began with a vivid description of a terrifying period

  when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into

  darkness by the disappearance of the sun. Society had fallen into

  disorder, and the people suffered much hardship. Then

  there suddenly appeared, coming from the south, a white man of large stature and

  authoritative demeanour. This man had such great power that he changed the hills

  into valleys and from the valleys made great hills, causing streams to flow from

  the living stone ...1

  The early Spanish chronicler who recorded this tradition explained that it

  had been told to him by the Indians he had travelled among on his

  journeys in the Andes:

  And they heard it from their fathers, who in their turn had it from the old songs

  which were handed down from very ancient times ... They say that this man

  travelled along the highland route to the north, working marvels as he went and

  that they never saw him again. They say that in many places he gave men

  instructions how they should live, speaking to them with great love and kindness

  and admonishing them to be good and to do no damage or injury one to another,

  but to love one another and show charity to all. In most places they name him

  Ticci Viracocha ...2

  Other names applied to the same figure included Huaracocha, Con, Con

  Ticci or Kon Tiki, Thunupa, Taapac, Tupaca and Illa.3 He was a scientist,

  an architect of surpassing skills, a sculptor and an engineer: ‘He caused

  terraces and fields to be formed on the steep sides of ravines, and

  sustaining walls to rise up and support them. He also made irrigating

  channels to flow ... and he went in various directions, arranging many

  things.’4

  1 South American Mythology, p. 74.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Arthur Cotterell, The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends, Guild Publishing,

  London, 1989, p. 174. See also South American Mythology, p. 69-88.

  4 Francisco de Avila, 'A Narrative of the Errors, False Gods, and Other Superstitions and

  Diabolical Rites in Which the Indians of the Province of Huarochiri Lived in Ancient

  Times', in Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas (trans, and ed. Clemens R.

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  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  Viracocha was also a teacher and a healer and made himself helpful to

  people in need. It was said that ‘wherever he passed, he healed all that

  were sick and restored sight to the blind.’5

  This gentle, civilizing, ‘superhuman’, Samaritan had another side to his

  nature, however. If his life were threatened, as it seems to have been on

  several occasions, he had the weapon of heavenly fire at his disposal:

  Working great miracles by his words, he came to the district of the Canas and

  there, near a village called Cacha ... the people rose up against him and

  threatened to stone him. They saw him sink to his knees and raise his hands to

  heaven as if beseeching aid in the peril which beset him. The Indians declare that

  thereupon they saw fire in the sky which seemed all around them. Full of fear, they

  approached him whom they had intended to kill and besought him to forgive them

  ... Presently they saw that the fire was extinguished at his command, though

  stones were consumed by fire in such wise that large blocks could be lifted by

  hand as if they were cork. They narrate further that, leaving the place where this

  occurred, he came to the coast and there, holding his mantle, he went forth

  amidst the waves and was seen no more. And as he went they gave him the name

  Viracocha, which means ‘Foam of the Sea’.’6

  The legends were unanimous in their physical description of Viracocha. In

  his Suma y Narracion de los Incas, for example, Juan de Betanzos, a

  sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler, stated that according to the Indians,

  he had been ‘a bearded man of tall stature clothed in a white robe which

  came down to his feet and which he wore belted at the waist’.7

  Other descriptions, collected from many different and widely separated

  Andean peoples, all seemed to identify the same enigmatic individual.

  According to one he was:

  A bearded man of medium height dressed in a rather long cloak ... He was past his

  prime, with grey hair, and lean. He walked with a staff and addressed the natives

  with love, calling them his sons and daughters. As he traversed all the land he

  worked miracles. He healed the sick by touch. He spoke every tongue even better

  than the natives. They called him Thunupa or Tarpaca, Viracocha-rapacha o
r

  Pachaccan ...8

  In one legend Thunupa-Viracocha was said to have been a ‘white man of

  large stature, whose air and person aroused great respect and

  veneration’.9 In another he was described as ‘a white man of august

  appearance, blue-eyed, bearded, without headgear and wearing a cusma,

  a jerkin or sleeveless shirt reaching to the knees’. In yet another, which

  seemed to refer to a later phase of his life, he was revered as ‘a wise

  counsellor in matters of state’ and depicted as ‘an old man with a beard

  and long hair wearing a long tunic’.10

  Markhem), Hakluyt Society, London, 1873, vol. XLVIII, p. 124.

  5 South American Mythology, p. 74.

  6 Ibid., p. 74-6.

  7 Ibid., p. 78.

  8 Ibid., p. 81.

  9 John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Macmillan, London, 1993, p. 97.

  10 South American Mythology, p. 87.

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  Civilizing mission

  Above all else, Viracocha was remembered in the legends as a teacher.

  Before his coming, it was said, ‘men lived in a condition of disorder,

  many went naked like savages; they had no houses or other dwellings

  than caves, and from these they went forth to gather whatever they could

  find to eat in the countryside.’11

  Viracocha was credited with changing all this and with initiating the

  long-lost golden age which later generations looked back on with

  nostalgia. All the legends agreed, furthermore, that he had carried out his

  civilizing mission with great kindness and as far as possible had abjured

  the use of force: careful instruction and personal example had been the

  main methods used to equip the people with the techniques and

  knowledge necessary for a cultured and productive life. In particular, he

  was remembered for bringing to Peru such varied skills as medicine,

  metallurgy, farming, animal husbandry, the art of writing (said by the

  Incas to have been introduced by Viracocha but later forgotten), and a

  sophisticated understanding of the principles of engineering and

  architecture.

  I had already been impressed by the quality of Inca stonework in Cuzco.

  As my research in the old town continued, however, I was surprised to

  discover that by no means all the so-called Inca masonry could be

  attributed with any degree of archaeological certainty to the Incas. It was

  true that they had been masters in the manipulation of stone, and many

  monuments in the Cuzco area were indisputably their work. It seemed,

  however, that some of the more remarkable structures routinely

  attributed to them could have been erected by earlier civilizations; the

  evidence suggested that the Incas had often functioned as the restorers

  of these structures rather than their original builders.

  The same appeared to be true of the highly developed system of roads

  connecting the far-flung parts of the Inca empire. The reader will recall

  that these roads took the form of parallel highways running north to

  south, one along the coast and the other through the Andes. All in all

  more than 15,000 miles of surfaced tracks had been in regular and

  efficient use before the time of the Spanish conquest, and I had assumed

  that the Incas had been responsible for all of them. I now learned that it

  was much more likely that they had inherited the system. Their role had

  been to restore, maintain and unify a pre-existing network. Indeed,

  though it was not often admitted, no expert could safely estimate how

  old these incredible highways were or who had built them.12

  The mystery was deepened by local traditions which stated not only

  that the road system and the sophisticated architecture had been ‘ancient

  in the time of the Incas’, but that both ‘were the work of white, auburn

  11 Ibid., p. 72.

  12 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 26:42.

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  haired men’ who had lived thousands of years earlier.13

  One legend described Viracocha as being accompanied by ‘messengers’

  of two kinds, ‘faithful soldiers’ ( huaminca) and ‘shining ones’ ( hayhuay-

  panti). Their role was to carry their lord’s message ‘to every part of the

  world’.14

  Elsewhere there were phrases such as: ‘Con Ticci returned ... with a

  number of attendants’; ‘Con Ticci then summoned his followers, who

  were called viracocha’; ‘Con Ticci commanded all but two of the viracocha

  to go east ...’15; ‘There came forth from a lake a Lord named Con Ticci

  Viracocha bringing with him a certain number of people ...’16; ‘Thus those

  viracochas went off to the various districts which Viracocha had indicated

  for them ...’.17

  The work of demons?

  The ancient citadel of Sacsayhuaman lies just north of Cuzco. We reached

  it late one afternoon under a sky almost occluded by heavy clouds of

  tarnished silver. A cold grey breeze was blowing across the high-altitude

  tundra as I clambered up stairways, through lintelled stone gates built for

  giants, and walked along the mammoth rows of zig-zag walls.

  I craned my neck and looked up at a big granite boulder that my route

  now passed under. Twelve feet high, seven feet across, and weighing

  considerably more than 100 tons, it was a work of man, not nature. It had

  been cut and shaped into a symphonic harmony of angles, manipulated

  with apparent ease (as though it were made of wax or putty) and stood

  on its end in a wall of other huge and problematic polygonal blocks,

  some of them positioned above it, some below it, some to each side, and

  all in perfectly balanced and well-ordered juxtaposition.

  Since one of these astonishing pieces of carefully hewn stone had a

  height of twenty-eight feet and was calculated to weigh 361 tons18

  (roughly the equivalent of five hundred family-sized automobiles), it

  seemed to me that a number of fundamental questions were crying out

  for answers.

  How had the Incas, or their predecessors, been able to work stone on

  such a gargantuan scale? How had they cut and shaped these Cyclopean

  boulders so precisely? How had they transported them tens of miles from

  13 Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Harper & Brothers, New York,

  1882, p. 394.

  14 From the 'Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del Piru',

  reported in The Facts on File Encyclopaedia .. ., p. 657.

  15 Pears Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends: Oceania, Australia and the Americas, (ed.

  Sheila Savill), Pelham Books, London, 1978, pp. 179-80.

  16 South American Mythology, p. 76.

  17 Ibid.

  18 The Conquest of the Incas, p. 191.

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  distant quarries? By what means had they made walls of them, shuffling

  the individual blocks around and raising them high above the ground

  with such apparent ease? These people weren’t even supposed to have

  had the wheel, let alone machinery capable of lifting and manipulating

  dozens of irregularly shaped 100-ton blocks, and sorting them into threedimen
sional jigsaw puzzles.

  I knew that the chroniclers of the early colonial period had been as

  perplexed as I was by what they had seen. The respected Garcilaso de la

  Vega, for example, who came here in the sixteenth century, had spoken

  with awe about the fortress of Sacsayhuaman:

  Its proportions are inconceivable when one has not actually seen it; and when one

  has looked at it closely and examined it attentively, they appear to be so

  extraordinary that it seems as though some magic had presided over its

  construction; that it must be the work of demons instead of human beings. It is

  made of such great stones, and in such great number, that one wonders

  simultaneously how the Indians were able to quarry them, how they transported

  them ... and how they hewed them and set them one on top of the other with such

  precision. For they disposed of neither iron nor steel with which to penetrate the

  rock and cut and polish the stones; they had neither wagon nor oxen to transport

  them, and, in fact, there exist neither wagons nor oxen throughout the world that

  would have sufficed for this task, so enormous are these stones and so rude the

  mountain paths over which they were conveyed ...19

  Garcilaso also reported something else interesting. In his Royal

  Commentaries of the Incas he gave an account of how, in historical times,

  an Inca king had tried to emulate the achievements of his predecessors

  who had built Sacsayhuaman. The attempt had involved bringing just one

  immense boulder from several miles away to add to the existing

  fortifications: ‘This boulder was hauled across the mountain by more than

  20,000 Indians, going up and down very steep hills ... At a certain spot, it

  fell from their hands over a precipice crushing more than 3000 men.’20 In

  all the histories I surveyed, this was the only report which described the

  Incas actually building, or trying to build, with huge blocks like those

  employed at Sacsayhuaman. The report suggested that they possessed no

  experience of the techniques involved and that their attempt had ended

  in disaster.

  This, of course, proved nothing in itself. But Garcilaso’s story did

  intensify my doubts about the great fortifications which towered above

  me. As I looked at them I felt that they could, indeed, have been erected

  before the age of the Incas and by some infinitely older and more