So it’s in a setting of great natural beauty overlooking the Sacred Valley that we explore Pisac, a site less famous, but in many ways more spectacular than Machu Picchu, which lies another seventy kilometers to the northwest.
As at Machu Picchu, the centerpiece at Pisac, around which everything else seems focused, is an Intihuatana (the word means “hitching post of the sun”)—a massive outcrop of rock, shaped by human hands in what Gamarra calls the Hanan Pacha style, with a gnomon sticking up from its summit. Surrounding it, and in some cases molded to its surface, are walls of beautifully shaped polygonal blocks in the later Uran Pacha style, which seem to have been designed to cradle and protect the Intihuatana. And around them are Ukun Pacha—Inca—structures of simpler, cruder stonework.
“Each of these cultures,” Gamarra explains, “venerated and respected the culture that went before. They expressed their feelings of respect by building over and around the work of their predecessors and by attempting to copy what they did. As I showed you in Loreto Street, the Incas sought to emulate the Uran Pacha style, but they didn’t have the knowledge or the right conditions to do such a good job.”
By “the right conditions” Gamarra means the lowered gravity and greater malleability of stone that he hypothesises in past epochs, but I don’t need to embrace that to accept that his observations about the different building styles and their likely origination by different cultures make complete sense of what we’re looking at.
I see many more examples of these three distinctive styles, sometimes with Gamarra to guide me, sometimes not. Machu Picchu itself, which I’ve written about at length in previous books, is, of course, the archetypal Hanan Pacha site adopted and overbuilt by later cultures. Then there’s a mysterious little cave overlooking a remote valley, through the floor of which passes the rail track connecting Cuzco to Machu Picchu.20 It’s quite a clamber three hundred meters up the almost sheer valley side and along a narrow track, but the end result is worth the effort. At the front of the cave (see Plate 60) a black andesite boulder has been sculpted—or molded?—into a curious-looking shrine with a step-pyramid motif engraved upon it.
Treasure hunters have been here and dynamited the shrine, but enough of it survived the explosion to get a sense of how beautiful it must have been before it was attacked. In the same Hanan Pacha style, one wall of the cave appears to have been planed smooth and an alcove with absolutely precise straight edges, as though milled by a machine tool, has been cut into it. But on the other side, on my right as I look out of the cave, an Inca wall of rough stone mortared together with adobe has been built, and into this wall—crudely done—six alcoves have been fashioned in an obvious attempt to mimic the high-precision rock-cut alcove on the left. The qualities and styles of workmanship are so completely different that it makes no sense, as is presently the case, to insist that both the rock-cut work and the crude wall were produced by the same culture. Gamarra’s theory that a much older monument has been honored and mimicked by the Incas better fits the evidence before my eyes.
Déjà vu
Heading out of Peru on our way to Bolivia, we stop in the town of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, 3,812 meters (12,507 feet) above sea level and from there, the next day we drive 22 kilometers south to a dramatic mesa at an altitude of 4,023 meters (13,198 feet), on top of which is perched the archaeological site of Cutimbo. The main features of the site—several tall towers, some circular, some square, and known collectively as chullapas—are visible from the road. They are thought to have been built as tombs for the nobility of a local Indian culture, the Lupakas, who were made vassals of the Incas in the period between AD 1470 and AD 1532.21 Undoubtedly there were burials within the chullapas in that period,22 but the possibility must be considered that these were intrusive and that the towers, made from fine polygonal blocks that have all the hallmarks of Jesus Gamarra’s Uran Pacha style, are much older than their latest use.
I’m getting accustomed to the thin air of the Andes by now, but it’s a long hike through yellow pampas grass up the side of the mesa under a burning morning sun. Once we get to the top, however, my fatigue vanishes when I start finding, and Santha starts photographing, really interesting imagery carved in high relief on the sides of a number of the towers and on scattered blocks lying at random here and there, the result of more demolition efforts by treasure hunters.
It’s this imagery, on the far side of the world, including that stone serpent in the Temple of the Moon, that a year later will suddenly come to mind in ŞanlIurfa Museum, as I study the collection of reliefs from Göbekli Tepe. I leave readers to form their own views from Plates 61–72, but the obvious parallels include the following:
At Göbekli Tepe there is a creature, sculpted in high-relief, identified by Klaus Schmidt as a beast of prey with splayed claws and powerful shoulders, its tail bent to its left over its body. A very similar animal is seen at Cutimbo with the same splayed claws and the same powerful shoulders, while the tail instead of being bent to its left is bent to its right.
At both Göbekli Tepe and Cutimbo, reliefs of salamanders and of serpents are found. The style of execution in all cases is very similar.
At about the level of the genitals of the so-called “Totem Pole” of Göbekli Tepe, a small head and two arms protrude. The head has a determined look, with prominent brows. The long fingers of the hands almost meet. The posture is that of a man leaning down through the stone and playing a drum. This is also the posture of two figures at Cutimbo, who emerge from a large convex block on one of the circular towers. They have the same determined features and prominent brow ridges as the figure on the “Totem Pole.”
The two serpents on the side of the “Totem Pole” have peculiarly large heads, making them look almost like sperm. So, too, does the serpent that emerges from the dark narrow entrance of the Temple of the Moon above Cuzco.
Lions feature in the reliefs at Göbekli Tepe, pumas feature in the reliefs at Cutimbo and again the manner of representation is similar.
I don’t know what to make of these similarities. Just coincidences? Very likely. Even so they go on.
City of Viracocha
It’s quite a trial crossing the land border from Peru into Bolivia through a series of bureaucratic hurdles and long queues, but close by is the charmingly-named town of Copacabana and a comfortable hotel overlooking Lake Titicaca. If we had more time we’d visit the Islands of the Sun and Moon by boat from here; but we’ve been to them often before and they’re not our target on this trip. It’s Tiahuanaco up on the Altiplano at 12,800 feet, near the southeastern shore of the giant lake, that we’re keen to get back to.
Orthodox archaeologists date Tiahuanaco to the period between 1580 BC and AD 724, but in both Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror I argued that it might ultimately prove to be many thousands of years older than that. Up to now less than two percent of the site has been excavated and I think it likely that further excavations will force a change of the archaeological paradigm. It is perhaps a sign of things to come that on 27 March 2015 Bolivia’s Tiahuanaco Archeological Research Center reported that a survey with ground-penetrating radar had revealed the existence of a complete “buried pyramid” in a previously unexcavated area of the site, together with “a number of underground anomalies” that are thought to be monoliths. A five-year plan of excavation to learn more about these mysterious structures has now been launched.23
Figure 64
Since I’ve already described Tiahuanaco at length in my previous books, it seems superfluous to repeat those descriptions here. What’s new for me on my October 2013 visit is a much closer look at the machine-age precision of the megaliths littered around the immense platform of the Puma Punku, and the truly intricate manner in which so much of the stone has been cut—molded, I think Jesus Gamarra would say. As at the Coricancha, I come across several megaliths that resemble circuit boards stripped of their circuits. There are others with cross-shaped indentations that look as though they
were part of some contraption—as though perhaps they were to receive the ends of metal axles, or connecting pieces that have long since oxidized or been carried off by looters.
Particularly striking, because I’ve missed them before on all previous visits, are a couple of rows of massive andesite blocks all identical, as though stamped out of some mold, and all shaped like the letter “H.” The comparison with the “H” motif at Göbekli Tepe, on the belts of the pillars, for example, is irresistible even if it is just another coincidence (see Plates 75 and 76).
Figure 65: The principal structures of Tiahuanaco.
Figure 66: Above artist’s impression of Toxodon. Below the imagery on the pillar in the semi-subterranean temple at Tiahuanaco (left, photograph; right, highlighted).
Then there’s the pillar statue in the semi-subterranean temple at Tiahuanaco. Like the Totem Pole of Göbekli Tepe, it is anthropomorphic. Like the Totem Pole at Göbekli Tepe, it has serpents writhing up its side. Like the Totem Pole at Göbekli Tepe, the long fingers of its hands almost meet in front of its body. The face is human not animal, however, and it’s heavily bearded. Nonetheless, the figure of an animal is carved on the side of its head and this animal resembles no known species more closely than it does Toxodon (see illustration above), a sort of New World rhino that went extinct during the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. This isn’t pareidolia—the figure is definitely there. So there’s only one question—and it’s difficult to answer: is this a depiction of Toxodon, or is it some creature of the artist’s imagination?
I move on into the Kalasasaya, the huge open rectangle, bounded by megalithic walls, that appears to have been the central ceremonial area of ancient Tiahuanaco. On the monolithic Gateway of the Sun is carved the image of another elephant with tusks and trunk, like the elephant sculpted into the living bedrock of the Temple of the Moon near Sacsayhuaman. This Tiahuanaco “elephant” has been dismissed by critics as merely the heads of two condors side by side, but if that is the case, then the image on the matching—mirror—side of the Gateway is puzzling (see illustration below), since it definitely shows two condors side by side yet is different from the elephant relief.
If it was modeled from nature it doesn’t have to be that old—Cuvieronius, as noted earlier, survived in South America until 6,000 years ago. On the other hand, most related mastodon species went extinct during the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
Figure 67: An elephant on the Gateway of the Sun? Or just two condors side by side?
The Kalaysasaya is a huge, largely empty, open space. But there are two statues here that I want to take another look at—the Ponce Monolith, named after Carlos Ponce Sanginés, the “godfather” of Bolivian archaeology, and El Fraile (“the Friar”) a smaller, slightly different version done in the same general style.
What’s striking about both of them are the hand positions, with the fingers almost meeting across the belly—virtually identical to the hand positions on the Göbekli Tepi pillars or on the Totem Pole. However, the Tiahuanaco figures, like the Mesopotamian Apkallus, carry objects in their hands—not a cone and a bucket but, as archaeologist and ethnobotanist Constantino Manuel Torres has demonstrated, snuff trays for the consumption of hallucinogenic DMT powders from the Amazon.24
It’s a reminder, even up here in the cold, austere highlands of the Altiplano, that the Amazon with its riotous, exuberant life is not far away. When we are looking for the remnants of a lost civilization that once perhaps spanned the globe, it might not be the first place we would think of, but its dense jungles hide so much and recent clearances have revealed the remains of ancient cities, megaliths, gigantic earthworks and soils enriched by some mysterious process that keeps them fertile for thousands of years.25
What is also clear is that a legacy of high-level scientific skills, inherited from somewhere, was passed down through generation after generation of shamans. The making of a psychedelic, DMT-containing brew—Ayahuasca—from two jungle plants, neither of which is an orally active psychedelic in its own right, is an astonishing pharmacological achievement when we remember that there are 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon. Likewise a nerve poison like Curare, which has eleven different ingredients and which produces lethal fumes during preparation, is not something that can be dreamed up overnight, but requires the application of a thoroughly worked-out science.
Another point of interest about the Tiahuanaco monoliths is that their garments from the waist down are patterned in the form of fish scales. Here, too, is a parallel to the Apkallus—the bearded, “fish-garbed figures” who brought high civilization to Mesopotamia and whose mysteries we explored in earlier chapters. Nor is it as though bearded figures are missing from the repertoire of Tiahuanaco. Two have survived, and one on the pillar in the semi-subterranean temple has been identified since time immemorial with the great civilizing deity Kon-Tiki Viracocha, who I wrote about at length in my previous books and who is described in multiple myths and traditions as being white skinned and bearded. Garcilaso Inca de La Vega, who lived through the last years of the conquest and grew up in Cuzco, wrote that Viracocha:
wore a thick beard—whereas the Indians are clean shaven—and his robe came down to the ground, while that of the Incas came only to their knees; this is why the Peruvian people called the Spanish “Viracochas” the minute they saw them … The Indians had no difficulty believing that the Spaniards were all the sons of God …26
In other words, with their white skins and beards the Spanish fitted an ancient tribal memory, passed down from generation to generation, of civilizing heroes who had come to the Andes in remote prehistory and taught the people there the skills of agriculture, architecture and engineering.
And what about Kon-Tiki Viracocha himself? What happened to him?
It seems after a civilizing mission across the Americas:
His travels took him to Manta (Ecuador) from where he crossed the Pacific Ocean, walking on the water.27
I am not going to repeat here the stories and traditions of Viracocha that I reported in my previous books, but he is the Osiris and the Quetzalcoatl of the Andes who comes in a time of darkness, after a great flood, bringing the gifts of civilization.
That he should leave eventually, and that he should do so by some high-tech means, “walking on the water” across the Pacific Ocean, is intriguing.
Let’s follow him and see where he might have gone …
Chapter 18
Ocean
According to the most ancient traditions of Mesopotamia, humanity was created at the “navel of the earth,” in uzu (flesh), sar (bond), ki (place, earth).1 In the Rig Veda, the most ancient scripture of India, the universe was born and developed “from a core, a central point.”2 Bearing markings that Jesus Gamarra would instantly nominate as belonging to the oldest, Hanan Pacha, style of the Andes, the Shetiyah—Foundation Stone—of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, now the “rock” of the Dome of the Rock (see Chapter Twelve), is considered to be “the center of the earth.”3 Indeed this notion that there are certain primordial centers of creation from which all else grows is a global theme of ancient religion and mythology:
The Most Holy One created the world like an embryo. As the embryo grows from the navel, so God began to create the world by the navel and from there it spread out in all directions.4
In the Greek myth of the universal Deluge, sent by Zeus to punish mankind for wickedness, the only survivors are Deucalion and Pyrrha. Their Ark comes to rest on Mount Parnassus, high above Delphi, a site regarded throughout classical antiquity as the “navel of the earth.”5 Just as Heliopolis in Egypt possessed the sacred Benben, a betyl stone fallen from heaven (see Chapter Eleven), so too Delphi possessed a betyl, nominated as its omphalos, or “navel stone.” It was specifically identified in Greek mythology as the stone which had been fed to the monstrous time-god Kronos—who devoured his own children—in place of the infant Zeus. When Zeus grew to manhood,
he took revenge on Kronos, “driving him from the sky to the very depths of the universe” after first—in imagery that calls to mind the debris stream of a comet—forcing him to vomit up the stone.6 “It landed in the exact center of the world, in the shrine at Delphi.”7
We saw in the last chapter that the name of Cuzco, the megalithic city in the Peruvian Andes, means “the navel of the earth.” More than 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) to the southwest, across the Pacific Ocean, the ancient name of Easter Island, Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, also means “the navel of the earth”8—which in turn has affinities to the ancient name of Tiahuanaco, Taypicala, “the stone at the center.”9 Indeed, on the edge of Easter Island’s La Perouse Bay there is a mysterious spherical, carefully-tooled stone called Te-Pito-Kura—the “golden navel stone”—which is regarded as the navel of the island itself.10
Traditions state that there was once a time when “great magicians” used this stone to focus their mana power—literally “sorcery”—to make the Moai, the famous megalithic statues of the island “walk” from the quarry to the places where they were to be set up.11 An almost identical notion is preserved among the indigenous Aymara of Bolivia, who have lived in the vicinity of Tiahuanaco since time immemorial. They state that the mysterious city with its own extraordinary megalithic statues was built by magic in a single night and that “the stones came down of their own accord, or at the sound of a trumpet, from the mountain quarries and took up their proper positions at the site.”12
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