by Jay Weidner
OCRU X AVEC
PECU NICA
This is not much better, but we are making progress. The next step is to reciprocate the transformation and turn the X into an S:
OCRU S AVEC
PECU NICA
Now we have a simple anagram. Exchange the R and the C on the left side of the S and rearrange the right side with a few simple transpositions and we have:
OCCU S CAVE
PERU INCA
Then, finally, do the same transposition of the top word on the left side, including the extra S, and the meaning becomes clear:
CUSCO CAVE
PERU INCA
which can be transposed and written as:
INCA CAVE, CUSCO, PERU
While this is clear and simple in several languages, we still haven’t found the importance of the displaced S. Merely changing it to a C in an anagram doesn’t tell us why it is important. But there is more. There is another message encrypted within the inscription. This additional message is another interpretation of the Latin inscription’s place of refuge and uses the displaced S to point to a specific place, the “single space.” It uses only the top line of the inscription as originally written:
OCRU X AVES
Taking the S off the end of the phrase and placing it at the beginning is the only major shift in the letters. It then reads:
SOCRU X AVE
Now we have three words, read outward from the central cross. The first word is AVE; the second word is the X, or cross; the third word must be read backward. So instead of SOCRU the word now reads as URCOS. The line now looks like this:
AVE X URCOS
or
HAIL (TO THE CROSS AT) URCOS
which seemed rather obscure. Consulting a world atlas provided the answer. Looking closely at a map of Peru, we found a town called Urcos, in the Peruvian province of Cusco, only about twenty miles from Cusco city itself. The inscription’s message is pointing to the city or the province of Cusco, Peru. It is also pointing to a cross that is in, or near, the town of Urcos. The conclusion must be that this is our place of refuge.
Fulcanelli mentions the Inca briefly in his discussion of the green language, but gives us no other obvious pointers. Mevryl mentions the Andes, but avoids any other suggestion of South America or its cultures. Van Buren, in her Refuge of the Apocalypse, thinks, on very slim evidence, that the place of refuge is Rennes-le-Château, not Peru.
The Chronicle of Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, written by one of Pizarro’s conquistadors, presented us with an incredible coincidence concerning the images on the cross at Hendaye. As shown in figure 12.7, one of the very first drawings in de Ayala’s chronicle of Peru is called “The Symbols of the Incas: The Sun; the Moon; Lightning; the hill of Guanacaure and the caves at Pacarictambo.” These four symbols are astonishingly close to the four symbols found on the pedestal at Hendaye.
Mevryl implies that the A’s represent mountains with caves in them in either the South American Andes or the Himalayas, which suggests “the caves at Pacarictambo” in de Ayala’s sketch. The other three panels correspond directly to the sun, moon, and star images at Hendaye. The juxtaposition of the images in de Ayala’s sketch and the cross at Hendaye is astonishing.
Figure 12.7. Title page from the sixteenth-century Chronicle of Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, showing the close link to the symbols on the Hendaye cross.
A few months after deciphering the message of the inscription, we met with Dr. Juan del Prado, professor of anthropology at Cusco University. He was touring the United States with William Sullivan, who had recently published the groundbreaking book The Secret of the Incas. We asked about the town of Urcos, and the possibility of a cross of some kind being there. Del Prado looked surprised and told us, “There is a strange cross in Urcos. No one knows where it came from or who built it.”
Right then and there, we realized that a trip to Peru was the next step in our investigation.
ATLANTIS IN THE ANDES
It is hard to determine exactly when the Old World “discovered” the New. Columbus’s voyages mark a watershed only of publicity and royal exploitation. Given that he seemed to know exactly where he was going and had fairly accurate sailing directions on how to get there, discovery is hardly the correct term. In fact, the farther back we go, the less of a distinction we find between the Old World and the New. One of the prime mysteries of the Bronze Age, roughly 3000 B.C.E. to around 800 B.C.E., is where did the enormous amounts of copper needed to plate whole buildings in bronze, such as we find in Minoan Crete, come from? As shown in figure 12.8B, the tin came from England and the coast of Cornwall, but there are no significant copper deposits in Europe or the Mediterranean basin. So where did all this copper come from?
In the five hundred years before Columbus, we find evidence of Vikings, Scottish and Welsh princes, and Irish monks all traveling to the New World. Indeed, the Vikings created a colony in North America. A twelfth-century pope even appointed a bishop to Vinland, and the remains of his church can still be seen today in Newport, Rhode Island. The Viking sagas show that they penetrated into the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes. The sagas also refer to the inhabitants of what is now New England as being Irish, labeling the region White Man’s Land.19
In fact, New England has many Celtic and even megalithic-type stone structures whose closest analogs are found in Ireland and the west coast of Britain. Such structures are found in odd places up and down the East Coast, and differ greatly from the clearly indigenous Hopewell and Adena cultures in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.20 In the Grave Creek burial mound in West Virginia, a clay tablet was found with an inscription in ancient Celto-Iberian exchanging greetings from the queen of a Celtic culture to the east and the king of the local Hopewell nation. This tablet has been dated to around 1000 B.C.E. One must assume that the copper trade was still viable at that point, since the Hopewell federation contained many sources of easily accessible copper.21
Figure 12.8. A. the prevailing Atlantic Ocean currents; B. map of ancient trade routes.
A megalithic or Celtic presence in North America seems indisputable given the evidence of the structures and inscriptions on the ground. But the Celts were not the only visitors to the New World. The Egyptians may have traveled in the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. as far as Australia, where the cartouche of Rajedef, the son of Khufu of Great Pyramid fame, has been found carved in stone in the desert outback.22 By the time of Hatshepsut, a millennium later, regular trade voyages were under way to places that remain unknown to this day. One of these was the “land of the copper mountain,” as the inscription reads on the porch of her mortuary tomb on the west bank at Luxor. The fact that cocaine and nicotine residue has been found in New Kingdom mummies suggests that this trade was in fact with South America.
Soon after Hatshepsut’s reign, New Kingdom Egypt lost its overseas trade to the up-and-coming Sea Peoples, the Phoenicians and the Minoans. By the time the queen of the Celtic east in America was conducting her negotiations with the Hopewell magnate, a Phoenician was sure to be the middleman in the exchange. The Phoenician trading culture began to fade with the arrival of iron-equipped Aryans, such as the Doric Greeks, a century or so after the turn of the first millennium B.C.E. These are the Greeks of our history books, brash barbarians eager to acquire the knowledge of the ancient world.
The Greek connection brings us to Plato and his story of Atlantis. In his dialogues, Plato introduces the idea of an ancient civilization that died out in a great catastrophe roughly nine thousand years before the Golden Age of ancient Greece. In most of these dialogues it is hard to tell which are Socrates’ ideas and which are Plato’s, but the Atlantis story is solidly attributed. In the Critias, it is Plato’s friend of the same name who relates the tale. He claims to have heard it from his grandfather, who learned it from the great Solon, one of Greece’s Seven Sages, who heard it from an Egyptian priest of Sais named Sonchis. Thus, in the dialogue the story has a clear and prominent lineage.
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Plato insisted four times that the story was true. He was quite definite about it. “The fact that it is not invented fable but a genuine history is all important,” he tells us in the Timaeus. The most reasonable explanation is that Solon gave an accurate account of what his Egyptian source told him. From this, we would be wise to consider Atlantis a genuine Egyptian tradition, rather than a philosophical fable. Chances are, Atlantis really existed and it wasn’t Minoan Crete, although they may have had “Atlantean” connections.
But where was Atlantis? Plato tells us “in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules [the Straits of Gilbraltar].” This seems clear enough, but modern knowledge of sea-floor spreading and continental drift suggests that no extra island of any size is possible in the mid-Atlantic. The sunken continent idea seems improbable, even though Plato insists that Atlantis disappeared in a single day and night of catastrophe.
Modern consensus among archaeologists and scholars is that if there is any truth to Plato’s tale, then it must be referring to the explosion of Thera, an island in the Aegean Sea, around 1500 B.C.E.23 Along with ignoring Plato’s precise location and dating, this theory has massive problems on its own terms. Dramatic as the destruction of Thera was, its loss hardly affected life in the Mediterranean. The Minoans did not fade out over night; their main cities were not abandoned or destroyed for another hundred years. The Phoenicians were untouched, and their expansion of trade routes increased in the centuries after Thera’s explosion. Thera was a disaster, and its destruction was sudden, but it was hardly the fall of Atlantis.
Other theorists have located Atlantis in places as fanciful as Ceylon and as Heligoland in the Baltic Sea. Ignatius Donnelly, a nineteenth-century American politician and lecturer, wrote two massive books on Atlantis and the various catastrophes of prehistory. Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, while postulating a mid-Atlantic island and other outdated ideas, comes closest to being the textbook on Atlantis. Some of Donnelly’s other suggestions are intriguing, however, as when he speculates that the end of the Ice Age coincides perfectly with Plato’s dates for the destruction of Atlantis.
While Donnelly and the other mid-Atlantic theorists are right to take Plato literally—“in front of the pillars of Hercules” is clear and simple enough—their maps mislead them. If we look at a standard wall map of the world, we see only open ocean in front of the Pillars of Hercules. There is certainly room in the mid-Atlantic for a very large island or continent. But if we look at a polar projection map or a globe, such as the one shown in figure 12.9, we notice something right away. There already is a large island continent in front of the Pillars. It’s called South America.
Figure 12.9. Polar projection of a world map showing Atlantis/South America opposite the Strait of Gibraltar.
Plato tells us “in a single day of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea.” Given the evidence of modern geology, it is hard to conceive of how an entire continent, or even a very large island, could become completely submerged beneath the ocean. Even extreme theories, such as crustal displacement, can’t account for a complete disappearance. We would do better to interpret Plato’s statement as being a description of a vast tidal wave that brought the depths of the sea to Atlantis than to insist on a literal sunken continent.
With that in mind, we turned to South America with new interest. Did it, in any significant way, fit Plato’s description? Plato says that Atlantis was larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined, suggesting an accessible coastline of over a thousand miles. South America is the only candidate, including mythical mid-Atlantic islands, that fits these criteria. He goes on to say that Atlantis “was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent, which surrounds the true Ocean.”24 However one reads Plato’s account, it is quite startling and reveals that whoever told Solon originally knew much more of the true geography of the planet than he should have. Let us merely note that this description clearly could apply to South America. Evidence has also been found of ancient visits to the Andean coast from Japan and China.
In addition, South America has both advanced civilizations and evidence of their catastrophic destruction. On the shore of Lake Titicaca, high in the Peruvian Andes, stands the mysterious ancient city of Tiahuanaco, built, according to tradition, by the Andean culture hero Viracocha. Viracocha first appeared in Tiahuanaco after a great disaster had destroyed everything. This is from Father Molina in his chronicle Relacion de las fabulas ritos de los Yngas: “They say that in it [the catastrophe] perished all races of men and created things insomuch that the waters rose above the highest mountain peaks in the world. No living thing survived except a man and a woman who remained in a box, and, when the weather subsided, the wind carried them . . . to Tiahuanaco [where] the creator began to raise up the people and the nations that are in that region.”25
Even today, the ruins of Tiahuanaco are impressive. To the early Spanish visitors after the conquest they were truly awe-inspiring. Garcilasco de la Vega, who visited in the mid-sixteenth century, described it this way:
We must now say something about the large and almost incredible buildings of Tiahuanaco. There is an artificial hill, of great height, built on stone foundations so that the earth will not slide. There are gigantic figures carved in stone . . . these are much worn which shows great antiquity. There are walls, the stones of which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put them into place. And there are the remains of strange buildings, the most remarkable being stone portals, hewn out of solid rock; these stand on bases up to 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 6 feet thick. How, and with the use of what tools or implements, massive works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer.26
One of the stone portals de la Vega describes stands at the north-west corner of a vast enclosure known as the Place of Upright Stones. This portal, while an amazing work of art, is also a complex and accurate calendar in stone. The whole complex has been found to be an intricate astronomical observatory, designed perhaps to calculate alignments of solstices and equinoxes with the galactic core and edge. Whatever it was designed to do, its astronomical nature allows us to date its construction with precision.
In the 1920s, Arthur Posnansky, a German-Bolivian scholar who had been investigating Tiahuanaco for almost fifty years, published his monumental, four-volume work, Tiahuanaco: The Cradle of American Man. By using the small differences in the earth’s tilt against the ecliptic and its effect on the sunrise azimuth from century to century, Posnansky calculated a date for the construction of Tiahuanaco.27
The earth’s tilt changes slightly over time, with a length of one and a half precessional cycles between maximum and minimum. As we saw above, Reich postulated that the tilt’s angle is caused by the earth’s spin in the midst of an orgone flow from the center of the galaxy. On the basis of this bobbing or rolling motion, which resembles that of a ship on an ocean, Reich predicted the reason for the narrow, three-degree band of the tilt.28 LaViolette also speculates that the periodic eruptions from the galactic core could create the tilt, and therefore its relationship to precessional motion, Fulcanelli’s “helicoidal track of the sun.”29
Posnansky found that by establishing the solar alignments of key structures that now looked out of true, he could determine the angle of the ecliptic tilt at the time when the structure was built. He found a tilt of 23°8'48". Comparing this angle to the graph developed in 1911 by the International Conference of Ephemerids, we find a corresponding date of around 15,000 B.C.E. Naturally, most orthodox archaeologists found this hard to take.
But Posnansky’s work was checked by a high-powered group of specialists, and at the end of a three-year study it concluded that Posnansky’s observation were correct.30 The sites at Tiahuanaco were indeed laid out to match a tilt-angle-derived date of circa 15,000 B.C.E. This
confirmation did little, however, to change the prevailing archaeological paradigm, and even today glossy picture books of the Andes tell us that Tiahuanaco was built by the pre-Inca civilization around 500 B.C.E. No one has an answer for why anyone would build an observatory with its instruments fourteen and a half millennia out of alignment.
Tiahuanaco was originally built as a port on the shores of Lake Titicaca when the lake was at least one hundred feet deeper and far wider. In that case, Tiahuanaco would have been an island, and the visitor can see the changes in the lake level and shoreline for over 5,000 years of inhabitance. The geological record shows that sometime in the eleventh millennium B.C.E., a sudden natural disaster struck the city. The evidence of this disaster is still visible in the vast chunks of rocks littering the site like so many discarded matchsticks.
Posnansky argued that “this catastrophe was caused by seismic movements which resulted in an overflow of the waters of Lake Titicaca” in a vast flood. He cites the evidence of jumbles of human, animal, and fish bones covered by an alluvial deposit, suggesting that the water descended on Lake Titicaca and Tiahuanaco “in onrushing and unrestrainable torrents.”31
This certainly sounds similar to Plato’s description of the destruction of Atlantis. Curiously enough, it also matches LaViolette’s predictions of the effects of the double catastrophe that would result from a galactic core explosion. And while the initial destruction was sudden, the disasters continued for almost two millennia before the people of Tiahuanaco gave up and departed. This also fits LaViolette’ galactic-core explosion scenario and prediction, both in terms of dating and in terms of the long-felt effects of the core explosion.