The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  Atawallpa, after he had established himself on the throne, investigated the Spaniards’ settlement and concluded that they posed little problem. In the old days of The Inca, this might have been true. But Atawallpa chose to negotiate with the barbarians and so was captured and held for ransom. When the Spaniards saw the amount of gold available to The Inca, they killed him, launched a palace revolt, and marched on Cusco in the name of Atawallpa’s son Manku. The Spaniards played on the divisions caused by the civil war, which along with disease had decimated the army. By 1533, they were in control of Cusco. Their puppet ruler Manku revolted in 1536, but by then it was too late. Too many Spaniards and too many guns faced a declining population and a disorganized army, and the result was disastrous to The Inca.

  Manku retreated to Machu Picchu, far into the Andes, and formed his own neo-Inca state, which survived for another two centuries. Interestingly enough, the Torreon, a now roofless temple structure at Machu Picchu, retains the traditional northwest–southeast alignment so that when the Pleiades rise in one window, Scorpio sets in the opposite. Even in the midst of disaster, the Incas clung to their belief in the importance of the galactic axis.

  The Incas had mined the gold that Pizarro so coveted, and they used it in ceremonial ornaments and, hammered into large plates, to line the walls of their palaces and their great religious centers. The most famous of these was the above-mentioned Corincancha in Cusco. The original temple has disappeared and a cathedral has been built over the old Incan foundation. In fact, most of the city of Cusco is built on Incan foundations that are hundreds of years old. With no mortar or concrete, these people were able to build stone edifices that have stood the test of time.

  The cathedral of Santa Domingo in Cusco is a decrepit and dark place. The magnificent building, the Corincancha that this cathedral replaced, can only be imagined now. In addition to the gold plates on its walls, stories say that a huge circular object of pure gold called “the Disk of the Sun” sat in its center. This disk was said to represent the central sun of the cosmos and was many inches thick, covered with precious jewels. It is said that when it reflected the light of the sun, it transformed it. The Incas believed that the light became so pure that the people in the temple, particularly The Inca himself, seated in his golden niche, were physically transformed.

  The original Incan temple was much bigger than the cathedral that occupies the present spot. The Temple of the Sun was connected to the Temple of the Moon and the complex of Sacsayhuaman by a series of underground tunnels. After the conquest, Pizarro heard rumors from the remaining Incas that there was a vast subterranean tunnel system under the Andes. He had heard from the Indians that these tunnels were filled with gold and jewels hidden by Atawallpa’s queen. The Incan queen had successfully hidden all of the tunnel openings from the Spanish.

  Cieza de Leon states in his Chronicle of Peru, written in 1555: “If, when the Spaniards entered Cusco they had not committed other tricks, and had not so soon executed their cruelty in putting Atahualpha to death, I do not know how many great ships would have been required to bring such treasures to old Spain, as is now lost in the bowels of the earth and will remain so because those who buried it are now dead.”41 Perhaps the most aggravating part about any examination of the history of Peru is that the Spanish wrote it all. Pizarro and his band of men were brilliant at the goals of genocide, murder, and treachery. The voices of the Incas have been stilled and their secrets forgotten in the sudden strike of Spanish sword, gun, and horse. But the rumors of vast tunnels persist, inflamed by the legends of lost Incan gold, and perhaps even the Disk of the Sun itself, which lies waiting to be found in some cave in the Andes.

  The ancient city of Cusco was laid out in the shape of a puma, a South American mountain lion (see fig. 12.15); this shape was made more pronounced by Incan emperor Pachacuti’s rebuilding around 1440 C.E. The main part of the old city lies within the animal’s torso, but the face of the puma and the nose are both part of the Sacsayhuaman complex, which towers high above the city. What is left today of the giant stonework of Sacsayhuaman tells only a tiny part of the story of these magnificent monuments and the unknown people who built them. At its height, the complex at Sacsayhuaman was enormous, with three tall towers and room for over five thousand defenders in its labyrinth of rooms. But it is only in the mind’s eye that one can reconstruct the magnificence of this center, built to mark the origin of the sacred river, channeled through stone conduits and tunnels into the city. There are several tunnel openings still to be seen in the complex. But they appear to have been sealed to depths of twenty to thirty feet.

  In his book Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins, William Montgomery McGovern writes about Sacsayhuaman: “Near this fortress [Sacsayhuaman] are several strange caverns reaching far into the earth. Here altars to the Gods of the Deep were carved out of the living rock, and the many bones scattered about tell of the sacrifices which were offered up here.”42

  There are caves—just as the inscription on the cross at Hendaye suggests—in the cliffs above Sacsayhuaman, at one of the highest places above Cusco. Although they are natural, it is obvious that humans have carved out major parts of the interior of the caves. Not much is known about these caves except that the Quechua have used them for ancient ceremonies for centuries. No one knows who carved these caves, and as far as we can tell, no one has done any archaeological study of them. They could very likely be places of refuge from an ancient catastrophe.

  The area around the caves is as interesting as the caves themselves. Nearby are the ancient remains of a small city. This extremely old site is sculpted and carved in such a way as to reveal that it was once a ceremonial or spiritual center. Avenues and the foundations of buildings are laid out on the ground. Water pipes made of clay, for plumbing, are still visible.

  Less obvious are the number of sculpted animal effigies that have been carved into the rocks. The figures of snakes, pumas, and monkeys are still discernible despite erosion. These carvings and statues are so old that many of the features have disappeared under the forces of wind and rain. Only faint traces of this once magnificent site remain.

  The cross at Hendaye, which is over three thousand miles and an ocean away, points to a cave in Cusco, Peru. Once the trek is made and enough questions are asked of the local Quechua population, this fabulous and forgotten site becomes more interesting. One has to wonder if the caves are not an homage, or tribute, to the people who used them to survive the great catastrophe. Are they the ones who built the gigantic tunnel system that allegedly runs under the Andes?

  One thing is for sure: The caves of Cusco referred to in the inscription on the Hendaye cross do exist. And it is also true that these same caves are held sacred by the local remnants of the Incas by virtue of the large piles of melted ceremonial candle wax that are found everywhere inside the caves. Our guide, a local Quechuan, told us that there are many ceremonies in these caves at night. He also said that the caves, although unknown to foreign tourists, are quite well known to the Quechua people. Many of the local Indians make pilgrimages to these caves at least once a year.

  The Inti Raymi, or Festival of the Sun, is still celebrated every year at Sacsayhuaman on the eve of June 23, the winter solstice. What until the 1940s had been a small affair has now grown into a three-day festival based around a mock “Inca” and a procession from the square in front of the cathedral, the site of the Corincancha, the Sun Temple, to Sacsayhuaman, with its caves and underground water source.

  When he was asked why these caves are so important, our Quechua guide shrugged his shoulders and said: “White people do not care for the earth in the same way that we do. When we grow our food, we always ask mother earth for help. These caves are inside our mother. They are closer to her soul. So we go there to talk to her and to ask for her help.”43

  Several of our questions are answered by the discovery of these caves. They are very old, and they still hold a deep significance to the local people. They are in old Cusco, the hea
d of Cusco’s puma. In fact, the caves, the sacred river’s origin, and the ceremonial complex are near the tip of the nose of the puma, as if the animal were pointing his entire body at them. This site suggests Mevryl’s cat-man’s-breath image that he attributes to Kathmandu in Nepal. It actually fits the pattern on the ground in Cusco much more closely.

  But we still had one clue from the Hendaye cross left to check. The inscription, and Dr. del Prado, had told us of a strange cross at Urcos, about twenty miles southeast of Cusco. The last piece of the mystery was the secret of this second cross.

  Urcos is a small and poverty-stricken town sixteen miles southeast of Cusco, remembered by history only for its role in Manku’s Incan rebellion. Every Sunday the local farmers make their way down the steep mountain paths with sacks of freshly picked fruits, vegetables, and coca leaves to sell at the outdoor market. There is a beautiful mountain lake next to the town. The cross at Urcos sits at the mouth of this body of water, appropriately called Lake Urcos.

  No one knows who built the cross at Urcos. It is prominently displayed, sitting on top of a fifteen-foot-high stone pile (see fig. 12.16). One must walk up the sides of the steep pile to reach the cross that sits on top. The cross that is now on this promontory, however, is not the original one.

  In perhaps the most heartbreaking part of our investigation, we found that the original cross at Urcos was missing. The only thing left was its base, to which a newer cross had been affixed. The base of the original cross is badly eroded and must be centuries old. The new cross is recent, perhaps less than fifty years old, and unadorned. No one knows how the old cross was broken or who took it away.

  The locals say that there has always been a cross there. They say that the symbol of the cross was extremely important to their culture. Indeed crosses, as we saw in the imagery of the Four United Quarters, were a key concept in Incan tradition. In addition, Urcos falls on the southeast–northwest, galactic-center–galactic-edge alignment along the sight line from the ancient stone pillar in the main square of Cusco toward the bright star Alpha Crucis of the Southern Cross.

  Beyond these tantalizing hints, however, the information—if there ever was any—on the cross at Urcos has been destroyed. Nonetheless, its location and alignment do provide us with a valuable clue. The ushnu, the stone pillar in the main square of Cusco, defines the solar sight lines of the solstices and equinoxes along the reconstructed line of the Huatanay River toward Alpha Crucis. This alignment leads to the valley gate at Rumicola and beyond to the cross at Urcos, suggesting that the cross was somehow associated with the Southern Cross of stars in the sky, a grouping that the Incas obviously found as fascinating as the movements of the sun.

  Figure 12.16. The cross at Urcos, Peru, sits upon an ancient base. (Photo by Jay Weidner)

  The message of the Hendaye cross comes down to “Hail, X (cross) Urcos.” Fulcanelli alerted us, through green-language wordplay and anagrams, to the importance of this point. Assuming that Urcos is indeed the location and that its alignment is significant, rather than any lost inscription that may have clarified the matter, we are left with another mystery. How could a constellation all but ignored by the Greeks and not even observable from northern Europe provide the key to the place of refuge?

  Interestingly enough, the Greeks thought of the four stars of the Southern Cross as part of the Centaur, the constellation just above it. The constellation of four bright stars that is recognizably a cross straddles the Milky Way, a full four degrees wide at that point, and its vertical axis through Alpha Crucis points to the southern celestial pole. The horizontal axis points toward the galactic center at the cusp of Scorpio/Sagittarius, making it a perfect astral marker of the cosmic Great Cross and the Cube of Space.

  The ability to observe the Southern Cross, and to successfully make calculations based on it, would inevitably lead to an understanding of both precession and the galactic alignments resulting from it. Owing to the motion of precession on the celestial poles, the constellations appear to rise and fall in the sky over vast periods of time. This can be seen best by observing Orion, located on the celestial equator, which therefore makes it an excellent marker for precessional motion as well. Like Orion, precessional motion causes the Southern Cross to rise and fall in the sky, as shown in figure 12.17. For roughly one-eighth of a precessional cycle, approximately three thousand years, the Southern Cross is visible above thirty degrees north latitude. In ancient Egypt during the New Kingdom, the Southern Cross was clearly visible as far north as Jerusalem.

  At the latitude of Luxor, the source of the curious rose-cross ankhs of the Coptic Museum, the Southern Cross would have been high in the southern sky at the winter solstice. As the first rays of the rising sun flooded the inner sanctum of Karnak Temple, the Southern Cross would still have been faintly visible to the south, as the Milky Way in the sky matched almost exactly the course of the Nile. Just as the alignments at the Corincancha united the sight line to the Southern Cross and the midwinter sunrise, so too does the great temple of Amun at Karnak (see fig. 12.18). Unlike the Corincancha in the southern hemisphere, Karnak over time saw the celestial ankh slide down the sky until, soon after Egypt itself ceased to exist, the Southern Cross slipped below the horizon.

  Figure 12.17. The Southern Cross never dips below the horizon in the southern hemisphere although its neighbor Gamma Centauri does, showing how the Southern Cross is circumpolar for that hemisphere.

  From Jerusalem, this celestial event occurred over the winter of 2 C.E. It is possible that event was the source of the “Jesus” myths, with their blend of alchemy and eschatology. The “earthing” of the cross, the place where the Southern Cross touched the horizon, could easily be seen as the “birthplace” of a messianic figure. In the first century C.E., the Southern Cross could still be seen from Luxor and Cairo, so its appearance with a bright star on top of it could easily became a “rose” ankh, connecting the ancient mystery tradition and the new messiah figure in one powerful symbol.

  Figure 12.18. The solstice alignment of the temple of Amun at Karnak, showing the unification of the solstice axis and the axis to the setting of the Southern Cross, circa 1600 B.C.E.

  Indeed, the key piece of information hidden in the ancient star charts preserved by the Arab scholars of Cairo and studied with such interest by Pope Sylvester II may in fact be the existence of the Southern Cross, with its rose-ankh appearance and the ability to use this constellation to precisely define the Great Cross of the galactic alignment. The medieval Italian poet Dante, in his Purgatory, refers to the Southern Cross, now lost to northern eyes, leaving the northern hemisphere “famished and widowed.” The reappearance of this information in observations by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, and perhaps some information from Incan sources, seemed to have provoked a flurry of esoteric activity in Europe; the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Rosicrucians are two that come to mind.

  Ultimately, the meaning of both crosses, Hendaye and Urcos, points to a metaphysical place of refuge, although it is just possible that the caves of Cusco did help survivors of a previous catastrophe. Even the surviving Quechua shamans agree that something more profound is involved this time around.

  Alberto Villoldo has been a student of Quechua shamanism for over twenty years. He discovered that the traditions of the shamans of Peru contained astonishing information. The goal of this shamanic wisdom seems to be the attainment of a luminous body of light. These same shamans told Villoldo, and the rest of the planet on their 1996 tour of the Americas, that the world was truly coming to an end.44 They also told Villoldo that the planet would be transformed over the next few years in ways beyond our current ability to comprehend. These shamans referred to the time period from 2002 to 2012 as “Pachacuti,” the time when everything is turned upside down and reality is restructured.

  Villoldo also speaks of a possible break between Homo sapiens and what he refers to as an emerging new species, Homo luminous. Perhaps the path toward the apocalypse and the path
toward spiritual liberation are the same. The shamans in Peru possess the same nuggets of information as are encoded in the cross at Hendaye, the cathedrals in Europe, and the temple at Karnak, and that constitute the secret of alchemy.

  The path toward extinction is very likely also the path toward a more enlightened state. As a species begins to collectively realize that it is dying out, an inner mechanism, possibly built into the blueprint of the DNA, begins to create the next level of being, a new species.45 Alchemy and the secret of esoteric philosophy are the pathways to Homo luminous.

  Alchemy is nothing less than the science of how our species evolves. We can see traces of this fact in the ancient Andean civilizations from Tiahuanaco to the Cusco of the Incas, but unfortunately we have no written records, no literature, to allow us to flesh out these celestial beliefs within a cultural framework. For that we must turn to ancient Egypt and its sacred science of immortality.

  I know, myself, that the goddess Isis is the mother of all things . . . and that she alone can bestow Revelation and Initiation.

  —LE MYSTÈRE DES CATHÉDRALES

  THIRTEEN

  FROM ATLANTIS TO SHAMBHALA

  THE CROSS AND THE MYTH OF TIME

  When we began our quest that chilly spring morning standing in front of the cross in the midst of Hendaye’s market day, we had no idea of the strange pathways down which it would lead us. We started with a series of mysteries—the mystery of Fulcanelli, the mystery of the cathedrals, the mystery of alchemy and its connection with chiliasm and eschatology, the mystery of the Hendaye cross and its message of an approaching catastrophe—and the closer we came to solving these mysteries, the greater the overall mystery became.