Grid of the Gods (26 page)

History and Mythology of the Aztecs: the Codex Chimalpopoca,

Trans. John Bierhorst

6

P
ARADOXES AT
P
UMA
P
UNKHU
:

T
HE
A
NTIQUITY OF
M
AN IN
S
OUTH
A
MERICA, AND
A
NCIENT
M
ACHINING

“Tiahuanaco is a perfect illustration of a certain ‘challenge’ to
all
the theories, namely that it experienced a period of uncanny technological progress, followed by an equally unexplainable period of deterioration.”
  Igor Witkowski
¹

s
outh America is famous for its huge cyclopean walls of massive stones, cut at impossible angles and all fitted together so precisely, and without mortar, that one cannot slide a penknife blade between them; it is famous for ancient ruins, thousands of years old, buried beneath deep jungle in the heart of its murky interior, for strange sites of great antiquity depicting figures on the ground only visible and discernible from the air, and for a megalithic site high in the lofty reaches of the Andes mountains, a site that evidences such paradoxes that any way one slices them, one is in the presence of a great historical and technological mystery, one with crucial bearing on any study of the world Grid.

That site is Tiahuanaco, and its sister site a few miles away, Puma Punkhu, both near the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.

But before looking closer at Tiahuanaco and Puma Punkhu, an overview of the general context — itself bizarre enough — is needed, in order to see just how strange Tiahuanaco really is in the midst of so much other strangeness.

In Peru, for example, it is well known that there are walls of stone, with two distinctive features or periods of construction in evidence. The first, and oldest of these, features large stones with irregular cuts, so precisely joined together, without mortar, that knife blades cannot be inserted into the cracks. The most famous of these is a twelve-sided stone with such irregular cuts as to defy the imagination, yet, it is fitted perfectly to all the surrounding stones.

The Twelve-Sided Stone in an Ancient Wall near Cuzco.
²

Note that all of the stones seen in the above picture are joined together without mortar, and the twelve-sided stone implies a measure of technological sophistication to even cut and fit the stone so precisely with the surrounding blocks. Oftentimes these cyclopean structures are topped with a later layer of construction made according to a more traditional “rectangular brick and mortar” approach typical of Incan construction.

But why would an earlier culture construct walls in such a complex way? One answer, given by engineers, is that in earthquake-prone Peru, the cavitation of an earthquake would certainly shake the walls, but, given the irregularity of many of the stone blocks in these walls, the stones would simply fall more or less back into their original position and the wall would remain intact. The later layers of Incan construction, built according to more conventional models, do not fare so well.

Similar construction principles are found elsewhere in the world, as, for example, in the Gate of the
Nekromonteion
near the ancient city of Ephyra.

The Gate of the Nekromonteion in Greece

Again, the stones are irregularly cut and joined so precisely, that the structure, like the walls in Peru, has survived for centuries in spite of the many earthquakes in the region.

A. The Riddle of Sacsayhuaman
1. Indicators of Advanced Machining Technology

A closer look at the walls near Cuzco — at a place called Sacsayhuaman — are in order to see precisely how intricate this method of construction could be. Indeed, so intricate is it that the sixteenth century Spanish chronicler, Garcilaso de la Vega, described his own shock at discovering the wall, and his deeper shock over its implications:

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 It… construction is made of such (enormous) 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 on top of one another… They are so well fitted together that you could not slip the point of a knife between two of them.
If we think, too, that this incredible work was accomplished without the help of a single machine… how may we explain the fact that these Peruvian Indians were able to split, carve, lift, carry, hoist and lower such enormous blocks of stone, which are more like pieces of a mountain than building stones? Is it too much to say that it represents an even greater enigma than the seven wonders of the world?
³

A glance at a picture will demonstrate the enormity of the mystery, one that has not cleared up in the centuries between de la Vega’s observations and the present.

The Irregular Cut Stones of the Wall of Sacsayhuaman

It is intriguing to note that the notion of machining these massive and irregularly cut stones did not originate in late nineteenth or twentieth century “pseudo-archaeology,” the favorite term of the
academically-blinded, for de la Vega’s observations were made in the sixteenth century, and even
then
, the implications were obvious and apparent. Indeed, one scientist calculated the weight of one of the enormous stone blocks in the wall and concluded it weighed approximately 355 tons, one of the heaviest such cut stones in the world,
⁴
and exceeded in weight only by some of the truly gigantic stones of Baalbek in Lebanon.

Conventional archaeological theory here as elsewhere seems unable, or afraid, to confront the obvious, and attributes these huge constructions to the Incas, who, it maintains, used a “trial and error” approach in cutting and then fitting these stones together so snugly. But having stated this nonsensical position, conventional archaeological theory admits that the Incas, for some inexplicable reason — just as the Egyptians — left no
records
nor even maintained any
traditions
about the construction of these huge walls!
⁵
As Hancock and Faiia point out, the
only
record of the Incas even attempting to move such a huge stone, recorded once again in de la Vega’s
Royal Commentaries of the Incas
, “suggests that they had no experience of the techniques involved — since the attempt ended in disaster.”
⁶

And there is one final, highly significant, fact to be noted about Sacsayhuaman, and that is, that the Inca name means, quite literally, “Satisfied Falcon.” This, notes Hancock and Faiia, connects the site to the unlikely place of Egypt in a more direct way, since the name “Falcon” is a name of Horus, and suggests the secret “mystery school” or elite of Egypt, the
Shemsu-Hor
, the Followers of Horus.
⁷

2.The Incas, the Grid, and Human Sacrifice

The scholar William Sullivan noted that, just as in the Old World, the ancient sites of the New World were used to convey complex astronomical information, in a “language of sacred revelation grounded in empirical observation,”
⁸
but like the Aztecs, the Incas, according to Sullivan, took the symbolism of the heavenly machine, and the individual person’s ascent to it after death, literally, and thus were led “into the dark hell of black magic and human sacrifice.”
⁹
In the Incas’ case, these sacrifices were always offered along the system of their straight roads, roads that were laid out in the customary design of making structures on Earth correspond to celestial constellations,
¹⁰
the magical power thus conjured being concentrated at the place of sacrifice and “transmitted” throughout the empire by means of those roads and “ley lines.”

The contrast is acute and compelling, and again, raises the central mystery:

In Mexico and the Andes astronomically aligned, pyramidal monuments were used as part of the apparatus of sacrifice. In Egypt and Angkor astronomically aligned pyramidal monuments were used as part of a gnostic quest for immortality.
¹¹

In other words, from one and the same mythological cosmology, two entirely
different
practices subsequently emerged. This is a crucial point, and we shall have occasion to return to it in a later chapter, but for the present moment, it is important to understand the significance of this point, for
if
the ancient cosmology examined in conjunction with Angkor Wat and some ancient texts (examined in chapter three) conceals a sophisticated topological metaphor of the physical medium, whose principal property is the creation of information via an “analogical process,” then the implication is that,
in the ancient view, there is a direct relationship between consciousness and that physical medium. It is this direct relationship that leads to the subsequent divergence of the religious practices — one contemplative, the other very murderous and brutal — in connection with it.

3.The “Aerial” Mysteries: The Transition to the Heart of the South American Riddle

There are other mysteries, equally imponderable, to be found in Peru.

The famous Nazca Lines in Peru, for example, are only visible from the air: