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able to count a total of thirty-three angles, every one intermeshed
faultlessly with a matching angle on an adjoining block. There were
massive polygons and perfect ashlars with razor-sharp edges. There were
also natural, unhewn boulders integrated into the overall design at a
number of points. And there were strange and unusual devices such as
the Intihuatana, the ‘hitching post of the sun’. This remarkable artefact
consisted of an elemental chunk of bedrock, grey and crystalline, carved
into a complex geometrical form of curves and angles, incised niches and
external buttresses, surmounted at the centre by a stubby vertical prong.
Jigsaw puzzle
How old is Machu Picchu? The academic consensus is that the city could
not have been built much earlier than the fifteenth century AD.9
Dissenting opinions, however, have from time to time been expressed by
a number of more daring but respectable scholars. In the 1930s, for
example, Rolf Muller, professor of Astronomy at the University of
Potsdam, found convincing evidence to suggest that the most important
features of Machu Picchu possessed significant astronomical alignments.
From these, through the use of detailed mathematical computations
concerning star positions in the sky in previous millennia (which
gradually alter down the epochs as the result of a phenomenon known as
precession of the equinoxes), Muller concluded that the original layout of
the site could only have been accomplished during ‘the era of 4000 BC to
2000 BC’.10
In terms of orthodox history, this was a heresy of audacious
proportions. If Muller was right, Machu Picchu was not a mere 500 but
could be as much as 6000 years old. This would make it significantly
older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt (assuming, of course, that one
accepted the Great Pyramid’s own orthodox dating of around 2500 BC).
There were other dissenting voices concerning the antiquity of Machu
Picchu, and most, like Muller, were convinced that parts of the site were
thousands of years older than the date favoured by orthodox historians.11
Like the big polygonal blocks that made up the walls, this was a notion
9 The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 163.
10 Cited in Zecharia Sitchin, The Lost Realms, Avon Books, New York, 1990, p. 164.
11 Another scholar, Maria Schulten de D'Ebneth, also worked with mathematical methods
(as opposed to historical methods which are heavily speculative and interpretive). Her
objective was to rediscover the ancient grid used to determine Machu Picchu's layout in
relation to the cardinal points. She did this after first establishing the existence of a
central 45° line. In the process she stumbled across something else: ‘The sub-angles
that she calculated between the central 45° line and sites located away from it ...
indicated to her that the earth's tilt ("obliquity") at the time this grid was laid out was
close to 24° o’. This means that the grid was planned (according to her) 5125 years
before her measurements were done in 1953; in other words in 3172 BC.’ The Last
Realms, pp. 204-5.
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that looked as though it might fit with other pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—in
this case the jigsaw puzzle of a past that didn’t quite make sense any
more. Viracocha was part of that same puzzle. All the legends said his
capital had been at Tiahuanaco. The ruins of this great and ancient city
lay across the border in Bolivia, in an area known as the Collao, twelve
miles south of Lake Titicaca.
We could get there, I calculated, in a couple of days, via Lima and La
Paz.
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Chapter 8
The Lake at the Roof of the World
La Paz, the capital city of Bolivia, nestles in the uneven bottom of a
spectacular hole in the ground more than two miles above sea level. This
plunging ravine, thousands of feet deep, was carved in some primeval
age by a tremendous downrush of water that carried with it an abrasive
tide of loose rocks and rubble.
Provided by nature with such an apocalyptic setting, La Paz possesses a
tenements, imposing cathedrals, garish cinemas and hamburger bars
open till late, it generates an atmosphere of quirky intrigue which is
oddly intoxicating. It’s hard going for the pedestrian, however, unless
equipped with lungs like bellows, because the whole of the central
district is built up and down the sides of precipitous hills.
La Paz airport is almost 5000 feet higher than the city itself on the edge
of the Altiplano—the cold, rolling uplands that are the dominant
topographical feature of this region. Santha and I landed there well after
midnight on a delayed flight from Lima. In the draughty arrivals hall we
were offered coca tea in little plastic cups as a prophylactic against
altitude sickness. After considerable delay and exertion, we extracted our
luggage from customs, hailed an ancient American-made taxi, and
clanked and rattled down towards the dim yellow lights of the city far
below.
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Lake Titicaca.
Rumours of a cataclysm
Around four o’clock the next afternoon we set off for Lake Titicaca in a
rented jeep, fought our way through the capital’s incomprehensible
permanent rush-hour traffic-jams, then drove up out of the skyscrapers
and slums into the wide, clear horizons of the Altiplano.
At first, still close to the city, our route took us through a zone of bleak
suburbs and sprawling shantytowns where the sidewalks were lined with
auto-repair shops and scrap yards. The more distance we put between
ourselves and La Paz, however, the more attenuated the settlements
became, until almost all signs of human habitation ceased. The empty,
treeless, undulating savannahs, distantly bordered by the snow-covered
peaks of the Cordillera Real, created an unforgettable spectacle of natural
beauty and power. But there was also a feeling of otherworldliness about
this place, which seemed to float above the clouds like an enchanted
kingdom.
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Although our ultimate destination was Tiahuanaco, we were aiming that
night for the town of Copacabana on a promontory near the southern end
of Lake Titicaca. To reach it we had to cross a neck of water by
improvised car ferry at the fishing town of Tiquine. Then, with dusk
descending, we followed the main highway, now little more than a narrow
and uneven track, up a series of steep hairpin bends and on to the
shoulder of a mountain spur. From this point a contrasting panorama
unfolded: the dark, dark waters of the lake below appeared to lie at the
edge of a limitless ocean drowned in sombre shadows, and yet the
jagged peaks of the snowcapped mountains in the distance were still
drenched in dazzling sunlight.
From the very beginning Lake Titicaca seemed to me a special place. I
knew that it lay some 12,500 feet above sea level, that the frontier
between Peru and Bolivia passed through it, that it covered an area of
3200 square miles and was 138 miles long by about 70 miles wide. I also
knew it was deep, reaching almost 1000 feet in places, and had a
puzzling geological history.
Here are the mysteries, and some of the solutions that have been
proposed:
1 Though now more than two miles above sea level, the area around
Lake Titicaca is littered with millions upon millions of fossilized sea
shells. This suggests that at some stage the whole of the Altiplano was
forced upwards from the sea-bed, perhaps as part of the general
terrestrial rising that formed South America as a whole. In the process
great quantities of ocean water, together with countless myriads of
living marine creatures, were scooped up and suspended among the
Andean ranges.1 This is thought to have happened not more recently
than about 100 million years ago.2
2 Paradoxically, despite the mighty antiquity of this event, Lake Titicaca
has retained, until the present day, ‘a marine icthyofauna’3, in other
and crustacea feature many oceanic (rather than freshwater) types.
Surprising creatures brought to the surface in fishermen’s nets have
1 Professor Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanacu: The Cradle of American Man, Ministry of
Education, La Paz, Bolivia, 1957, volume III p. 192. See also Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth
in Upheaval, Pocket Books, New York, 1977, pp. 77-8: ‘Investigation into the topography
of the Andes and the fauna of Lake Titicaca, together with a chemical analysis of this
lake and others on the same plateau, has established that the plateau was at one time at
sea level, 12,500 feet lower than it is today ... and that its lakes were originally part of a
sea-gulf ... Sometime in the past the entire Altiplano, with its lakes, rose from the
bottom of the ocean ...’
2 Personal communication with Richard Ellison of the British Geological Survey, 17
September 1993. Ellison is the author of the BGS Overseas Geology and Mineral
Resources Paper (No. 65) entitled The Geology of the Western Corriera and Altiplano.
3 Tiahuanacu, III, p. 192.
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included examples of Hippocampus (the seahorse).4 In addition, as one
authority has pointed out, ‘The various species of Allorquestes
( hyalella inermis, etc.) and other examples of marine fauna leave no
doubt that this lake in other periods was much saltier than today, or,
more accurately, that the water which formed it was from the sea and
that it was damned up and locked in the Andes when the continent
rose.’5
3 So much, then, for the events which may have created Lake Titicaca in
the first place. Since its formation this great ‘interior sea’, and the
Altiplano itself, has undergone several other drastic and dramatic
changes. Of these by far the most notable is that the lake’s extent
appears to have fluctuated enormously, indicated by the existence of
an ancient strandline visible on much of the surrounding terrain.
Puzzlingly, this strandline is not level but slopes markedly from north
to south over a considerable horizontal distance. At the northernmost
point surveyed it is as much as 295 feet higher than Titicaca; some
400 miles farther south, it is 274 feet lower than the present level of
the lake.6 From this, and much other evidence, geologists have
deduced that the Altiplano is still gradually rising, but in an
unbalanced manner with greater altitudes being attained in the
northern part and lesser in the southern. The process involved here is
thought to have less to do with changes in the level of Titicaca’s
waters themselves (although such changes have certainly occurred)
than with changes in the level of the whole terrain in which the lake is
situated.7
4 Much harder to explain in such terms, however, given the very long
time periods major geological transformations are supposed to
require, is irrefutable evidence that the city of Tiahuanaco was once a
port, complete with extensive docks, positioned right on the shore of
Lake Titicaca.8 The problem is that Tiahuanaco’s ruins are now
marooned about twelve miles south of the lake and more than 100
feet higher than the present shoreline.9 In the period since the city was
built, it therefore follows that one of two things must have happened:
either the level of lake has fallen greatly or the land on which
Tiahuanaco stands has risen comparably.
5 Either way it is obvious that there have been massive and traumatic
4 Tiahuanacu, J. J. Augustin, New York, 1945, volume I, p. 28.
5 Ibid.
6 See, for example, H.S. Bellamy, Built Before the Flood: The Problem of the Tiahuanaco
Ruins, Faber & Faber, London, 1943, p. 57.
7 Ibid., p. 59.
8 Tiahuanacu, III, pp. 192-6. See also Bolivia, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne,
Australia, 1992, p. 156.
9 Ibid. See also Harold Osborne, Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952, p. 55.
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physical changes. Some of these, such as the rise of the Altiplano from
the floor of the ocean, certainly took place in remote geological ages,
before the advent of human civilization. Others are not nearly so
ancient and must have occurred after the construction of
Tiahuanaco.10 The question, therefore, is this: when was Tiahuanaco
built?
The orthodox historical view is that the ruins cannot possibly be
dated much earlier than AD 500.11 An alternative chronology also
exists, however, which, although not accepted by the majority of
scholars, seems more in tune with the scale of the geological
upheavals that have occurred in this region. Based on the
mathematical/astronomical calculations of Professor Arthur Posnansky
of the University of La Paz, and of Professor Rolf Muller (who also
challenged the official dating of Machu Picchu), it pushes the main
phase of construction at Tiahuanaco back to 15,000 BC. This
chronology also indicates that the city later suffered immense
destruction in a phenomenal natural catastrophe around the eleventh
millennium BC, and thereafter rapidly became separated from the
lakeshore.12
We shall be reviewing Posnansky’s and Muller’s findings in Chapter
Eleven, findings which suggest that the great Andean city of Tiahuanaco
flourished during the last Ice Age in the deep, dark, moonless midnight
of prehistory.
10 Earth In Upheaval, p. 76: ‘The conservative view among evolutionists and geologists is
that mountain-making is a slow process, observable in minute changes, and that
because it is a continuous process there never could have been spontaneous upliftings
on a large scale. In the case of Tiahuanaco, however, the change in altitude apparently
occurred after
the city was built, and this could not have been the result of a slow
process ...’
11 See, for example, Ian Cameron, Kingdom of the Sun God: A History of the Andes and
Their People, Guild Publishing, London, 1990, pp. 48-9.
12 Tiahuanacu II, p. 91 and I, p. 39.
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Chapter 9
Once and Future King
During my travels in the Andes I had several times re-read a curious
variant of the mainstream tradition of Viracocha. In this variant, which
was from the area around Lake Titicaca known as the Collao, the deity
civilizing-hero had been named Thunupa:
Thunupa appeared on the Altiplano in ancient times, coming from the north with
five disciples. A white man of august presence, blue-eyed, and bearded, he was
sober, puritanical and preached against drunkenness, polygamy and war.1
After travelling great distances through the Andes, where he created a
peaceful kingdom and taught men all the arts of civilization,2 Thunupa
was struck down and grievously wounded by a group of jealous
conspirators:
They put his blessed body in a boat of totora rush and set it adrift on Lake
Titicaca. There ... he sailed away with such speed that those who had tried so
cruelly to kill him were left behind in terror and astonishment—for this lake has no
current ... The boat came to the shore at Cochamarca, where today is the river
Desguardero. Indian tradition asserts that the boat struck the land with such force
it created the river Desguardero, which before then did not exist. And on the water
so released the holy body was carried many leagues away to the sea coast at Africa
...3
Boats, water and salvation
There are curious parallels here to the story of Osiris, the ancient
Egyptian high god of death and resurrection. The fullest account of the
original myth defining this mysterious figure is given by Plutarch4 and
says that, after bringing the gifts of civilization to his people, teaching
them all manner of useful skills, abolishing cannibalism and human
sacrifice, and providing them with their first legal code, Osiris left Egypt
and travelled about the world to spread the benefits of civilization to
other nations as well. He never forced the barbarians he encountered to
accept his laws, preferring instead to argue with them and to appeal to