by Freddy Silva
We now have a potential link between the antediluvian gods of Easter Island, Polynesia, New Zealand, Egypt and the Andes.
Once Tiwanaku was up and running again, this brotherhood set out to create other cult centers and promulgate the ideals of civilization throughout the Andes, exactly as local traditions recall,30 establishing and re-establishing temples stretching in a line from Lake Titicaca to Cuzco, as evidenced by the two oldest layers of megalithic masonry mentioned earlier which, to many eyes, provide clear evidence of an antediluvian cultural project interrupted by a major catastrophe. Both styles of construction share obvious common elements yet differ drastically in terms of style, the oldest being fluid and organic, while the successive is sharp, linear and urbane, yet loses none of the craftsmanship of the former. They are clearly linked and yet disconnected by a period of time.
One piece of circumstantial evidence lies near the quarry used to build Ollantaytambo, where beautiful recumbent monoliths mark the path leading down to the river plain and up to the temple itself. These massive works appear to have been abruptly dropped en route as though work was curtailed due to some other, more pressing matter. When you've just extracted and shaped a 300-ton rock, nothing could be more pressing than an impending meteorite and tsunami.
So, what else can we find out about these ancient architects? One answer lies in a seemingly trivial detail: beards.
A typical corner of Saqsayhuaman reveals the superlative craftsmanship in curving the stone. Obviously aesthetics were of great importance.
5. BEARDS
Men cannot grow facial hair in the Andes. You need to travel across the Pacific to Asia, India and the Middle East to find such physiognomy. And yet my good friend and guide, Edgar, has a beard. But then he's Aymara, a very ancient people with mysterious roots, the pun on hair notwithstanding.
I made this seemingly innocuous observation while driving through Puno, a city on the shore of Lake Titicaca, and it led to a lively discussion about the remote origins of the people living around the lake's periphery, particularly that most famous of local personalities, the god-man Viracocha, who “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.”1 On the southern end of Lake Titicaca, an anthropomorphic pillar was found buried in deep silt inside the semi-subterranean temple at Tiwanaku, roughly at the level where the lakeshore used to be 11,000 years ago. Carved from red volcanic scoria, it depicts the bearded Viracocha. It is not an isolated idol. Traditions state that one of the first acts performed by the Viracochas was the raising of many such effigies around the region. Some exist on the Mocachi peninsula facing Tiwanaku to the north, an area of scattered megaliths as tall as 8 feet, marking an rectangle much like the Kalasasaya, and appear to belong the earlier Tiwanaku building period. One red statue representing a bearded Viracocha is surrounded by the snake symbol, just as it is at Tiwanaku. This will be of great importance later.
When Spanish missionaries arrived in Cuzco they found a similar statue still standing inside the Qorikancha, depicting a man looking remarkably like an itinerant monk, tall and lean and wearing a long robe and sandals, his pale face fully bearded — a Caucasian. No wonder Pizzaro and his band of barbarians were mistaken for the progeny of the gods, handing thirty conquistadores a major psychological advantage with which to subdue half a continent despite being vastly outnumbered. It is not by accident that the same fate befell the Cholulans of Mexico when they too mistook Cortez and his bearded pirates for another returning, light-skinned, bearded god, Quetzalcoatl.
A bearded and girdled Viracocha from the semi-subterranean temple at Tiwanaku, and right, in Mocachi, with recurring serpent symbolism.
Edgar, who is also a shaman, impressed me with how the Aymara are themselves the progeny of the Puquina, who fled to the Andes when the flood sank their home in the Pacific, an island continent they call Lupakije, better known by its nicknames Mu and Lemuria. No wonder they still talk openly about it as a matter of pride even though the event occurred 11,000 years ago; even a false door, carved on the face of a hill beside Lake Titicaca, bears the name Amaru Muru — Old Bearded Man of Mu.2 Legends of Viracocha's arrival in Tiwanaku and his eventual departure across the Pacific were handed down from them.
The Puquina's tradition neatly overlaps that of the Waitaha, whose predecessors, the Urukehu, frequently sailed between Tiwanaku, Easter Island and New Zealand, a nautical triangle covering over 14,000 miles. The adventurer Thor Heyerdahl proved such long distance travel across the Pacific was possible when he reached French Polynesia from South America on his famous Kon-Tiki voyage of 1947; sixty-eight years later a second Kon-Tiki expedition reached Easter Island itself. A text acquired by Heyerdahl on Easter Island mentions the existence of an ancient land named Kainga Nuinui (Enormous Land) and how, after it sank in the flood, Hotu Matu'a — one of the heroes of the Waitaha narrative — sent seven scouts to Easter Island on a reconnaissance mission before bringing survivors with her to the island.3
EASTER ISLAND'S NAVEL
Two thousand miles separate the temple cities of Tiwanaku, Pisac, Cuzco and Machu Picchu from the monuments of Easter Island, yet you'd think they belong to the same culture. For one thing, the shared attributes of the Urukehu and Viracocha's Shining Ones — light-skinned, red-haired and bearded — suggest they were one and the same brotherhood. And for another, the locations associated with the flood gods are defined as navels of the earth.
Over one hundred ahu (ceremonial platforms) are spread over the island. The oldest — Ahu Tahiri, Ahu Mata and Ahu Vinapu — are also the best constructed. If one were to take the stones of Ahu Vinapu and replace them for those in Cuzco no one would notice the cunning swap, right down to tiny, three-inch keystones; another ahu by the name Hanaunakou contains impressively large megaliths that appear to show carved faces, now heavily weathered due to their antiquity.4 Such ahu differ from newer platforms in that they are built from basalt, which is not found on the island, so where did it come from? When marine explorer Jacques Cousteau explored the island, he and his team came across rectangular cavities in basalt layers on ledges below sea level, thus the basalt must have been extracted when the quarry was still accessible 12,000 years ago, prior to the dramatic rise in sea level, when Easter Island was considerably larger and part of an archipelago stretching several hundred miles.5 Folklore adds that when the island was a substantial landmass, it was criss-crossed by roads so long that no one was able to determine where they began or ended, and indeed there are still traces of these tracks leading to the edge of the sea, into which they disappear.6
Whoever built the original ahu was most likely responsible for the sites in the high Andes, and not just because the methods of construction are identical, but for the manner in which the stones were moved. The masons of Easter Island are said to have focused their mana (magical power)7 around a special spherical stone called Te-Pito-Kura (the golden navel stone),8 enabling the stones to be lifted and making them appear as though walking through the air to their locations during the course of a single night, much as they did at Tiwanaku and Cuzco. The Swiss ethnologist Alfred Metreux made extensive studies of Easter Island and wrote down oral traditions involving levitation: "When Easter Islanders of today are asked about means by which the statues were transported, they only say: 'King Tiikoihu, the great magician, used to move them with the words of his mouth... the idea of flying statues did not seem strange to the natives... C.E. Fox reports such a concept from San Cristobal in the Solomons: "Levitation is described as common both in the case of sacred stones and of priests, some of whom were levitated large distances through the air."'" 9
Ahu Vinapu, Easter Island. Identical to megalithic stonework in the Andes.
Easter Island's flood myth features an antediluvian supernatural being called Uoke "who traveled around the Pacific with a gigantic lever with which he prie
d up whole islands and tossed them into the sea where they vanished forever under the waves. After thus destroying many islands he came at length to the coast of Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, then a much larger land that it is today. He began to lever up parts of it and cast them into the sea. Eventually he reached a place called Puko Pihipuhi... in the vicinity of Hanga Hoonu [site of the navel stone]. Here the rocks of the island were too sturdy for Uoke's lever, and it was broken against them. He was unable to dispose of the last fragment, and this remained as the island we know today."10 Uoke’s actions appear oddly similar to those of the Finnish god Ukko.
The first survivors to reach Easter Island after the flood are said to have come from a massive Pacific island called Hiva which "submerged under the sea" due to "the mischief of Uoke's lever."11 These were the 300 people picked up by Hotu Matu'a and her Seven Sages, "all initiated men," whose first task upon arriving was the construction of ahu.12 As to where Hiva might have been remains a mystery. There are two islands in the Marquesas bearing the name Hiva Oa and Nuku Hiva, although the names may be homage to the original homeland. They lie to the northwest of Easter Island and feature their own extensive collection of ahu, along with unusual goggle-eyed statues not dissimilar to those in Easter Island and Tiwanaku. Before the flood, the Marquesas also had a substantially larger footprint and ostensibly formed one massive island.
BEARDED MOAI
But back to beards. Easter Island's most celebrated inhabitants are made of stone and stare longingly at the sky. At least the oldest do. Over a thousand of these moai (statue) dot the island, some erected on ahu, others along the slopes of Rano Raraku volcano, covered up to their necks in deep sediment. Excavation of one statue revealed the head to be attached to a long torso, making the moai just over 40 feet tall.13
The moai tend to be lumped together as a single event but they were definitely carved by different people over different epochs following a similar recipe. The younger are shaped from the readily available volcanic tuft and tend to lack the finesse and attention to aesthetic detail of the older moai, whose style and facial features differ significantly, are carved from the tougher basalt, and are found at deeper stratigraphic levels, or beneath newer moai and their ahu; some have been recycled to shore up damaged structures.14
Like the question of megalithic masonry in the Andes, the skill of the stone masons on Easter Island began at an exceptionally high level and degraded over time, the complete opposite of what civilization is supposed to induce. This brings up an uncomfortable issue for historians who claim all the moai were carved by Polynesians arriving up to 1500 years ago, who allegedly conducted this labor-intensive symbolic project while conducting a civil war on a sixty square-mile speck of rock in the Pacific. The problem with this theory is, stone cannot be dated, only undisturbed organic matter found under it, and to date no one has bothered to conduct a thorough radiocarbon test to determine the age of the sediment upon which the statues stand, probably because thirty feet of soil covering a moai is incompatible with a few centuries of erosion. Such a depth is more likely the result of thousands of years of accumulation, an opinion shared by the noted Harvard geologist Robert Schoch.15 Expectations were raised early in 2018 when UCLA archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg and assistants dug to the base of another moai and were finally in a position to secure organic material. I was in communication with her at this time and was told that by November of that year we should see a paper published with the results. November came and went, no paper emerged, and upon expressing my surprise, her response was that “several papers will be published… none of them carbon date the moai but present associated dates.”16
Sensing a whitewash-in-the-making, I turned to the Waitaha narrative — which covers at least 10,000 years of oral history 17 — to enlighten us on this affair, but it does not mention the original carving of moai, despite the story taking place on Easter Island. As with the Inka and the megalithic structures of the Andes, the few references appear matter-of-fact, suggesting the statues were already established on the island at that time. There are only two notable mentions in the narrative: one, during a journey back from New Zealand the seafearers are described as “eager to stand beneath the great monuments carved by the Stone People. Everyone stood in awe of the Mokai, the towering stone figures shaped by those ancestors to keep the God of Earthquakes quiet in his lair.”18 It is for this reason that the oldest moai face inland, toward the volcano.
Tukuturi features large eye sockets, long ears and, uncommon for Easter Island, a beard. Similar statues around Lake Titicaca depict Viracocha.
The Stone People arrived from the direction of Asia after the flood and during the period when the island was densely forested. This implies a more remote age than the one proposed by academics, who claim the island was already sparsely forested and subsequently depleted as a result of carving moai, the consequence of which was famine and civil war. The Waitaha claim the Stone People were conscionable, they knew how "to shape stone without breaking its spirit," just as they held a particular sensitivity towards the environment. Only lunatics would deplete an already meager infrastructure by embarking on a vanity project that exacerbated soil erosion on an overcrowded island. There is also the issue of the island’s indigenous palm trees. Historians claim the trunks were used to move the statues, however, the bulk of this type of palm is too pulpy to carry such heavy loads, the trunks would easily crush, rendering the argument of transportation and deforestation null and void.
The second notable mention is when the Waitaha returned to New Zealand with six small moai totems to be deliberately buried at strategic locations throughout three islands, where they remain safely concealed to this day.19
Aside from their enigmatic gaze at the sky, the older moai along the slopes of Rano Raraku feature unusually elongated chins. Unlike the typical human face where the distance from mouth to chin is twice the distance from mouth to nose, the sculptors of the moai extended the face much lower to represent a bearded chin. Smaller, wooden carvings of the moai are depicted with goatees, along with extended ear lobes, another trait common to the gods, the historians Albert Metreux and Eve Routledge have even pointed out that four of the moai inside Rano Raraku show the same form of goatee. Although the statues have been subjected to much erosion, a close look at the Rano Raraku group does reveal worn vertical lines along the chin indicating stylized beards, while Moai 002-077 features a pattern of curved incisions depicting hair on its neck, along with traces of red pigment.20 One unusual kneeling statue called Tukuturi shows a bearded giant with elongated ears, carved from the same red volcanic scoria as the statues of the bearded Viracocha around Tiwanaku. According to the wisdom keeper of Tongareva — whose ancestors once lived on Easter Island — the bearded effigies represent the visiting Starwalkers, the Urukehu. It is the later moai who represent the chiefs of the island.21
Bearded men are not indigenous to this remote Pacific region, but then Easter Island has an unusual history of unusual people, including the closest descendent of its last king, a man with high cheekbones and forehead, inset eyes and a beard, features consistent with Caucasians. There were other out-of-place people still living on the island in the 18th century. When the first Europeans arrived, an entry in the ship's log describes how a boat came to greet them, steered by a giant of a man: "With truth, I might say that these savages are all of more than gigantic size. The men are tall and broad in proportion, averaging twelve feet in height. Surprising as it may appear, the tallest men on board of our ship could pass between the legs of these children of Goliath without bending the head. The women cannot compare in stature with the men, as they are commonly not above 10 feet high."22 These giants were referred to as Long Ears, compared with run-of-the-mill humans, the Short Ears.
Moai with exaggerated, bearded chins.
It's not difficult to experience affection for the moai. Their elongated ears, their pouting expression carved so eloquently on enormous blocks of stone, their arms reaching around a protruding
belly to hands with slender, outstretched fingers spread around a navel. An arresting image. With so much focus on that navel, and of course its umbilical connotation, the statues' inherent symbolism commemorates Easter Island as a fundamental place of creation, a birthplace.
If the Waitaha narrative is correct and Hotu Matu’a — "a child of the gods" — appeared after the flood from the west to “find the Sacred Birthing Cord of the World,”23 the logical assumption is that the island was already a strategic location before the flood, much like Tiwanaku. The earliest moai may have been raised after the flood to re-establish the connection, "to keep the God of Earthquakes quiet in his lair,” as the narrative says. After the tectonic convulsions of 9700 BC, the statues may have served a symbolic as well as a practical, even magical function, after all, these gods are described as having the ability to imbue physical substances with life as well as possessing a degree of control over the laws of nature.
There's another location where outstretched fingers point to navels, and it too is considered a Navel of the Earth. It lies a world away in Anatolia.
GÖBEKLI TEPE, HILL OF OSIRIS
Beards are not out of place in the Middle East. But belts are, particularly if they come with distinctive H and U symbols and attached to slender, anthropomorphic pillars near the summit of a hill in Anatolia by the name of Göbekli Tepe.
