by Jay Weidner
Does that mean that Tiahuanaco is the lost city of Atlantis? Possibly, for there is one curious connection with Plato’s tale that is hard to account for any other way. Plato tells us that Atlantis contained a great number of elephants, a fact that argues against Crete or Thera. Present-day South America has no elephants, of course, but during the Ice Age it apparently did. Remains have been found of a species called Cuvieronius, which was an elephant-like proboscidean complete with trunk and tusks. We find these animals carved on the great stone portal of the Gateway of the Sun (fig. 12.10), suggesting they were common in the Tiahuanaco area. These “elephants,” however, became extinct around 10,000 B.C.E.
Figure 12.10. This tablet, found near Cuena, Ecuador, reads, “The elephant that supports the earth upon the waters and causes it to quake.”
Suggestive as this is, Tiahuanaco, even as an island, fails to match Plato’s description of the city of Atlantis. His account of the city may in fact be purely symbolic or allegorical. Paul LaViolette points out that the description of Atlantis matches a subquantum kinetic model of the primordial atom.32 At the very least, this would suggest that the Atlanteans had a mythic understanding of continuous-creation ether physics.
While we can’t definitely say that the ancient cultures of South America are the lost Atlanteans, we can say that the likelihood is strong. No other alternative matches Plato so closely, and an advanced civilization in 15,000 B.C.E., whatever its resemblance to Plato, must be considered a candidate for Atlantis.
The cross at Hendaye’s inscription encodes a place of refuge, a place where the survivors of the last catastrophe gathered. One of our solutions of the inscription says “Inca Cave, Cusco, Peru,” directing us to the cultural descendants of the mysterious builders of Tiahuanaco, the Incas. Whether or not Atlantis can be found in the Andes, Fulcanelli and the cross are telling us that the secret of the place of refuge from the last catastrophe can be found there.
During the writing of this book, long after the above section was finished, cartographer J. M. Allen published his Atlantis: The Andes Solution, which not only supported our ideas on Atlantis in the Andes, but also disclosed the actual location of the city itself.
Starting with the same commonsense deductions as ours, Allen focuses on South America as the most logical choice for Atlantis. He notes that the pre-Columbian Indian name for the continent was Atlanta, a name Allen feels is related to the Quechua word for copper, antis, and the Nahuatl word for water, atl.33 Since antis is the origin of the word Andes, we might suspect that the phrase on Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple is the Egyptian name for Atlantis.
Allen turned to Plato and, taking literally his description of a rectangular plain crisscrossed by a grid of canals in the middle of the island, settled on the Altiplano of southern Peru and northern Bolivia as the best match for the location of Atlantis. He built a three-dimensional model of the region and discovered Plato’s “rectangular plain surrounded by mountains.”
This, Allen believed, was the key to the mystery. Plato describes a plain in the center of the long side of the continent, next to a body of water. The plain was very smooth and level, surrounded by mountains, high above sea level with the form of “a quadrangle, rectilinear for the most part and elongated.”34 This is, in fact, a close description of the Altiplano, the largest level plain in the world, and which also contains the two inland seas of Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo (see fig. 12.11).
With this in mind, Allen went looking for Plato’s regular grid pattern. It was described as a 600-foot-wide canal running around the perimeter of the plain with regular intersections and transverse canals forming a vast grid work. “It only remains then to discover on site evidence of a channel 600 ft. wide to say without any more doubts that here indeed is the proof that the city and the civilization of Atlantis existed in these parts,”35 Allen informs us. Satellite and aerial photos suggest that such canals do exist, and in the summer of 1995, Allen traveled to Bolivia in search of them.
“I found,” he tells us, “the remains of a channel of enormous dimensions, the base of the canal was around 120 ft. wide and the gently sloping sides were each of some 230 ft., making it just under 600 ft. from crest to crest of the parallel embankments.”36 Atlantis, it seemed, had been located.
Allen buttresses his argument with examples of mineral wealth and early mining that match Plato’s description. Atlantean use of gold to plate their sacred precincts has echoes in the Inca temples discovered by the Spanish, and a natural alloy of gold and copper, mentioned by Plato, oriculum, can be found as a mineral only in the region of the Altiplano. As the matches mounted up, we became convinced that Allen had discovered the source of Plato’s tale.
Figure 12.11. The region around the Altiplano, the irrigated plain mentioned by Plato, showing Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo, probably the location of various Atlantean cities.
For most interpreters and Atlantis seekers, the description of the city itself is the most problematic. Why concentric circles of water and land? It seems odd and unnecessary. But the Altiplano hypothesis addresses this very issue. Being an ancient volcanic region, there are many eroded volcanic cones near the Altiplano, including one on the northeast side of Lake Poopo, which match in size Plato’s dimensions. These cones form natural concentric circles out from the central flue of the volcano and can be easily shaped and filled with water to produce the specific Atlantis configuration, which Allen calls the Cross of Atlantis, as shown in figure 12.12. It is just possible that this ancient civilization built its greatest city as a model of the primordial atom of continuous creation and the Great Cross of the galactic alignment. Certainly these concepts remained in play down to the time of the Incas, and even today a Christianized version of the cosmic model survives in the remote village of Misminay, as we shall see a little later.
Figure 12.12. An overhead view of the plan of Atlantis reveals Allen’s Cross of Atlantis. Three circular walls surround the island city with canals traversing them. The shaft of the cross is the large entrance canal.
There are a few problems, from the perspective of our inquiry, with Allen’s work. He seems hesitant to let go of the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age date of Thera, circa 1300 B.C.E., even though he tells us that Lake Poopo flooded the region around 12,000 B.C.E. It is hard to account for his reluctance to embrace the older dates. He is apparently unaware of Posnansky’s work, and barely mentions archaeo-astronomy in any meaningful way. Even with these gaps, however, it is clear that Allen is presenting significant evidence for the location and date of Atlantis.
Here we have more proof that Fulcanelli’s possible place of refuge was the ancient home of the advanced global civilization of prehistory. Carrying this scenario further, we can speculate that the Atlantean culture survived one thousand years or more of intermittent catastrophe before finally emigrating to colonies around the planet, which would include the ancient Nile Valley. The Incan Viracocha was the godlike survivor from the Atlantean civilization who brought back to cataclysmravaged regions the skills and graces of civilization, including perhaps the knowledge of how to calculate the time of the next cosmic disaster.
THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD
Lima, Peru, is one of the driest places on earth. It sits on the west coast of South America, at the north end of the Peru/Chile coastal desert. Ten to twenty years will sometimes pass without a single drop of rainfall. Although the ocean is just a stone’s throw away, there is no moisture and very little life in this desert. Outside of the sprawling, povertyridden city there is nothing but miles and miles of dried yellow sand with not a weed, plant, or any other living thing in sight.
When the Spanish asked the Incas where the best place to put a city was, they were told to settle where Lima stands today. The Incas considered Lima to be the worst place on earth to live, so recommending it as a place of settlement was their way of getting back at the Spanish. Lima today is a sprawling metropolis that stretches for mile upon dusty mile in all directions. Only the Pacific Ocean mer
cifully stops it from going any farther. But the coastline doesn’t stop everything; the beaches are filled with mountains of trash washed out by the tidal flow, every day, into the blue waters of the world’s biggest ocean.
Lima is the only major city in Peru. Outside the city limits lies a country that is wild, unpopulated, and forbidding. There is no shortage of mysteries in this land. There are lost cities, hidden tunnel systems, gigantic ruins, and remnants of ancient societies. Peru also has four ecological zones that run the gamut from the hottest desert to the wettest rain forest on earth. Needless to say, there are countless places to get lost and remain hidden forever.
The one-hour flight from sweltering Lima to the cool mountains of Cusco brings welcome relief. Cusco is an Inca word for “navel of the world,” possibly even an analog for the center of the galaxy. If we think of the curving, snakelike shape of the Andes Mountains as the Milky Way, then Cusco is indeed at the center.
The high Andes Mountains rise out of the earth to climb in places to altitudes over 20,000 feet. Their ragged cliffs, proof of their young age, attract the clouds and moisture out of the Amazon jungle far below and to the east. These clouds bring the necessary rainfall that keeps the high Andes fertile and verdant. In Cusco, as opposed to Lima, there is always a cool wind that blows through the green trees and fertile valleys. The people seem happier, too. The Quechua are a proud and handsome people with high cheekbones and honest eyes, reminding us of the Basque people on the border of Spain and France.
The Incas ruled their empire for less than 150 years before the Spanish conquistadors appeared. Around 1400 C.E., a group of Quechua nobles from Cusco managed to unite the warring factions left from the dissolution of the ancient empire of the Wari-Tiawanku, which had ruled the Andean highlands for a thousand years.37 They accomplished this by returning to the way of Viracocha, producing a brilliant synthesis of Andean civilization going all the way back to the culture of Tiahuanaco and the prehistoric Atlanteans. The physical remains of the Incan empire, its roads and bridges, temples, towns, fortresses, and irrigation canals, can today be seen everywhere in Peru and Bolivia. The modern visitor is left with the impression that something very important happened in the Andean highlands long ago, and that nothing much has happened since.
It’s hard to account for the sudden brilliance of the Incan civilization. The empire itself was an idea whose time had come. Several centuries of constant warfare had prepared the highlands to accept a political solution, but it is the cultural effervescence that catches our attention. The way of Viracocha taught that civilization must be in the image of the origin of all things. The word inca in Quechua means “archetype” or “original pattern.” The world was “inca,” or correctly aligned with the original model when it was formed as a cross with a unifying center point. As with most Native American cultures, this arrangement was visualized as the essential order of space.
In the high Andes, the Milky Way is the most striking feature of the night sky. It arches overhead like a great river of stars encircling the terrestrial sphere. To the Quechua, descendants of the Incas, it was simply Mayu, “the river,” which brought water from the cosmic ocean upon which the terrestrial sphere floats and gave it back to the land as rain. However, the motions in the sky of the river of the Milky Way over the course of twenty-four hours create two lines, which cross at the zenith and divide the sky into four quarters. At one zenith, the galaxy stretches out in a northwest–southeast diagonal; twelve hours later, at the other zenith, the galaxy stretches northeast–southwest.
The zenith crossing point is called Cruz Calvario, the Cross of Calvary, by a group of Quechua in the small community of Misminay. This group of Incan descendants were studied in the 1970s by anthropologist Gary Urton, who discovered that the ancient cosmology of the Incas, and perhaps all the way back to Viracocha, had survived in the now largely Christianized worldview of the local community. This combination of ancient cosmology and Christian symbolism makes Urton’s descriptions of the landscape organization of Misminay read like a living commentary on the Hendaye cross.
The great galactic cross, the Calvario, is mirrored on the ground by the two major roads of the region, which run northeast–southwest and southeast–northwest and cross at the center of the village (fig. 12.13). Marking this spot is a small chapel, the Crucero, or cross, in the form of a cross, mirroring the galactic Calvario and linked by an invisible axis. The local river, the Vilcanota, runs beside the “middle way,” the northwest–southeast axis that is the “day” diagonal of the Galaxy at the local zenith. The other road, which mirrors the “night” diagonal of the local zenith, is considered the ascending or vertical path and is called the “path of the great division.” Canals and other water channels in the region also follow this cross pattern paralleling the roads.
Figure 12.13. The Misminay worldview: living inside sacred space. The cross below the chapel, or Crucero, mirrors the cross of the galaxy in the sky, the Calvario. (Redrawn from Geoffrey Cornelius and Paul Devereux, The Secret Language of the Stars and Planets [San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996])
The ancient Andean people based this ordering of the landscape on their observation of the behavior of the Milky Way, which appears to divide the sky and the horizon intercardinally. More than any other point, this basic arrangement of space and time into an intercardinal, northeast–southwest/northwest–southeast cross suggests the supreme importance of the galaxy, the great Mayu, in Andean mythology.
The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the United Four Quarters, to echo this primal alignment in the sky. The center of the cross was Cusco, the navel of the world (fig. 12.14).
Figure 12.14. Tawantinsuyu, the Incan “United Four Quarters,” divided at Cusco, navel of the world.
And if Cusco was the navel of the world, then the Corincancha, the great Temple of the Sun, was the navel of Cusco. Built at the confluence of Cusco’s two rivers, the Corincancha was the center of an enormous ceremonial calendar alignment based on the sidereal lunar year of 328 days (12 × 27.33 = 327.96). The key alignment was based on the winter solstice sunrise. The Sapa Inca, the archetypal man, or the king, would have been seated in a niche lined with gold and precious stones. As the rising solstice sun struck the niche, the Inca would have been bathed in a shimmering golden aura, making him truly the “Son of the Sun.”38
Through Cusco, these alignments, shown in figure 12.15, with the heavens nourished the earth in the person of The Inca, the archetypal man, or the king. He was the center of the hub around which the crossed circle of time and space revolved. In Western terms, he is most like the pharaoh of Egypt as son of the Sun, and beyond that a composite of Adam, Christ, and the Grail King.
Figure 12.15. Map of ancient Cusco showing the Corincancha and the major alignments of the city. Also shown are the traditional names of the four quarters.
All of these correspondences become even more intriguing when we think of the Andes as a naturally suggestive pattern for the Milky Way, with Cusco at the galactic center. The cross of the four quarters then echoes the four projected Trees of Life on the celestial sphere. The Sapa Inca, the unique man in the form of the king, begins to look a lot like the Adam Kadmon, the cosmic man of the kabbalists, formed from the intersection of these Trees. The Adam Kadmon, a series of meditative and magical exercises, developed from the idea of the Tree of Life as it extends through the worlds, and was seen as a model for universal consciousness. The way of Viracocha could be the secret of astro-alchemy itself in a form lost to the West after Egypt’s decline, a way to tap into this current of sentience that, theoretically at least, embraces Mind everywhere in the universe. The star religion of the early dynasties of Egypt, as recorded in the Pyramid Texts, can dimly be perceived as a practical application of this cosmological philosophy, and as we shall see, the arrangement of the Pyramids at Giza also reflects this quartering of the sky by the galactic river.
INCAN CAVES AND THE CROSS AT URCOS
When Pizarro learned of
the Incas in 1526, by intercepting a strange craft far out on the western ocean loaded with golden and silver trade objects, the throne of Tawantinsuyu was occupied by the eleventh Inca since the unification of the four quarters, Wayna Qhapaq.39 The Inca had been crowned in 1493, the year a corrupt pope, Alexander VI, divided the New World between the Spanish and the Portuguese, and lived out his long and illustrious reign in blissful ignorance of history’s ticking clock. When word reached him of the strangers probing the borders of his empire, The Inca was in Quito consolidating his conquest of what is now Ecuador and thinking of pushing on into what is now Colombia. And then the Spaniards’ secret weapon struck.
The pandemic that devastated Mexico and Central America arrived, either with Pizarro or overland through Colombia, and burst upon the twenty million inhabitants of the Incan empire with lethal effect. Half the population died, including The Inca. Pachakuti Yamki, an Inca noble writing a century later, described The Inca’s vision: “And when he turned to the sea with his entourage, there were seen at midnight, as if surrounding him, a million people . . . living souls . . . [of those] . . . about to die in the pestilence.”40 Soon after this, word of the Spaniards’ arrival reached Quito and the court began to die. Wayna Qhapaq and his son and heir died within a few days.
Had it not been for this plague, Pizarro would have faced a united and powerful foe with a wily and battle-hardened king at the helm. It is unlikely that he would have made much of a showing with only two hundred men, even armed with muskets, against such might as the Incan empire had just fielded in Ecuador. But The Inca was far from the center, and disaster occurred. After the plague, to compound the problem, fighting broke out between The Inca’s two surviving sons as Waskhar, in control of Cusco, and Atawallpa, in control of the north, fought it out for the succession while the Spaniards moved into the valley of Peru and built settlements.
