The Gold of the Gods (4 page)
At some time in the future, probably after the metal library has been deciphered, it will transpire that figures with anatomically inaccurate limbs are really pictorial representations of traditional oral descriptions of phenomena from the cosmos that were different.
The masterpiece of the Inca’s Dürer, Degas or Picasso, is a metal plaque measuring 38 1/2 inches by 19 inches by 1 inch. No matter how long one studies it, one keeps on making new discoveries. I noted down what I found: a star, a being with a fat paunch and a snake’s tail, a rat-like animal, a man in a coat of mail and a helmet, a man with a triangular head from which rays emanate, two faces, a wheel with a face peeping out of it, birds, snakes, bald and hairy heads, a face that grows out of another one, a snake with a face, two concentric circles with a face inside. A veritable riot! Paired together amid all the disorder are two strong gold “hinges,” which bring into prominence a face above a falling bomb!
What was the artist trying to convey?
Was he a predecessor of Hieronymus Bosch?
Has he perpetuated the moment of the annihilation of earthly chaos by the Star God?
What were the Incas’ metal objects for, what was their purpose? Are they simply expensive primitive toys?
Or are they really messages from a very early age that we cannot decipher?
Professor Miloslav Stingl is the leading South American scholar in the Iron Curtain countries; he graduated in the ancient civilizations of America. Today he is a member of the Academy of Sciences at Prague and author of archaeological and ethnological books.
In versunkenen Mayastadten
(1971), for example, is highly acclaimed. Professor Stingl, who was a guest in my house, saw the photographs I had taken at Cuenca.
“If these pictures are genuine, and everything indicates that they are, because no one makes forgeries in gold, at any rate not on such a large scale, this is the biggest archaeological sensation since the discovery of Troy. Years ago I myself supported the view that the Incas had no writing in the alphabetical sense of the word. And now I’m faced with Inca writing! It must be very, very ancient, because one can recognize the transition from ideograms to writing.”
“What do you make of the engravings? How do you fit them into the existing system?”
“To be able to give a precise scientific verdict I should have to subject each plaque to a detailed and lengthy examination, and compare each one with material already available. For the moment I can only say that I am dumbfounded. The sun was often part of the scenery in known Inca engravings, but man was never equated with the sun, as I see time and again in these photographs. There are representations of men with sun’s rays round their heads and there are men depicted with star points coming from them. The symbol of ‘holy power’ has always been the head. But in these pictures the head is simultaneously sun or star. That points to new direct connections.”
“How would you interpret the bomb on the plaque?”
The famous scholar took out a magnifying glass and examined the photograph in silence for a long time.
“No interpretation is possible; all this is absolutely new. Explained in totemistic terms, I would say the radiant figures with the stars above and the snake symbols below indicate a connection between heaven and earth. And that means that the stellar beings and suns had a relationship with the inhabitants of the earth.”
“What else?”
“I cannot say any more. Of course, the solar wheel is well known, but here it is not clear whether it is a solar wheel, for there is a face inside it, which is quite contradictory. At all events, all the figures, birds, snakes, helmeted figures and everything else that can be seen on the plaque seem to originate from a dream world, from a mythology.”
“A mythology that is daily acquiring a more tangible and realistic background!”
The professor laughed: “I have to admit that you have arguments in your jigsaw puzzle that disconcert even an old fox like me and give me cause for reflection.”
Who is going to study the tunnels and treasures Underneath Ecuador, who is going to bring this sensational archaeological discovery into the searching light of scientific examination? There does not seem to be anyone available as rich and enthusiastic as Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Troy and Mycenae. When Moricz discovered the tunnels he was as poor as a church mouse. Since then he has discovered iron and silver mines and leased them to metal firms to exploit. He has become comparatively rich, but he lives extremely simply and uses all his wealth for his research work. But Juan Moricz is not rich enough to engage expert assistance and continue his work on the extended scale that is essential. He knows perfectly well that he could immediately get the help of speculators, Wild West type gold-diggers; he would only have to show them a fraction of the alluring gold treasures in the tunnels below Ecuador. He does not want that kind of assistance. It would degenerate into plundering and would not benefit mankind. That is why it is difficult to organize a disinterested expedition that would be exclusively devoted to research. Even in 1969 when Moricz invited guests to visit the site, he had the group accompanied by armed guards. Moricz and Peña said that the further the group penetrated into the labyrinth, the tenser and more febrile grew the atmosphere, until finally the guests were afraid of the guards, who had caught gold fever. They all had to turn back.
Why does Ecuador do nothing to encourage a scientific expedition that would bring fame to the country?
Ecuador, with its five million inhabitants, is one of the poorest countries in South America. The plantations of cocoa, bananas, tobacco, rice and sugar-cane do not bring in enough foreign exchange for the purchase of modern technical equipment. Indian agriculture on the plateau produces potatoes and corn, and there is some sheep and lama breeding. The wild rubber obtained from the eastern forests is no longer in demand. Perhaps government-aided exploitation of mineral wealth (gold, silver, copper, lead and manganese) may bring in some income in the years to come, as may the petroleum found offshore. But even then all the surplus will be used in the first place to alleviate the wretched poverty; as yet the government shows no interest in projects that do not directly help to overcome the problem of hunger.
Juan Moricz estimates that inspection of the tunnel system alone, without detailed research, would cost more than one million Swiss francs. An electricity station would have to be set up, security measures would have to be taken and some form of mining machinery would be necessary.
My knowledge of this buried treasure, which has so much to tell us about human history, induces me to repeat the challenge I issued in
Chariots of the Gods?
in 1968:
“A Utopian archaeological year is due! During this year archaeologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, metallurgists and all the allied branches of these disciplines would concentrate on one question: did our ancestors receive visits from outer space?”
Nearby, in the Peruvian Andes, Francisco Pizarro (1478-1541) discovered cave entrances closed with slabs of rock on Huascaran, the mountain of the Incas, 22,203 feet above sea level. The Spaniards suspected that there were storerooms behind them.
Speleologists did not remember these caves until 1971, when an expedition was organized. The periodical
Bild der Wissenschaft
gave an account of the expedition which descended in the neighborhood of the Peruvian village of Otuzco equipped with all the latest technical equipment (winches, electric cables, miner’s lamps and hydrogen bottles). Two hundred feet below the. earth the scientists made a staggering discovery. At the far end of caves which had several stories they suddenly found themselves confronted with water-tight doors made of gigantic slabs of rock. In spite of their tremendous weight, four men were able to push the doors open. They pivoted on stone balls in a bed formed by dripping water.
Bild der Wissenschaften
reported as follows:
“Vast tunnels, which would leave even modern underground constructors green with envy, began behind the ‘six doors.’ These tunnels lead straight towards the coast, at times with a slope of 14 per cent. The floor is covered with stone slabs that have been pitted and grooved to make them slip-proof. If it is an adventure even today to penetrate these 55- to 65-mile-long transport tunnels in the direction of the coast and finally reach a spot 80 feet below sea level, imagine the difficulties that must have been involved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in transporting goods deep under the Andes to save them from the grasp of Pizarro and the Spanish Viceroy. The Great Ocean lurks at the end of the underground passages of ‘Guanape,’ so called after the island that lies off the coast of Peru here, because it is assumed that these passages once led under the sea to this island. After the passages have gone uphill and downhill several times in pitch darkness, a murmur and the strangely hollow sounding noise of surf is heard. In the light of the searchlight the next downhill slope ends on the edge of a pitch black flood which is identified as seawater. The present-day coast also begins here underground. Was this not the case in former times?”
Scholars think that a search on the island of Guanape would be pointless, because there is nothing there to indicate that a passage from the mainland ever emerged on to it. “No one knows where these subterranean roads of the Incas and their ancestors end or whether they lead the way to the bursting treasuries of worlds that vanished long ago.”
Francisco Pizarro and his rapacious followers had already suspected that gold treasures existed in impenetrable Inca hiding places. In 1532 the noble Spaniard promised the Inca ruler Atahualpa his life and freedom if he filled two-thirds of a room measuring 23 by 16 by 10 feet with gold. Atahualpa believed the word of the ambassador of Her Christian Majesty Juana the Mad (1479-1555). Day after day the Incas fetched gold until the room was filled to the required height. Then Pizarro broke his word and had Atahualpa executed (1533).
In the same year the Spanish Viceroy elevated the Inca Manco Capac to the rank of shadow king. (He, too, was murdered by the Christian conquerors in 1544.) His death saw the end of the Inca dynasty, which had entered history with its legendary founder of the same name. According to the historians, 13 “Sons of the Sun” are supposed to have ruled the Inca kingdom between the first and the last Manco Capac. If we date its historically established beginning to around A.D. 1200 and its end to 1544, the year when the last sun king died, then this mighty empire that stretched from Chile to Ecuador, from the Andes north of Quito to Valparaiso in the south, must have been built up in barely 350 years. During this period, the first pre-Columbian empire in South America must have been welded together. For the conquered territories and peoples were not considered as occupation zones, but were integrated into the prevailing constitution. Progressive achievements in agriculture were passed on by trained officials, as were the smoothly functioning rules of a communal economic order.
Did the Incas equip a network of 2,500 miles of well-built roads with rest-houses during the same span of time? Did they simultaneously build cities such as Cuzco, Tiahuanaco, Macchu Picchu, and the cyclopean fortresses of Oliantaytambo and Sacsahuamán? Did they also lay down water mains and work silver, tin and copper mines, whose products they alloyed to make bronze? And did they develop the goldsmith’s art, weave the finest cloth and make pottery with noble shapes “on the side,” as it were? I hardly dare speak of the high culture which they nurtured in addition during this limited 350 year period. But if it was not the Incas but their ancestors who should be credited with these wonderful achievements, surely the culture and tool technology of the pre-Inca peoples must have been higher than the Incas who came after them.
No, the chronology cannot be blindly pasted together like that, because there are so many indications to turn the arbitrary (re-)construction upside down.
I assert that the tunnel system existed thousands of years before the Inca kingdom came into being. (How and with what tools are the Incas supposed to have built hundreds of miles of passages deep under the earth? The Channel tunnel has been planned by the engineers of our highly technological century for fifty years and they still have not decided which method should be used to build this comparatively minor tunnel.)
I assert that the age-old tunnel systems were known to the Inca ruling classes. (After Atahualpa’s murder, the last Manco Capac ordered the metal treasures scattered throughout the kingdom to be collected in the Temple of the Sun and deposited in the
existing caves, which were known to him,
to keep them safe from the white invaders.)
I assert that the metal treasures under Ecuador and Peru came from a period long before the rise of the Inca kingdom and its culture. About 1570 the Spanish chronicler Pater Cristobal de Molina tried to fathom the motives behind the Incas’ tunnel building. In his book
Ritos y Fabulos de los Incas
, published in 1572, Molina tells us that the original father of mankind withdrew into a cave after he had done his work, i.e. after the creation was completed. But this secret retreat became the birthplace of many peoples who had appeared out of an “endless night.” Molina related that these caves were also used for generations as treasuries for hiding the peoples’ wealth whenever they were oppressed. Absolute secrecy in the circles who knew about the caves was an iron law, non-compliance with which was punishable by death. (How potent this law still is today I was able to experience on my journey through Ecuador in the year of grace 1972.)
Let the Vatican grail guardian Father Crespi of Cuenca be the key witness to the pre-Christian origin of the metal treasures. He said to me: