Author(s): Graham Hancock

History

Published to Coincide with the Channel 4 TV SeriesFrom the author of the Number One International Bestseller, FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS On an astounding odyssey of the world's oldest and most sacred sites, from the Pyramids of Egypt to the engimatic statues of Easter Island, from the haunting ruins of South American cities to the beauty of Angkor Wat, Graham Hancock puts forward compelling evidence to show that the cultures we term ancient were in fact the heirs to an older lost civilization, and the inheritors of its archaic wisdom. HEAVEN'S MIRROR ? Re-examines the significance of the precise astronomical patterns of the great ancient sites ? Asks why monuments, such as those at Giza and Angkor, mirror whole constellations on the ground ? Draws inescapable conclusions about the world before known history began ? Reveals the existence of an ancient cult which may hold the secret of immortality Our final destination in Peru was the geomantic city of Machu Picchu, which stands on a soaring pinnacle of rock entwined in an oxbow of the sacred river Vilcamayu. All of it is remarkable, and most of it is indisputably of Inca origin. Within its precincts, however, are certain structures that are surely much older, although they too were used and modified by the Incas. These include a rock-hewn cave, the beautiful megalithic monument known as the 'Temple of the tree Windows', and, most conspicuously, Machu Picchu's central pyramidial mound, part natural, part built-up. The summit of the mound is exposed bedrock and has been carved into a shape something like a giant flattened fist with one finger pointing vertically upwards. This object, the so-called 'Intihuatana', or 'hitching post of the Sun', has never been satisfactorily explained. Its name was given to it rather arbitrarily by Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who discovered Machu Picchu in 1911. It does definitely exhibit solar alignments - both to the equinoxes and to the solstices - when used as a foresight against neighbouring peaks. But it is by no means an ideal shadow-casting or sighting device. Carved at the base of the Intihuatana, the archaeoastronomer Ray White recently uncovered depictions of four constellations that are prominent in the Andean skies - the Southern Cross, the Summer Triangle, the bright 'eye stars' of the dark-cloud constellations of the Milky Way that the Incas called the Llama, and the Pleiades. These are the constellations that were believed to rule the four suyus, or quarters, of the Inca empire. The 'umbilical' descendant of an ancient astronomical religion, the origins of which are lost to history, that great empire achieved much that was admirable during its brief existence. Nevertheless, in the decades before it was swept away forever by the cataclysm of the Spanish Conquest, it fell into a state of spiritual decay and lost contact with the allegorical and initiatory nature of its spiritual beliefs. We suggest that the Incas had inherited this remarkable spiritual system through an immensely long chain of transmission from the unknown predecessors who built the Andean megaliths. We suggest, too, that these megalith builders were connected to others, equally anonymous, all around the world, and that they all taught the same system. In this respect it is highly suggestive, as William Sullivan's landmark study of Andean cosmology persuasively demonstrates, that the same 'technical language of myth' that was used throughout the Old World to convey complex information about the precession of the equinoxes was also used by the Incas and by their predecessors in the pre-Columbian Andes. In Sullivan's opinion, 'some very unusual spiritual perception, with deep insight into the operations of the human mind' lies behind the formulation of this 'language of sacred revelation grounded in empirical observation'. He argues that the Incas forgot, or misunderstood - and thus distorted - the original teachings that had come down to them. Like the Aztecs, who were the beneficiaries of an almost identical spiritual legacy in Central America, they made the deadly mistake of taking the symbolism of the initiatory rituals literally. This error led them into the dark hell of black magic and human sacrifice and caused them to abandon the instruction of their 'Father the Sun' that they should rule a society based on justice and reason with 'pity, mercy and mildness'. Inca sacrifices were carried out with cold, robotic deliberation along a system of geodetically surveyed straight lines that were laid out according to a sky-ground design. The lines, called 'Ceques', corresponded in orientation to the rising and setting of certain stars and constellations, including the four that appear on the Intihuatana. Radiating out for hundreds of kilometres in all directions from the 'Navel of the World' in the Corichana at Cuzco, this strange network, bloodied by sacrifice, created invisible connections between many prominent and widely separated monuments. In a setting as serene as Machu Picchu it is disquieting to remember that the Incas, just like the Aztecs, believed that the souls of sacrificial victims would rise directly to the heavens and become stars in the sky. In Egypt and in Angkor the same belief existed. We have seen, however, that it was not connected to human sacrifice there but to the teachings and rituals of an astronomical wisdom cult that sought immortal life for its initiates. In Mexico and the Andes astronomically aligned, pyramidial monuments were used as part of the apparatus of sacrifice. In Egypt and Angkor astronomically aligned pyramidial monuments were used as a part of a gnostic quest for immortality. Perhaps the difference between the darkness and the light really is no wider that a human hair. If Egypt, Angkor, Mexico and the Andes all inherited a common legacy of sky-ground ideas, as we are proposing here, it is not necessarily the case that these ideas should always have been received in the same way. On the contrary, everything suggests that it is inherent in the nature of the system itself that those who participate in it must choose the direction of their own destiny: We have the power to choose the better, and likewise the power to choose the worse ... It is we who are to blame for our own evils, if we chose the evil in preference to the good.