PERUVIAN ANTIQUITIES

Contents:

- Peruvian Antiquities - E. R. Heath

- A Land of Mystery - H. P. Blavatsky
- Notes on Peruvian Antiquities - Fred J. Dick

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Peruvian Antiquities
by E. R. Heath, M.D.

(From Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, November, 1878)

On the Peruvian coast in ancient times, as now, nearly every structure was made
of adobes or sun-dried brick, while in the mountains stone was used instead. The adobe
ruins present nothing of beauty, architecturally. The subject for wonder is their immensity
and number. Go where you will, relics of the past meet your eye either in ruined walls,
water-courses, terraces, or extensive lands covered with the debris of pottery.
Take for example the Jequetepeque valley. In 7' 24' south latitude you will find on
recent maps the port of Pacasmayo. Four miles north, separated from it by a barren waste,
the river Jequetepeque empties into the sea. The bottom lands of the river are from two
to three miles in width, with a southern sloping bank and the northern a perpendicular one
nearly eighty feet high. Beside the southern shore, as it empties into the sea, is an
elevated plat one fourth of a mile square and forty feet high, all of adobes. A wall fifty feet
wide connects it with another, a few hundred yards east and south, that is 150 feet high,
200 feet across the top, and 500 at the base, nearly square. This latter was built in
sections of rooms ten feet square at the base, six feet at the top and about eight feet high.
These rooms were afterward filled with adobes, then plastered on the outside with mud and
washed in colors. All of this same class of mounds - temples, to worship the sun, or
fortresses, as they may be - have on the north side an incline for an entrance or means of
access. Treasure-seekers have cut into this one about half way, and it is said $150,000
worth of gold and silver ornaments were found. In the sand, banked up behind the wall and
mound, many were buried, as the thousands of skulls and bones now exposed prove;
thrown out by the hunter of huacos, as the pottery is called, huaca being the came given
to these cemeteries. Each body has buried with it a vessel or water craft and a pot with
grains of corn or wheat, and it is supposed the drinking vessel was filled with "chicha," a
fermented drink made from corn or peanuts. Beside these were many ornaments of gold,
silver, copper, coral and shell beads and cloths. On the north side of the river, on the top
of the bluff, are the extensive ruins of a walled city, two miles wide by six long. Within the
enclosure are the relics of two large reservoirs for fresh water. The clay from which these
adobes were made was found at least six miles distant.
 Follow the river to the mountains. All along you pass ruin after ruin and huaca after
huaca. At Tolon, a town at the base of the mountains, the valley is crossed by walls of
boulders and cobble stones, ten, eight and six feet high, one foot to eighteen inches wide
at the top and two to three feet at the base, enclos-

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ing ruins of a city one-fourth of a mile wide and more than a mile long. The upper wall has
projecting parts at the entrances, with port-holes, evidently serving as sentry boxes. At this
point the Pacasmayo Railroad enters the Jequetepeque valley. For eight miles back it
crosses a barren sand plain of more than fifteen miles in length, covered with ruined walls,
water courses, dead algaroba and espino trees, with fragments of pottery and sea shells,
even to nine feet in depth mixed with the sand. The base of the mountains have, in good
state of preservation, many thousand feet of an old water course, while their sides to the
perpendicular parts are lined with terraces. This water course took its head from a ravine
now dry, and, even beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitants, except in one or two
cases, never carried water. It can be traced as far as Ascope, forty-five miles south. Five
miles from Tolon, up the river, there is an isolated boulder of granite, four and six feet in its
diameters, covered with hieroglyphics. Fourteen miles further, a point of mountain at the
junction of two ravines is covered to a height of more than fifty feet with the same class of
hieroglyphics: Birds, fishes, snakes, cats, monkeys, men, sun, moon and many odd and
now unintelligible forms. The rock on which these are cut is a silicated sandstone, and
many of the lines are an eighth of an inch deep. In one large stone there are three holes,
twenty to thirty inches deep, six inches in diameter at the orifice and two at the apex, and
although polished as porcelain, these markings extend even to the bottom. The locality is
of no importance; the stones as nature placed them; why, then, was so much labor and
time expended upon them?
At Anchi, on the Rimac river, upon the face of a perpendicular wall two hundred feet
above the river bed, there are two hieroglyphics, representing an imperfect B and a perfect
D. In a crevice below them, near the river, were found buried twenty-five thousand dollars
worth of gold and silver. When the Incas learned of the murder of their chief, what did they
do with the gold they were bringing for his ransom? Rumor says they buried it, and many
places are pointed out and thousands of dollars spent in useless search for the lost
treasure. May not these markings at Yonan tell something, since they are on the road and
near to the Incal city? Eleven miles beyond Yonan, on a ridge of mountain seven hundred
feet above the river, are the walls of a city of 2,000 inhabitants. A perilous ascent on hands
and knees is now the only way to reach it; however, on the opposite side of the river are
similar ruins, but easy of access. A remnant of a stone wall, ten and twelve feet high, built
of small flat stones and without mortar, probably at one time served as river protection and
against the tribe on the other side, there being a tradition that two powerful chiefs occupied
these cities and were ever at war. The dead were buried in sepulchres, using large
boulders as the top, while stone walls divided the space beneath into compartments. Six
and twelve miles further are extensive walls and terraces. Three miles north of the latter
place are the rich silver mines of Chilete, formerly worked by the Indians, who left
excavations two and three
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hundred feet deep, and must have taken out quantities of silver. A company with a paid-up
capital of half a million is now working them.
Leaving the valley at seventy-eight miles from the coast, you zigzag up the mountain
side 7,000 feet, then descend 2,000, to arrive at Cajamarca, or Coxamalca of Pizarro's
time. Here and there all the way you find relics of the past. In a yard off one of the main
streets, and near the center of the city, is still standing the house made famous as the
prison of Atahualpa, and which he promised to fill with gold as high as he could reach, in
exchange for his liberty. Like all their stone work, the walls are slightly inclined inward,
uncemented, built of irregular stones, each exactly faced to fit the next. The floor and
porch are cut out of the solid stone, two and three feet deep, as the still intact remnants of
stone pillars of the same rock show. The hill from which the stone for the walls was taken
is near by. On its top a large stone in the shape of a chair bears the name of "Inca's chair,"
and the Indians say it was the king's custom to sit here every morning and salute the sun
as it rose above the horizon. "The two large places excavated out of the rock on the
hillside, and now used as reservoirs for the city, were of ancient make. Three miles distant,
and across the valley, are the hot springs, where the Inca was encamped when Pizarro
took possession of Cajamarca. Part of the wall is of unknown make, (that encloses the
baths.) Cemented, the cement is harder than the stone itself. At Chocofan, nine miles
from Pacasmayo, on the line of the railroad, a barren, rocky mountain, 1,200 feet high, is
encircled four hundred feet from its top by a stone wall eight or ten feet high. From its
northern side, running nearly northwest, is about five miles of the coast road of the Incas.
Perfectly straight, it is twenty feet wide, and walled on both sides by round stones piled to
a height of three and four feet, three feet wide at the base and two at the top, uncemented.
At Chepen, a station near the terminus of the branch of the Pacasmayo Railroad, is a
mountain with a wall in many places twenty feet high, the summit being almost entirely
artificial. In the sand at its base is one of Peru's most extensive "huacas," and from which
some of the finest pottery and ornaments have been taken.
Fifty miles south of Pacasmayo, between the seaport of Huanchaco and Truxillo,
nine miles distant, are the ruins of "Chan Chan," the capital city of the Chimoa kingdom,
which extended, when conquered by the Incas, from Supe to Tumbez, or over nearly the
northern half of the coast of modern Peru. The road from the port to the city crosses these
ruins, entering by a causeway about four feet from the ground, and leading from one great
mass of ruins to another; beneath this is a tunnel. Be they forts, castles, palaces, or burial
mounds called "huacas," all bear the name "huaca." Hours of wandering on horseback
among these ruins give only a confused idea of them, nor can old explorers there point out
what were palaces and what were not.
To the right is the "Huaca of Toledo;" to the left, "Bishop's Huaca." The large
square enclosures, shut in by wedge-shaped walls of adobe, twenty to twenty-five feet high,
have nothing of an entrance into them that would be defined as a palace gate. A half a
dozen of these, at least, are among the ruins. Within

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some of them are large square mounds or burying chambers, many of which have been
opened and rifled of their contents. These are plastered at the ceilings. Beside the so-
called "huacas" already mentioned, there is another on the left side of the road called by
the Spaniards "the Mass." On many of the walls is some excellent stucco work. Excellent
as regards the material of which it is made, more than with reference to its style of art.
There is not a single grain of disintegration in the parts that surround the walls of the
chamber, although it is half an inch high above the ordinary plaster in which it is done, nor
the slightest impairment in its integrity during the many centuries it has stood exposed to
the elements. The highest enclosures - those of adobe brick, up to thirty feet, with a base
of fifteen feet, on the right hand of the city as you advance toward Truxillo, between that
town and the "Toledo huaca" - must have cost an immense amount of labor, and needed
a large number of hands for their erection. Inside some of them, besides the square
mounds, are narrow passages, not more than a yard in width. In others are squares,
wherein are visible, though now filled with clay, the outlines of water tracks. On this side
are the principal burial mounds, some having stairs of adobe.
In the city of Truxillo there exists in the records of the municipality a copy of the
accounts that are found in the book of Fifths of the Treasury, in the years 1577 and 1578,
referring to the "Huaca of Toledo." The following is a condensed inventory:
First - In Truxillo, Peru, on the 22d of July, 1577, Don Garcia Gutierrez de Toledo
presented himself at the royal treasury, to give into the royal chest a fifth. He brought a bar
of gold nineteen carats ley and weighing two thousand four hundred Spanish dollars, of
which the fifth, being seven hundred and eight dollars, together with one and a half percent
to the chief assayer, were deposited in the royal box.
Second - On the 12th of December he presented himself with five bars of gold,
fifteen and nineteen carats ley, weighing eight thousand nine hundred and eighteen dollars.
Third - On the 7th of January, 1578, he came with his fifth of large bars and plates
of gold, one hundred and fifteen in number, fifteen to twenty carats ley, weighing one
hundred and fifty-three thousand, two hundred and eighty dollars.
Fourth - On the 8th of March he brought sixteen bars of gold, fourteen to twenty-one
carats ley, weighing twenty-one thousand one hundred and, eighteen dollars.
Fifth - On the 5th of April he brought different ornaments of gold, being little bells of
gold and patterns of corn-heads and other things, of fourteen carats ley, weighing six
thousand two hundred and seventy-two dollars.
Sixth - On the 20th of April he brought three small bars of gold, twenty carats ley,
weighing four thousand one hundred and seventy dollars.
Seventh - On the 12th of July he came with forty-seven bars, fourteen to twenty-one
carats ley, weighing seventy-seven thousand, three hundred and twelve dollars.

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Eighth - On the same day he came back with another portion of gold and ornaments
of cornheads and pieces of effigies of animals, weighing four thousand seven hundred and
four dollars.
The sum of these eight bringings amounted to 278,174 gold dollars or Spanish
ounces. Multiplied by sixteen gives $4,450,784 silver dollars. Deducting the royal fifth -
$985,953.75 - left $3,464,830.25 as Toledo's portion.
Even after this great haul, effigies of different animals of gold were found from time
to time. Mantles also, adorned with square pieces of gold, as well as robes made with
feathers of divers colors, were dug up. There is a tradition that in the huaca of Toledo there
were two treasures, known as the great and little fish. The smaller only has been found.
Between Huacho and Supe, the latter being one hundred and twenty miles north of
Callao, near a point called Atahuanqui, there are two enormous mounds, resembling the
Campana and San Miguel, of the Huatica valley, soon to be described. About five miles
from Patavilca (south and near Supe) is a place called "Paramonga," or the fortress. The
ruins of a fortress of great extent are here visible, the walls are of tempered clay, about six
feet thick. The principal building stood on an eminence, but the walls were continued to the
foot of it, like regular circumvallations; the ascent winding round the hill like a labyrinth,
having many angles, which probably served as outworks to defend the place. In this
neighborhood much treasure has been excavated, all of which must have been concealed
by the pre-historic Indian, as we have no evidence of the Incas ever having occupied this
part of Peru after they had subdued it.
From Lima north along the coast the Ancon & Chancay Railroad is built. Ancon,
eighteen miles from Lima, is a favorite summer seaside resort. Just before reaching
Ancon, the railroad runs through an immense burying-ground or "huaca." Make a circuit
of six to eight miles, and on every side you see skulls, legs, arms, and the whole skeleton
of the human body, lying about in the sand. Legs attached to pelvis, and bent up, still with
mummified skin on them; arms in the same state; relics of plaited straw, forming coffin
swathes; pieces of net, of cloth, and many other such accompaniments of funeral
accessories. Some water crafts of very superior quality have been obtained from these
graves. Of these there are three different forms, in places separated a short distance from
each other, but each style having its defined outline of locale. As to the shape of the
graves, there are some of an inverted cylinder form, like that of a lime-kiln, the insides of
which are lined with masonry work. In these the body is placed in the upright position.
There is also the ordinary longitudinal grave, in which the corpse is right in contact with the
earth. Likewise the grave cut square to a depth of six to eight feet, at the top of which, or
within one or two feet of the surface of the ground, is a roofing or covering of mat work,
placed on wooden rafters. In one of these Dr. Hutchinson, her Britannic Majesty's Consul
at Callao, found three bodies, all wrapped up together - being a man, woman and child -
their faces being swathed with llama wool instead of cotton, as is usually seen in ordinary
ones. He also turned out relics of fishing nets, with some

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needles for making them, varieties of cloth, tapestry, and work-bags resembling ladies'
reticules. Not a vestige of vegetation about, nor sign of relic of the terraces mentioned by
Prescott. Whence came these hundreds and thousands of people who are buried at
Ancon? How did they make out a living while on the earth? Time and time again the
archaeologist finds himself face to face with such questions, to which he can only shrug his
shoulders and say with the natives, "Quien sabe?" Who knows?
At Pasamayo, 14 miles further "down north," and on the sea shore, is another great
burying ground. Thousands of skeletons lie about, thrown out by the treasure-seekers. It
has more than a half mile of cutting through it for the Ancon & Chancay R. R. It extends
up the face of the hill from the sea-shore to the height of about 800 feet, and being from a
half to three-fourths of a mile in breadth, some idea may be formed of its extent.
Dr. Hutchinson, in two days, from these burial grounds, gathered 384 skulls, which,
with specimens of pottery, he presented to Professor Agassiz and he to the Cambridge
University, near Boston.
Between the teeth he found pieces of copper as if for the Charon obolus, and one
or two had plates of copper on their heads.
Crossing the brow of the hill, entering Chancay, and stretching toward the sea, are
the remains of a six feet adobe wall. On the face of this hill, pointing to the line of the
railway from Ancon, are two stone ditches, perfectly parallel and symmetrical, about 100
yards apart, and running from bottom to top to a height of about 300 yards. Between these
are other lines of stone displaced, perhaps the ruins of some old terraces. All about this
place, at the base of the hill, looking towards Chancay, as well as on the side in front of the
sea, is full of graves; some are built up with stone walls, others lined inside with mud-
bricks, of no formation more than a heap of clay and water molded up in the hands and
dried in the sun. Over the hills of Chancay are quantities of small stones of different
geological formation from the rock there.
Dr. Hutchinson writes, under date of Oct. 30th, 1872, in an article to the Callao and
Lima Gazette, now the South Pacific Times: "I am come to the conclusion that Chancay
is a great city of the dead, or has been an immense ossuary of Peru; for go where you will,
on mountain top or level plain, or by the sea side, you meet at every turn, skulls and bones
of all descriptions."
Lima, the capital of Peru, is situated seven miles inland from Callao. Nine miles on
the sea shore "up south," is the city of Chorillos, the Long Branch of Peru. A railway
connects Lima with these two cities, forming with the coast nearly a right angled triangle.
This triangular ground is known as the Huatica
Valley, and is an extensive ruin. Between Callao and Magdalena, four miles distant, there
are seventeen mounds called "huacas," although they present more the form of fortresses,
residences or castles, than burying grounds. 'Tis difficult to make out anything but
fragments of walls, as the ground is mostly under cultivation. However, at various points,
one can see that a triple wall surrounded the ancient city. These walls are respectively one
yard, two yards, and

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three yards in thickness, being in some parts of their relics, from fifteen to twenty feet high.
To the east of these is the enormous mound called Huaca of Pando; and to the west, with
the distance of about half a mile intervening, are the great ruins of fortresses, which natives
entitle Huaca of the Bell. La Campana, the huacas of Pando, consisting of a series of large
and small mounds, and extending over a stretch of ground incalculable without being
measured, form a colossal accumulation. The principal large ones are three in number;
that holding the name of the "Bell" is calculated to be 108 to 110 feet in height. At the
western side, looking towards Callao, there is a square plateau with an elevation of about
twenty-two to twenty-four feet, 95 to 96 yards north and south, east and west. At the
summit it is 276 to 278 yards long, and 95 to 96 across. On the top there are eight
gradations of declivity, each from one to two yards lower than its neighbor; counting in
direction lengthwise, the 1st plateau is 96 to 97 yards; 2nd plateau, 96 to 26 yards [sic];
3rd plateau, 23 to 24 yards; 4th plateau, 11 to 12 yards; 5th plateau, 11 to 25 yards; 6th
plateau, 23 to 24 yards; 7th plateau, 35 to 36 yards; 8th plateau, 35 to 37 yards; making
the total of about 278 yards. For these measurements of the Huatica ruins I am indebted
to the notes of J. B. Steere, Professor of Natural History and Curator of the Museum at Ann
Arbor, Michigan.
The square plateau first mentioned, at the base, consists of two divisions, one six
feet lower than the other, but each measuring a perfect square 47 to 48 yards; the two
joining form the square of 96 yards. Beside this, and a little forward on the western side,
is another square 47 to 48 yards. On the top, returning again, we find the same symmetry
of measurement in the multiples of twelve, nearly all the ruins in this valley being the same,
which is a fact for the curious. Was it by accident or design? In its breadth from north to
south, three levels are found. The first lower down, 17 to 18 yards wide; the second or
highest summit, 59 to 60 yards across; and the third descent again, 23 to 24 yards. The
mound is a truncated pyramidal form, and is calculated to contain a mass of 14,641,820
cubic feet of material. For the most part, this great work is composed of adobes, each six
inches long, four inches wide, and two and a half inches thick, many having the marks of
fingers on them. But this does not consist of more than one-third of the Pando huaca.
Walking down past the southern corner, where the adobes are tumbled into a
conglomerate mass by some earthquake, we see skulls with bones of arms and legs,
cropping up in many places. The same adobe work is visible throughout, and the whole
length of these structures ranges between seven and eight hundred yards. The "Fortress"
is a huge structure, 80 feet high, 148 to 150 yards in measurement. Great large square
rooms show their outlines on the top, but are filled with earth. Who brought this earth here,
and with what object was the filling up accomplished? The work of obliterating all space
in these rooms with loose earth must have been almost as great as the construction of the
building itself. About two miles south of the last named large fort, and in a parallel line with
it as regards the sea, we find another similar structure, probably a little

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more spacious and with a greater number of apartments, or divisions by walls, on the top
of which we can now walk, as it is likewise filled up with clay. This is called "San Miguel."
It is nearly 170 yards in length, and 168 in breadth, and 98 feet high. The whole of these
ruins, big fortress, small forts and temples, were enclosed by high walls of adobones, but
all of wedge-shaped form, with the sharp edge upward. Adobones are large mud bricks,
some from one to two yards in thickness, length and breadth. The huaca of the "Bell"
contains about 20,220,840 cubic feet of material, while that of "San Miguel " has
25,650,800. These two buildings were constructed in the same style - having traces of
terraces, parapets, and bastions, with a large number of rooms and squares - all now filled
up with earth.
Near Lima, on the south, is another mound, 70 feet high and 153 yards square.
Near the residence of Par Soldan, the Geographer of Peru, is a mound called "Sugar Loaf,"
or "San Isidro," 66 feet high, 80 yards broad at the base, and 130 yards long. Professor
Raimondi, the naturalist, chemist and scientist, who is doing for Peru what Gay did for Chili,
said he found nothing in it but bodies of ordinary fishermen, relics of nets, and some inferior
specimens of pottery.
 Prof. Steere and Dr. Hutchinson turned out about forty skulls, some bits of red and
yellow dyed thread, being relics of cloth; a piece of string made of woman's hair, plaited,
about the size of what is generally used for a watch guard; and pieces of very thick cotton
cloth, bits of fish nets, portions of slings, and two specimens of crockery ware of excellent
material.
About a mile beyond, in the direction of "Mira Flores," is Ocharan, the largest burial
mound in the Huatica valley. This mound presents, as it is approached, the appearance
of an imposing and enormous structure. It has 95 feet of elevation in its highest part, with
an average width of 55 yards on the summit and a total length of 428 yards, or 1,284 feet,
another multiple of twelve. It is inclosed by a double wall 816 yards in length by 700
across, thus enclosing 117 acres. Between Ocharan and the ocean are from 15 to 20
masses of ruins, like those already described.
Fifteen miles south of Lima in the valley of Lurin, and near the sea, are the ruins of
Pacha Camac, the Inca temple of the sun. Like the temple of Cholula on the plains of
Mexico, it is a sort of made mountain or vast terraced pyramid of earth. It is between two
and three hundred feet high, and forms a semi-lunar shape, that is beyond a half mile in
extent. Its top measures about ten acres square. Much of the walls are washed over with
a red paint, probably ochre, and are as fresh and bright as when centuries ago it was first
put on. In these walls in three or four places, are niches, apparently of the same shape and
size as we see in the ruins of Pagan temples. From one side, going toward the north, are
the relics of a wall, which is covered with soot, possibly the remnant of fires to make
sacrifices, and nothing can better illustrate the conservative tendency of the Peruvian
climate than the fresh appearance of the soot. Prescott says of Pacha Camac, that it was
to the Peruvians what Mecca is to the Mahometan, and Cholula was to the Mexican.

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In the Canete valley, opposite the Chincha Gaano Islands, are extensive ruins. In
that region a terra-cotta mask was found similar to that of which there is a drawing in Mr.
Squiers' report of his explorations in the State of New York, and discovered while
excavating for the St. Lawrence canal. From the hill called "Hill of Gold," copper and silver
pins were taken like those used by ladies to pin their shawls; also, tweezers for pulling out
the hair of the eye-brows, eye-lids and whiskers, as well as silver cups.
Buried 62 feet under the ground on the Chincha Islands, stone idols and water pots
were found, while 35 and 33 feet below the surface were wooden idols. Beneath the
Guano on the Guanapi Islands, just south of Truxillo, and Macabi just north, mummies,
birds and bird's eggs, gold and silver ornaments were taken. On the Macabi the laborers
found some large valuable golden vases, which they broke up and divided among
themselves, even though offered weight for weight in gold coin, and thus have relics of
greatest interest to the scientist been forever lost. He who can determine the centuries
necessary to deposit thirty and sixty feet of guano on these islands, remembering that,
since the conquest three hundred years ago, no appreciable increase in depth has been
noted, can give you an idea of the antiquity of these relics.
The coast of Peru extends from Tumbez on the north to the river Loa on the south,
a distance of 1,235 miles. Scattered here and there over this whole extent, there are
thousands of ruins beside those just mentioned, and similar, only not so extensive; while
nearly every hill and spur of the mountains have upon them or about them some relic of the
past; and in every ravine from the coast to the central plateau, there are ruins of walls of
fortresses, cities, burial vaults, and miles and miles of terraces and water courses. Across
the plateau and down the eastern slope of the Andes to the home of the wild Indian, and
into the unknown, impenetrable forest, still you find them. In 1861, Mendoza, in the
Argentine Republic, a beautiful city on the plain, 45 miles from the foot of the Andes, in the
short space of five minutes was a complete ruin, and 15,000 out of her 20,000 inhabitants,
or 75 percent, were in the arms of death. In 1871 it was still exactly as on the evening of
her destruction; the miles of skeletons lying uncovered where they perished, and the
streets yet obstructed with the debris of the fallen walls of the houses. A new city has been
built beside the old one. Seeking a photograph of the ruins, I was told there were none.
Persuading one of the artists to take some views of them, and going to see the proof, he
told me he had been out all day and had done nothing, as he could find nothing to take "but
a pile of dirt." Thus, also, you might, as most do, style these coast ruins, and those who
live among them understand and appreciate them no better than did the Mendoza artist the
ruins of that ill-fated city.
In the mountains, however, where storms of rain and snow with terrific thunder and
lightning are nearly constant a number of months each year, the ruins are different. Of
granitic, porphyritic, lime and silicated sand-stone, these massive, colossal, cyclopean
structures have resisted the disintegration of time, geological transformations, earthquakes,
and the sacrilegious, destructive hand of

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the warrior and treasure-seeker. The masonry composing these walls, temples, houses,
towers, fortresses, or sepulchres, is uncemented, held in place by the incline of the walls
from the perpendicular, and adaptation of each stone to the place destined for it, the stones
having from six to many sides, each dressed, and smoothed to fit another or others, with
such exactness that the blade of a small pen knife cannot be inserted in any of the seams
thus formed, whether in the central parts entirely hidden, or on the internal or external
surfaces. These stones, selected with no reference to uniformity in shape or size, vary
from one-half cubic foot to 1,500 cubic feet solid contents, and if, in the many, many
millions of stones you could find one that would fit in the place of another, it would be purely
accidental. In "Triumph street," in the city of Cuzco, in a part of the wall of the ancient
house of the virgins of the sun, is a very large stone, known as "the stone of the twelve
corners," since it joins with those that surround it, by twelve faces, each having a different
angle. Beside these twelve faces it has its external one, and no one knows how many it
has on its back that is hidden in the masonry. In the wall of the center of the Cuzco fortress
there are stones 13 feet high, 15 feet long, and eight feet thick, and all having been
quarried miles away. Near this city there is an oblong smooth boulder 18 feet in its longer
axis, and 12 in its lesser. On one side are large niches cut out, in which a man can stand,
and by swaying his body cause the stone to rock. These niches apparently were made
solely for this purpose. One of the most wonderful and extensive of these works in stone,
is that called Ollantay-Tambo, a ruin situated thirty miles north of Cuzco, in a narrow ravine
on the bank of the river Urubamba. It consists of a fortress constructed on the top of a
sloping, craggy eminence. Extending from it to the plain below, is a stone stairway. At the
top of the stairway are six large slabs, twelve feet high, five feet wide, and three feet thick,
side by side, having between them and on top narrow strips of stone about six inches wide,
frames as it were to the slabs, and all being of dressed stone. At the bottom of the hill, part
of which was made by hand, and at the foot of the stairs, a stone wall ten feet wide and
twelve feet high extends some distance into the plain. In it are many niches, all facing the
south.
The ruins on the islands in Lake Titicaca, where Incal history begins, have often
been described.
At Tiahuanaco, a few miles south of the lake, there are stones in the form of
columns, partly dressed, placed in line at certain distances from each other, and having an
elevation above the ground of from eighteen to twenty feet. In this same line there is a
monolithic doorway, now broken, ten feet high by thirteen wide. The space cut out for the
door is seven feet four inches high, by three feet two inches wide. The whole face of the
stone above the door is engraved. Another, similar, but smaller, lies on the ground beside
it. These stones are of hard porphyry, and differ geologically from the surrounding rock,
hence, we infer they must have been brought from elsewhere.
At "Chavin de Huanca," a town in the province of Huari, there are some ruins worthy
of note. Entrance to them is by an alley-way six feet wide and

--- 465

nine feet high, roofed over with sand-stone partly dressed, of more than twelve feet in
length. On each side there are rooms twelve feet wide, roofed by large pieces of sand-
stone one and a half feet thick and from six to nine feet wide. The walls of the rooms are
six feet thick, and have some loop-holes in them, probably for ventilation. In the floor of this
passage there is a very narrow entrance to a subterranean passage that passes beneath
the river to the other side. From this many huacos, stone drinking vessels, instruments of
copper and silver, and a skeleton of an Indian sitting, were taken. The greater part of these
ruins are situated over aqueducts. The bridge to these castles is made of three stones of
dressed granite, twenty-four feet long, two feet wide by one and a half thick. Some of the
granite stones are covered with hieroglyphics.
At Corralones, twenty-four miles from Arequipa, there are hieroglyphics engraved
on masses of granite, which appear as if painted with chalk. There are figures of men,
llamas, circles, parallelograms, letters, as an R and an O and even remains of a system of
astronomy.
At Huaytar, in the Province of Castro Virreina, there is an edifice with the same
engravings.
At Nazca, in the Province of Ica, there are some wonderful ruins of aqueducts, four
to five feet high and three feet wide, very straight, double walled, of unfinished stone,
flagged on top.
At Quelap, not far from Chochapayas, there have lately been examined some
extensive works. A wall of dressed stone 560 feet wide, 3,660 long, and 150 feet high.
The lower part is solid. Another wall above this has 600 feet length, 500 width, and the
same elevation of 150 feet. There are niches over both
walls, three feet long, one and a half wide and thick, containing the remains of those
ancient inhabitants, some naked, others enveloped in shawls of cotton of distinct colors,
and well embroidered. Their legs were doubled so that the knees touched the chin, and
the arms were wound about the legs. The wall has three uncovered doors, the right side
of each being semicircular, and the left angular. From the base an inclined plane ascends
almost insensibly the 150 feet of elevation, having about mid-way a species of sentry box
in stone. In the upper part there is an ingenious hiding place of dressed stone, having upon
it a place for an outlook from which a great portion of the Province can be seen. Following
the entrances of the second and highest wall, there are other sepulchres like small ovens,
six feet high and twenty-four in circumference, in their base are flags, upon which some
cadavers reposed. On the north side there is, on the perpendicular rocky side of the
mountain, a brick wall, having small windows 600 feet from the bottom. No reason for this,
nor means of approach, can now be found. The skillful construction of utensils of gold and
silver that were found here, the ingenuity and solidity of this gigantic work of dressed stone,
make it, also, probably pre-Incal date.
To support the inhabitants, it became necessary to cultivate every part of the land
possible, and since the greater portion is mountainous, they could make no use of that land
except by such means as they adopted, i.e., by terraces.

--- 466

Along the side, at the base of a hill or mountain, a stone wall is laid from one to eight feet
high, according to the slope, and earth filled in between it and the side of the mountain, till
even with the wall. Having this level for a base, another wall is laid, and again earth tilled
in, and so on, tier above tier, as high as the place will permit. These are terraces. The
summits of the mountains are saturated with water from the melting snow or winter rains.
This, forming little streams, is guided over these terraces. Each terrace is divided into
patches by making a little ridge of earth a few inches high all around them, enclosing places
two feet by six, or eight feet by ten, and so on according to the size of the terrace. The top
terrace is first flooded, the ridge of earth serving as a dam. When it is considered wet
enough, a channel is made by taking out a part of the ridge (with the hand or a little paddle
about the size of a pancake turner) permitting the water to escape to the part below, flowing
over the wall to the next terrace, which is similarly treated. But there are thousands of
terraces where the mountains and hills are so low and near the rainless portion that snow
never, and rain, very seldom, moistens their summits, and where no one could expect
water for irrigation unless carried there by hand. Starvation alone would compel people to
undertake so fatiguing and laborious a work, especially in a country where the evenness
of the climate tends to relax the energy of both mind and body. Estimating five hundred
ravines in the twelve hundred miles of Peru, and ten miles of terraces of fifty tiers to each
ravine, which would only be five miles of twenty-five tiers to each side, we have 250,000
miles of stone wall, averaging three to four feet high - enough to encircle this globe ten
times. Surprising as these estimates may seem, I am fully convinced that an actual
measurement would more than double them, for these ravines vary from thirty to one
hundred miles in length, and ten miles to each is a low estimate. While at San Mateo, a
town in the valley of the river Rimac, seventy-seven miles from the coast, where the
mountains rise to a height of fifteen hundred or two thousand feet above the river bed, I
counted two hundred tiers, none of which were less than four and many more than six miles
long. Even at four miles, there would be at that point alone eight hundred miles of stone
wall, and that only on one side of the ravine.
Who, then, were these people, cutting through sixty miles of granite, transporting
blocks of hard porphyry, of Baalbic dimensions, miles from the place where quarried,
across valleys thousands of feet deep, over mountains, along plains, leaving no trace of
how or where they carried them; people ignorant of the use of iron, with the feeble llama
their only beast of burden; who, after having brought these stones together and dressed
them, fitted them into walls with mosaic precision; terracing thousands of miles of mountain
side; building hills of adobes and earth, and huge cities; leaving works in clay, stone,
copper, silver, gold and embroidery, many of which cannot be duplicated at the present
age; people apparently vying with Dives in riches, Hercules in strength and energy and the
ant and bee in industry?
Callao was submerged in 1746 and entirely destroyed. Lima was ruined in 1678 -
in 1746 only twenty houses out of three thousand were left standing - and

--- 467

again injured in 1764, 1822 and 1828, while the ancient cities in the Huatica and Lurin
valleys still remain in a comparatively good state of preservation. San Miguel de Piura,
founded by Pizarro in 1531, was entirely destroyed in 1855, while the old ruins near by
suffered little. Arequipa was thrown down in August, 1868, but the ruins near show no
change.
Spanish writers refer all to Incal make, but Incal history only dates back to the
eleventh century, and from that time to the Conquest is insufficient, nor do they speak of
many of these works. It is granted that the Temple of the Sun, at Cuzco, was of Incal
make, but that is the latest of the five styles of architecture visible in the Andes, each
probably representing an age of human progress; therefore we are pretty certain that the
imperial glories of the Incas were but the last gleam of civilization that mounted up to
thousands of years; that long before Manco Capac, the Andes had been the dwelling place
of races whose beginnings must have been coeval with the savages of Western Europe.
The gigantic architecture points to the Cyclopean family, the founders of the Temple of
Babel and the Egyptian Pyramids. The Grecian scroll found in many places, borrowed from
the Egyptians; the mode of burial and embalming their dead, points to Egypt as their
similar, while the distaff, plow, manner of threshing and of making brick the same as when
the Israelites were captives.
The hieroglyphics, to none of which as yet a key has been found, cannot be referred
to the Incas, since they apparently had no knowledge of characters, but kept their records
and accounts by means of a quippus, or knots and different colored threads, as did those
in Asia, China, Mexico and Canada, in ancient times, and they kept in each city an official
whose business it was to keep and decipher their quippus. It was made of twisted wool,
and consisted of a thread or thick string, from one to eighteen feet long, as a base upon
which other threads or strings were attached. The different colors had different
significations: the red, soldier or warrior; the yellow, gold; the white, silver or peace; the
green, wheat or corn, and so on. In numerals, one knot signified ten; two simple knots,
twenty; the knot doubly interlaced, one hundred; trebly interlaced, one thousand; two
interlacings of this latter, two thousand. By setting apart a quippus for the military, another
for laws and decrees, another for historic events - i.e., a separate quippus for distinct
classes of ideas - the same knots could be used many times over, but to read them one
must know to which class they belonged. Certain signs were affixed to the beginning of
each "mother-thread," as the base or principal string was called, by which the official could
distinguish each; however, should an official visit another locality, these signs had to be
explained verbally, also the signs representing local events, names of rivers, mountains,
ships, cities, etc. Hence, a quippus was only intelligible, for the most part, in the place it
was kept. Many quippus have been taken from the graves, in excellent state of
preservation in color and texture, but the lips that alone could pronounce the verbal key
have forever ceased their function, and the relic seeker has failed to note the exact spot
each was found, so that the records which could tell so much we want to know, will remain
sealed till all is revealed at the last day.

--- 468

The skulls taken from the burial-grounds, according to craniologists, represent three
distinct races.
The first, to which the name "Chinchas" has been given, occupied the western part
of Peru from the Andes to the Pacific, and from Tunebez on the north to the desert of
Atacama on the south.
The second, called "Aymaras," dwelt in the elevated plains of Peru and Bolivia, on
the southern shore of lake Titicaca, where they reside even to this day, being the only race
that did not give up their language for the Inichua, or language of the Incas, when
conquered by them.
The third, called "Huancas," occupied the plateau between the chains of Andes north
of lake Titicaca to the 9th degree of south latitude. This race were supposed to have
caused the peculiar shape of their heads by mechanical means, as the Flat head Indians
with us, and the Combos, a tribe that now live on the banks of the Ucayali near Sarayacu,
but the taking from a mummy of a foetus of seven or eight months having the same
configuration of the skull, has placed a doubt as to the certainty of this fact.
How changed! How fallen from their greatness must have been the Incas when a
little band of 160 men could penetrate uninjured to their mountain homes, murder their
worshiped kings and thousands of their warriors, and carry away their riches, and that, too,
in a country where a few men with stones could resist successfully an army! Who could
recognize in the present Inichua and Aymara Indians their noble ancestry?
Their songs are typical of their condition, and are called "tristes," or sad songs.
Always a duet in a minor key, and at night as you hear it, it seems rather the expiring wail
of some lost spirit than a human voice. It begins with a full inspiration of the lungs and at
the highest pitch of the voice, and ends with the expiration of the breath in a low, long
drawn out "andante pianissimo." The words are chanted and often made up for the
occasion. These are the words heard by a traveler from the lips of a young Indian mother,
in the wild recesses of the Andes:

"My mother begat me amid rain and mist,

To weep like the rain and be drifted like the clouds.
You are born in the cradle of sorrow,
Says my mother; and she weeps as she wraps me around.
 If I wander the wide world over,
I could not meet my equal in misery.
Accursed be the day of my birth,
Accursed be the night I was born,
From this time, for ever and ever!"

Three times the Andes sank hundreds of feet beneath the ocean level, and again
were slowly brought to their present height. A man's life would be too short to count even
the centuries consumed in this operation. The coast of Peru has risen eighty feet since it
felt the tread of Pizarro. Supposing the Andes to have risen uniformly and without
interruption, seventy thousand years must have elapsed before they reached their present
attitude.

--- 469

Who knows, then, but that Jules Verne's fanciful idea regarding the lost continent
Atlanta may be near the truth? Who can say that where now is the Atlantic ocean, formerly
did not exist a continent, with its dense population, advanced in the arts and sciences, who,
as they found their land sinking beneath the waters, retired, part east and part west,
populating thus the two new hemispheres? This would explain the similarity of their
archaeological structures and races and their differences, modified by and adapted to the
character of their respective climates and countries. Thus could the llama and camel differ,
although of the same species; thus the algoraba and espino trees; thus the Iroquois
Indians of North America and the most ancient Arabs call the constellation of the "Great
Bear" by the same name: thus various nations, cut off from all intercourse or knowledge
of each other, divide the Zodiac in twelve constellations, apply to them the same names,
and the northern Hindoos apply the name Andes to their Himalayan mountains, as did the
South Americans to their principal chain. Must we fall in the old rut and suppose no other
means of populating the Western Hemisphere except "by way of Behring's strait?" Must
we still locate a geographical Eden in the East, and suppose a land equally adapted to man
and as old geologically, must wait the aimless wanderings of the "lost tribe of Israel" to
become populated?
Beside dead and speechless relics of the past, there exists a living antiquity. In 7'
south latitude, a couple of miles from the sea, there is a town of about 4,000 inhabitants
called Eten. They speak, besides the Spanish, a language that some of the recently
brought over Chinese laborers understand, but differ in all other respects. They intermarry
brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces, nephews and aunts, i.e. promiscuously, with no
apparent curse of consanguinity. They are exclusive, permitting no intermarriage into their
number or with the outside world. They have laws and customs and dress of their own,
and live by braiding hats, mats, and weaving cloths. They will give no account of when they
came or from whence, nor does history mention them as existing before the Spaniards
came, nor does it record their arrival since. Among them you will find no sick or deformed
people, their custom being to send a committee to each sick or old person, and if they
judge the patient past recovery or the aged past usefulness, the public executioner is sent
and they are strangled. Eten orders it, they say, and none ever interfere with these orders.
Thirteen thousand years ago, Vega, or a. Lyrae, was the north polar star. Since
then how many changes has she seen in our planet? How many nations and races spring
into life, rise to their zenith splendor and then decay; and when we shall have been gone
thirteen thousand years, and once more she resumes her post at the north, completing a
"Platonic, or Great Year," think you that those who shall fill our places on the earth at that
time will be more conversant with our history than we are of those that have passed?
Verily might we exclaim in terms almost Psalmistic, Great God, Creator and Director of the
Universe, - what is man that Thou art mindful of him!

-----------------

A LAND OF MYSTERY
by H. P. Blavatsky
[The Theosophist, Vol. I, No. 6, March, 1880, pp. 159-161; April, 1880, pp. 170-173;
June, 1880, pp. 224-227; August, 1880, pp. 277-78]

[[There are long quotes in this article from Heath's article above, but allowed to remain
for continuity of the article. The "compiler notes" are Boris de Zirkoff's.]

Whether one surveys the imposing ruins of Memphis or Palmyra; stands at the foot
of the great pyramid of Gizeh; wanders along the shores of the Nile; or ponders amid the
desolate fastnesses of the long-lost and mysterious Petra; however clouded and misty the
origin of these prehistoric relics may appear, one nevertheless finds at least certain
fragments of firm ground upon which to build conjecture. Thick as may be the curtain
behind which the history of these antiquities is hidden, still there are rents here and there
through which one may catch glimpses of light. We are acquainted with the descendants
of the builders. And, however superficially, we also know the story of the nations whose
vestiges are scattered around us. Not so with the antiquities of the New World of the two
Americas. There, all along the coast of Peru, all over the Isthmus and North America, in the
canyons of the Cordilleras, in the impassable gorges of the Andes, and, especially beyond
the valley of Mexico, lie, ruined and desolate, hundreds of once mighty cities, lost to the
memory of men, and having themselves lost even a name. Buried in dense forests,
entombed in inaccessible valleys, sometimes sixty feet underground, from the day of their
discovery until now they have ever remained a riddle to science, baffling all inquiry, and
they have been muter than the Egyptian Sphinx herself. We know nothing of America prior
to the Conquest - positively nothing. No chronicles, not even comparatively modern ones
survive; there are no traditions, even among the aboriginal tribes, as to its past events. We
are as ignorant of the races that built these cyclopean structures, as of the strange worship
that inspired the antediluvian sculptors, who carved upon hundreds of miles of walls, of
monuments, monoliths and altars, these weird hieroglyphics, these groups of animals and
men, pictures of an unknown life and lost arts - scenes so fantastic and wild, at times, that
they involuntarily suggest the idea of a feverish dream, whose phantasmagoria at the wave
of some mighty magician's hand suddenly crystallized into granite, to bewilder the coming
generations for ever and ever. So late as the beginning of the present century, the very
existence of such a wealth of antiquities was unknown. The petty, suspicious jealousy of
the Spaniards had, from the first, created a sort of Chinese wall between their American
possessions and the too curious traveller; and the ignorance and fanaticism of the
conquerors, and their carelessness as to all but the satisfaction of their insatiable
greediness, had precluded scientific research. Even the enthusiastic accounts of Cortez
and his army of brigands and priests, and of Pizarro and his robbers and monks, as to the
splendour of the temples, palaces, and cities of Mexico and Peru, were long discredited.
In his The History of America, Dr. Wm. Robertson goes so far as to inform his reader that
the houses of the ancient Mexicans were "mere huts, built with turf, or mud, or the
branches of trees, like those of the rudest Indians";* and, upon the testimony of some
Spaniards he even risked the assertion that "in all the extent of that vast empire," there was
not "a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the conquest"! It was
reserved to the great Alexander Humboldt to vindicate the truth. In 1803 a new flood of light
was poured into the world of archaeology by this eminent and learned traveller. In this he
luckily proved but the pioneer of future discoverers. He then described but Mitla, or the Vale
of the Dead, Xochicalco, and the great pyramidal Temple of Cholula. But, after him came
John L. Stephens, F. C. Catherwood, and Squier; and, in Peru, d'Orbigny and Dr. Tschudi.
Since then, numerous travellers have visited and given us accurate details of many of the
antiquities. But, how many more yet remain not only unexplored, but even unknown, no one
can tell. As regards prehistoric buildings, both Peru and Mexico are rivals of Egypt.
Equalling the latter in the immensity of her cyclopean structures, Peru surpasses her in
their number; while Cholula exceeds the grand pyramid of Cheops in breadth, if not in
height. Works of public utility, such as walls, fortifications, terraces, watercourses,
aqueducts, bridges, temples, burial-grounds, whole cities, and exquisitely paved roads,
hundreds of miles in length, stretch in an unbroken line, almost covering the land as with
a net. On the coast, they are built of sun-dried bricks; in the mountains, of porphyritic lime,
granite, and silicated sandstone. Of the long generations of peoples who built them, history
knows nothing, and even tradition is silent. As a matter of course, most of these lithic
remains are covered with a dense vegetation. Whole forests have grown out of the broken
hearts of the cities, and, with a few exceptions, everything is in ruin. But one may judge of
what once was by that which yet remains.

----------
* See J. L. Stephens' Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan,
12th ed., London 1846, Vol. I, p. 97.
----------

With a most flippant unconcern, the Spanish historians refer nearly every ruin to
Incal times. No greater mistake can be made. The hieroglyphics which sometimes cover
from top to bottom whole walls and monoliths are, as they were from the first, a dead letter
to modern science. But they were equally a dead letter to the Incas, though the history of
the latter can be traced to the eleventh century. They had no clue to the meaning of these
inscriptions. but attributed all such to their unknown predecessors; thus barring the
presumption of their own descent from the first civilizers of their country. Briefly, the Incal
history runs thus: -
Inca is the Quichua title for chief or emperor, and the name of the ruling and most
aristocratic race or rather caste of the land, which was governed by them for an unknown
period, prior to, and until, the Spanish Conquest. Some place their first appearance in Peru
from regions unknown in 1021; others, also; or conjecture, at five centuries after the
Biblical "flood," and according to the modest notions of Christian theology. Still the latter
theory is undoubtedly nearer truth than the former. The Incas, judged by their exclusive
privileges, power, and "infallibility," are the antipodal counterpart of the Brahmanical caste
of India. Like the latter, the Incas claimed direct descent from Deity, which, as in the case
of the Suryavansa dynasty of India, was the Sun. According to the sole but general
tradition, there was a time when the whole of the population of the now New World was
broken up into independent, warring, and barbarian tribes. At last, the "Highest" deity - the
Sun - took pity upon them, and, in order to rescue the people from ignorance, sent down
upon earth, to teach them, his two children Manco Capac and his sister and wife, Mama
Oella Huaca - the counterparts, again, of the Egyptian Osiris, and his sister and wife, Isis,
as well as of the several Hindu gods and demi-gods and their wives. These two made their
appearance on a beautiful island in Lake Titicaca - of which we will speak further on - and
thence proceeded northward to Cuzco, later on the capital of the Incas, where they at once
began to disseminate civilization. Collecting together the various races from all parts of
Peru, the divine couple then divided their labour. Manco Capac taught men agriculture,
legislation, architecture, and arts; while Mama Oella instructed the women in weaving,
spinning, embroidery, and housekeeping. It is from this celestial pair that the Incas claimed
their descent; and yet, they were utterly ignorant of the people who built the stupendous
and now ruined cities which cover the whole area of their empire, and which then extended
from the Equator to over 37 degrees of [South] Latitude, and included not only the western
slope of the Andes, but the whole mountain chain with its eastern declivities to the Amazon
and Orinoco. As the direct descendants of the Sun, they were exclusively the high priests
of the state religion, and at the same time emperors and the highest statesmen in the land;
in virtue of which, they, again like the Brahmans, arrogated to themselves a divine
superiority over the ordinary mortals, thus founding like the "twice-born" an exclusive and
aristocratic caste - the Inca race. Considered as the son of the Sun, every reigning Inca
was the high priest, the oracle, chief captain in war, and absolute sovereign; thus realizing
the double office of Pope and King, and so long anticipating the dream of the Roman
Pontiffs. To his command the blindest obedience was exacted; his person was sacred;
and he was the object of divine honours. The highest officers of the land could not appear
shod in his presence; this mark of respect pointing again to an Oriental origin; while the
custom of boring the ears of the youths of royal blood and inserting in them golden rings
"which were increased in size as they advanced in rank, until the distention of the cartilage
became a positive deformity," suggests a strange resemblance between the sculptured
portraits of many of them that we find in the more modern ruins, and the images of Buddha
and of some Hindu deities, not to mention our contemporary dandies of Siam, Burma, and
Southern India. In that, once more like in India, in the palmy days of the Brahmin power,
no one had the right to either receive an education or study religion except the young men
of the privileged Inca caste. And, when the reigning Inca died, or as it was termed, "was
called home to the mansion of his father," a very large number of his attendants and his
wives were made to die with him, during the ceremony of his obsequies, just as we find in
the old annals of Rajasthan, and down to the but just abolished custom of Suttee. Taking
all this into consideration, the archaeologist cannot remain satisfied with the brief remark
of certain historians that "in this tradition we trace only another version of the story of the
civilization common to all primitive nations, and that imposture of a celestial relationship
whereby designing rulers and cunning priests have sought to secure their ascendancy
among men." No more is it an explanation to say that "Manco Capac is the almost exact
counterpart of the Chinese Fohi, the Hindu Buddha, the terrestrial Osiris of Egypt, the
Quetzalcohuatl of Mexico, and Votan of Central America"; for all this is but too evident.
What we want to learn is, how came these nations, so antipodal to each other as India,
Egypt, and America, to offer such extraordinary points of resemblance, not only in their
general religious, political, and social views, but sometimes in the minutest details. The
much-needed task is to find out which one of them preceded the other; to explain how
these people came to plant at the four corners of the earth nearly identical architecture and
arts, unless there was a time when, as assured by Plato and believed in by more than one
modern archaeologist, no ships were needed for such a transit, as the two worlds formed
but one continent.
According to the most recent researches, there are five distinct styles of architecture
in the Andes alone, of which the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was the latest. And this one,
perhaps, is the only structure of importance which, according to modern travellers, can be
safely attributed to the Incas, whose imperial glories are believed to have been the last
gleam of a civilization dating back for untold ages. Dr. E. R. Heath, of Kansas (U.S.A.),
thinks that
". . . long before Manco Capac, the Andes had been the dwelling-place of races,
whose beginnings must have been coeval with the savages of Western Europe. The
gigantic architecture points to the Cyclopean family, the founders of the Temple of Babel,
and the Egyptian pyramids. The Grecian scroll found in many places is borrowed [?] from
the Egyptians; the mode of burial and embalming their dead points to Egypt . . . ." *

----------
* [Heath, "Peruvian Antiquities," Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, Nov.,
1878, p. 467. - Compiler.]
----------

Further on, this learned traveller finds that the skulls taken from the burial-grounds,
according to craniologists, represent three distinct races: the Chinchas, who occupied the
western part of Peru from the Andes to the Pacific; the Aymaras, dwellers of the elevated
plains of Peru and Bolivia, on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca; and the Huancas, who
"occupied the plateau between the chains of Andes north of Lake Titicaca to the 9th degree
of south latitude."* To confound the buildings of the epoch of the Incas in Peru, and of
Montezuma and his Caciques, in Mexico, with the aboriginal monuments, is fatal to
archaeology. While Cholula, Uxmal, Quiche, Pachacamac, and Chichen were all perfectly
preserved and occupied at the time of the invasion of the Spanish banditti, there are
hundreds of ruined cities and works which were in the same state of ruin even then; whose
origin was unknown to the conquered Incas and Caciques as it is to us; and which are
undoubtedly the remains of unknown and now extinct peoples. The strange shapes of the
heads, and profiles of the human figures upon the monoliths of Copan are a warrant for the
correctness of the hypothesis. The pronounced difference between the skulls of these
races and the Indo-European skulls was at first attributed to mechanical means, used by
the mothers for giving a peculiar conformation to the head of their children during infancy,
as is often done by other tribes and peoples. But, as the same author tells us, the finding
in "a mummy of a foetus of seven or eight months having the same conformation of skull,
has placed a doubt as to the certainty of this fact." And besides hypothesis, we have a
scientific and an unimpeachable proof of a civilization that must have existed in Peru ages
ago. Were we to give the number of thousands of years that have probably elapsed since
then, without first showing good reasons for the assumption, the reader might feel like
holding his breath. So let us try.

----------
* [Ibid., p. 468.]
----------

The Peruvian guano (huano), that precious fertilizer, composed of the excrement of
sea-fowl, intermixed with their decaying bodies, eggs, remains of seal, and so on, which
has accumulated upon the isles of the Pacific and the coast of South America, and its
formation are now well known. It was Humboldt who first discovered and drew the world's
attention to it in 1804. And, while describing the deposits as covering the granite rocks of
the Chinchas and other islands to the depth of 50 or 60 feet, he states that the
accumulation of the preceding 300 years, since the Conquest, had formed only a few lines
in thickness. How many thousands of years, then, it required to form this deposit 60 feet
deep, is a matter of simple calculation. In this connection we may now quote something of
a discovery spoken of in the "Peruvian Antiquities."*
"Buried 62 feet under the ground, on the Chincha islands, stone idols and water pots
were found, while 35 and 33 feet below the surface were wooden idols. Beneath the guano
on the Guanape islands, just south of Truxillo, and Macabi just north, mummies, birds, and
birds' eggs, gold and silver ornaments were taken. On the Macabi the laborers found some
large valuable golden vases, which they broke up and divided among themselves, even
though offered weight for weight in gold coin, and thus have relics of greatest interest to the
scientist been for ever lost. He who can determine the centuries necessary to deposit thirty
and sixty feet of guano on these islands, remembering that, since the conquest three
hundred years ago, no appreciable increase in depth has been noted, can give you an idea
of the antiquity of these relics." **

----------
* A paper published by Mr. E. R. Heath in the Kansas City Review of Science and
Industry, November 1878.
** [Op. cit., p. 463.]
-----------

If we confine ourselves to a strictly arithmetical calculation, then, allowing 12 lines

to an inch, and 12 inches to a foot, and allowing one line to every century, we are forced
to believe that the people who made these precious gold vases lived 864,000 years ago!
Leave an ample margin for errors, and give two lines to a century - say an inch to every
100 years - and we will yet have 72,000 years back a civilization which - if we judge by its
public works, the durability of its constructions, and the grandeur of its buildings - equalled,
and in some things certainly surpassed, our own.
Having well defined ideas as to the periodicity of cycles, for the world as well as for
nations, empires, and tribes, we are convinced that our present modern civilization is but
the latest dawn of that which already has been seen an innumerable number of times upon
this planet. It may not be exact science, but it is both inductive and deductive logic, based
upon theories far less hypothetical and more palpable than many another theory, held as
strictly scientific. To express it in the words of Professor F. E. Nipher of St. Louis, "we are
not the friends of theory, but of truth," and until truth is found, we welcome every new
theory, however unpopular at first, for fear of rejecting in our ignorance the stone which
may in time become the very corner-stone of the truth. "The errors of scientific men are
well-nigh countless, not because they are men of science, but because they are men," says
the same scientist; and further quotes the noble words of Faraday - "occasionally, and
frequently the exercise of the judgment ought to end in absolute reservation. It may be very
distasteful and a great fatigue to suspend a conclusion, but as we are not infallible, so we
ought to be cautious." (Experimental Researches, 24th Series.)
It is doubtful whether, with the exception of a few of the most prominent ruins, there
ever was attempted a detailed account of the so-called American antiquities. Yet, in order
to bring out the more prominently a point of comparison, such a work would be absolutely
necessary. If the history of religion and of mythology and - far more important - the origin,
developing and final grouping, of the human species are ever to be unravelled, we have
to trust to archaeological research, rather than to the hypothetical deductions of philology.
We must begin by massing together the concrete imagery of the early thought, more
eloquent in its stationary form than the verbal expression of the same, the latter being but
too liable, in its manifold interpretations, to be distorted in a thousand ways. This would
afford us an easier and more trustworthy clue. Archaeological Societies ought to have a
whole cyclopaedia of the world's remains, with a collation of the most important of the
speculations as to each locality. For, however fantastic and wild some of these hypotheses
may seem at first glance, yet each has a chance of proving useful at some time. It is often
more beneficial to know what a thing is not than to know what it is, as Max Muller truly tells
us.
It is not within the limits of an article in our paper that any such object could be
achieved. Availing ourselves, though, of the reports of the Government surveyors,
trustworthy travellers, men of science, and even our own limited experience, we will try in
future issues to give to our Hindu readers, who possibly may never have heard of these
antiquities, a general idea of them. Our latest information is drawn from every reliable
source; the survey of the Peruvian antiquities being mostly due to Dr. Heath's able paper,
above mentioned.
-----------

Evidently, we, Theosophists, are not the only iconoclasts in this world of mutual
deception and hypocrisy. We are not the only ones who believe in cycles and, opposing the
Biblical chronology, lean towards those opinions which secretly are shared by so many, but
publicly avowed by so few. We, Europeans, are just emerging from the very bottom of a
new cycle, and progressing upwards, while the Asiatics Hindus especially - are the lingering
remnants of the nations which filled the world in the previous and now departed cycles.
Whether the Aryans sprang from the archaic Americans, or the latter from the prehistorical
Aryans, is a question which no living man can decide. But that there must have been an
intimate connection at some time between the old Aryans, the prehistoric inhabitants of
America - whatever might have been their name - and the ancient Egyptians, is a matter
more easily proved than contradicted. And probably, if there ever was such a connection,
it must have taken place at a time when the Atlantic did not yet divide the two hemispheres
as it does now.
In his "Peruvian Antiquities" Dr. Heath, of Kansas City - rara avis among scientific
men, a fearless searcher, who accepts truth wherever he finds it, and is not afraid to speak
it out in the very face of dogmatic opposition - sums up his impressions of the Peruvian
relics in the following words:
"Three times the Andes sank hundreds of feet beneath the ocean level, and again
were slowly brought to their present height. A man's life would be too short to count even
the centuries consumed in this operation. The coast of Peru has risen eighty feet since it
felt the tread of Pizarro. Supposing the Andes to have risen uniformly and without
interruption, seventy thousand years must have elapsed before they reached their present
altitude.
"Who knows, then, but that Jules Verne's fanciful idea* regarding the lost continent
Atlanta may be near the truth? Who can say, that where now is the Atlantic Ocean, formerly
did not exist a continent, with its dense population, advanced in the arts and sciences, who,
as they found their land sinking beneath the waters, retired, part east and part west,
populating thus the two new hemispheres? This would explain the similarity of their
archæological structures and races and their differences, modified by and adapted to the
character of their respective climates and countries. Thus could the llama and the camel
differ, although of the same species; thus the algoraba and espino trees; thus the Iroquois
Indians of North America and the most ancient Arabs call the constellation of the "Great
Bear" by the same name; thus various nations, cut off from all intercourse or knowledge
of each other, divide the zodiac in twelve constellations, apply to them the same names,
and the Northern Hindoos apply the name Andes to their Himalayan mountains, as did the
South Americans to their principal chain.** Must we fall in the old rut and suppose no other
means of populating the Western Hemisphere except "by way of Behring's Strait"? Must
we still locate a geographical Eden in the East, and suppose a land equally adapted to man
and as old geologically, must wait the aimless wanderings of the "lost tribe of Israel" to
become populated?" ***

----------
* This idea is plainly expressed and asserted as a fact by Plato in his Banquet; and
was taken up by Lord Bacon in his New Atlantis. [H.P.B.]
** "The name America," said I, in Isis Unveiled (Vol. I, p. 591) three years ago, "may
one day be found more closely related to Meru, the sacred mount in the centre of the seven
continents." When first discovered America was found to bear among some native tribes
the name of Atlanta. In the States of Central America we find the name Amerih, signifying,
like Meru, a great mountain. The origin of the Kamas Indians of America is also unknown.
[H.P.B.]
*** [Heath, op. cit., pp. 468-69.]
----------–

Go where we may, to explore the antiquities of America - whether of Northern,

Central, or Southern America - we are first of all impressed with the magnitude of these
relics of ages and races unknown, and then with the extraordinary similarity they present
to the mounds and ancient structures of old India, of Egypt, and even of some parts of
Europe. Whoever has seen one of these mounds has seen all. Whoever has stood before
the cyclopean structures of one continent can have a pretty accurate idea of those of the
other. Only be it said - we know still less of the age of the antiquities of America than even
of those in the Valley of the Nile, of which we know next to nothing. But their symbolism -
apart from their outward form - is evidently the same as in Egypt, India, and elsewhere. As
before the great pyramid of Cheops in Cairo, so before the great mound, 100 feet high, on
the plain of Cahokia - near St. Louis (Missouri) - which measures 700 feet long by 500 feet
broad at the base, and covers upwards of eight acres of ground, having 20,000,000 cubic
feet of contents, and the mound on the banks of Brush Creek, Ohio, so accurately
described by Squier and Davis, one knows not whether to admire more the geometrical
precision, prescribed by the wonderful and mysterious builders in the form of their
monuments, or the hidden symbolism they evidently sought to express. The Ohio mound
represents a serpent, upwards of 1,000 feet long. Gracefully coiled in capricious curves,
it terminates in a triple coil at the tail. "The embankment constituting the effigy, is upwards
of five feet in height, by thirty feet base at the centre of the body, diminishing somewhat
toward the head and tail."* The neck is stretched out and its mouth wide opened, holding
within its jaws an oval figure. "This oval is formed by an embankment four feet in height,
and is perfectly regular in outline, its transverse and conjugate diameters being 160 and
80 feet respectively," say the surveyors.

-----------
* [New American Cyclopaedia, 1873-76, art. on "American Antiquities"; same ref.
in the case of the quotation immediately following. - Compiler.]
----------

The whole represents the universal cosmological idea of the serpent and the egg. This is
easy to surmise. But how came this great symbol of the Hermetic wisdom of old Egypt to
find itself represented in North America? How is it that the sacred buildings found in Ohio
and elsewhere, these squares, circles, octagons, and other geometrical figures, in which
one recognizes so easily the prevailing idea of the Pythagorean sacred numerals, seem
copied from the Book of Numbers? Apart from the complete silence as to their origin, even
among the Indian tribes, who have otherwise preserved their own traditions in every case,
the antiquity of these ruins is proved by the existence of the largest and most ancient
forests growing on the buried cities. The prudent archaeologists of America have
generously assigned them 2,000 years. But by whom built, and whether their authors
migrated, or disappeared beneath victorious arms, or were swept out of existence by some
direful epidemic, or a universal famine, are questions, "probably beyond the power of
human investigations to answer," they say.*

----------
* [New Amer. Cyclop., as above. - Compiler.]
----------
The earliest inhabitants of Mexico, of whom history has any knowledge - more hypothetical
than proven - are the Toltecs. These are supposed to have come from the North and
believed to have entered Anahuac in the 7th century A.D. They are also credited with
having constructed in Central America, where they spread in the eleventh century, some
of the great cities whose ruins still exist. In this case it is they who must also have carved
the hieroglyphics that cover some of the relics. How is it then, that the pictorial system of
writing of Mexico, which was used by the conquered people and learned by the conquerors
and their missionaries, does not yet furnish the keys to the hieroglyphics of Palenque and
Copan, not to mention those of Peru? And these civilized Toltecs themselves, who were
they, and whence did they come? And who are the Aztecs that succeeded them? Even
among the hieroglyphical systems of Mexico, there were some which the foreign
interpreters were precluded the possibility of studying. These were the so-called schemes
of judicial astrology "given but not explained in Lord Kingsborough's published collection,"*
and set down as purely figurative and symbolical, "intended only for the use of the priests
and diviners and possessed of an esoteric significance." Many of the hieroglyphics on the
monoliths of Palenque and Copan are of the same character. The "priests and diviners"
were all killed off by the Catholic fanatics - the secret died with them.
Nearly all the mounds in North America are terraced and ascended by large graded
ways, sometimes square, often hexagonal, octagonal or truncated, but in all respects
similar to the teocallis of Mexico, and to the topes of India. As the latter are attributed
throughout this country to the work of the five Pandus of the Lunar Race, so the cyclopean
monuments and monoliths on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in the republic of Bolivia, are
ascribed to giants, the five exiled brothers "from beyond the mounts." They worshipped the
moon as their progenitor and lived before the time of the "Sons and Virgins of the Sun."
Here, the similarity of the Aryan with the South American tradition is again but too obvious,
and the Solar and Lunar races - Surya-Vansa and the Chandra-Vansa - reappear in America.
This Lake Titicaca, which occupies the centre of one of the most remarkable
terrestrial basins on the whole globe, is "160 miles long and from 50 to 80 broad, and
discharges through the valley of El Desaguadero, to the south-east into another lake called
Lake Aullagas, which is probably kept at a lower level by evaporation or filtration, since it
has no known outlet. The surface of the lake is 12,846 feet above the sea, and it is the
most elevated body of water of similar size in the world."** As the level of its waters has
very much decreased in the historical period, it is believed on good grounds that they once
surrounded the elevated spot on which are found the remarkable ruins of Tiahuanaco.

----------
* [This has reference to Agostino Aglio's Antiquities of Mexico, edited with copious
notes by E. King, Viscount Kingsborough, London, 1830-48, 9 vols., fol. - Compiler.]
** [New Amer. Cyclop., art. on "Titicaca" - Compiler.]
----------

The latter are without any doubt aboriginal monuments pertaining to an epoch which
preceded the Incal period, as far back as the Dravidian and other aboriginal peoples
preceded the Aryans in India. Although the traditions of the Incas maintain that the great
lawgiver and teacher of the Peruvians, Manco Capac - the Manu of South America -
diffused his knowledge and influence from this centre, yet the statement is unsupported by
facts. If the original seat of the Aymara, or "Inca race" was there, as claimed by some, how
is it that neither the Incas, nor the Aymaras, who dwell on the shores of the Lake to this
day, nor yet the ancient Peruvians, had the slightest knowledge concerning their history?
Beyond a vague tradition which tells us of "giants" having built these immense structures
in one night, we do not find the faintest clue. And, we have every reason to doubt whether
the Incas are of the Aymara race at all. The Incas claim their descent from Manco Capac,
the son of the Sun, and the Aymaras claim this legislator as their instructor and the founder
of the era of their civilization. Yet, neither the Incas of the Spanish period could prove the
one, nor the Aymaras the other. The language of the latter is quite distinct from the Inichua
- the tongue of the Incas; and they were the only race that refused to give up their
language when conquered by the descendants of the Sun, as Dr. Heath tells us.
The ruins afford every evidence of the highest antiquity. Some are built on a
pyramidal plan, as most of the American mounds are, and cover several acres; while the
monolithic doorways, pillars, and stone-idols, so elaborately carved, are "sculptured in a
style wholly different from any other remains of art yet found in America."* D'Orbigny
speaks of the ruins in the most enthusiastic manner.

----------
* [Op. cit., art. on "Tiahuanaco." - Compiler.]
----------

"These monuments [he says] consist of a mound raised nearly 100 feet, surrounded
with pillars - of temples from 600 to 1,200 feet in length, opening precisely toward the east,
and adorned with colossal angular columns - of porticoes of a single stone, covered with
reliefs of skilful execution though of rude design, displaying symbolical representations of
the Sun, and the condor his messenger - of basaltic statues loaded with bas-reliefs, in
which the design of the carved head is half Egyptian - and lastly, of the interior of a palace
formed of enormous blocks of rock completely hewn, whose dimensions are often 21 feet
in length, 12 in breadth, and 6 in thickness. In the temples and palaces, the portals are not
inclined as among those of the Incas, but perpendicular; and their vast dimensions, and
the imposing masses of which they are composed, surpass in beauty and grandeur all that
were afterward built by the sovereigns of Cuzco." *

----------
* [New Amer. Cyclop., art. on "American Antiquities." - Compiler.]
----------

Like the rest of his fellow-explorers, d'Orbigny believes these ruins to have been the
work of a race far anterior to the Incas.
Two distinct styles of architecture are found in these relics of Lake Titicaca. Those
of the Island of Coati, for instance, bear every feature in common with the ruins of
Tiahuanaco; so do the vast blocks of stone elaborately sculptured, some of which,
according to the report of the surveyors, in 1846, measure: "3 feet in length by 18 feet in
width, and 6 feet in thickness"; while on some of the islands of the Lake Titicaca there are
monuments of great extent, "but of true Peruvian type, apparently the remains of temples
destroyed on the arrival of the Spaniards." The famous sanctuary, with the human figure
in it, belongs to the former. Its doorway 10 feet high, 13 feet broad, with an opening 6 feet
4 inches, by 3 feet 2 inches, is cut from a single stone. "Its east front has a cornice, in the
centre of which is a human figure of strange form, crowned with rays, interspersed with
serpents with crested heads. On each side of this figure are three rows of square
compartments, filled with human and other figures, of apparently symbolic design . . ."
Were this temple in India, it would undoubtedly be attributed to Siva; but it is at the
antipodes, where neither the foot of a Shaiva nor one of the Naga tribe has ever penetrated
to the knowledge of man, though the Mexican Indians have their Nagual, or chief sorcerer
and serpent worshipper. "The ruins stand on an eminence, which, from the watermarks
around it, seems to have been formerly an island in Lake Titicaca; but the level of the lake
is now 135 feet lower, and its shores 12 miles distant. This fact, in conjunction with others,
warrants the belief that these remains antedate any others known in America."* Hence, all
these relics are unanimously ascribed to the same "unknown and mysterious people who
preceded the Peruvians, as the Tulhuatecas or Toltecs did the Aztecs. It seems to have
been the seat of the highest and most ancient civilization of South America and of a people
who have left the most gigantic monuments of their power and skill." And these monuments
are all either Dracontias - temples sacred to the Snake, or temples dedicated to the Sun.

----------
* New American Cyclopaedia, art. on "Tiahuanaco." [This applies to all the passages
quoted in the above paragraph. - Compiler.]
----------

Of this same character are the ruined pyramids of Teotihuacan and the monoliths
of Palenque and Copan. The former are some eight leagues from the city of Mexico on the
plain of Otumla, and considered among the most ancient in the land. The two principal ones
are dedicated to the Sun and Moon, respectively. They are built of cut stone, square, with
four stories and a level area at the top. The larger, that of the Sun, is 221 feet high, 680 feet
square at the base, and covers an area of 11 acres, nearly equal to that of the great
pyramid of Cheops. And yet, the pyramid of Cholula, higher than that of Teotihuacan by ten
feet according to Humboldt, and having 1,400 feet square at the base, covers an area of
45 acres!
It is interesting to hear what the earliest writers - the historians who saw them during
the first conquest - say even of some of the most modern of these buildings, of the great
temple of Mexico, among others. It consisted of an immense square area "surrounded by
a wall of stone and lime, eight feet thick, with battlements, ornamented with many stone
figures in the form of serpents," says one. Cortez shows that 500 houses might be easily
placed within its enclosure. It was paved with polished stones, so smooth, that "the horses
of the Spaniards could not move over them without slipping," writes Bernal Díaz del
Castillo. In connection with this, we must remember that it was not the Spaniards who
conquered the Mexicans, but their horses. As there never was a horse seen before by this
people in America, until the Europeans landed it on the coast, the natives, though
excessively brave, "were so awestruck at the sight of horses and the roar of the artillery,"
that they took the Spaniards to be of divine origin and sent them human beings as
sacrifices. This superstitious panic is sufficient to account for the fact that a handful of men
could so easily conquer incalculable thousands of warriors.
 According to F. Lopez de Gomara, the four walls of the enclosure of the temple
corresponded with the cardinal points. "In the centre of this gigantic area arose the great
temple, an immense pyramidal structure of 5 stages, faced with stone, 300 feet square at
the base and 120 feet in height, truncated, with a level summit, upon which were situated
two towers, the shrines of the divinities to whom it was consecrated" - Tezcatlipoca and
Huitzilopochtli. It was here that the sacrifices were performed, and the eternal fire
maintained. F. J. Clavijero tells us, that "besides this great pyramid . . . there were forty
other similar structures of smaller size, consecrated to separate divinities. One was called
Tezcacalli, ‘House of the Shining Mirrors,' . . . sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the God of Light, the
Soul of the World, the Vivifier, the Spiritual Sun." The dwellings of priests, who, according
to Zarate, amounted to 5,000, were near by, as well as the seminaries and the schools.
"Ponds and fountains, groves and gardens, in which flowers and ‘sweet smelling
herbs' were cultivated for use in certain sacred rites, and for the decoration of altars," were
in abundance; and, so large was the inner yard, that "8,000 or 10,000 persons had
sufficient room to dance in it, upon their solemn festivals" - says de Solís. Torquemada
estimates the number of such temples in the Mexican empire at 40,000, but Clavijero,
speaking of the majestic Teocallis (literally, houses of God) of Mexico, estimates the
number higher.
So wonderful are the features of resemblance between the ancient shrines of the
Old and the New World that Humboldt remains unequal to express his surprise. "What
striking analogies exist between the monuments of the old continents and those of the
Toltecs who . . . built several of these colossal structures, truncated pyramids, divided by
layers, like the temple of Belus at Babylon! Where did they take the model of these
edifices?" - he exclaims.*

----------
* [Quoted passages associated with the names of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Lopez
de Gomara, F. J. Clavijero, Zarate, de Solís and Humboldt, are from the article on
"American Antiquities," in the New American Cyclopaedia (1873-76). Humboldt's remarks
are from his Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient
Inhabitants of America, tr. from the French by H. M. Williams, London, 1814. - Compiler.]
-----------

The eminent naturalist might have also enquired where the Mexicans got all their
Christian virtues from, being but poor pagans. The code of the Aztecs, says Prescott
"evinces a profound respect for the great principles of morality, and as clear a perception
of these principles as is to be found in the most cultivated nations." Some of these are very
curious inasmuch as they show such a similarity to some of the Gospel ethics, "He, who
looks too curiously on a woman, commits adultery with his eyes," says one of them. "Keep
peace with all; bear injuries with humility; God, who sees, will avenge you," declares
another. Recognizing but one Supreme Power in Nature, they addressed it as the deity "by
whom we live, Omnipresent, that knoweth all thoughts, and giveth all gifts, without whom
man is as nothing; invisible, incorporeal . . . of perfect perfection and purity, under whose
wings we find repose and a sure defence." And, in naming their children, says Lord
Kingsborough, they used a ceremony strongly resembling the Christian rite of baptism, "the
lips and bosom of the infant were sprinkled with water, and the Lord was implored to permit
the holy drops to wash away the sin that was given to it before the foundation of the world;
so that the child might be born anew."** "Their laws were perfect; justice, contentment and
peace reigned in the kingdom of these benighted heathens," when the brigands and the
Jesuits of Cortez landed at Tabasco. A century of murders, robbery, and forced conversion,
were sufficient to transform this quiet, inoffensive and wise people into what they are now.
They have fully benefited by dogmatic Christianity. And he, who ever went to Mexico,
knows what that means. The country is full of bloodthirsty Christian fanatics, thieves,
rogues, drunkards, debauchees, murderers, and the greatest liars the world has ever
produced! Peace and glory to your ashes, O Cortez and Torquemada! In this case at least,
will you never be permitted to boast of the enlightenment your Christianity has poured out
on the poor, and once virtuous heathens!

-----------
** [The quoted passages in this paragraph are from Wm. H. Prescott's History of the
Conquest of Mexico, etc. (chap. III, pp. 19-21), wherein they are quoted from Bernardino
de Sahagun's Historia General de las cosas de Nueva Espana (lib. vi, cap. 37), published
by Lord Kingsborough, which explains the mention of his name in the test. - Compiler.]
----------------

The ruins of Central America are no less imposing. Massively built, with walls of a
great thickness, they are usually marked by broad stairways, leading to the principal
entrance. When composed of several stories, each successive story is usually smaller than
that below it, giving the structure the appearance of a pyramid of several stages. The front
walls, either made of stone or stuccoed, are covered with elaborately carved, symbolical
figures; and the interior divided into corridors and dark chambers, with arched ceilings, the
roofs supported by overlapping courses of stones, "constituting a pointed arch,
corresponding in type with the earliest monuments of the old world." Within several
chambers at Palenque, tablets, covered with sculptures and hieroglyphics of fine design
and artistic execution, were discovered by Stephens. In Honduras, at Copan, a whole city -
temples, houses and grand monoliths intricately carved - was unearthed in an old forest by
Catherwood and Stephens. The sculpture and general style of Copan are unique, and no
such style or even anything approaching it has been found anywhere else, except at
Quirigua, and in the islands of Lake Nicaragua. No one can decipher the weird
hieroglyphical inscriptions on the altars and monoliths. With the exception of a few works
of uncut stone, "to Copán we may safely assign an antiquity higher than to any of the other
monuments of Central America with which we are acquainted," says the New American
Cyclopaedia. At the period of the Spanish conquest, Copan was already a forgotten ruin,
concerning which existed only the vaguest traditions.
No less extraordinary are the remains of the different epochs in Peru. The ruins of
the temple of the Sun at Cuzco are yet imposing, notwithstanding that the deprecating hand
of the Vandal Spaniard passed heavily over it. If we may believe the narratives of the
conquerors themselves, they found it, on their arrival, a kind of a fairy-tale castle. With its
enormous circular stone wall completely encompassing the principal temple, chapels and
buildings, it is situated in the very heart of the city, and even its remains justly provoke the
admiration of the traveller. "Aqueducts opened within this sacred enclosure; and within it
were gardens, and walks among shrubs and flowers of gold and silver, made in imitation
of the productions of nature. It was attended by 4,000 priests." "The ground," says La Vega,
"for 200 paces around the temple, was considered holy, and no one was allowed to pass
within this boundary but with naked feet." Besides this great temple, there were 300 other
inferior temples at Cuzco. Next to the latter in beauty, was the celebrated temple of
Pachacamac. Still another great temple of the Sun is mentioned by Humboldt; and, "at the
base of the hill of Cannar was formerly a famous shrine of the Sun, consisting of the
universal symbol of that luminary, formed by nature upon the face of a great rock." Roman
tells us that "the temples of Peru were built upon high grounds or the tops of hills, and were
surrounded by four circular embankments of earth, one within the other." Other remains
seen by myself - especially mounds - are surrounded by two, three, and four circles of
stones. Near the town of Cayambe, on the very spot on which A. de Ulloa saw and
described an ancient Peruvian temple "perfectly circular in form and open at the top," there
are several such cromlechs.* Quoting from an article in the Madras Times of 1876, Mr. J.
H. Rivett-Carnac gives, in his Archaeological Notes, the following information upon some
curious mounds in the neighbourhood of Bangalore:
"Near the village there are at least one hundred cromlechs plainly to be seen. These
cromlechs are surrounded by circles of stones, some of them with concentric circles three
and four deep. One very remarkable in appearance has four circles of large stones around
it, and is called by the natives, ‘Pandavara Gudi' or the temples of the Pandas. . . . This is
supposed to be the first instance, where the natives popularly imagine a structure of this
kind to have been the temple of a by-gone, if not of a mythical, race. Many of these
structures have a triple circle, some a double, and a few single circles of stone round
them." **
In the 35th degree of latitude, the Arizona Indians in North America have their rude
altars to this day, surrounded by precisely such circles, and their sacred spring, discovered
by Major Alfred R. Calhoun, F.G.S., of the United States Army Survey Commission, is
surrounded with the same symbolical wall of stones, as is found in Stonehenge and elsewhere.
By far the most interesting and full account we have read for a long time upon the
Peruvian antiquities is that from the pen of Mr. Heath of Kansas, already mentioned.
Condensing the general picture of these remains into the limited space of a few pages in
a periodical,*** he yet manages to present a masterly and vivid picture of the wealth of
these remains. More than one speculator has grown rich in a few days through his
desecrations of the "huacas." The remains of countless generations of unknown races, who
had slept there undisturbed - who knows for how many ages - are now left by the
sacrilegious treasure-hunter to crumble into dust under the tropical sun. Mr. Heath's
conclusions, more startling, perchance, than his discoveries, are worthy of being recorded.
We will repeat in brief his descriptions: -

----------
* [Quoted passages up to this point in this new section are from the article on
"American Antiquities," in the New American Cyclopaedia. - Compiler.]
** Archaeological Notes on Ancient Sculpturings on Rocks in Kumaon, India, similar
to those found on Monoliths and Rocks in Europe, with other papers. By J. H. Rivett-
Carnac, Esquire, Bengal Civil Service, C.I.E., F.S.A., M.R.A.S., F.G.S., etc. [Calcutta,
1879].
 *** See Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, November, 1878.
----------

"Take for instance the Jequetepeque valley. In 7' 24' south latitude you will find on
recent maps the port of Pacasmayo. Four miles north, separated from it by a barren waste,
the river Jequetepeque empties into the sea. . . . Beside the southern shore as it empties
into the sea, is an elevated platform one-fourth of a mile square and forty feet high, all of
adobes. A wall fifty feet wide connects it with another, a few hundred yards east and south,
that is 150 feet high, 200 feet across the top, and 500 at the base, nearly square. This latter
was built in sections of room ten feet square at the base, six feet at the top and about eight
feet high. All of this same class of mounds - temples, to worship the sun, or fortresses, as
they may be - have on the north side an incline for an entrance or means of access.
Treasure-seekers have cut into this one about half way, and it is said $150,000 worth of
gold and silver ornaments were found. In the sand, banked up behind the wall and mound,
many were buried. . . . Besides these were many ornaments of gold, silver, copper, coral
and shell beads and cloths. On the north side of the river, on the top of the bluff, are the
extensive ruins of a walled city, two miles wide by six long . . . .
"Follow the river to the mountains. All along you pass ruin after ruin and huaca after
huaca. At Tolon, a town at the base of the mountain [there is another ruined city] . . . . Five
miles from Tolon, up the river, there is an isolated boulder of granite, four and six feet in its
diameters, covered with hieroglyphics. Fourteen miles further, a point of mountain at the
junction of two ravines is covered to a height of more than fifty feet with the same class of
hieroglyphics: birds, fishes, snakes, cats, monkeys, men, sun, moon and many odd and
now unintelligible forms. The rock on which these are cut is a silicated sandstone, and
many of the lines are an eighth of an inch deep. In one large stone there are three holes,
twenty to thirty inches deep, six inches in diameter at the orifice and two at the apex. . . .
...
"At Anchi, on the Rimac river, upon the face of a perpendicular wall two hundred feet
above the river bed, there are two hieroglyphics, representing an imperfect B and a perfect
D. In a crevice below them, near the river, were found buried twenty-five thousand dollars
worth of gold and silver. When the Incas learned of the murder of their chief, what did they
do with the gold they were bringing for his ransom? Rumour says they buried it. . . . May
not these markings at Yonan tell something, since they are on the road and near to the
Incal city? . . . ." *

----------
* [Heath, op. cit., pp. 455-56.]
----------

The above was published in November, 1878. When in October, 1877, in my work
Isis Unveiled (Vol. I, pp. 595-98), I gave a legend, which, for circumstances too long to
explain, I hold to be perfectly trustworthy, relating to these same buried treasures for the
Inca's ransom, a journal more satirical than polite classed it with the tales of Baron
Munchausen. The secret was revealed to me by a Peruvian. At Arica, going from Lima,
there stands an enormous rock, which tradition points to as the tomb of the Incas. As the
last rays of the setting sun strike the face of the rock, one can see curious hieroglyphics
inscribed upon it. These characters form one of the landmarks that show how to get at the
immense treasures buried in subterranean corridors. The details are given in Isis, and I will
not repeat them. Strong corroborative evidence is now found in more than one recent
scientific work; and the statement may be less pooh-poohed now than it was then.
". . . . . Eleven miles beyond Yonan, on a ridge of mountain seven hundred feet
above the river, are the walls of a city of 2,000 inhabitants. . . . Six and twelve miles further
are extensive walls and terraces. . . . .
"Leaving the valley at seventy-eight miles from the coast, you zigzag up the
mountain side 7,000 feet, then descend 2,000, to arrive at Cajamarca, or Cojamalca of
Pizarro's time. . . . In a yard off one of the main streets, and near the center of the city, is
still standing the house made famous as the prison of Atahualpa. . . ." [pp. 456-57]
It is the house which the Inca "promised to fill with gold as high as he could reach,
in exchange for his liberty" in 1532; he did fill it with 17,500,000 dollars' worth of gold, and
so kept his promise. But Pizarro, the ancient swineherd of Spain and the worthy acolyte of
the priest Hernando de Lugues, murdered him, notwithstanding his pledge of honour.
". . . . Three miles distant, and across the valley, are the hot springs, where the Inca
was encamped when Pizarro took possession of Cajamarca. Part of the wall is of unknown
make . . . . . cemented, the cement is harder than the stone itself . . . . . At Chepen . . . is
a mountain with a wall in many places twenty feet high, the summit being almost entirely
artificial. . . .
"Fifty miles south of Pacasmayo, between the seaport of Huanchaco and Truxillo,
nine miles distant, are the ruins of "Chan-Chan," the capital city of the Chimu kingdom. .
. . The road from the port to the city crosses these ruins, entering by a causeway about four
feet from the ground, and leading from one great mass of ruins to another; beneath this
is a tunnel. Be they forts, castles, palaces, or burial mounds called "huacas," all bear the
name "huaca." Hours of wandering on horseback among these ruins give only a confused
idea of them, nor can old explorers there point out what were palaces and what were not.
. . .The highest enclosures. . . .must have cost an immense amount of labor. . . . ." *

---------
* [op. cit., pp. 457-58.]
----------

To give an idea of the wealth found in the country by the Spaniards, we copy the
following, taken from the records of the municipality in the city of Truxillo by Mr. Heath. It
is a copy of the accounts that are found in the book of Fifths of the Treasury in the years
1577 and 1578, of the treasures found in the "Huaca of Toledo" by one man alone.
"FIRST. - In Truxillo, Peru, on the 22nd of July, 1577, Don Garcia Gutierrez de
Toledo presented himself at the royal treasury, to give into the royal chest a fifth. He
brought a bar of gold nineteen carats ley and weighing two thousand four hundred Spanish
dollars, of which the fifth, being seven hundred and eight dollars, together with one and a
half per cent. to the chief assayer, were deposited in the royal box.
"SECOND. - On the 12th of December he presented himself with five bars of gold,
fifteen and nineteen carats ley, weighing eight thousand nine hundred and eighteen dollars.
 "THIRD. - On the 7th of January, 1578, he came with his fifth of large bars and
plates of gold, one hundred and fifteen in number, fifteen to twenty carats ley, weighing one
hundred and fifty-three thousand two hundred and eighty dollars.
"FOURTH. - On the 8th of March he brought sixteen bars of gold, fourteen to twenty-
one carats ley, weighing twenty-one thousand one hundred and eighteen dollars.
"FIFTH. - On the 5th of April he brought different ornaments of gold, being little bells
of gold and patterns of corn-heads and other things, of fourteen carats ley, weighing six
thousand two hundred and seventy two dollars.
"SIXTH. - On the 20th of April he brought three small bars of gold, twenty carats ley,
weighing four thousand one hundred and seventy dollars.
"SEVENTH. - On the 12th of July he came with forty-seven bars, fourteen to twenty-
one carats ley, weighing seventy-seven thousand, three hundred and twelve dollars.
"EIGHTH. - On the same day he came back with another portion of gold and
ornaments of cornheads and pieces of effigies of animals, weighing four thousand seven
hundred and four dollars.
"The sum of these eight bringings amounted to 278,174 gold dollars or Spanish
ounces. Multiplied by sixteen gives $4,450,784 silver dollars. Deducting the royal fifth -
$985,953.75 - left $3,464,830.25 as Toledo's portion.
"Even after this great haul, effigies of different animals of gold were found from time
to time. Mantles also, adorned with square pieces of gold, as well as robes made with
feathers of divers colors, were dug up. There is a tradition that in the huaca of Toledo there
were two treasures, known as the great and little fish. The smaller only has been found.
"Between Huacho and Supe, the latter being 120 miles north of Callao, near a point
called Atahuanqui, there are two enormous mounds, resembling the Campana and San
Miguel, of the Huatica valley, soon to be described. About five miles from Patavilca (south
and near Supe) is a place called "Paramonga," or the fortress. The ruins of a fortress of
great extent are here visible; the walls are of tempered clay, about six feet thick. The
principal building stood on an eminence, but the walls were continued to the foot of it, like
regular circumvallations; the ascent winding round the hill like a labyrinth, having many
angles, which probably served as outworks to defend the place. In this neighbourhood
much treasure has been excavated, all of which must have been concealed by the pre-
historic Indian, as we have no evidence of the Incas ever having occupied this part of Peru
after they had subdued it.
". . . . . Just before reaching Ancon, the railroad runs through an immense burying-
ground or "huaca." Make a circuit of six to eight miles, and on every side you see skulls,
legs, arms, and the whole skeleton of the human body, lying about in the sand. . . . .
"At Pasamayo, 14 miles further "down north," on the seashore, is another great
burying ground. Thousands of skeletons lie about, thrown out by the treasure-seekers. It
has more than a half mile of cutting through it for the Ancon & Chankay R.R. It extends up
the face of the hill from the seashore to the height of about 800 feet. . . . . . . . . . . Whence
came these hundreds and thousands of peoples who are buried at Ancon? . . . Time and
time again the archaeologist finds himself face to face with such questions, to which he can
only shrug his shoulders and say with the natives, "Quien sabe?" Who knows? . . . .
"Dr. Hutchinson writes, under date of Oct. 30th, 1872, in an article to the Callao and
Lima Gazette, now the South Pacific Times: 'I am come to the conclusion that Chankay
is a great city of the dead, or has been an immense usury of Peru; for go where you will,
on mountain top or level plain, or by the sea-side, you meet at every turn, skulls and boner,
of all descriptions.'"*

----------
* [Heath, op. cit., pp. 458-60.]
----------

In the Huatica Valley, which is an extensive ruin, there are seventeen mounds,
called "huacas," although, remarks the writer, "they present more the form of fortresses,
residences or castles, than burying-grounds." A triple wall surrounded the city. These walls
are often three yards in thickness and from fifteen to twenty feet high.
"To the east of these is the enormous mound called Huaca of Pando; and to the
west, with the distance of about half a mile intervening, are the great ruins of fortresses,
which natives entitle Huaca of the Bell. La Campana, the Huacas of Pando, consisting of
a series of large and small mounds, and extending over a stretch of ground incalculable
without being measured, form a colossal accumulation. The principal large ones are three
in number; that holding the name of the 'Bell' is calculated to be 108 to 110 feet in height.
At the western side, looking towards Callao, there is a square plateau . . . . At the summit
it is 276 to 278 yards, long, and 95 to 96 across. On the top there are eight gradations of
declivity, each from one to two yards lower than its neighbor . . . making the total of about
278 yards. For these measurements of the Huatica ruins I am indebted to the notes of J.
B. Steere, Professor of Natural History and Curator of the Museum at Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"The square plateau first mentioned, at the base, consists of two divisions . . . each
measuring a perfect square 47 to 48 yards; the two joining, form the square of 96 yards.
Besides this . . . . is another square of 47 to 48 yards. On the top, returning again, we find
the same symmetry of measurement in the multiples of twelve, nearly all the ruins in this
valley being the same, which is a fact for the curious. Was it by accident or design? . . . The
mound is a truncated pyramidal form, and is calculated to contain a mass of 14,641,820
cubic feet of material . . . The 'Fortress' is a huge structure, 80 feet high, 148 to 150 yards
in measurement. Great large square rooms show their outlines on the top, but are filled with
earth. Who brought this earth here, and with what object was the filling-up accomplished?
The work of obliterating all space in these rooms with loose earth must have been almost
as great as the construction of the building itself. . . . Two miles south . . . we find another
similar structure . . . more spacious and with a greater number of apartments. . . .
"It is nearly 170 yards in length, and 168 in breadth, and 98 feet high. The whole of
these ruins . . . were enclosed by high walls of adobones . . . large mud-bricks, some from
1 to 2 yards in thickness, length, and breadth. The huaca of the 'Bell' contains about
20,220,840 cubic feet of material, while that of 'San Miguel' has 25,650,800. These two
buildings were constructed in the same style - having traces of terraces, parapets, and
bastions, with a large number of rooms and squares - all now filled up with earth.
"About a mile beyond, in the direction of 'Mira Flores,' is Ocharan - the largest burial
mound in the Huatica valley . . . It has 95 feet of elevation and a width of 55 yards on the
summit, and a total length of 428 yards, or 1,284 feet, another multiple of twelve. It is
enclosed by a double wall 816 yards in length by 700 across, thus enclosing 117 acres.
Between Ocharan and the ocean are from 15 to 20 masses of ruins, like those already
described. . . .
 ". . . . the Inca temple of the Sun, like the temple of Cholula on the plains of Mexico
. . . . is a sort of vast terraced pyramid of earth. It is from 200 to 300 feet high, and forms
a semi-lunar shape that is beyond a half mile in extent. Its top measures about 10 acres
square. Much of the walls are washed over with red paint, probably ochre, and are as fresh
and bright as when centuries ago it was first put on . . . In the Canete valley, opposite the
Chincha Guano Islands, are extensive ruins [described by Squier]. . . . From the hill called
'Hill of Gold,' copper and silver pins were taken like those used by ladies to pin their shawls;
also tweezers for pulling out the hair of the eyebrows, eyelids and whiskers, as well as
silver cups.*

----------
* [Heath, op. cit., pp. 461-63.]
----------

"The coast of Peru [says Mr. Heath], extends from Tumbes to the river Loa on the
south, a distance of 1,235 miles. Scattered here and there over this whole extent, there are
thousands of ruins beside those just mentioned . . . while nearly every hill and spur of the
mountains have upon them or about them some relic of the past; and in every ravine, from
the coast to the central plateau, there are ruins of walls, fortresses, cities, burial-vaults, and
miles and miles of terraces and water-courses. Across the plateau and down the eastern
slope of the Andes to the home of the wild Indian, and into the unknown, impenetrable
forest, still you find them. . . . In the mountains, however, where storms of rain and snow
with terrific thunder and lightning are nearly constant a number of months each year, the
ruins are different. Of granitic, porphyritic, lime and silicated sandstone, these massive,
colossal, cyclopean structures have resisted the disintegration of time, geological
transformations, earthquakes, and the sacrilegious, destructive hand of the warrior and
treasure-seeker. The masonry composing these walls, temples, houses, towers, fortresses,
or sepulchres, is uncemented, held in place by the incline of the walls from the
perpendicular, and adaptation of each stone to the place destined for it, the stones having
from six to many sides, each dressed, and smoothed to fit another or others, with such
exactness that the blade of a small penknife cannot be inserted in any of the seams thus
formed, whether in the central parts entirely hidden, or on the internal or external surfaces.
These stones, selected with no reference to uniformity in shape or size, vary from one-half
cubic foot to 1,500 cubic feet solid contents, and if, in the many, many millions of stones
you could find one that would fit in the place of another, it would be purely accidental. In
"Triumph Street," in the city of Cuzco, in a part of the wall of the ancient house of the
Virgins of the Sun, is a very large stone, known as 'the stone of the twelve corners,' since
it joins with those that surround it, by twelve faces, each having a different angle. Beside
these twelve faces it has its external one, and no one knows how many it has on its back
that is hidden in the masonry. In the wall of the centre of the Cuzco fortress there are
stones 13 feet high, 15 feet long, and 8 feet thick, and all having been quarried miles away.
Near this city there is an oblong smooth boulder 18 feet in its longer axis, and 12 in its
lesser. On one side are large niches cut out, in which a man can stand, and by swaying his
body cause the stone to rock. These niches apparently were made solely for this purpose.
One of the most wonderful and extensive of these works in stone, is that called
Ollantaytambo, a ruin situated 30 miles north of Cuzco, in a narrow ravine on the bank of
the river Urubamba. It consists of a fortress constructed on the top of a sloping, craggy
eminence. Extending from it to the plain below, is a stony stairway. At the top of the
stairway are six large slabs, 12 feet high, 5 feet wide, and 3 feet thick, side by side, having
between them and on top narrow strips of stone about 6 inches wide, framed as it were to
the slabs, and all being of dressed stone. At the bottom of the hill, part of which was made
by hand, and at the foot of the stairs, a stone wall 10 feet wide and 12 feet high extends
some distance into the plain. In it are many niches, all facing the south.
"The ruins on the islands in Lake Titicaca, where Incal history begins, have often
been described.
"At Tiahuanaco, a few miles south of the lake, there are stones in the form of
columns, partly dressed, placed in line at certain distances from each other, and having an
elevation above the ground of from 18 to 20 feet. In this same line there is a monolithic
doorway, now broken, 10 feet high by 13 wide. The space cut out for the door is 7 feet 4
inches high, by 3 feet 2 inches wide. The whole face of the stone above the door is
engraved. Another, similar, but smaller, lies on the ground beside it. These stones are of
hard porphyry, and differ geologically from the surrounding rock, hence, we infer they must
have been brought from elsewhere.
"At 'Chavin de Huanta,' a town in the province of Huari, there are some ruins worthy
of note. The entrance to them is by an alleyway 6 feet wide and 9 feet high, roofed over
with sandstone partly dressed, of more than 12 feet in length. On each side there are
rooms 12 feet wide, roofed by large pieces of sandstones, 1-1/2 feet thick and from 6 to 9
feet wide. The walls of the rooms are 6 feet thick, and have some loopholes in them,
probably for ventilation. In the floor of this passage there is a very narrow entrance to a
subterranean passage that passes beneath the river to the other side. From this many
huacas, stone drinking-vessels, instruments of copper and silver, and a skeleton of an
Indian sitting, were taken. The greater part of these ruins are situated over aqueducts. The
bridge to these castles is made of three stones of dressed granite, 24 feet long, 2 feet wide
by 1-1/2 thick. Some of the granite stones are covered with hieroglyphics.
"At Corralones, 24 miles from Arequipa, there are hieroglyphics engraved on
masses of granite, which appear as if painted with chalk. There are figures of men, llamas,
circles, parallelograms, letters as an R and an O and even remains of a system of astronomy.
"At Huaitara, in the province of Castrovirreina, there is an edifice with the same engravings.
"At Nazca, in the province of Ica, there are some wonderful ruins of aqueducts, four
to five feet high and 3 feet wide, very straight, double-walled, of unfinished stone, flagged
on top.
"At Quelap, not far from Chochapayas, there have lately been examined some
extensive works. A wall of dressed stone 560 feet wide, 3,660 long, and 150 feet high. The
lower part is solid. Another wall above this has 600 feet length, 500 width, and the same
elevation of 150 feet. There are niches over both walls, three feet long, one-and-a-half wide
and thick, containing the remains of those ancient inhabitants, some naked, others
enveloped in shawls of cotton of distinct colours and well embroidered. . . .
"Following the entrances of the second and highest wall, there are other sepulchres
like small ovens, six feet high and twenty-four in circumference; in their base are flags,
upon which some cadavers reposed. On the north side there is, on the perpendicular rocky
side of the mountain, a brick wall, having small windows 600 feet from the bottom. No
reason for this, nor means of approach, can now be found. The skillful construction of
utensils of gold and silver that were found here, the ingenuity and solidity of this gigantic
work of dressed stone, made it, also, probably of pre-Incal date. . . . Estimating five
hundred ravines in the 1,200 miles of Peru, and ten miles of terraces of fifty tiers to each
ravine, which would only be five miles of twenty-five tiers to each side, we have 250,000
miles of stone wall, averaging three to four feet high - enough to encircle this globe ten
times. Surprising as these estimates may seem, I am fully convinced that an actual
measurement would more than double them, for these ravines vary from 30 to 100 miles
in length, and ten miles to each is a low estimate. While at San Mateo, a town in the valley
of the river Rimac . . . where the mountains rise to a height of 1,500 or 2,000 feet above the
river bed, I counted two hundred tiers, none of which were less than four and many more
than six miles long . . . .
"Who, then [very pertinently enquires Mr. Heath] were these people, cutting through
sixty miles of granite, transporting blocks of hard porphyry, of Baalbec dimensions, miles
from the place where quarried, across valleys thousands of feet deep, over mountains,
along plains, leaving no trace of how or where they carried them; people [said to be]
ignorant of the use of iron, with the feeble llama their only beast of burden; who, after
having brought these stones together and dressed them, fitted them into walls with mosaic
precision; terracing thousands of miles of mountain side; building hills of adobes and
earth, and huge cities; leaving works in clay, stone, copper, silver, gold and embroidery,
many of which cannot be duplicated at the present age; people apparently vying with Dives
in riches, Hercules in strength and energy and the ant and bee in industry?
"Callao was submerged in 1746 and entirely destroyed. Lima was ruined in 1678 -
in 1746 only twenty houses out of three thousand were left standing . . . . while the ancient
cities in the Huatica and Lurín valleys still remain in a comparatively good state of
preservation. San Miguel de Piura, founded by Pizarro in 1531, was entirely destroyed in
1855, while the old ruins near by suffered little. Arequipa was thrown down in August, 1868,
but the ruins near show no change.*
"In engineering, at least, the present may learn from the past. We hope to show that
it may in most things else."

----------
* [Heath, op. cit., pp. 463 67]

---------------

To refer all these cyclopean constructions then to the days of the Incas is, as we
have shown before, more inconsistent yet, and seems even a greater fallacy than that too
common one of attributing every rock-temple of India to Buddhist excavators. As many
authorities show - Dr. Heath among the rest - Incal history only dates back to the eleventh
century A.D., and the period, from that time to the Conquest, is utterly insufficient to
account for such grandiose and innumerable works; nor do the Spanish historians know
much of them. Nor again, must we forget that the temples of heathendom were odious to
the narrow bigotry of the Roman Catholic fanatics of those days; and that, whenever the
chance offered, they either converted them into Christian churches or razed them to the
ground. Another strong objection to the idea lies in the fact that the Incas were destitute of
a written language, and that these antique relics of bygone ages are covered with
hieroglyphics. "It is granted that the Temple of the Sun, at Cuzco, was of Incal make, but
that is the latest of the five styles of architecture visible in the Andes, each probably
representing an age of human progress." *
The hieroglyphics of Peru and Central America have been, are, and will most
probably remain for ever as dead a letter to our cryptographers as they were to the Incas.
The latter, like the barbarous ancient Chinese and Mexicans, kept their records by means
of a quipus (or knot in Peruvian) - a cord, several feet long, composed of different coloured
threads, from which a multicoloured fringe was suspended; each colour denoting a
sensible object, and knots serving as ciphers. "The mysterious science of the quipus," says
Prescott, "supplied the Peruvians with the means of communicating their ideas to one
another, and of transmitting them to future generations . . . ** Each locality, however, had
its own method of interpreting these elaborate records, hence a quipus was only intelligible
in the place where it was kept. "Many quipus have been taken from the graves, in excellent
state of preservation in colour and texture," writes Dr. Heath; "but the lips that alone could
pronounce the verbal key, have for ever ceased their function, and the relic-seeker has
failed to note the exact spot each was found, so that the records which could tell so much
we want to know, will remain sealed till all is revealed at the last day,*** . . . if anything at
all is revealed then.

----------
* [Heath, op. cit., p. 467.]
** [Hist. of the Conquest of Peru, Chap. IV, p. 792.]
*** [Heath, op. cit., p. 467.]
----------

But what is certainly as good as a revelation now, while our brains are in function, and our
mind is acutely alive to some pre-eminently suggestive facts, is the incessant discoveries
of archaeology, geology, ethnology, and other sciences. It is the almost irrepressible
conviction that man having existed upon earth millions of years - for all we know - the
theory of cycles is the only plausible theory to solve the great problems of humanity, the
rise and fall of numberless nations and races, and the ethnological differences among the
latter. This difference - which, though as marked as the one between a handsome and
intellectual European and a digger Indian of Australia, yet makes the ignorant shudder and
raise a great outcry at the thought of destroying the imaginary "great gulf between man and
brute creation" - might thus be well accounted for. The digger Indian, then in company with
many other savage, though to him superior nations, which evidently are dying out to afford
room to men and races of a superior kind, would have to be regarded in the same light as
so many dying-out specimens of animals - and no more. Who can tell but that the
forefathers of this flat-headed savage - forefathers who may have lived and prospered
amidst the highest civilization before the glacial period - were in the arts and sciences far
beyond those of the present civilization - though it may be in quite another direction? That
man has lived in America, at least 50,000 years ago, is now proved scientifically and
remains a fact beyond doubt or cavil. In a lecture delivered at Manchester, in June last, by
Mr. H. A. All-butt, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society, the lecturer stated
the following: -
 "Near New Orleans, in one part of the modern delta, in excavating for gas works, a
series of beds, almost wholly made up of vegetable matter, were dug through. In the
excavation, at a depth of 16 feet from the upper surface, and beneath four buried forests,
one on the top of the other, the labourers discovered some charcoal and the skeleton of
a man, the cranium of which was reported to be that of the type of the aboriginal Red Indian
race. To this skeleton Dr. Dowler ascribed an antiquity of some 50,000 years."
The irrepressible cycle in the course of time brought down the descendants of the
contemporaries of the late inhabitant of this skeleton, and intellectually as well as physically
they have degenerated, as the present elephant has degenerated from his proud and
monstrous forefather, the antediluvian Sivatherium whose fossil remains are still found in
the Himalayas; or, as the lizard has from the plesiosaurus. Why should man be the only
specimen upon earth which has never changed in form since the first day of his
appearance upon this planet? The fancied superiority of every generation of mankind over
the preceding one is not yet so well established as to make it impossible for us to learn
some day that, as in everything else, the theory is a two-sided question - incessant
progress on the one side and an as irresistible decadence on the other of the cycle. "Even
as regards knowledge and power, the advance which some claim as a characteristic
feature of humanity is effected by exceptional individuals who arise in certain races under
favourable circumstances only, and is quite compatible with long intervals of immobility, and
even of decline," says a modern man of science.* This point is corroborated by what we
see in the modern degenerate descendants of the great and powerful races of ancient
America - the Peruvians and the Mexicans.
"How changed! How fallen from their greatness must have been the Incas when a
little band of one hundred and sixty men could penetrate uninjured to their mountain
homes, murder their worshipped Icings and thousands of their warriors, and carry away
their riches, and that, too, in a country where a few men with stones could resist
successfully an army! Who could recognize in the present Inichua and Aymara Indians their
noble ancestry?" **

----------
* Journal of Science, Vol. I, 3rd Series, February, 1879, pp. 148-49, articles -
"Progress. The Alleged distinction between Man and Brute."
** [Heath, op. cit., p. 468]
----------

Thus writes Dr. Heath, and his conviction that America was once united with Europe,
Asia, Africa and Australia, seems as firm as our own. There must exist geological and
physical cycles as well as intellectual and spiritual; globes and planets, as well as races
and nations, are born to grow, progress, decline and - die. Great nations split, scatter into
small tribes, lose all remembrance of their integrity, gradually fall into their primitive state
and - disappear, one after the other, from the face of the earth. So do great continents.
Ceylon must have formed, once upon a time, part of the Indian continent. So, to all
appearances, was Spain once joined to Africa, the narrow channel between Gibraltar and
the latter continent having been once upon a time dry land. Gibraltar is full of large apes
of the same kind as those which are found in great numbers on the opposite side on the
African coast, whereas nowhere in Spain is either a monkey or ape to be found at any
place whatever. And the caves of Gibraltar are also full of gigantic human bones,
supporting the theory that they belong to an antediluvian race of men. The same Dr. Heath
mentions the town of Eten in 7' S. Latitude of America, in which the inhabitants of an
unknown tribe of men speak a monosyllabic language that imported Chinese labourers
understood from the first day of their arrival. They have their own laws, customs and dress,
neither holding nor permitting communication with the outside world. No one can tell
whence they came or when; whether it was before or after the Spanish Conquest. They
are a living mystery to all who chance to visit them . . .
With such facts before us to puzzle exact science herself, and show our entire
ignorance of the past, verily, we recognize no right of any man on earth - whether in
geography or ethnology, in exact or abstract sciences to tell his neighbour - "so far shalt
thou go, and no further!"
But, recognizing our debt of gratitude to Dr. Heath of Kansas, whose able and
interesting paper has furnished us with such a number of facts and suggested such
possibilities, we can do no better than quote his concluding reflections.
"Thirteen thousand years ago [he writes] Vega or [[script]] Lyrae was the north polar
star. Since then how many changes has she seen in our planet? How many nations and
races spring into life, rise to their zenith splendour and then decay; and when we shall
have been gone thirteen thousand years, and once more she resumes her post at the
north, completing a 'Platonic or Great Year,' think you that those who shall fill our places
on the earth at that time will be more conversant with our history than we are of those that
have passed? Verily might we exclaim in terms almost Psalmistic, 'Great God, Creator and
Director of the Universe, what is man that Thou art mindful of him!'"
Amen! ought to be the response of such as yet believe in a God who is "the Creator
and Director of the Universe."

-------------

Appendix by Boris de Zirkoff:

The passage in Isis Unveiled to which H. P. B. refers, in connection with the Incas
gold and the mysterious hieroglyphics upon a certain rock, is as follows:
"The ruins which cover both Americas, and are found on many West Indian islands,
are all attributed to the submerged Atlanteans. As well as the hierophants of the old world,
which in the days of Atlantis was almost connected with the new one by land, the magicians
of the new submerged country had a network of subterranean passages running in all
directions. In connection with those mysterious catacombs, we will now give a curious story
told to us by a Peruvian, long since dead, as we were travelling together in the interior of
his country. There must be truth in it; as it was afterward confirmed to us by an Italian
gentleman who had seen the place and who, but for lack of means and time, would have
verified the tale himself, at least partially. The informant of the Italian was an old priest, who
had had the secret divulged to him, at confession, by a Peruvian Indian. We may add,
moreover, that the priest was compelled to make the revelation, being at the time
completely under the mesmeric influence of the traveller.
"The story concerns the famous treasures of the last of the Incas. The Peruvian
asserted that since the well-known and miserable murder of the latter by Pizarro, the secret
had been known to all the Indians, except the Mestizos who could not be trusted. It runs
thus: The Inca was made prisoner, and his wife offered for his liberation a room full of gold,
‘from the floor up to the ceiling, as high up as his conqueror could reach,' before the sun
would set on the third day. She kept her promise, but Pizarro broke his word, according to
Spanish practice. Marvelling at the exhibition of such treasures, the conqueror declared that
he would not release the prisoner, but would murder him, unless the Queen revealed the
place whence the treasure came. He had heard that the Incas had somewhere an
inexhaustible mine; a subterranean road or tunnel running many miles underground, where
were kept the accumulated riches of the country. The unfortunate Queen begged for delay,
and went to consult the oracles. During the sacrifice, the chief-priest showed her in the
consecrated ‘black mirror' the unavoidable murder of her husband, whether she delivered
the treasures of the crown to Pizarro or not. Then the Queen gave the order to close the
entrance, which was a door cut in the rocky wall of a chasm. Under the direction of the
priest and magicians, the chasm was accordingly filled to the top with huge masses of rock,
and the surface covered over so as to conceal the work. The Inca was murdered by the
Spaniards and his unhappy Queen committed suicide. Spanish greed overreached itself
and the secret of the buried treasures was locked in the breasts of a few faithful Peruvians.
"Our Peruvian informant added that in consequence of certain indiscretions at
various times, persons had been sent by different governments to search for the treasure
under the pretext of scientific exploration. They had rummaged the country through, but
without realizing their object. So far this tradition is corroborated by the reports of Dr.
Tschudi and other historians of Peru. But there are certain additional details which we are
not aware have been made public before now.
"Several years after hearing the story, and its corroboration by the Italian gentleman,
we again visited Peru. Going southward from Lima, by water, we reached a point near Arica
at sunset, and were struck by the appearance of an enormous rock, nearly perpendicular,
which stood in mournful solitude on the shore, apart from the range of the Andes. It was
the tomb of the Incas. As the last rays of the setting sun strike the face of the rock, one can
make out, with an ordinary opera-glass, some curious hieroglyphics inscribed on the
volcanic surface.
"When Cuzco was the capital of Peru, it contained a temple of the sun, famed far
and near for its magnificence. It was roofed with thick plates of gold, and the walls were
covered with the same precious metal; the eave-troughs were also of solid gold. In the
west wall the architects had contrived an aperture in such a way that when the sunbeams
reached it, it focused them inside the building. Stretching like a golden chain from one
sparkling point to another, they encircled the walls, illuminating the grim idols, and
disclosing certain mystic signs at other times invisible. It was only by understanding these
hieroglyphics - identical with those which may be seen to this day on the tomb of the Incas -
that one could learn the secret of the tunnel and its approaches. Among the latter was one
in the neighborhood of Cuzco, now masked beyond discovery. This leads directly into an
immense tunnel which runs from Cuzco to Lima, and then, turning southward, extends into
Bolivia. At a certain point it is intersected by a royal tomb. Inside this sepulchral chamber
are cunningly arranged two doors; or rather, two enormous slabs which turn upon pivots,
and close so tightly as to be only distinguishable from the other portions of the sculptured
walls by the secret signs, whose key is in the possession of the faithful custodians. One of
these turning slabs covers the southern mouth of the Liman tunnel - the other, the northern
one of the Bolivian corridor. The latter, running southward, passes through Tarapaca and
Cobija, for Arica is not far away from the little river called Pay'quina,* which is the boundary
between Peru and Bolivia.

----------
* Pay'quina or Payaquina, so called because its waves used to drift particles of gold
from Brazil. We found a few specks of genuine metal in a handful of sand that we brought
back to Europe.
----------

"Not far from this spot stand three separate peaks which form a curious triangle;
they are included in the chain of the Andes. According to tradition the only practicable
entrance to the corridor leading northward is in one of these peaks; but without the secret
of its landmarks, a regiment of Titans might rend the rocks in vain in the attempt to find it.
But even were someone to gain an entrance and find his way as far as the turning slab in
the wall of the sepulchre, and attempt to blast it out, the superincumbent rocks are so
disposed as to bury the tomb, its treasures, and - as the mysterious Peruvian expressed
it to us - 'a thousand warriors' in one common ruin. There is no other access to the Arica
chamber but through the door in the mountain near Pay'quina. Along the entire length of
the corridor, from Bolivia to Lima and Cuzco, are smaller hiding-places filled with treasures
of gold and precious stones, the accumulation of many generations of Incas, the aggregate
value of which is incalculable.
"We have in our possession an accurate plan of the tunnel, the sepulchre, and the
doors, given to us at the time by the old Peruvian. If we had ever thought of profiting by the
secret, it would have required the co-operation of the Peruvian and Bolivian governments
on an extensive scale. To say nothing of physical obstacles, no one individual or small
party could undertake such an exploration without encountering the army of smugglers and
brigands with which the coast is infested; and which, in fact, includes nearly the whole
population. The mere task of purifying the mephitic air of the tunnel, which had not been
entered for centuries, would also be a serious one. There, however, the treasure lies, and
there the tradition says it will lie till the last vestige of Spanish rule disappears from the
whole of North and South America" (Vol. I, pp. 595-98).

While no "accurate plan of the tunnel, the sepulchre, and the doors" mentioned by
H. P. B. has ever been found among her papers, there is nevertheless a curious document
in the Archives of The Theosophical Society at Adyar, which it has been thought advisable
to include in the present Volume.
This document consists of a folded sheet of foolscap containing drawings and
writings on three of its four pages. At the top of the front page appear two separate
inscriptions. One of them reads: "For those I love and protect. Try." It is signed by H.
Moore. This, in spite of the spelling, could very well be Henry More (1614-1687), the
famous English Platonist of the Cambridge school, whose collaboration in the writing of Isis
Unveiled is described by Col. Olcott (see Old Diary Leaves, I, 237-39). It might be tempting
to think of this signature as being that of an initiate who signed himself as Robert More on
a letter addressed to Col. Olcott by the Brotherhood of Luxor (see Letters from the Masters
of the Wisdom, Second Series, Letter No. 3), were it not again for the different spelling of
the name and for the fact that the initial looks more like a capital H. The other short
sentence is in the old-fashioned script-type used by John King and is signed by him,
advising "to ponder and discuss."
On the side of these brief sentences and somewhat below them is a drawing of the
West Coast of South America, showing a number of coastal and inland towns, as well as
the former boundary line between Peru and Bolivia. At the side of the map and below it are
explanatory notes and a sketch. Some have thought the notes to be in H. P. B.'s
handwriting, but this is hardly so, especially as they are in a rather peculiar and
ungrammatical mixture of French and Italian which would be most unlikely in H. P. B.'s
case, as she spoke both languages fluently. One short line is in English, and one other in
some script which might be Oriental.
The towns and other geographical localities on the map are: Guayaquil, Trujillo,
Callao, Lima, Ayacucho, Cuzco ("ancient capital of the Incas"), Pisco, the Island of
Chincha, Aucari, Caraveli, Arequipa, Arica; and farther down Tarapaca, Iquique and Cobija
The Payequina (or Pay'quina) river is said to cross the dividing line between Bolivia and
Peru, and to carry particles of gold from Brazil. Under the sketch, the explanatory note says
that this is a rock cut perpendicularly with hieroglyphics, and in the interior of which is the
tomb of the Inca Kings.
The last third of the front page and the whole of the second are occupied with a text
in a peculiar Italian, the approximate translation of which is given below:
"This was confided to me about fifteen years ago by an old priest in Peru who makes
journeys into the interior, and who told me this secret, which had been disclosed to him by
an Indian at confession, who said it had been revealed to him by his parents. It concerned
the famous mine where they found the gold which the Spaniards carried off soon after the
conquest of Peru.
"I was told that the last King of the Incas having been taken prisoner by Pizarro,
there was offered for his ransom a room full of gold, which they got in three days. Pizarro,
astounded by so much treasure, would only release the imprisoned King on condition that
they would tell from what mine the treasure came. The Queen gave the order to close the
ventilating shafts of the great tunnel, so that the mine should be for ever lost to the
rapacious Spaniards. After much search by commissions from various nations and by
naturalists, it still remains an impenetrable secret.
"By a strange coincidence it happened that, after this secret had been
communicated to me while travelling with the priest, I arrived, as the sun was setting, at
Arica; a hill or high rock perpendicular on the side facing the sea showed that it had on it
some hieroglyphics, of which I could get no explanation from the same priest. But some
months later, when we were back at Lima, he told me the following secret: that Cuzco was
the capital of Peru, where the Temple of the Sun used to be, and from a volcanic aperture
in the ground a great gold chain was thrown which encircled the Temple with all its idols,
etc., etc.
"In the neighborhood (still undiscovered) is the entrance to a tunnel which extends
from Cuzco to Lima, passing through the Andes and past Arica, where the rock bearing the
hieroglyphics is, and at the foot of which are to be found the tombs of the Inca kings. Inside
the mortuary chambers are said to be two closed doors, difficult to discover; one opens
into the tunnel that goes to Cuzco, and the door opposite leads towards Bolivia, passing
through Tarapaca and Cobija. On the boundary between Peru and Bolivia there is a river
which is called Pay'quina, and in this area there are three hills in a triangle (a continuation
of the chain of the Andes). In one of these three hills - I cannot now remember which -
about half way up, is the door to the end of the tunnel."
On the fourth page of the document a range of mountains is shown as seen from the
sea, giving the location of various coastal towns and the line of the tunnels mentioned in
the text.

-----------------

Notes on Peruvian Antiquities

by Prof. Fred. J. Dick
(from a lecture with slides)

The purpose of the present notes on Peruvian antiquities is to outline the general
nature of some of the problems - suggested by the ruins, known history, and traditions of
Peru - that still await solution. These problems may be found to bear an important relation,
not only to American history, but also to still broader questions connected with the past
history of humanity.
The center of ancient Inca civilization appears to have lain in the neighborhood of
Cuzco, between the middle and eastern chains of the Cordilleras, amid scenery of
unsurpassed grandeur; while the extent of the empire latterly under Inca rule was in length
nearly three times that of California. In the valleys of the Cuzco region the climate and
products are like those of Italy and Spain, while crops like those of northern Europe are
found in the more elevated plains and ravines. Above that level are Alpine pasture lands,
and then bleak regions, rocky peaks and everlasting snow. At Quito, once under the Incas,
there is a mountain just on the equator, whose summit is snow-capped throughout the year;
Cuzco is about 11,500 feet above the sea.
Lake Titicaca, 250 miles south of Cuzco, is 12,500 feet above sea level. Corn will
not ripen in the basin of this lake, which is about 300 miles by 100 in extent. The lake itself
is now 120 miles by 40. Around its watershed the Cordilleras attain their greatest heights.
According to Sir Clements Markham the most ancient human remains discovered
in Peru is the mummy exhumed at Tarapac in 1874. It lay beneath a volcanic formation
called chuco of vast antiquity. With the body were cotton twine, a woven bag, and some
cobs of maize. The perfection to which the cultivation of maize and potatoes had been
brought by the Peruvians, and their domestication of the llama and alpaca are, Markham
says, convincing proofs of the remote antiquity of this civilization. The maize at Cuzco has
stalks fifteen feet high, and grain four or five times the size of ordinary maize grain.
The extent of ancient ruins throughout the Andean regions and Central America was
very fully treated of by Dr. Heath in 1878, and an account thereof, with comments by H. P.
Blavatsky, will be found in our Spanish magazine, El Sendero Teosofico, from September
to December, 1912. It would take too long to describe a tithe of these wonders. There are
three main types of pre-Inca construction: the polygonal Cyclopean, the Tiahuanaco styles,
and the pre-Inca roads and aqueducts. One of these roads wound along the Andean
heights all the way from Cuzco to Quito, a distance of fifteen hundred miles. It was
macadamized, had many huge retaining walls, was often cut for leagues through rock,
sometimes to a depth of sixty feet, and was evenly graded, necessitating the use in ravines
of great masses of solid masonry, or occasionally, suspension bridges. Another proceeded
from Cuzco to the Pacific coast and then on to Quito. The wild route of the former made
the work a more difficult one than can be found in our transcontinental railroads. A
suggestion may be hazarded that the Cyclopean builders were not wholly unfamiliar with
the art of tunneling. As to this, time will doubtless show. One aqueduct alone was four
hundred and fifty miles in length. The main roads referred to were of unknown antiquity in
the time of the Incas. When Huayna Capac went to Quito with his army, he found it
necessary to repair them at some points. As to the extent of walled terraces, often
Cyclopean, in the Andean ravines, Dr. Heath estimated their length sufficient to encircle the
globe ten times, and he considered his estimate below the mark. That there are also
innumerable buried cities is something admitting of little doubt. Professor Bingham, while
pursuing his investigations in connection with his discovery of the remarkable Inca city of
Machu Picchu, perched on top of a mountain in one of the most inaccessible regions of the
Andes, traveled over about ten thousand miles of country, and reported that they had but
scratched the surface of Peruvian antiquities.
First let us glance at the nature of the problem presented by Peruvian polygonal
Cyclopean construction. The fort of Sacsahuaman, near Cuzco, may serve for an object
lesson. It will be seen that the Incas imitated in the upper walls the megalithic work
beneath of their unknown predecessors. But what are we to think of the immense stones,
many of them weighing from two hundred to three hundred tons, to be seen today in these
lower ancient walls? The human figures standing beside some of them afford a better idea
of their prodigious size than any merely arithmetical statement.* But it is not only their size,
but the extraordinary manner in which, despite their polygonal and varied shapes, they
were accurately cut and closely fitted, that excites astonishment. Some of them are known
to possess as many as twelve faces. Surely it is self-evident that the people who handled
and cut such blocks in the way they did, must have been of considerable stature, and have
owned excellent tools. Were it but a case of handling one or two such blocks, the
quarrying, cutting, and transportation would tax the resources of our day. But when we find
thousands of examples of this extraordinary style, in America, Etruria, and other parts,
there can surely be but one conclusion.
One writer says that the platforms on which the great stone images are, on Easter
Island, are "very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the ruins at
Tiahuanaco in Peru," and that they are in this identical Cyclopean style.

------------
* [[See photo at end of article]] Other illustrations of Sacsahuaman and
Ollantaytambo will be found in the numbers of El Sendero Teosofico above mentioned.
-----------

"Callao was submerged in 1746, and entirely destroyed. Lima was ruined in 1678;
in 1746 only 20 houses out of 3000 were left standing, while the ancient cities in the
Huatica and Lurin valleys still remain in a comparatively good state of preservation. San
Miguel de Puiro, founded by Pizarro in 1531, was entirely destroyed in 1855, while the old
ruins near by suffered little. Arequipa was thrown down in August, 1868, but the ruins near
show no change. In engineering, at least, the present may learn from the past, as we hope
to show it may in most things else," wrote H. P. Blavatsky in 1880.
Here we shall be obliged to take a short excursion into anthropology. According to
the law of atavism, if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from seven feet
to even nine feet and eleven feet high, it only proves that there was a time when nine feet
and ten feet was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo-European race.
But as science is in the habit nowadays of thinking in millions of years, we may as well
follow the fashion, and take a glance into Miocene times.
The Commentary to one of the Stanzas of an archaic record, to which H. P.
Blavatsky had access, and which is in safe keeping, says that after the Great Flood of the
Third Root-Race (the Lemurians):
"Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was
diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and
intermarried among giants and pigmies (the dwarfed races of the Poles). . . Many acquired
divine, - more unlawful knowledge."
Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. Who can tell how
many geological periods it took to accomplish this fourth destruction? But the Stanza goes
on to say, and this brings us to Miocene times, about four million years ago:
"They (the Atlanteans) built great images, nine yatis high (27 feet) - the size of their
bodies. Lunar fires had destroyed the land of their fathers (the Lemurians). Water
threatened the fourth (race)."
The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured, almost all, twenty-seven feet
in height, and eight feet across the shoulders. As to how the records just referred to have
been preserved, there is no time tonight to go into that question. The two volumes of The
Secret Doctrine have been published for nearly thirty years, and they are packed from
cover to cover with clues for devotees of Archaeology, Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology,
Electricity, Magnetism, Anthropology, Ethnology, Philology, and other sciences, and it is
one of the miracles of the times we live in, that its teachings are not better known, or at
least more openly acknowledged.
In Numbers, c. xviii, 11, we read of the giants Anakim. In Deuteronomy, c. iii, 11,
we read of Og, a king who was nine cubits high (15 feet 4 inches), and four wide. Goliath
was six cubits and a span in height (10 feet 7 inches). India had her Danavas and Daityas;
Ceylon her Rakshasas; Greece her Titans. The only difference between the Jewish
Scriptures and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny,
Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., is this: While the pagans mention only the skeletons of giants,
dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible
interpreters unblushingly demand that Geology and Archaeology should believe, that
several countries were inhabited by such giants in the days of Moses!
The two sculptured torsos now shown, which stand in front of the church at
Tiahuanaco village, and which are evidently portraits, like those on Easter Island, belong
to human forms about 12 feet in height.
Inasmuch as the height of the megalithic gateway to Sacsahuaman fort is 12 feet,
and width 6 feet, the conclusion is natural that these two torsos at Tiahuanaco are nothing
but veritable life-size portraits of two of the megalithic builders of Peru, of date nearly
coeval with the cataclysm of 850,000 years ago, which submerged the island continents
of Ruta and Daitya, and which survives in the Race-memory as "The Flood." These torsos
probably lay buried for long ages, and were thus fairly well preserved.
The figure next shown, also near Tiahuanaco, is, exclusive of the base, about 7-1/2
feet high. I shall refer to the details of this symbolic statue later on. Meantime it may be
suggested that three widely different epochs are indicated by the ruins at Tiahuanaco.
This, of course, is one of the problems requiring further investigation.
In Markham's latest book, The Incas of Peru, published in 1910 - and Markham is
one who has devoted the study of a long lifetime to Peru and its antiquities - he says of
Tiahuanaco:
"Such a region is only capable of sustaining a scanty population of hardy
mountaineers and laborers. The mystery consists in the existence of ruins of a great city
on the southern side of the lake, the builders being entirely unknown.
"The city covered a large area, built by highly skilled masons, and with the use of
enormous stones. One 36 ft. by 7 ft. weighs 170 tons, another is 26 ft. by 16 by 6.
[Another elaborately and accurately dressed stone, seen in the illustration, weighs 108
tons.] Apart from the monoliths of ancient Egypt, there is nothing to equal this in any other
part of the world. The moving and placing of such monoliths point to a dense population,
to an organized government, and consequently to a large area under cultivation, with
arrangements for the conveyance of supplies from various directions. There must have
been an organization combining skill and intelligence with power and administrative ability.
"The point next in interest to the enormous size of the stones is the excellence of the
workmanship. The lines are accurately straight, the angles correctly drawn, the surfaces
true planes. The upright monoliths have mortices and projecting ledges to retain the
horizontal slabs in their places, which completed the walls. The carvings are complicated,
and at the same time well arranged, and the ornamentation [symbolism, he means] is
accurately designed and executed. Not less striking are the statues with heads adorned
with curiously shaped head-dresses. Flights of stone steps have recently been discovered,
for the ancient city, now several miles from the lake, was once upon its borders.
Remarkable skill on the part of the masons is shown by every fragment lying about. Such
are the angle-joints of a stone conduit; a window-frame of careful workmanship with nine
apertures, all in one piece; and numerous niches and moldings. There is ample proof of
the very advanced stage reached by the builders in architectural art." *

-----------
* Besides the fourth plate now given, illustrations were Plates 26, 37, 38, 39 in Die
Ruinenstatte von Tiahuanaco, by Stubel and Uhle, Leipsic.
-----------

It appears that at the end of the sixteenth century Bartolome Cervantes, a canon of
Chuquisaca, gave to Oliva, who wrote a history of the Jesuits in Peru, a manuscript
dictated by Catari, a quipumayoc, or keeper of the records, in which manuscript the
statement is made that no judgment can be formed of the size of the ruined city, because
nearly all was built underground. And Markham adds that Professor Nestler of Prague has
proceeded to Tiahuanaco with the object of making researches by the light of the account
of Catari.
 In The Theosophical Path of July last will be found a reference to some of Professor
Nestler's work there, but he appears to have been unable to prosecute his investigations,
for some reason. The remarkable statement of Catari only serves to heighten our interest
in what Tiahuanaco may conceal.
Geologically, the Andes are comparatively modern. The bones of a mastodon have
been discovered at Ulloma, in Bolivia, which is now 13,000 feet above the sea. In the
deserts of Tarapaca are numerous skeletons of gigantic ant-eaters, whose habitat is a
dense forest. When the Andes were lower, the trade wind could carry its moisture over
them to the strip of coast land which is now an arid desert. When mastodons lived at
Ulloma, and ant-caters in Tarapaca, the Andes, slowly rising, were some two or three
thousands of feet lower than they are now. "If the megalithic builders were living under
these conditions,'' says Markham, "the problem is solved, for maize would then ripen in the
basin of Lake Titicaca, and the site of the ruins of Tiahuanaco could support the necessary
population."
But if the megalithic Cyclopean belongs to an epoch hundreds of thousands of years
back, it is certain that the monolithic doorways at Tiahuanaco belong to a far later period.
The height of the doorways is sufficient evidence, it appears to me, that these belong to
some time anywhere between say 10,000 and 80,000 years ago; and if it could be shown
that the Andes were say 3000 feet lower within about these time limits, we should have the
approximate date, at least, of these doorways. The people in the elevated province of
Huarochiri had an actual tradition that in remote times it possessed a climate similar to that
of the coast valleys.
Tradition throws another peculiar light, which one cannot ignore, on conditions once
prevailing in that region. Markham suggests that the Pirua and Amauta dynasties may
possibly represent the sovereigns of the megalithic empire, whose decline and fall was
followed by long centuries of barbarism, so that the people had almost forgotten its
existence, while the tribes of the Collao were probably of another race.
This at least suggests a continuous link through which ancient traditions might
descend. The tradition now to be referred to was, so to say, dramatized by the lady
Siuyaco, when she caused her son to appear, clad in shining gold, before the Incas on
Sacsahuaman hill, who hailed him, Inca Rocco, as ruler thenceforth.
Now this is the tradition. In Cieza's Cronica del Peru, c. 103, we read:
"Certain Indians relate that it was of a surety affirmed by their ancestors that there
was no light for many days, and that all being in darkness and obscurity, the Sun appeared
resplendent on the island of Titicaca."
Again, in vol. ii, c. 5, the Indians are reported as saying that, "far preceding the time
of the Incas, there was once a long period without seeing the Sun, and enduring great labor
by reason of this deprivation, the people made great offerings and supplications to those
they held as gods, begging the light they needed; and that being in this condition, there
appeared on the island of Titicaca, in the midst of the great lake of Collao, the Sun most
resplendent, at which all rejoiced."
This points to a time when the Earth's axis more or less coincided with the plane of
the ecliptic, more than 400,000 years ago, when there must have been darkness for a good
while each year at the place.
 Here we have Inca tradition corroborating what was taught in the temples of ancient
Egypt. Thus Tiahuanaco suggests another problem: Do we moderns understand the
forces which control, or do we know all about, the movements of the Earth?
The next problem is in regard to the symbolism at Tiahuanaco. Was it related in any
way to the religious belief, as it is called, of the Incas, or can any connection be traced?
If fundamental belief is best shown by character and deeds, what was it that mainly
characterized their civilization? Says Markham:
"Their name for the Supreme meant - 'The Splendor, the Foundation, the Creator,
the Infinite God,' which shows the sublimity of thought attained by the ancient Peruvians
in their conception of a Supreme Being - the infinite cause, the fundamental principle, the
light of the world, the great teacher.
"Under the Inca system all who could work were obliged to work, all lived in comfort,
and there was ample provision for the aged, for young children, and for the sick. No money
was necessary, for every family had a right to everything needed for the nourishment and
well-being of its members, from the market, without payment. In case of disaster to any
community, caused by weather, accident, or an enemy, the neighboring villagers repaired
all damages, and gave all needful help. So perfect was the Inca organization that it
continued to work efficiently, and almost mechanically, for some time after the guiding
heads had been struck down, by the Spaniards. Under such a system there could be no
want, for thought was taken for the nourishment and comfort of every creature. There was
hard work, while provision was made not only for rest, but also for recreation.
"Not only did they greatly prefer the arts of peace to those of war, but among them
the injunction of all the Great Teachers of Antiquity, to love and serve one another, was
raised to the rank of an everyday practical precept."
The Incas had many things we associate with the idea of culture. They used no
money, but some of their buildings were surrounded by gardens of flowers with numbers
of llamas and shepherds, life-size, all made out of pure, solid gold. The walls and floors
of some of their palaces and temples were lined with solid gold. Their art work in gold and
silver was something amazing. One would have to go back to the cities Plato tells of, that
belonged to later Atlantean times, to find a parallel to conditions actually existing in Peru
within what we call the historic period. The Incas had their sacrificers, speakers, hermits,
performers of family ceremonies, soothsayers, diviners, bards, reciters of history, musical
composers for string and wind instruments, dramatic authors, dancers, recorders,
accountants, designers of art work, architects, workers in metal, and so on. In fact their
activities were endless. They had their festivals at the same time as the peoples of the Far
East, that is, at the equinoxes and solstices, and for excellent reasons, too.
Possibly this picture of an Inca, surviving at the present day, may help us to realize
what must have been the character of this noble race before it was finally stupefied into
apathy through the horrors perpetrated by the gold-worshiping Europeans.
Some of the Inca pottery is now shown.* The next picture shows two of the many
specimens of pottery made by their neighbors, or possibly predecessors, in Chimu.** The
discoverer of the Chimu pottery in the Chimcana Valley, Mr. T. H. Meyring, placed its date
as at least 7000 years ago, while some think 12,000 would be nearer the truth. There are
many heads, statuettes, and vessels ornamented with heads; and the most remarkable
thing is revealed by the portraiture, which is undoubtedly what we call Aryan. These
artifacts exhibit not only great refinement of type and of coloring, but very considerable
variety, imagination, originality, and humor.

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* Plate 41 in Die Ruinenstatte von Tiahuanaco.
** See numbers of El Sendero Teosofico before mentioned.
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This piece of an ancient tapestry from the great Inca necropolis of Ancon, proves an
unmistakable link to have existed between the supra-physical teachings known to the Incas
at one time, and those of the earlier builders of the Temple of Ak-kapana at Tiahuanaco.
I use the word supra-physical, because "metaphysical" suggests little more nowadays than
a kind of intellectual gymnastics, instead of actual knowledge of inner nature. That we have
an inner subtle body, in which are the real organs of perception and action, constituting a
link between the soul (through thought and will) and the objective world, was known to
many Incas and Aztecs. This symbolic tapestry is one proof. In the original, the meaning
was accentuated by the use of various colors.
This reproduction of an Aztec design on deerskin, possesses also some points of
correspondence with Tiahuanaco symbolism. While largely astronomical, we find twice
depicted, accurately and unmistakably, the sacred Tetrad, or Tetraktys, an ancient and
universal symbol, as to which much is written in The Secret Doctrine.
The monolithic door at Tiahuanaco is famous among all archaeologists.* On the
interior side is the remarkable and most carefully executed symbolic design, which has long
been one of the interesting puzzles of archaeology. The monolith, which weighed nine tons
in its finished state, was broken across, probably during a severe earthquake. It was in fact
completely overturned, and to this, fortunately, is due the very perfect preservation of detail,
during what must have been an immense period of time. The eastern face, seen in the first
picture, lay uppermost, and has plain traces of its lengthy exposure to the elements.
The next picture shows the detail of the central figure, and with some of the others
is taken from Stubel and Uhle's splendid work, Die Ruinenstatte von Tiahuanaco.**

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* See illustrations in The Theosophical Path for July, 1915, accompanying "Studies
in Symbolism," III.
** Plates 5, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19.
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H. P. Blavatsky pointed out in The Secret Doctrine that there is not an old fragment
but shows belief in a multiform and even multi-genetic evolution, and unless I am greatly
mistaken we have here a fragment which proves this fairly conclusively, provided we admit
that it represents neither a human king, nor an idol, nor an anthropomorphic deity, but that
it stands simply - a symbol of the divine-human race.
The principles in Man, potential and actual, are typified radiating around the head,
and in other ways, in conformity with the teachings of the ancient Wisdom-Religion. The
dual ascending and descending evolution and involution appears to be indicated by the
puma- and condor-headed scepters in either hand. There are astronomical meanings, by
the laws of correspondence. The Aeon reached is suggested by the shape of the head and
of the three inner planes from which it protrudes. The Root-Race of this Aeon passed and
completed, is shown by the left hand covering the fourth division of the scepter; while the
right hand and scepter shows that the Fifth has commenced, with two more still to come.
The surrounding figures indicate the distinction drawn between the higher principles
and the lower. Notice the central position of the eye. An article on this topic will be found
in the November number of The Theosophical Path. A winged figure surrounds the eye.

Notice the distinct manner in which the idea of ascending evolution is indicated, in
the middle group of figures.
The next illustration shows detail of frieze below, which among other things appears
to typify the solar powers, and the fourfold powers ruling manifested nature. A definite
cycle, or rather succession of cycles, seems also to be implied, beginning and re-entering
at the divisions indicated.
The Chavin stone of diorite, now at Lima, is seen in the next picture.* It is twenty-
five feet long, and weighs forty-five tons. It was found in the Maranon Valley. Belonging
to megalithic times, its date is of course at present unknown. The symbolism is totally
different in treatment, and clearly betokens a different race. But the subject matter is
identical, and in some respects grander, than at Tiahuanaco, if that be possible. There
appears to be a reference, too to the forces controlling rotation and axial changes, as was
also found by Cambyses in an Egyptian temple.
The statue now shown is at Tiahuanaco. It is especially noteworthy in portraying,
almost humorously, in a simple but most effective manner, the main teaching of Antiquity,
namely, that humanity is the subject of both evolution and involution - Involution of the
higher spiritual and mental powers descending at a certain epoch from above - or rather,
from within; and Evolution of the physical and astral vehicles which constitute the lower
nature, ascending from beneath - or from without, that is, the regions of objectivity.
This duality is emphasized by the belt of flame, beneath which is depicted the
garment of the objective, composed of minute lives - only imperfectly conceived by us
moderns as atoms or electrons - which underlie and build up all living and material forms.
Their true supra-physical nature is typified by the detail shown in the next pictures** -
threefold on the spiritual side, and fourfold on the objective.
The objects found at Tiahuanaco - models of various kinds - shown in the next
picture,*** may be conjectured to have been used in the temple teachings, regarding
stages in Man's evolution and involution. Their symbolical character is evident.

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* See The Incas of Peru, by Sir Clements Markham.
** Plate 31a, Die Ruinenstatte von Tiahuanaco.
*** Plate 32, ibid.

(from Theosophical Path, Dec., 1915)

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