The Missing Lands Page 5

  Another fire of unknown origin c.1200 BC — quite likely another mass coronal ejection — destroyed practically every urban civilization in the eastern Mediterranean between Anatolia and Palestine and brought about the sudden collapse of the Bronze Age. The terror of “the Star Fires” — the Waitaha term describing meteoric or solar induced events — forced people to seek protection in deep caves, much in the same way they’d done on Easter Island under similar circumstances.26

  Another dramatic event imprinted in Waitaha memory is the creation of Lake Taupo, which covers a substantial portion of the North Island. According to mainstream geologists the lake is a caldera formed by the eruption of a supervolcano c.24,500 BC whose magnitude ranks as one of the greatest eruptions of all time. It is suggested that the debris ejected into the atmosphere may have been responsible for starting the Great Ice Age. However, the Waitaha beg to differ and, like their aboriginal neighbours in Australia who recall events proven to have taken place deep in prehistoric times,27 they too have eyewitness accounts to tell. According to the Waitaha, “Tohunga [wisdom keepers] hold within their kete [basket] a most sacred karakia [prayer] that travels the sky trails in the dawn. Its words reach out to the thirty-six houses in the heavens to awaken Auahi Tu Roa [Firebird] who carries messages across the darkened skies for the Sky Father. If the mana [spiritual integrity or magic] of the Tohunga is great enough he frees that shooting star to fly just as the last stars disappear.” Unfortunately the wisdom keeper got the prayer wrong on this occasion, allowing the passing comet to break away from its typical trajectory and crash to Earth. The impact was so strong it reversed the Earth’s rotation: “the days went backwards and the night became the day, and the day became the night.” Fire engulfed the land. Survivors hid in caves before rains finally quelled the flames and the earthquakes stopped. Re-emerging, the people predictably found a land completely altered, with Lake Taupo created when part of this "Earth Shaker" crashed. "It did not fly from a volcano to crash to Earth but came out of the heavens along the track of the Moon and Sun," they said, causing "fires that fell from the skies." Hence why the name originally given to the lake was Tauponui Atea, which roughly translates as ‘big lake created from space’.28

  THE THREAD TO SOUTH AMERICA

  Let’s now rejoin the narrative after Mãui reached Kura Tawhiti.

  He continued his journey throughout the South Island, marking other power places and connecting them to specific stars — the ancient practice of astro-archaeology that underlies the design of virtually every ancient temple on Earth29 — and locating nearby islands that in time became part of New Zealand’s mainland due to the ever shifting tectonic forces of this region.

  Finally, he asked a group of families to stay behind and establish a home before setting sail back to Easter Island. But before he could return, his waka vanished somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.30

  The importance of Waitaha history is two-fold: first, it marks, with absolute precision, the antediluvian Birthplace of the Gods, or at least one of them; and two, it depicts events before, during, and after the flood. The earliest point of the narrative places the Urukehu sailing the Pacific as the flood is taking place. If Mãui was their grandson, it stands to reason he and his crew were present in New Zealand within two generations, ostensibly around 9600 BC. A second time-frame is provided by the Waitaha grandmother elders in the second narrative Whispers of the Waitaha, in which they declare that the sacred teachings were carefully maintained, orally transmitted and applied for 10,000 years until 1743 — about 25 years prior to Captain James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand — when the elders were instructed to hide the knowledge until more appropriate times. If so, the compilation of teachings began about 1443 years after flood.31

  This leaves a discrepancy of 1343 years between the flood and the arrival of Mãui, meaning that each generation of the Urukehu lived for seven hundred years! As absurd as it may seem, one characteristic of antediluvian gods in India, Mesopotamia and Egypt is their superhuman life span, as we shall see later.

  All this changes everything and what little we have known about the prehistory of this part of the Pacific, and provides one point of origin for the antediluvian gods.

  But there’s one more aspect to be learned from the seafaring traditions of the Waitaha. They describe the manner in which the great ocean currents behave between New Zealand and Easter Island, and how the return journey required sailing past Easter Island to “a great land in the East before returning.”32 There are two possibilities here: either there used to be a landmass beyond Easter Island, now submerged, or the "great land" referred to is South America. The Waitaha narrative provides a clue. When visiting this land it was customary to take along a totem: “two birds, titi and kaka, went with them, and their names are joined in the most sacred waters of that distant homeland of the ancestors.”33 Obviously this refers to Lake Titicaca, whose shore was once home to a great civilization who built the temple cities of Puma Punku and Tiwanaku. Given how the megaliths marking Tiwanaku’s immense rectangular plaza align with stellar events along the horizon in 15,000 BC,34 the Waitaha of Aotearoa invariably give shape to a lost civilization in prehistoric times who sailed great distances as effortlessly as driving to the supermarket.

  How or why did three disparate points on the face of the Earth become so intrinsically linked? Part of the answer is mathematical: measure the distance from Tiwanaku to the Birthplace of the Gods via Easter Island, divide one section into the other and Easter Island marks phi, nature's mathematical proportion. The discrepancy is a mere 0.02, far too close to be mere coincidence.

  It appears that a remote outpost 12,000 feet up on the Bolivian altiplano might have been another home of the gods.

  The locations of the gods — Easter Island, Kura Tawhiti and Tiwanaku — are related to each other by phi.

  The ridge of Kura Tawhiti. Marotini is along the top, left of center.

  4. BUILT BEFORE THE FLOOD

  "Now, I don't believe an industrial civilization existed on Earth before our own — I don't think there was a dinosaur civilization... but the question of what one would look like if it did is important. How do you know there hasn't been one? The whole point of science is to ask a question and see where it leads."1

  The statement is by Adam Frank, astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York who co-authored a paper with Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, hypothesizing that advanced civilizations may have once populated the Earth.

  Their point is this: If complex life has existed on Earth for a period of 400 million years and an industrial civilization has only occupied a mere 300 years of it, surely somewhere along such a vast expanse of time other industrial civilizations might have flourished and fallen? In context of a 13.8 billion-year old universe, it is feasible that even extraterrestrial civilizations might have risen and expired.

  The problem is finding their traces. After a prolonged amount of time, artefacts of civilization are buried beneath rubble, dirt, volcanic ash, rising seas, creeping vegetation and encroaching urbanization. Even remnants of recent civilizations such as the Roman are hard to find on the surface; statues and pottery and tools are often discovered by blind luck or abrupt erosion. And if we were to rely solely on fossil evidence, it ought to be remembered that only a tiny fraction of fauna and flora become fossilized because the process requires a number of geologic and atmospheric conditions. Since most physical reminders of planetary civilizations may be erased by now, Frank and Schmidt proposed looking for subtle evidence of earlier industrial civilizations in sedimentary anomalies and chemical balances in the geological record, something that would indicate an alteration of the Earth’s habitat through human intervention, such as pollution. Certainly that’s one way to look at it.

  Another is to examine myth and folklore; and of course, to look at anomalous megalithic structures, things that look entirely out of place relative to their culture and level of sophistication, at least
to our eyes. Curiously, the co-authors raised the possibility that the end of one civilization could sow the seeds for another, which brings up an anomaly that happened across the Earth around 8000 BC, the period when humans suddenly and collectively discovered agriculture, domestication of animals, astronomy, mathematics, and so on.

  An accident? A global impulse? Or did we inherit seeds sown by an earlier, advanced civilization whose roots were erased by cataclysm?

  THE ENIGMA OF TIWANAKU

  One of the greatest anomalies lies hidden in plain view in the Andes.

  The Inka ruling class rose to prominence in the 15th century. Barely a century-and-a-half later it was all but wiped out, conquered by a small band of Spanish glory hounds that the Peruvians mistook for returning gods. In this blink of a historical eye we are meant to believe the Inka took the art of advanced stone masonry to the highest levels of any civilization, living or dead, achieving it without knowledge of alloys and the specialist tools required for complex stone cutting and shaping. And to make it easier for themselves, they allegedly built hundreds of megalithic citadels such as Saqsayhuaman, Tiwanaku, Puma Punku, Pisac, Cuzco and Machu Picchu while simultaneously dealing with a civil war.

  Exquisite masonry robbed for a local home.

  Anyone who's traveled extensively through the Andes is dumbstruck by the stratospheric architectural mastery of Saqsayhuaman. Or the razorblade precision of the Sun temple porphyry wall above the town of Ollantaytambo. Or the high tech H-blocks of Puma Punku, originally slotted together like Neolithic Lego. Surely projects of such magnitude, of such unique vision and endeavor, would have been recorded and loudly proclaimed by their architects? Yet no claim exists. Inka literature mentions such places casually as though already familiar and accepted, because the truth is they were in existence long before the Inka. The compiler Pedro Cieza de Léon describes his encounter with the Aymara living around Lake Titicaca who, when asked about the Inka having built Tiwanaku, laughed at his question, asserting that everything seen in this temple complex was built long before the Inka,2 assembled by magic in a single night when "the stones came down of their own accord, or at the sound of a trumpet, from the mountain quarries and took up their proper positions at the site."3

  Prehistoric Lego, anyone? Puma Punku’s H-blocks and a small selection of other stones, as surveyed in the 1890s. More the work of a machine than man.

  Tiwanaku's temple complex covers 2000 acres, and the latest aerial surveillance locates dozens of additional buildings still waiting excavation. Six known rectangular enclosures border a stepped mound called Akapana, whose megaliths have been heavily looted over the centuries, first by the Spanish looking for accessible building material for the capital La Paz, then by robber barons who literally robbed what remained to build the Bolivian railroads. The locals joined in, helping themselves to the fine masonry scattered about the place to build the homes and streets of the little town of Tiwanaku itself; one adobe house that once stood within the archaeological site employed large stone blocks carved with reliefs taken from the Akapana for a doorway. No doubt its humble owner was inspired by the actions of the zealous local Spanish priest Pedro de Castillo who destroyed a noteworthy third site in the 17th century, from which he built a disproportionately huge church in the center of this otherwise unremarkable town; his acolyte, the Andean chief Paxi-pati, behaved no better. Still, his actions helped me understand there once existed a relationship between the Akapana, Puma Punku, and a third, lost temple now beneath the church, for the three sites form a perfect equilateral triangle. In the ancient world it was standard practice to link sites sharing common functions using perfect triangles.4 It is also well known that the Spanish followed an official policy of building churches over pre-existing temples.

  The Tiwanaku triangle.

  Despite such travesties, enough masonry remained buried in 1904 for the Austrian archaeologist and engineer Arthur Posnansky to dedicate forty-eight years of his life to documenting Tiwanaku and its equally impressive satellite temple Puma Punku. He published five copious volumes detailing the impressive nature of the site, its stupendous scale, and the means by which it met an ugly fate 11,000 years ago.

  Posnansky was well aware that, like so many of its kind, Tiwanaku would have referenced the position of objects in the sky during the epoch in which it was built. He used as his main subject the relatively well-preserved quadrangle of standing stones called Kalasasaya (the name means ‘standing stones’ in Aymara). In his day the stones were still mostly freestanding, with just a low boundary wall connecting them; ignorant but well-meaning latter-day restorers have filled the spaces in-between with poorly fitted stones to form an enclosed courtyard. Posnansky reasoned that the monoliths mark celestial objects along the eastern horizon, when seen from an observation platform to the rear of the quadrangle. He took the corner megaliths to mark the position of the solstices, but the alignment missed the mark by 18 angular minutes.5 This is because the present position of the Earth relative to its celestial meridian has shifted over time, causing a relative shift in the marked position of the Sun.

  Celestial mechanics work like this: the Earth rotates with a kind of wobble at the poles which completes a full cycle over the course of 25,920 years, a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, meaning that celestial objects observed from the ground will be seen to shift in the sky, imperceptibly so. While this is taking place the Earth's axis tilts about 4º over the course of 21,600 years, an action called the obliquity of the ecliptic.

  Taking these two elements into account, Posnansky refined the date and got an exact match for the Kalasasaya. The row of megaliths referenced the solstices in 15,000 BC. 6 In Posnansky's words: "The calculations of the age of Tiwanaku are based solely and exclusively on the difference in the obliquity of the ecliptic of the period in which that great temple was built and that which it has today... the calculations were only possible by means of a building located exactly on the meridian and the length and width of which conformed to the maximum angle of solar declination between the two solstices."7

  His work was peer-reviewed for three years and the calculations were proven to be sound. 8

  The Kalasasaya viewed from the Akapana Pyramid in 1890. Note the disproportionate size of the church (top left) for such a small, remote village.

  The Kalasasaya buried in a deep sediment layer. Only possible through thousands of years of pluvial climate and exposure to higher water levels from Lake Titicaca.

  The Kalasasaya's earliest known name, Oka-uru-ymata, given by the Puquina, means Measure-Day-Observed. It is a massive courtyard calendar measuring 421 feet long by 389 feet wide, almost twice the size of an average football field, and yet the simple design belies its complexity — its length-to-width ratio of 1:1.08 is the difference between solar and lunar calendars.

  When Lake Titicaca’s level was higher (white) its temples were connected along the shore.

  TIWANAKU AND THE FLOOD

  Prior to 11,000 BC the agricultural conditions around Tiwanaku and the altiplano of Bolivia in general were excellent. There is even evidence of introduced agricultural experiments, such as raised soil tables. But within 5,000 years Tiwanaku was to face its biggest desecration, a disaster that marked the region with slow and irrecoverable decline. Tremendous seismic movements forced the waters of Lake Titicaca to overflow. Other lakes to the north broke bulwarks, their waters emptying into Titicaca to form a wall of water that overwhelmed everything and everyone in its rampage. Archaeological digs reveal a jumble of human remains tangled with those of fish, pottery and utensils. Stones were mixed with jewels, tools and shells, and megaliths weighing hundreds of tons were tossed around like matchsticks.

  One of the surviving artefacts is an impressive 440-ton monolithic block of andesite carved into a doorway. Along the top, a set of beautiful reliefs depict the Creator God Pachacamac holding two serpents, each representing the alternating electric and magnetic currents that give life to the universe. The ninete
en rays around his head cleverly reflect the Metonic Cycle, the calibration of solar and lunar calendars every 18.6 years. Along the periphery, bird-like creatures depict, in stylized form, information relating to the cycles of Venus, Sirius as well as eclipses. This calendrical masterpiece is the work of an inspired artist-astronomer, carved for posterity on one single, massive block of stone whose height and width also conform to the ratio between solar and lunar calendars.9

  But more revealing on this doorway are the forty-six reliefs of toxodons, a type of rhino made extinct by the flood 11,000 years ago. Since the stone masons would have borrowed from observation or memory, the doorway must have been carved when the creatures were still roaming the altiplano, and still relevant to people of the period.