Lost, p.33
lost, page 33
biru with the vital metal in sufficient quantities, once and for
all?
If the answer is yes. then the existence of Tiahuanacu and
much else about it could be explained. For if, in Sumer, a spe-
cial city with a brand-new sacred precinct, with a golden enclo-
sure, and an Avenue of the Gods and Holy Quays was
established for the visit to the Olden Land, we could presume
Gods of the Golden Tears
259
the similar establishment of a new city with a brand-new golden
enclosure and a sacred avenue and sacred quays in the heart of
the New Lands. And, as at Uruk, we would expect to find an
observatory for determining the moment of the appearance of
Nibiru in the evening skies, followed by the rising of the other
planets.
Only such a parallelism, we feel, can explain the need for
the observatory that the Kalasasaya had been, for its precision,
and for its date: circa 4000 B.C. Only such a state visit, we sug-
gest, can explain the elaborate architecture of Puma-Punku. its
royallike piers, and, yes, its gold-plated enclosure. For that
is precisely what archaeologists had found at Puma-Punku:
incontrovertible evidence that gold plates covered not only por-
tions of gates (as were the back panels of the Gate of the Sun at
Tiahuanacu), but that whole walls, entrances and cornices were
plated with gold. Posnansky found and photographed rows of
small round holes in many polished and dressed stone blocks
that "served to support golden plates which covered them by
means of nails, also of gold." When he delivered a lecture on
the subject to the Geographic Society in April 1943, he pre-
sented one of these blocks with five golden nails still sticking in
it (the other nails having been pulled out by gold seekers when
they removed the golden plates).
The possibility that at Puma-Punku there had been erected,
at the earliest time, an edifice whose walls, ceiling, and cornices
were covered with gold just as the E.NIR had been in Uruk
becomes even more significant when we find that the bas-reliefs
decorating the ceremonial gates at Puma-Punku, as well as
some of the gigantic statues of the Great God at Tiahuanacu.
were inlaid with gold. Posnansky discovered and photographed
the attachment holes, "some two millimeters in diameter, round
about the reliefs." A principal gate at Puma-Punku that he
named Gate of the Moon had its relief of Viracocha as well as
the god's face in the meander under it "inlaid with gold...
which made the principal hieroglyphs stand out with great bril-
liance."
No less significant was the discovery of Posnansky that where
these figures depicted the god's eyes, the gold inlay and nails
"secured into the slits of the eyes small round plates of tur-
quoise. We have found," Posnansky reported, "many of these
pieces of turquoise perforated in the center, in the cultural
strata of Tiahuanacu"—a fact that led him to believe that not
only the reliefs on the gates, but also the gigantic stone statues
of gods that have been found at Tiahuanacu, were inlaid with
gold on their faces and their eyes inlaid with turquoise.
260
THE LOST REALMS
Figure 131
This discovery is most remarkable, for there is no turquoise
—a semiprecious blue-green stone—anywhere in South Amer-
ica. It is a mineral whose earliest mining, at the end of the fifth
millennium B.C., is believed to have taken place in the Sinai
peninsula and in Iran. All told, these inlaying techniques were
purely Near Eastern and are found nowhere else in the Amer-
icas—certainly not at those early times.
Virtually all the statues found at Tiahuanacu depict the gods
shedding three tears from each eye. The tears were inlaid with
gold, as can still be seen on some of the statues now on display
at the Museo del Oro in La Paz. A famous large statue that has
been nicknamed El Fraile (Fig. Ola), which is about ten feet
high, has been carved, as other gigantic Tiahuanacu statues
have been, of sandstone; this suggests that they all belong to the
earliest Tiahuanacu period. The deity holds a serrated tool in
his right hand; the three stylized teardrops from each eye, which
were undoubtedly inlaid with gold, can be clearly seen (as in the
sketch, Fig. 131b). Similar three teardrops can be seen on the
face called the Gigantic Head (Fig. 131c) that treasure hunters
Gods of the Golden Tears 261
broke off a colossal statue because of the local belief that Tia-
huanacu's builders "possessed the secret of compounding stone"
and that the statues were not carved from stone but were cast by
a magical process that enabled the hiding of gold inside the
statues.
This belief may have been sustained by the inlaying of the
god's tears with gold, a practice that may explain why the An-
dean people (like the Aztecs) called gold nuggets "tears of the
gods." Since all these statues depicted the same deity as on the
Gate of the Sun, where he is also shown shedding tears, he has
come to be called "The Weeping God." In view of our evidence,
we feel justified calling him "God of the Golden Tears." A gi-
gantic carved monolith found at a satellite site (Wancai) depicts
the deity with a conical and horned headdress—the typical
headdress of Mesopotamian gods—and with lightning bolts in-
stead of tears (Fig. 132), clearly identifying him as the Storm
God.
Figure 132
One of the gold-plated stone blocks at Puma-Punku with
"mysterious cavities" and a deep channel within it was cut at a
corner to hold a funnel, and Posnansky surmised it was part of a
sacrificial altar. However, one of the several satellite sites near
Tiahuanacu, where stone remains make them a mini Puma-
Punku and where golden artifacts have been found, is called
Chuqui-Pajcha, which in Aymara means "where the liquid gold
is funneled," suggesting a gold producing process rather than
sacrificial libations.
That gold was available and plentiful at Tiahuanacu and its
satellites is evident not only from legends, tales, or place names,
but also from archaeological remains. Many golden objects clas-
sified by scholars as Classical Tiahuanacu because of their shape
or decorations (stylized images of the God of the Golden Tears,
262
THE LOST REALMS
staircases, crosses) have been found at nearby land sites as well
as islands in the course of excavations in the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s. Especially noteworthy were the archaeological missions
sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (under
William C. Bennett), the Peabody Museum of American Ar-
chaeology and Ethnology (under Alfred Kidder II), and the
Ethnological Museum of Sweden (under Stig Ryden, together
with Max Portugal, then curator of the Archaeological Museum
in La Paz.)
The objects included cups, vases, disks, tubes, and pins (one
of the latter, some six inches long, had a head in the shape of a
three-branched plume). Golden objects found during earlier ex-
cavations on the two sacred islands, Titicaca (Island of the Sun)
and Coati (Island of the Moon), were described by Posnansky in
his Guia General to Tiahuanacu and its environs, and even more
so by A. E Bandelier (The Islands of Titicaca and Koati). The
finds on Titicaca have been mostly in unidentifiable ruins in the
vicinity of the Sacred Rock and its cavern; scholars cannot agree
whether the artifacts belong to the early periods of Tiahuanacu,
or (as some hold) stem from Inca times, for it is known that the
Incas came to this island to worship and to erect shrines in the
reign of Mayta Capac, the fourth Inca ruler.
The finds at and around Tiahuanacu of golden and bronze
artifacts leave no doubt that gold preceded bronze (i.e., tin) in
that area. Posnansky was emphatic in relegating bronze to the
third period of Tiahuanacu, and showed incidences where
bronze clamps were used to repair structures from the golden
era. Since the mines in the nearby mountains show clear evi-
dence that tin ores and gold were obtained at the same sites, it
was probably the discovery of gold followed by its placer mining
in the Titicaca region that brought out the existence of cassiter-
ite: the two are found intermingled in the same riverbeds and
streams. At the Tipuani river and at the river that flows from
Mount Illampu. an official Bolivian report (titled Bolivia and
the Opening of the Panama Canal, 1912) stated that in addition
to the tin ores, "both rivers are famous for the presence of
gravels containing immense quantities of gold"; at depths of 300
feet, rock bottom could not be found. Remarkably, "the pro-
portion of gold increases with the depth of the gravel." The
report pointed out that Tipuani river gold was 22-23 1/2 carat
fine—almost purest gold. The list of Bolivian sites of placer
gold is almost inexhaustible, even after all the centuries of
exploitation since the Conquest. The Spaniards alone, be-
tween 1540 and 1750, extracted from Bolivian sources over
100,000,000 ounces of gold.
Gods of the Golden Tears 263
Before the land now called "Bolivia" became independent in
the nineteenth century, it was known as Upper Peru and was
part of the Spaniards' Peruvian domains. The mineral resources
certainly knew no political borders, and we have already de-
scribed in earlier chapters the riches in gold, silver, and copper
that the Spaniards encountered in Peru proper and the Euro-
pean belief that the "mother lode" of all gold in the western
Americas, north and south, lay within the Peruvian Andes.
A look at a map of South America mineral resources pro-
vides a clear picture. Three bands of varying widths of gold,
silver, and copper lodes snake their way along the Andean
ranges in the northwestern-southeastern slant, all the way from
Colombia in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south.
Dotted along the way are some of the world's most renowned
sources for these metals, some regarded as almost pure moun-
tains of the minerals. The slow forces of nature, and no doubt
the immense avalanche of water of the Deluge, have forced the
metals and their ores out of their rock-embedded lodes—ex-
posing them, washing them down mountainsides and into river-
beds. Since most of the mightiest rivers of South America flow
off the Andean ranges eastward, through the vast plains of Bra-
zil to the Atlantic Ocean, it is no wonder that gold and copper
have also been plentiful on this side of the continent.
But it is the lodes within the Andean ranges that are the
ultimate source of all the placer and mined metals; and as one
looks at these interwined bands of lodes, differently colored on
a map for identification, the image bears a resemblance to color
drawings of the double-helix structure of DNA, entwined within
itself and with its counterpart RNA, the genetic chains of life
and heredity of everything that lives on Earth. Within these
bands there are scattered other valuable, even rare minerals—
platinum, bismuth, manganese, wolfram, iron, mercury, sul-
phur, antimony, asbestos, cobalt, arsenic, lead, zinc; and. quite
important for modern and ancient smelting and refining, coal
and petroleum.
Some of the richest lodes of gold, partly washed down river-
beds, lie east and north of Lake Titicaca. It is there, in the
Cordillera Real that embraces the lake from its northeast to its
southeast that a fourth band joins the others: a band of tin in
the form of cassiterite. It becomes prominent on the lake's east-
ern shore, bends westward along the Tiahuanacu basin, then
runs southward almost parallel to the Desaguandero river. It
joins the other three bands near Oruro and Lake Poopo, and
vanishes there.
When Anu and his spouse arrived to see all the mineral
264
THE LOST REALMS
Figure 133
riches, the sacred precinct of Tiahuanacu, its golden enclosure,
its quays, were all in place. Whom did the Anunnaki enlist and
bring over, at about 4000 B.C., to build all that? By then, the
highland peoples around Sumer had already a tradition of rudi-
mentary metallurgy and stoneworking, and they could have
been among the artisans brought over. But the true metallurgi-
cal technology including that of casting, of high-rise construc-
tion, of building according to architectural plans, and following
stellar orientations, was in the hands of the Sumerians.
The central effigy in the semisubterranean sacred enclosure
is bearded, as are many of the stone heads attached to the en-
closure's wall that portray unknown dignitaries. Many are tur-
baned, as Sumerian dignitaries had been (Fig. 133).
One must wonder where and how the Incas, continuing the
custom of the Ancient Empire, acquired the Sumerian (i.e.,
Anunnaki-given) rules of succession. Why was it that in their
incantations the Inca priests invoked Heaven by uttering the
magical words Zi-Ana and Earth by the words Zi-ki-a—totally
meaningless terms in either Quechua or Aymara (according to
S. A. Lafone Quevado, Ensayo Mitologico)—but words that in
Sumerian mean "Heavenly Life" (ZI.ANA) and "Life of Earth
and Water" (ZI.KI.A). And why did the Incas retain from an-
cient empire times the term Anta for metals in general and cop-
per in particular—a term that is Sumerian, as AN.TA, would
have been of a class with AN.NA (tin) and AN.BAR (iron)?
These relics of Sumerian metallurgical terms (which were
borrowed by their successors) are augmented by the discovery
of Sumerian mining pictographs. German archaeologists led by
A. Bastian have found such symbols incised on rocks on the
banks of the Manizales river in Colombia's central gold region
(Fig. 134a); and a French governmental mission under E.
Andre, exploring riverbeds in the eastern region, found similar
Gods of the Golden Tears
265
Figure 134
symbols (Fig. 134b) carved on rocks above caves that have been
artificially deepened. Many petroglyphs in the Andean gold
centers, the routes to them, or at places where the term Uru
appears as a name-component include symbols that resemble
Sumerian cuneiform script or pictographs. such as the radiating
cross (Fig. 134c) found among petroglyphs northwest of Lake
Titicaca—a symbol that the Sumerians had used to represent
the planet Nibiru.
Add to all that the possibility that some of the Sumerians
brought over to Lake Titicaca may have survived to present
times. Nowadays only a few hundred of them are left; they live
on some islands in the lake, sailing upon it in reed boats. The
Aymara and Kholla tribesmen that now make up most of the
area's inhabitants consider them remnants of the area's earliest
dwellers, aliens from another land, whom they call Uru. The
name is taken to mean "the Olden Ones"; but have they been so
called because they came from the Sumerian capital Ur?
266
THE LOST REALMS
According to Posnansky, the Urus named five deities or
Samptni: Pacani-Malku, meaning Olden or Great Lord; Malku,
meaning Lord; and the gods of the Earth, the Waters, and the
Sun. The term malku is of obvious Near Eastern origin, where it
meant (as it still does in Hebrew and Arabic) "king." One of the
few studies on the Urus, by W. La Barre (American Anthropol-
ogist vol. 43), reports that Uru "myths" relate that "we, the
people of the lake, are the oldest on this Earth. A long time we
are here, from before the time when the Sun was hidden...
Before the Sun hid himself we were already a long time in this
place. Then the Kollas came... They used our bodies for sacri-
fices when they laid the foundations for their temples...
Tiahuanaco was built before the time of the darkness."
We have already established that the Day of Darkness,
"when the Sun was hidden," occurred circa 1400 B.C. It was. we
have shown, a global event that left its mark in the writings and
recollections of people on both sides of the Earth. This Uru
legend, or collective memory, affirms that Tiahuanacu was built
