Page
204
The
first ruler who emerges from myth into a shadowy form of
history is Sinchi Roca, who reigned about
1150.
Our
chief concern here, however, is with the
eighth
of the series (counting from Manco Capac), whose name or
title was Vira-cocha Inca. The original
Viracocha
,as
we have seen, was the white god of the Quechuas, and the
Spaniards were given this name by reason of their fair
skin.The historical Vira-cocha, Inca was of fair
complexion and bearded, as we know from his
portrait.
The
nobles were known as 'long-ears' since as we have seen, they
pierced their ears and hung heavy ornaments from them. They
and the priests were responsible for the wonders of
architecture of which E.Fergusson wrote: 'Neither the Greeks
nor the Romans nor the middle ages achieved such
perfection,' while H. Velarde speaks of a 'country
crystallized
into
geometrical
shapes"
"The
Incas were devout sun
worshippers"
As
fast as Alizzed could weave a tapestry, the far yonder
scribe had stiched it into the patchwork quilt.
Page
205
"The
ancient American sovereigns were called 'sons of the Sun'as
were those of Egypt, Assyria and Crete and also the Chinese
emperors, especially the Chou dynasty"
"As
regards links between the Quechuas and Egyptians in August
1953 Dr. Bird discovered near Lima the tombs of a prince
named Capac who died in the fourth or fifth millen-nium B.C.
and was buried in a sarcophagus of Egyptian type. Another
such sarcophagus, together with statues in Mexican style,
was excavated in the 'Egyptian valley' in the southern part
of the Amazon basin,half-way between the rivers Xingu and
Tocantins. On 13 November 1954 the Rio de Janeiro newspaper
O Cruzeiro reported the discovery, in the village
of Durados on the Pira-Veve river of an 'Egyptian' cameo
representing a queen with an inscription in hiero-glyphics
signifying that after her death her soul mounted to heaven
and her virtues were rewarded by celestial peace.
In
1531, when Pizarro's Spaniards eager for gain as
usual, burst into the great temple at Cuzco, they found some
strange bundles that proved to contain mummified bodies in a
foetal position, wrapped in precious cloths, their faces
covered by masks of gold, silver, wood or clay. Unlike the
Egyptians, who used natron and resin packs and
anointing
with
oil, the Incas relied for mummification on the dry climate
and saliferous soil of Peru. However excavators at
Ganchavita in Columbia found a group of mummies each wearing
a small gold crown and surrounded by funeral
offerings-cloth,
gold figures ornaments and emeralds. As Honore remarks 'it
was suprising that mummies should have been found here, a
country with a climate most unfavourable for conservation by
natural processes. But chemical analysis has established
that resins and oils were
used-so
the
methods
of mummi-fication were almost exactly the same as in ancient
Egypt.'
The
Quechuas in fact used different techniques,as the discovery
of mummified bodies as
shown.
In
1560Garcilaso
/
Page
206 /
de
la Vega witnessed the removal of the mummies of five Inca
sovereigns identified as
Viracocha
Inca of the long white hair, Capac Yupanqui, Huayana Capac,
Mama Runto and Mama Ocllo. In a sitting position,with
downcast eyes and arms crossed over their breasts, the
bodies in royal robes were an impressive
sight.
According
to Jose de Acosta 'they were so intact and well
preserved with a certain kind of pitch that they seemed as
though alive' Garcilaso added : 'I believe that
the Indians' secret consists in burying the bodies in
snow
and afterwards using the bitumen of which Father
de Acosta speaks. When I saw them thus, I felt like touching
one of Huayana Capac 's fingers as though it were that of a
living man.'
The
Spaniards removed these mummies to Lima, where they rapidly
de composed in the heat and damp and had to be buried. We
may recall that in March 1963 the mummy of the Egyptian
princess Mene, who died in
322
B.C.,
began
to decompose and had to be moved to a cold storage chamber
at Oklahoma University, where biologists were astonished to
find that the epithelial cells were still intact.
Mummies
in a perfect state of preservation have also been found in
America in recent times. In 1953 a Chilean muleteer
discovered, in an Andean glacier, a small sarcophagus
contain-ing the mummified body of an Inca
girl
Who
had lived about 730 years ago, surrounded by figurines of
solid gold includ-ing one with a toad's
head.
In
1959 chance
led
to the discovery, in a cave in Sonara province in Mexico, of
thirty well preserved mummies dating from about 10,000 years
ago and belonging to an unknown
civilization.
These
facts are remarkable enough in themselves, but Sr. Beltran
Garcia embroiders them after his own
fashion
'The
mummies of the five Inca sovereigns,' he tells us, were
removed from the temple before Garcilaso was born, and their
discovery was due to an error.From the scientific point of
view they were bodies in a state of hibernation, with all
their organs inert but living. The Incas were skilled at
producing this condition, and they did so in the expectation
that scientists would one day be able to re-suscitate the
bodies. The technique of embalming was used
at
the
Vatican too, and the "pitch" used by the Incas was in fact a
solid transperent cream consisting of three ingrediants, one
of which was quinine.'
We
report these singular ideas merely as a curiosity, though
some people have been taken in by them.
Garcilaso's
account
makes it clear that he is talking of dead bodies, but his
decendant, referring to the Chilean discovery,writes as
follows : ' Garcilaso
de la Vega
states that the method of the "frozen toad" ( sapo
helado ) was an Inca
secret.
It
seems that the child was meant to be
the
bearer of a message to scientists of the
future,
but that the body's sudden exhumation deprived it of life.
The gold figurines, especially that with the toad's head,
contained a secret explanation of the
experiment.'
If
and when Sr Garcia and those who share his views are
privelidged to hold telepathic converse with some
half-
immortal
Inca scientist whose hiding place is unknown to the rest of
us, it is to be hoped that they can give a fuller
ex-planation of the gold figurines. Meanwhile, we are
assured 'other live mummies are hidden in the creators of
volcanoes and in Andean glaciers. Those in craters are in a
state of lethergy induced by the curare process, while those
in glaciers are in artificial hibernation due to the "toad
method"
The Zed AlizZed cracked open the any stone and
gooddayed the toad
The
scribe carefully noted the comments made by Brother Kolosimo
with regard to Senor Beltran
Garcia.
ZedAlizZed
meanwhile calculated the odds.
Page
182
"Garcilaso
Inca de la Vega. Garcilaso, who lived
from
1539 to 1616"
1539 - 1616 = 77
Page
182
/ 183
"
We
may also quote from Beltran Garcia, a Spaniard who wishes to
revive the sun worship of the Incas and claims to be a
descendant of Garcilaso Inca de la Vega. Garcilaso, who
lived from
1539 to 1616,
was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess;
he wrote a history of the Incas and is said by / his
descendant to have left important documents that remain
unpublished. One of the most bizzare of Beltran Garcia's
stories, allegedly based on these documents, is as
follows;
'According
to the pictograph writings of
Tiahuanaco,
"
Leaving
out parts of that particular story the scribe moved on
apace.
"
During their passage through space they cast their excrement
out of the space-ship and turned the lake into the shape of
a man lying on his back, with his navel at the spot where
our first mother is said to have reclined, impregnated with
the seed of human
knowledge."
"As
for the "excrement" which they jettisoned from the ship to
alter the context of the lake, may it perhaps have been an
atomic bomb? It is a curious fact that, in order to rob Lake
Titicaca of the symbolic character which the Indians
ascribed to it, it was represented on maps up to 1912 as
almost circular shape. Its true name was Titi - lake of
mystery and of the sun - but to this was added a suffix
which in many languages conveys the notion of
"excrement".'
We
are entitled to treat the story and the gloss with a good
deal of scepticism, and this applies even more to the
continuation of Sr. Garcia's account in which science
fiction is spiced with a touch of
pornography."
This
part of the story recalls the Inca nobles' custom of
/
Page
184 /
deforming
their ear lobes by hanging costly ornaments from them in
order to draw attention to their wealth. For this reason the
Spaniards called them Orejones ('Big - ears'
)
"
"
This farrago is only worth quoting as an illustration of how
elements of information which deserve to be judged on their
merits are blended with pure fantasy and served up in a
manner which shows no regard for probability or for the
reader's intelligence. Nobody, as far as we are aware, has
ever seen, much less examined, the ' secret manuscripts' of
Garcilaso
Inca de la Vega.
The
writers who base eccentric theories on fables of this
/
Page
185 /
kind
are usually careful not to refer to them in too much detail
but to select the parts that best fit their purpose. This
method has the unfortunate effect of discrediting genuine
scholars whose minds are open to new
ideas,
While
it strengthens the position of hidebound traditionalists and
en-courages public opinion to be sceptical of theories
which, however fantastic in appearance, may in fact be
basically sound. It is not necessary to resort to distortion
and ex-travagant imagery in order to frame hypotheses of
much greater interest and verisimilitude than that of
Orejona. It is in fact quite possible to suppose that the
blood of voyagers from outer space flows in our own veins,
and if we do so we shall be less sceptical of attempts by
some Soviet scholars to place the story of Atlantis in its
cosmic setting.
Blue
men
Plato
tells us that the first Atlanteans were of different race
and blood from the other inhabitants of earth, and in 1960 a
group of Soviet scholars suggested that they may have been
men of a bluish colour. This theory was based in part on
Herodotus and the Egyptian historian Manetho, who lived in
the third century B.C. and wrote a work which we possess in
part only, describing his country,s past on the basis of the
inscriptions on ancient monuments. Other sources are the
Palermo Stone and the Turin Papyrus which gives lists of the
Pharaohs and date respectively from about
2400
and 1250
B.C.
At
this juncture in the quintessential moment of the now The
Zed Aliz Zed asked the scribe to make a note of how many
days there were in todays year.
The
far yonder scribe writ 365.
Then did the Alizzed take a further moment to do a spell of
simple arithmetic, this the scribe duly
recorded
2400 + 1250 = 3650
2400 - 1250 = 1150
2400 x 1250 = 3000000
2400 x 360 =
864000
1250 x 360 =
450000
And
then writ 864
less the zeroes + 45
less the zeroes of which there are three and four azin
7
864 + 45
= 909
and 9
x 9 =
81
and 9
+ 9 =
18
and 8
+
1 iz 9
and 1
+
8 =
9
220
continued
"The
Greek historian Plutarch (c.
A.D.50-120
) refers to the people of the Canaries as Atlanteans. Homer
may have identi-fied the islands, as later writers did, with
Elysium, the mythical winterless home of the happy dead.
This may not have been due merely to their position in the
far west, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, but the discovery
by ancient navigators of the natives' cult of the dead and
their belief in immortality. They used to embalm dead
bodies, reducing them by some means to a weight
of only 7 or 8 pounds, and, like many American peoples, they
believed that the dead gave their advice to their
descendants. When Peruvian Indians had to appear in a court
of law they brought with them all their mummified ancestors:
while among the Guanches a dead ruler was never buried until
his successor died, so that the living king was, so to speak
, assisted at all times by his
predecessor.
Some
believe that the Guanches learnt the technique of
mummification from the Egyptians, but in fact the methods
were completely different. The Egyptians may have taught the
Guanches their writing system and the custom of
brother-sister marriage, but in other respects the Guanche
civilization remains a mystery. It is only known to us only
from ruins that call to mind those of Sardinia, Jerico and
Zimbabwe and from the underground structures on the island
of Grand Canary,which have much in common with the relics of
other ancient Mediterranean cultures."
Page
224
Beyond
the Styx
"
Some years ago a young engineer and amateur archeologist
named Kama el Malakh discovered not far from the Great
Pyramid, the funeral barques of the first Pharaohs. These
were some 180
feet long and 10
feet wide, and contained everything the dead monarch might
need on a long voyage. They were not destined to put to sea,
however, but to convey the sovereign until such time as he
should be reincarnated , following the journey round the
earth of the Sun, his
father."
"
This
custom may or may not derive from ancient memories of
space-travel. Until recent times it was thought to be of
purely Egyptian origin, the Greeks having borrowed the myth
in a modified form - that of Charon's barque transporting
the souls of the dead across the Styx. However, it appears
that
/ Page
225 /
many
peoples of the remote past buried their dead in boat-shaped
coffins, and some South American tribes do so to this day.As
Homet writes,
"
We
find examples still current in Oceania, in central Africa
and in the region of the Amazon. These barques served as
transitional vessels from one point to another, and most
cultures combine the migration of the soul with the crowning
of its rebirth. And always - as we have found in numerous
documents in Africa-the soul travelled towards the Sun God.
But it always travelled in "something" which could also
accommodate the body before it was resurrected, hence a
"death barque"
'The
facts suggest,' Homet continues, that their may have been a
place of common origin, an earlier culture that was the
primordial home of the death barque and the fountain-head
uniting all the ancient cultures: Celtic, ancient Egyptian,
north-west European and South American. This we call
Atlantis, the mother civilization of
all
"children
of the sun"
In
Greek mythology the entrance to Hades was guarded by the
three-headed dog Cerberus. Among the Aztecs the
abode of the dead was surrounded by a
sevenfold
river,
and the god who presided over the departed
spirits was the dog-headed Xolotl (like Anubis, the Egyptian
god of the dead ). A thin leaf of copper has been found in
the mouth of certain mummies, apparently to pay for their
passage to the shades below, in the same way as the obol
which was Charon's fee.
In
the roof of the funeral crypt at Tiahuanaco there is a round
hole exactly like the one found in Egyptian tombs, where its
purpose is to allow the 'bird of death' to
escape."
The
belief in reincarnation was common to many parts of
/
Page
226 /
ancient
America, and this is why mummies and skeletons are often
found in the foetal position: the bodies were bound in this
fashion with ropes, even while there owners were still
alive, so that they might be ready for rebirth. A similar
custom prevailed in ancient Gaul, Mecklemburg, Britain,
Sweden and southern Russia,and also the Tonga islands. It is
still in force in the Amazon region, and so is the practice
of 'double burial'which was also once known in Ireland,
Crete and various parts of Europe. The bodies were first
buried in damp ground to accelerate decomposition (the
Indians of Brazil have a different method-they suspend them
in nets in running water, where the piranhas soon pick them
dry ); then the skeleton is removed, cleaned and painted
red-the colour of blood or placenta, as Homet
remarks-after which it is re-interred. We have already
mentioned symbols of life after death, such as yokes (among
the Olmecs and Egyptians), knots and butterflies,which are
common to ancient America and the Mediterranean peoples. The
lotus which in India is the symbol of birth , is common in
pre-Columbian temples and burial-places, especially in the
Mayan capital of Chichen Itza. Here it is represented
complete with flowers, leaves and root-stock, in motifs
similar to those of India, Cambodia and Indonesia, and with
the same accompanment of dragons, sea-monsters and fierce
animals of the cat
tribe.
We
do not know the age of the lotus as a symbol, but in Europe
it is found amongst the Celts who brought it from Asia as
long ago as 2000B.C.,and whose rulers later trans-formed it
into the fleur de lys. It is usually thought to have spread
from India to south east Asia, but Homet believes it to be
of much earlier, Atlantean origin. His view finds some
support in the enigmatic 'Phaistos disc'- a round terracotta
tablet, six inches in diameter and about an inch thick,
discovered in 1908
in a Cretan palace in a stratum belonging to the sixteenth
century B.C. "
"
The
disc is inscribed on both sides with ideograms, quite
different from Cretan writing in a left hand
spiral.
In
the centre
Page
227 /
of
one side is a lotus flower, and of the signs which follow it
15
are identical to those found in Brazilian inscriptions,
while 19
resemble them closely. Also depicted on the disc are heads
adorned with feathers, constellations - the Plaides, Serpens
and Pisces - a kind of fire bird and the quaz, the
Egyptian symbol of physical strength. The disc remains
undeciphered "
Around
and about this time both the scribe and Zed Ali
Zed remembered their visit to the there and back
of
the blessed "
half-mythical land
of ultima
Thule
"
Page
235
"
Ptolemy's map of the world (second century A.D. ) shows
Thule as an island to the north-east of britain, but by the
late middle ages it had disappeared from the ken of
geographers. Ultima Thule - our last hope, perhaps, of
gazing beyond the point where ferocious savages block the
extension of our knowledge and prevent us from journeying
back through time' following a trail more fascinating and
less obscure than we have been able to indicate in these
pages.
But
the past is not wholly lost. As Ivar Lissner puts
it: 'History is imperishable. Unseen and
unrecognized, the past lives on in its quiet, imperceptible
way. Whether lying dormant in the unfathomable sea of the
millennia or buried beneath the ground and swathed in a vast
winding sheet of earth and stone, "past civilizations" are
still with us even though their tangible remains lie hidden
and still un-discovered. All civilizations that have ever
been live on in us, and our lives are rooted deep in the
remote, mysterious and ancient civilizations of the past. It
is our task again and again to rediscover these
civilizations, which have a strange way of falling silent as
if they no longer lived in us and
/ Page
236 /
we
in them. But
once a civilization has existed on earth, its effects are
permanent. A memory, a new discovery, a visit to an
exibition - any one of these may suddenly alert us to their
mute presence. And when this happens we feel a strange
desire to weep for something that is near us, yet cannot be
recalled
The
ZedAlizZed thanked the venerable brother Kolosimo for his
most invaluable past, present, and future gifts, then after
entering into a three way goodbye, along with the poor sad
blind ass of serendip, they continued on their not too weary
way.
Alizzed
cast around, and although not seeking,
nevertheless finding, other hidden
pieces of the jigsaw that never was, These, the, well, would
you believe it scribe, used to make corkwool soup for the
evening repast.
They
said their goodbyes to Brother Kolosimo thanking him with
just the right amount of humble pi for all that he had so
freely given and promised to return at just the right
time.
The
Magic Mountain
Page
511 / 512
"The
learner must be of daunt-less courage and athirst for
knowledge, to speak in the style of our theme.
The
grave, the sepulchre, has always been the emblem of
initiation into the society. The neophyte coveting admission
to the mysteries must always preserve undaunted courage in
the face of their terrors; it is the purpose of the order
that he should be tested in them ,led down into and made to
linger among them,and later fetched up from them by the hand
of an unknown Brother. Hence the winding passages, the dark
vaults , through which the novice is made to wander; the
black cloth with which the Hall of Strict Observance was
hung , the cult of the sarcophagus , which played so
important a role in the ceremonial of meetings and
initia-tions. The path of mysteries and purification was
encompassed by /dangers, it led through the pangs of death ,
through the kingdom of dissolution; and the learner, the
neophyte, is youth itself, thirsting after the miracles of
life, clamouring to be quickened to a demonic capacity of
experience, and led by shrouded forms which are the
shadowing forth of the mystery."
The
Magic Mountain
"
The Making Of "
Page726
/ 727
"
in
the course of his experiences, overcomes his inborn
attraction to death and arrives at
an
understanding
of a humanity that does not, indeed, rationalistically
ignore death , nor scorn the dark mysterious side
of life, but takes account of it, without letting it get
control over his mind.
What
he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep
experience of sickness and
death
To
arrive at a higher sanity and health; in just the same way
that one must have knowledge of sin in order to find
redemption."
"There
are"
"
two
ways to life:one is the regular, direct and good way ; the
other is bad , it leads through death, and that is the way
of genius" It is this notion of disease and death
as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life that
makes The Magic Mountain a novel of
initiation."
Page
727 "
"...
The Quester legend "
"
Faust the eternal
seeker "
"...the eternal seeker, is a group of compositions generally
known as the Sangraal or Holy Grail romances. Their
hero be it Gawain or Galahad or Perceval, is the seeker, the
quester, who ranges heaven and hell , makes terms with them,
and strikes a pact with the unknown, with sickness and evil,
with death and the other world, with the supernatural, the
world that in the Magic Mountain is called
'questionable'. He is forever searching for the
grail - that is to say, the Highest: knowledge, wisdom,
consecration, the philosophers' stone, the aurum
potabile, the elixir of
life."
Page
728
"The
Quester of the Grail Legend, at the beginning of his
wanderings, is often called a fool, a great fool, a
guileless fool."
Page728
"The
seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the Sacred Castle,
has to undergo various frightful and mysterious ordeals in a
wayside chapel called the Atre
Perilleux. Probably these ordeals were originally
rites of initiation, conditions of the permission to
approach the esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge,
wisdom, is always bound up with the 'other world,' with
night and death."
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