The southern sun has already begun to chart a descent towards the west, yet the heat is relentless. I hold a hand up to my forehead and strain my eyes against the light.
The inhabitants of Tiwanaku, like those of Machu Picchu, are said to have abandoned the place en masse one day. How do I begin to contemplate the mindset that compelled them to leave this stone city that they had slaved to build? Whether from cities or not, there are instances of humans suddenly deciding to move on. Many historians and archeologists put forward the commonplace view that environmental changes caused food shortages. The same argument has been applied to Tiwanaku. The mainstream explanation is that a progressively drier climate brought about the failure of agriculture, fishing, and livestock rearing and hence societal collapse. The Indio departed, then, in search of more fertile land.
The widespread theory should not be blindly accepted. It is true that peoples migrate for the sake of sustenance, but to see that rationale as an end-all is simplistic. Our premise needs to be that the ancients did not necessarily think as we do. While we moderns have no difficulty handling abstract concepts such as morality, love, and the good, ancients apart from the tiny minority who were literate couldn’t have grasped them as such, since these are only obtained via mastery of a rich, complex system of writing. Their cognition does not align with ours. Applying current reasoning unmodified to those times exacerbates the gap and takes us further from the truth.
What to do, then? We must do away with reasoning by modern analogy and adequately examine their language and cognitive level, then rely on the work of our imagination. How did the ancients conceive of life and death? Only by discarding our yardsticks and reenacting their sensitivities within ourselves are we able to glimpse the truth.
One of the reasons put forward for the sudden abandonment of ancient Machu Picchu is that the inhabitants feared the onslaught of a powerful enemy. True, the Incas stood in terror of the Spanish invasion at the time, but there are no signs that Machu Picchu was ever actually attacked. A grave containing over a hundred bodies has been found, but the remains tell no tale of war.
Machu Picchu was first discovered by the American archeologist Hiram Bingham, who believed he’d found the legendary city of Vilcabamba. But when the excavation failed to turn up the empire’s gold hoard, Bingham concluded that he must have stumbled upon a previously unknown ancient city. The diggers may not have revealed any hidden gold but did uncover, in a tomb near the “Funerary Stone,” 173 mummified bodies of which curiously enough 150 were female. Archeologists explain that Machu Picchu, with its many shrines, was a place for rituals and included many priestesses among its inhabitants. An alternative view holds that when the Incans fled the city fearing a Spanish attack, they killed and buried the older women that would have slowed down their progress.
Be it for food in a new land or from a potential enemy, the mainstream theories of flight are too easily imagined. No matter what interpretation is applied to the fact that 150 out of 173 mummies were women, it can be no more than a fiction devised by some individual. Rather than choose or not choose to believe someone else’s fiction, why not come up with a more convincing story yourself?
The sense of that something like déjà vu is coming back. I am becoming certain that I have seen this same landscape somewhere before. It’s affecting not just sight but hearing, smell, taste, and touch as well. The dusty wind seems to whisper in my ear. The enveloping air feels rough against my skin, and I can taste sunbaked earth on my tongue.
They’re nothing as gentle as sensations. A chill is assaulting the nape of my neck, and my skin is breaking out in goose bumps. At first I’m not sure why, but I gradually recognize the feeling. I’m less gazing at a landscape than being gazed at by something. Not just one, but by many, as though I’m on a stage addressing an audience.
The Underground Shrine is nine meters wide by twelve meters long, cut 1.8 meters into the ground. On the south side descends a set of steps. I stand at the top and look down. The rectangular space is surrounded by an elaborate collection of piled stones, and in the center is a large stone pillar flanked by two smaller ones. The human figure of Viracocha is carved into the central pillar.
This Viracocha appears in many of the ancient South American legends. It is probably better to think of him as a group of people with a certain talent than as one man. Depending on the legend, his name changes, as do the places and ages in which he appears. In each legend, however, he has more or less the same physical characteristics: tall, pale, robed, wearing a goatee on his chin and a belt around his waist.
He is said to have appeared from nowhere one day to bestow various benefits on the locals. He built irrigation ducts, taught how to build stone structures, planted crops, and even healed the sick. He preached mercy, ended fights, encouraged good deeds, exuded dignity, and commanded the respect of all. He was first a scientist, but also an architect and an artist. He was fluent with words and taught Aymara, the world’s oldest language. In short, he was the one who brought civilization and order to a primitive land, a god-like figure.
But Viracocha would never stay in one place for long. As soon as his work was done, he would leave as suddenly as he’d arrived.
The relief carved into the surface of the pillar leans more towards the abstract than the mimetic. Viracocha’s hair is long, and his beard thick around his mouth. His forehead is the shape of Mt. Fuji, his nose rounded, his face plum, and his eyes are simply depicted as circles. His eyebrows and lips are manly, like thick ropes twisted by the ends. Looking closer, however, it becomes apparent that his eyes are brimming with tears. This feature is clearly part of the original carving, not an effect of centuries of wear and degradation.
Is it empathy with the weeping figure? I find myself close to tears and dab a handkerchief to my cheek. The sun now hangs behind the column and gives a halo to the man. When face and sun come to overlap, the illusion is of the sun itself crying.
Later, when I was driving away from Tiwanaku on my way back to La Paz, I came across a young Japanese backpacker hitching for a ride. It was late in the day and the sky was already growing dark, so I felt compelled to pick him up. He was talkative; for the whole trip back he leant forwards, his head poking out between the front seats as he spoke excitedly about his own theories about the ancient civilizations. He seemed to favor the idea that they were driven away by a “spurring fear.” Fear has indeed always been a fundamental factor in the patterns of human behavior over time, and his idea isn’t to be dismissed. The next day he was due to set off for Machu Picchu.
I dropped him off in front of the Tiwanaku Museum and made it back to my hotel just before nightfall. Once I got to my room I put my shoulder bag on the table and looked at the clock on the night stand between the beds — it was just after 5 o’clock. I lay back on the sofa and rested for a while, staring at the ceiling.
I planned to relax a bit before going out for dinner. I had already decided where to eat: a casual cafe-type place on the Plaza del Estudiante, only a five-minute walk from the hotel. I called to make a reservation and booked for 8 o’clock when they had an opening. All I had to do then was shower; plenty of time to write down some thoughts inspired by the Gateway of the Sun with its detailed reliefs.
Some while ago I became obsessed with the question of how life (DNA) came into existence. Looking at the gate, feeling that I had seen it before, my conviction deepened that life could be analyzed from the viewpoint of information and that light worked upon its birth and evolution.