The Legend of Lemuria – Part Five
It is evident that the ruins at Tiwanaku have mystified visitors for centuries. When the chronicler Pedro Cieza de León first arrived in the area with the Spanish conquistadors in 1548, he was told by the Incas that the place had been abandoned long before their arrival, and that they had no idea who built them.
Arthur Posnansky
And this mystery might have persisted right up to the present day, had it not been for the intervention of an extraordinary adventurer by the name of Arturo (Arthur) Posnansky. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1873, Arthur did not take long to demonstrate his life-long interest in ancient civilizations.
Soon after completing his studies in engineering, he undertook a series of training voyages with the Austro-Hungarian navy. These journeys took him to many places, including Easter Island in the South Pacific. It was here that he first began to write about his archaeological and ethnological investigations.
Then in 1896, at the age of 23, he emigrated to South America where he participated in several expeditions exploring the upper reaches of the Amazon river. After a variety of adventures in Brazil he subsequently moved to Bolivia in 1903, where he remained until his death in 1946.
Over the years he published many books, and at the time of his death he was the Director of the National Museum of Bolivia, as well as the Archaeological Society. The climax of his investigative career was the publication in four volumes of his most famous work: Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American Man.
When Posnansky first visited Tiwanaku in 1903, very little excavation had taken place at the site, which was still covered with four to six feet of alluvial mud that had been frozen into a solid mass by the harsh climate. At that time relatively little could be seen above the surface of the ground.
The “Gateway of the Sun” was broken into two pieces, and was half buried in the soil. But there was another feature of the site that caught Posnansky’s attention. This was a series of stone columns more than twelve feet high that had been sunk into the ground of what is now known as the courtyard.
These stone columns have been responsible for giving the entire courtyard area its modern name of Kalasasaya, or place of the standing stones. When he had an opportunity to study these stones, Posnansky described what he found in the following words:
“The columns today have the appearance of crude stones planted in the ground. However, in their time they were not only carefully aligned and carved but on the sides facing the interior of the building were magnificent symbolical inscriptions as can be seen on a piece that has fallen from one of them and on which a part of these drawings has been miraculously saved.
“Because of the enormous age of these great pilasters which were the support of the walls, some of them have fallen down and others are so thin in certain parts that they threaten to fall over from one moment to the next.”
When Posnansky first came across these columns, they stood separately from one another in a straight line. He discovered that there were eleven stone columns in total. However, not all of them were still standing. One had fallen down, while another was found in a field some distance away, as shown in the photograph below.
It is important to point out here that, during the course of reconstruction by the authorities in the 1960’s, a wall was built to fill in the spaces between these columns. Apparently, not realizing the significance of the stone column which lay in the field nearby, they ignored it when they were building the wall.
But the significance of these standing stones would have been lost, were it not for the presence of the “Gateway of the Sun”, and the unique set of glyphs that were carved upon it. Through a fortunate set of circumstances, the face of the Sun Gate had been remarkably preserved. As Posnansky later wrote:
“The Sun Door which was found lying on its face on the ground, has been preserved in wonderful condition with all its inscriptions; but its back, and especially the end exposed to the adverse atmospheric conditions, shows an enormous wearing away.
“It should be pointed out that the block from which this notable monument was carved, is composed of andesitic hornblende, vitreous and very hard lava, which, polished as it was in that period, required several thousands of years to wear away in the form in which we see it today.”
In studying the inscriptions that had been carved on the face of the Sun Gate, Posnansky was intrigued by a series of eleven glyphs that were carved along the bottom of the gate. There were five glyphs on the left of the central glyph, and five on the right, as shown below.
The eleven glyphs carved along the bottom of the Gateway of the Sun
Ponansky’s crucial contribution towards unravelling the mystery of Tiwanaku, was his realization that these eleven glyphs carved on the “Gateway of the Sun” explained how the eleven standing stones could be used as a sophisticated ancient calendar.
Although the inscriptions on the Sun Gate held the key to understanding how this ancient calendar worked, it was the actual row of pillars (standing stones) themselves that served as the means of calculating the calendar, as well as the months and seasons of the year.
Posnansky discovered that there was a “viewing stone” that was set into the centre of the courtyard, from which it was possible to observe the sun as it set below the horizon in the West. By studying the daily movements of the sun, he found that the standing stones at each end had been deliberately placed to coincide with the positions of the sun at the mid-summer and mid-winter solstices.
Over the course of every six months therefore, the sun would set directly over each standing stone in sequence, before turning back and following the same procedure in reverse. It was clear to Posnansky that the builders of Tiwanaku had used this simple but sophisticated system to track the path of the sun and the moon.
Over the course of half a year, the sun would pass directly over each of the eleven standing stones in turn, before reversing its path back to where it started
Because there were eleven standing stones, it was evident that the builders divided the year into two sets of ten periods or “months”. Starting from the extreme left hand stone, it would take the sun ten “months” to reach the extreme right-hand stone, and another ten “months” to do the same thing in reverse.
As an interesting aside, the Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León noted in his Chronicle of Peru published in 1553:
“Among the people of the Collao (the area around Lake Titicaca) there are men of great intelligence, who reply to what is asked from them; and they take account of time, and know some of the movements both of the sun and the moon. They count their years from ten months to ten months, and I learned from them that they call the year Mari, the moon or month Alespaquexe, and the day Auro.”
By analysing the movements of the sun as it passed over the various standing stones, Posnansky was able to determine that the amount of time it took for the sun to move from one stone to another was eighteen days. This enabled him to calculate that the Tiwanaku year consisted of 360 days. (10 x18 days x 2)
When Posnansky determined that the length of the Tiwanaku year was 360 days, it is unlikely that he realised the true significance of his discovery. It was not until about half a century later that Immanuel Velikovsky was able to explain why ancient societies used 360 days as the length of the solar year.
As everyone today is aware, the current length of the solar year is slightly more than 365 days, with an extra day being added every four years in order to bring our modern calendar into alignment with the movements of the sun. But, as Velikovsky pointed out, the length of the year was not always that way.
As was pointed out in the Post titled 2012 And All That, the basic unit of the “Long Count” calendar of the Maya was the Tun, which consisted of a cycle of 360 days. But the Maya were not the only people in antiquity to base their calendar on a solar year consisting of 360 days.
So did the Incas of Peru, as well as the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Hebrews, Chinese, Greeks and the Romans. And the reason they did so, was because the length of the solar year at that time actually was 360 days. In other words, the earth moved in a different orbit around the sun than it does now.
According to their “Long Count” calendar, the Maya believed that we are currently living in the fifth world age, and that the present cycle of the sun began in 3114 BC. So, had Posnansky been aware of this, he would have immediately realised that Tiwanaku had to have been built more than five thousand years ago, that is before 3114 BC.
How much earlier than five thousand years ago might have seemed to be an insoluble problem, but based on his own measurements involving the movements of the sun and the alignments of the standing stones, Posnansky came up with an ingenious solution. It was a solution that was based on archaeo-astronomy.
As he later explained in his book Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American Man, the earth is tilted on its axis with respect to the plane of the solar system. The extent of this angular tilt is known as the “obliqueness of the ecliptic”, not to be confused with the well known “precession of the equinox”.
At present the earth is tilted at an angle of 23º and 27 minutes, but this angle is not constant. Over the years it oscillates between 22º and 1 minute, and 24º and 5 minutes. Posnansky found that the alignment of the Kalasasaya temple depicted a tilt in the earth’s axis amounting to 23º, 8 minutes and 48 seconds.
Based on these calculations, Posnansky came up with a date when the Kalasasaya temple was constructed, of about 15,000 years BC. For those who would like a visual summary of Posnansky’s theory, the principles on which it was based, and how he came up with the date of 15,000 BC, the following video provides an excellent illustration.
Naturally, the idea of an advanced civilization existing on the South American continent around 15,000 BC defied all conventional thinking about the age of civilization on the earth, and for this reason Posnansky was denounced as a fraud by the scientific fraternity.
Unfortunately, little has changed since the death of Posnansky almost seventy years ago. It seems that we will have to wait for many more years before conventional science is willing to accept the idea that the history of humanity on this planet extends a lot farther back in time than they presently admit.
When James Churchward published his book The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Man in 1926, he claimed that a towering civilization once dominated the world for hundreds of thousands of years, only to be destroyed in a world-wide cataclysm that has long since been forgotten.
Based on ancient clay tablets that he had been taught to decipher by an old temple priest while he was in India, Churchward said that the name of this civilisation was Mu, and that it existed on a continent called Lemuria, that stretched across a large part of the Pacific Ocean.
In previous instalments it was pointed out that, while there is no evidence of a sunken continent in that area, there are numerous island chains scattered around the Pacific Ocean which possess enigmatic stone ruins which were clearly never built by the Polynesian cultures that populate the region today.
In addition, there remains the mystery of Easter Island and its giant carved stone statues called Moai, which continue to defy conventional explanation. And now we have Tiwanaku and Puma Punku, which point to a date of origin far earlier than modern historians are willing to accept.
Despite the fact that Churchward’s ideas have been scornfully rejected by the academic community, in light of the mysteries that have been exposed in this series of articles, it is perhaps instructive to read what he wrote in his book The Lost Continent of Mu:
“Continuing my researches, I discovered that this lost continent had extended from somewhere north of Hawaii to the south as far as the Fijis and Easter Island, and was undoubtedly the original habitat of man.”
“I learned that in this beautiful country there had lived a people that colonized the earth, and that this land of smiling plenty had been obliterated by terrific earthquakes and submersion 12,000 years ago, and had vanished in a vortex of fire and water.”
“On some of the South Sea Islands, notably Easter, Mangaia, Tonga-tabu, Panape, and the Ladrone or Mariana Islands, there stand today remains of old stone temples and lithic remains which take us back to the time of Mu.” (View Source)
It is clear from what James Churchward has written, that the ruins that can still be found today on various islands in the Pacific Ocean, such as Ponape, Tonga and Easter Island, were once part of the great civilization of Mu, before it disappeared beneath the waves some 12,000 years ago.
Churchward also goes on to point out that while the continent of Lemuria was the centre of the civilization of Mu, there were other places on earth where they had established colonies, such as Egypt, India and South America. It is certainly possible that the ruins of Tiwanaku could well be the remains of one of these colonies.
And if it was, then they too would have been engulfed by the terrible events that led to the destruction of Mu, and its disappearance beneath the raging waters of the Pacific Ocean. There was, however, one significant difference.
Instead of plunging beneath the sea, they suddenly found themselves being thrust many thousands of feet into the air. In what was probably a compensatory geological response, as one landmass disappeared under the water, the coastline of South America was suddenly elevated.
While the convulsions of this rising land would likely have destroyed the cities located on the shore, it is possible that scattered groups of people might somehow have survived these catastrophic events. Finding that they could no longer live at their new elevation, they might have made their way back to the sea.
There they would have to face the challenge of trying to survive on a coastline that had been swept clean by devastating tsunamis. One can imagine how they might have reacted, possessing vast technological knowledge, yet without the means or resources to be able to resuscitate their former way of life.
Would they have spent their time trying to create a record of what they had once achieved, in the hope that this would one day be discovered by later generations? And if so, could this have been the explanation for the mysterious lines of Nazca in Peru, or the controversial “Stones of Ica”.
It was in 1956 that a pilot flying over the coastal area of southern Peru noticed a series of unusual designs etched into the desert sand near the town of Nazca. What made these designs so unusual was their enormous size, and the fact that they had gone unnoticed for so long by people on the ground.
Two things were obvious. The first was that these designs had been made by people who had an advanced knowledge of surveying, to enable them to construct straight lines over long distances with extraordinary accuracy. The second was that these images were intended to be seen from the air.
Then in the early 1960’s, a local Doctor discovered a series of stones in the town of Ica, not far from Nazca. These stones were made of a very hard form of granite called andesite. What was so distinctive about these stones was that they had images carved into them.
Some of these images were of flowers, fishes and animals, but others had pictures of advanced technical subjects such as maps, astronomy, telescopes, and even heart transplants, which were completely unknown to the natives of the area at that time. It is not surprising that scientists dismissed these stones as modern fakes.
But what is clear from an examination of both sites is that the same people who created these enigmatic designs on the desert sands of Nazca, also carved the “Stones of Ica”, as the designs that appear on the desert floor are the same as those depicted on these andesite stones, as can be seen from the following Blog post.
Because these designs were obviously made to be seen from the sky, it suggests that that the civilization of Mu had attained the power of flight, and that the survivors at Nazca hoped that their SOS signals in the desert might possibly attract the attention of their craft.
Sadly for those people gathered on the shore, the same forces of Nature that had destroyed their former city of Tiwanaku, had also been responsible for the complete destruction of the Motherland as well. As a result, their longed awaited rescue never arrived.
If the story told by James Churchward based on the Naacal clay tablets that he studied in India is true, then there once was an advanced civilization that reached great technological heights, only to be destroyed completely in a series of catastrophic disasters.
And today, only a faint echo of the glory of that time lives on in isolated islands scattered around the Pacific Ocean, and in places like Tiwanaku and other parts of Bolivia and Peru. So the crucial question remains. If such a continental cataclysm happened on the earth in the past, could it occur again?
And if it did, could this happen in our own time? In answer, it is perhaps worth repeating the comment made by the old Egyptian priest to the Greek lawmaker Solon, with which we began this series on Lemuria. As Plato recorded in his dialogue Timaeus:
“Oh Solon, Solon, you Greeks are all children, and there is no such thing as an old Greek…You have no belief rooted in old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means.”
These words should serve as a warning to us that advanced technological accomplishments are no guarantee that civilizations are safe from destruction, and that sudden disaster may overtake them at any time, perhaps when they least expect it.
If the clarion call of history cannot bring us to our senses, by pointing out the destruction of ancient civilizations in the past, then maybe the words of Biblical prophets will serve to remind us that our time is short, and that dire events may soon befall us.
In addition, as the Oracle of Tolemac has warned:
“For you have reached that point in your history when many will face the same conditions that occurred on that far-off day in Tolemac, when the earth shook, the waters rose, the land fell, and the people cried out in terror, fearing that they would all be destroyed.”
(Excerpt from “The Last Days of Tolemac”)
