The sun goddess; named Amaterasu, is shown coming out of a cave and bringing sunlight back to the universe
Tarot is a 600-year old game that has, over time, become known for it’s use for divination and association with the occult. Pictured is The Chariot, card number 7 in the Rider-Waite deck. The Chariot is often interpreted to represent spirit, tenacity, rigidity, and confidence.
Ornate door standing at the entrance of a fantastic villa. Wall painting on the east wall of the Roman Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, Italy. The Villa Boscoreale was probably built shortly after the middle of the first century BC. It burned in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and was rediscovered in 1900.
Machu Picchu
Today’s holy ground post will be about a place that is really still a massive mystery to archaeologists everywhere: Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. Unlike the other cities of the Inca, when Pizarro and his conquistadors hacked, shot, and strangled their way through the once great South American empire, Machu Picchu, maybe because of its remoteness, escaped destruction, escaped the looting and pillaging in search of the gold and silver it was known the Inca possessed. The last official emperor, Atahualpa, of the Incas died surrounded by the ransom which was supposed to free him—and in a way, free him it did, just from all mortal concerns. The Spanish staged a mock trial and found him guilty of rebelling against Spain and a bunch of other charges, wanting him out of the picture because he was a liability to keep alive. To avoid being sentenced to burning, which Atahualpa believed would render him incapable of enjoying the afterlife in true Inca fashion, bodily and whatnot, he converted to Catholicism on the urging of a priest who suggested that if he did so, becoming a subject not only of Spain but with a soul in care of the Pope, then this priest would talk to Pizarro about having his sentence commuted. So it came to pass that Pizarro agreed not to have Juan Santos Atahualpa (his baptismal name) burned, as he was now a good Catholic…he simply had him garroted for treason and then some of his skin and clothing burned…because the Inquisition was nothing if not merciful to repentant heretics. His body was later buried in secret, with the strangulation room (also called the Ransom Room) becoming something of a tourist spot in modern Peru. Pizarro’s own demise some years later in 1541 was no less fascinating—he was assassinated by a political rival’s hitsquad, though not before killing three, being killed himself by a dagger through the throat while he was trying to withdraw his sword from the third assailant. Before his death, in true Spanish fashion, he drew a cross in his own blood…because…well, I guess that is one way to mess with your enemies, or something. His rival was killed a year later after his rebellion was crushed, and Pizarro’s descendants actually intermarried with those of Atahualpa, some going on to live on estates in Portugal—similar to the progeny of Montezuma, some of whom married various members of the Iberian nobility and returned to Europe. I find this sort of marriage between the conquered and conquerors fascinating—the same sort of thing happened in Ireland with Aoife and Strongbow of course—and even the most warlike folk (perhaps especially the most warlike folk) seem to recognize the utility in marrying the defeated party to gain local support—sometimes this works, and other times it only leads to even more trouble, with distant cousins claiming to be true heirs and such to the variously smashed thrones—the post-conquest rebellion of Tupac Amaru is a good example of this. You also have to worry about people simply ‘going native’ as happened in Ireland—in the end, nobody really wins these sorts of rebellions…except, of course, for the large empires that can pour manpower onto whatever fires brew in conquered territories.
Nice as that is, much nicer than, say, wearing see-through neon blue tights and a clashing red thong while touring the library with your hipster-boyfriend and philosophy grad student who doesn’t know how to look for books…it isn’t what I sat down to write about. No, that was Machu Picchu, still pictured above there, same as it was when I started writing. Where were we? Cuzco has fallen, and it can be theorized that some people fled to Machu Picchu, using it as a sort of mountain holdfast from which to conduct Incan affairs of state…except…we find no mention of Machu Picchu in either the Spanish conquest narratives or the Incan catalogs of cities—perhaps because we really find very little of Incan writing…because it doesn’t really exist in what Westerners would see as written form—instead, it is in the form of the quipu, squares containing various lengths of knotted and beaded rope designed to tell a story. Needless to say, the first thing the Spanish did when they conquered South America’s only empire at that time (there might have been something even greater in what is now the Amazon rainforest, but that is still being researched and theorized about as I write this—it is a really awesome theory that I’ll try to find more on as the week progresses) was to burn the quipus, often with the scribes who could…you guessed it…read the damned things. Plus, the ropes are made of llama wool, which doesn’t stand the test of time very well, and…long story short, we only have architectural remains, and even those are disappearing due to the effects of time, looting, and urban expansion—there are soccer fields on top of pre-Incan ruins, and neighborhoods going up where palaces once stood. Discovered by the incomparable Hiram Bingham of Yale, Machu Picchu lay forgotten about and overgrown for centuries until rumors of a lost city in the mountainous backlands of Peru reached the exploring professor’s ears. Deciding that everything on this mountaintop belonged in a museum, and not only a museum, but an American museum, Bingham promptly snatched up everything that was not nailed down, and since the Inca had not invented the nail, he had a number of donkeys full of loot by the time he left Peru, not really mentioning his find to the Peruvian government, because…well, they might just want to keep his treasure for themselves. Only now is the government of Peru bitching about taking goods out of what was then (and still is to some extent) an unstable dictatorship…Yale, to its credit or fault depending on whom you ask, is returning much of their renowned Peruvian collection…a win for Peru, but a loss to those poor archaeology students at Yale. Anyway, the city itself remained in Peru, and is still in the process of being cleared of brush. Modern archaeologists are discovering villages along nearby mountainsides, proving theories that Machu Picchu was more than just some secret redoubt, but also a functioning (or at least theoretically functioning) city in the clouds. So if it wasn’t a fortress, what was it? The palatial estate of an emperor who reigned about fifty years before the collapse of the empire. Abandoned after this specific emperor’s demise, Machu Picchu was promptly forgotten about, because there really wasn’t anything worth remembering to the Inca, who tended to build cities and palatial estates on mountaintops for something to do on those long Peruvian afternoons. Still, though this doesn’t really fall into my standard holy ground post…because it never really served as a site of pilgrimage, a repository of relics, knowledge, or anything other than a regal ass…I still think it is nifty, and there is a small temple of the sun within the bounds of the city/estate, which makes sense, considering how the Inca emperors considered themselves descendants of the sun god, Inti, to whom, along with an Andean earth goddess believed to be older than the Incan empire (most gods, you’ll find, are around longer than empires that co-opt them) named Pachamama, the Inca sometimes sacrificed people, though not in the same bloodthirsty way as the empires to the north in Mexico and the jungles of Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador. Still, the gods of the Inca at the time of conquest were hungry for blood in a way that the gods of the Old World had not hungered for centuries…at least not overtly—if we count the Crusades, Inquisition, the sacks and Fall of Constantinople, and various battles between sects of Islam as blood sacrifices of a sort, then those gods hunger still, and perhaps more powerfully if we tie in the horrors of Bosnia, Kosovo, and the rest of the Balkans, Afghanistan, Chechnya, the civil war in Sri Lanka, and every conflict I’m leaving out. Anyway, the Inca and Andean people in general also venerated huaca, natural places of holiness—mountain passes, glaciers, etc…and still do, to some extent, with rituals that the Catholic Church turns a blind eye to, because they discovered long before the conquest of the New World that leaving people with a little bit of their old ways, the planting rituals, wedding rites, and solstice festivals, saves a lot of blood and anger in the long run. Syncretism of this sort is necessary for societies and social constructs (like religion) to flourish—the more open a society, people, civilization, is to change, the more likely that society, people, civilization is to survive sudden changes—trees than bend rather than break live longer…until someone comes along with an axe, anyway.
For the moment, this rambling edition of ‘Holy Ground’ will come to a close.
I hope that all goes marvelously with all on this bright and beautiful Monday afternoon.
Steven
You left yourself logged in.
I’ll log out.
But before I go here’s Tim Allen. And there’s a chipmunk living in my gutter.
