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Visit Us: Portal Comercio 121
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Machupicchu. |
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The City
of Machu Picchu, rediscovered in 1911 by Yale
archaeologist Hiram Bingham, are one of the most
beautiful and enigmatic ancient sites in the world.
While the Inca people certainly used the Andean mountain
top (9060 feet elevation), erecting many hundreds of
stone structures from the early 1400's, legends and
myths indicate that Machu Picchu (meaning 'Old Peak' in
the Quechua language) was revered as a sacred place from
a far earlier time. Whatever its origins, the Inca
turned the site into a small (5 square miles) but
extraordinary city. Invisible from below and completely
self-contained, surrounded by agricultural terraces
sufficient to feed the population, and watered by
natural springs, Machu Picchu seems to have been
utilized by the Inca as a secret ceremonial city. Two
thousand feet above the rumbling Urubamba river, the
cloud shrouded ruins have palaces, baths, temples,
storage rooms and some 150 houses, all in a remarkable
state of preservation. These structures, carved from the
gray granite of the mountain top are wonders of both
architectural and aesthetic genius. Many of the building
blocks weigh 50 tons or more yet are so precisely
sculpted and fitted together with such exactitude that
the mortarless joints will not permit the insertion of
even a thin knife blade. Little is known of the social
or religious use of the site during Inca times. The
skeletal remains of ten females to one male had led to
the casual assumption that the site may have been a
sanctuary for the training of priestesses and /or brides
for the Inca nobility. However, subsequent osteological
examination of the bones revealed an equal number of
male bones, thereby indicating that Machu Picchu was not
exclusively a temple or dwelling place of women.
One of Machu Picchu's primary functions was that of
astronomical observatory. The Intihuatana stone (meaning
'Hitching Post of the Sun') has been shown to be a
precise indicator of the date of the two equinoxes and
other significant celestial periods. The Intihuatana
(also called the Saywa or Sukhanka stone) is designed to
hitch the sun at the two equinoxes, not at the solstice
(as is stated in some tourist literature and new-age
books). At midday on March 21st and September 21st, the
sun stands almost directly above the pillar, creating no
shadow at all. At this precise moment the sun "sits with
all his might upon the pillar" and is for a moment
"tied" to the rock. At these periods, the Incas held
ceremonies at the stone in which they "tied the sun" to
halt its northward movement in the sky. There is also an
Intihuatana alignment with the December solstice (the
summer solstice of the southern hemisphere), when at
sunset the sun sinks behind Pumasillo (the Puma's claw),
the most sacred mountain of the western Vilcabamba
range, but the shrine itself is primarily equinoctial.
Shamanic legends say that when sensitive persons touch
their foreheads to the stone, the Intihuatana opens
one's vision to the spirit world (the author had such an
experience, which is described in detail in Chapter one
of Places of Peace and Power, on the web site,
www.sacredsites.com). Intihuatana stones were the
supremely sacred objects of the Inca people and were
systematically searched for and destroyed by the
Spaniards. When the Intihuatana stone was broken at an
Inca shrine, the Inca believed that the deities of the
place died or departed. The Spaniards never found Machu
Picchu, even though they suspected its existence, thus
the Intihuatana stone and its resident spirits remain in
their original position. The mountain top sanctuary fell
into disuse and was abandoned some forty years after the
Spanish took Cuzco in 1533. Supply lines linking the
many Inca social centers were disrupted and the great
empire came to an end. The photograph shows the ruins of
Machu Picchu in the foreground with the sacred peak of
Wayna Picchu towering behind. Partway down the northern
side of Wayna Picchu is the so-called "Temple of the
Moon" inside a cavern. As with the ruins of Machu
Picchu, there is no archaeological or iconographical
evidence to substantiate the 'new-age' assumption that
this cave was a goddess site. |
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