16
The Amazon's Own Stonehenge
THE FIRST FOREIGN VISITOR TO mention the existence of megalithic circles in the Amazon was the Swiss zoologist Emílio Goeldi, who traveled up the Cunani River into what is now the northern part of the Brazilian state of Amapá, near its border with French Guiana, in the late nineteenth century.1 He makes no mention, however, of formations of huge granite blocks, obviously worked upon and moved into place by human beings, overlooking a stream called the Rego Grande.
In the 1920s Curt Nimuendajú, a German-Brazilian ethnologist, also visited megaliths in the region, but he likewise appears to have been unaware of the spectacular formations of Rego Grande. They were seen, however, and noted by Betty Meggers and her colleague Clifford Evans of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1950s 2 and now, at last, with the Smithsonian’s resources, came the opportunity for a thorough investigation of the mysterious site. Predictably, what we might call “the curse of Meggers” descended upon the Rego Grande stone circles. These great formations of megaliths shouldn’t have existed at all, according to her prejudices about the ancient Amazon, and were thus deemed unworthy of further excavation.3
Thereafter, lacking the Smithsonian’s seal of approval, the interesting problem of Rego Grande was quietly set aside and ignored by archaeology for the next 40 years while the site itself fell back into its former state of absolute obscurity and was in due course forgotten.
But climates of opinion in scholarship from time to time undergo radical shifts, and forgotten things sometimes cry out to be remembered. Thus, just as the geoglyphs of Acre were first identified back in the 1970s in an area where swaths of formerly dense rainforest were being cleared for use by the cattle industry, so it was with the Rego Grande stone circles. They were rediscovered in the 1990s by ranch foreman Lailson Camelo da Silva, who was clearing land for pasture. “I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon’s own Stonehenge,” he later told a reporter. “It makes me wonder. What other secrets about our past are still hidden in Brazil’s jungles?”4
The publicity around Silva’s “discovery,” coupled with new insights into the complexity of ancient Amazonian civilization, led to a gradual reawakening of interest in Rego Grande. More research was done and out of roughly 200 prehistoric sites identified across the state of Amapá it was found that 30 had megalithic monuments of one kind or another.5
In 2005 archaeologists Mariana Petry Cabral and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha of Amapá’s Institute of Scientific and Technological Research set about the task of surveying them all, with a particular focus on Rego Grande. There, the principal stone circle, which has a diameter of 30 meters, consists of 127 upright megaliths. Brought from a quarry 3 kilometers away, the megaliths weigh up to 4 tons each and stand between 2.5 meters (just over 8 feet) and 4 meters (just over 13 feet) tall.6 Areas within the circle were used for elaborate human burials involving funerary urns and vases in a known pottery style of the region.
By 2011 a preliminary age of about 1,000 years was being suggested for the site. This was based, according to Mariana Cabral, on “three date checks on fragments of charcoal” found among pottery in the burial area.7 Ten other prehistoric sites in the state of Amapá, three of them with megaliths, were also dated in the same way and “all seem to have been occupied between seven hundred and a thousand years ago.”8
Much more work will have to be done before we can be sure that these dates will not be revised—like the ages of the geoglyphs—in the light of new evidence. Most important, meticulous care will have to be taken to be certain that the stone circle, on the one hand, and the burials from which the C-14 dates were derived, on the other, are works of the same period. The phenomenon of “intrusive burials” is one that archaeologists commonly encounter; particularly where an ancient, sacred site is involved there is a tendency for later people to want to bury and sanctify their dead there (such anachronistic burials have been found, for example, at the Sphinx and at the Third Pyramid at Giza). The danger, therefore, is that an older site will be given a falsely young date based on materials from the intrusive burial.
Indeed, Cabral and Saldanha note that pottery of the same style and type as the pieces at Rego Grande from which the samples of charcoal were taken is common along “all of the northern coast of Amapá and in French Guiana” and has also been “regularly found in prehistoric sites that have no stone monuments.”9
I’m therefore not convinced by the association of this pottery and carbondatable charcoal with the original construction date of the stone circle at Rego Grande. That being said, however, it makes no difference to me if it does turn out to be of the same age as the burials. My argument is not that every mysterious monument now emerging from the depths of the Amazon must date back to the Pleistocene. I’m concerned here, rather, with the manifestation of a legacy of ideas that may be of Ice Age antiquity—ideas involving geometry and ideas also very much involving astronomy. It’s the ideas that matter, whether we encounter them in the Amazon, or at Serpent Mound in Ohio, or at Angkor in Cambodia, or at Stonehenge in the British Isles, or among the monuments of Egypt’s Giza plateau. If mechanisms to carry, preserve, and transmit them down the generations have been introgressed into the local cultural DNA, then I see no reason why they should not manifest, and reveal their fundamental similarities, wherever and whenever conducive circumstances arise.
It therefore has to be of interest, whatever the age of the great stone circle at Rego Grande ultimately proves to be, that it appears to share a key “meme” with Stonehenge and with Serpent Mound.
Coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene,10 the word “meme” refers to “An element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.”11
In the case of Stonehenge, Serpent Mound, and Rego Grande, the meme concerns the orientation of the sites—which in all three cases honors the sun on the June and December solstices. We reviewed these alignments for Stonehenge and Serpent Mound in part 1, and the reader will recall that they are reversible—that is, an alignment to the summer solstice sunrise is also, in the reverse direction, an alignment to the winter solstice sunset, while an alignment to the winter solstice sunrise is also, in the reverse direction, an alignment to the summer solstice sunset.
In the case of Rego Grande, it is the winter solstice that is the primary focus. Cabral and Saldanha point to a megalith that uses shadow effects to track “the sun’s path throughout this day.”12 Two other granite megaliths close by, one with an artificial hole cut through it, also line up to track the rising point of the winter solstice sun.13
The Rego Grande Stone Circle. Stone 3(one in front on the left) tracks the path of the sun throughout the day on the winter solstice. Stones 1 and 2 (the former with a sighting hole cut through it—see inset) line up to target the winter solstice sunrise.
The strong foundations of the site make it unlikely that the megaliths would have shifted position. Even blocks lying horizontally, it turns out, have not fallen but were purposefully placed:
Those lying on the ground never stood upright. Instead, the layer of laterite [beneath them] was carefully dug so that they fit snugly with the ground. Excavations carried out … around the bottom of the standing stones also revealed small blocks of granite and laterite which were used to wedge the monoliths at this unusual angle.14
Cabral and Saldanha’s conclusion is that all the angles were “carefully considered by those who conceived them.”15
Archaeologist Manoel Calado of the University of Lisbon, an expert on Portuguese megaliths, agrees. “I’m sure,” he said after a visit to Rego Grande. “This is one of the aspects that makes the Amazon megaliths very similar to those in Europe.”16
Richard Callahan, professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, is also on Cabral and Saldanha’s side:
Given that astronomical objects, stars, constellations, etc., have a major importance in much of Amazonian mythology and cosmology, it does not in any way surprise me that such an observatory exists.17
For Eduardo Neves, too, “the idea of the place being a sort of observatory is a good one,” although he adds, quite rightly, that “we still need to test it.”18
PAINEL DO PILÃO
ONLY THE MOST RUDIMENTARY SURVEY has been undertaken at Rego Grande, enough to reveal the major solstitial focus of the great stone circle, but nothing more. Other, much richer information may or may not be concealed within the multiple alignments of the megaliths, as is the case at Stonehenge and Serpent Mound, but a major archaeoastronomical study will be required to settle the matter. As Jarita Holbrook, associate professor of physics at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape, comments: “It takes more than a circle of standing stones to get a Stonehenge.”19
I would add, however, that a circle of standing stones with a solstitial alignment is a pretty good start!
Moreover, and I suggest of great relevance given the uncertainty over the dates of Rego Grande, a major archaeoastronomical study has already been undertaken at another Amazonian site approximately 550 kilometers to the southwest. Named Painel do Pilão, it is located just 400 meters from Pedra Pintada, the painted rock shelter investigated in 1996 by Anna Roosevelt. We saw in chapter 12 how she and her team excavated multiple occupation layers within the shelter, the oldest and deepest of which turned out to be perhaps as old as 16,000 years (according to thermoluminescence dating) and 14,200 years (according to radiocarbon dating).20
There has been no serious challenge to these dates but, following further work by Roosevelt, Pedra Pintada’s rock art is now usually reported, reflecting the current cautious consensus of the archaeological community, to date between 13,630 and 11,705 years ago.21
Dates for the art at the nearby Painel do Pilão rock shelter, excavated by Christopher Sean Davis of Northern Illinois University, are closely similar, being variously given in his 2016 report at between 13,014 and 12,725 years ago, and between 13,135 and 12,810 years ago.22 All together a total of four samples from two adjacent excavation levels were subjected to C-14 testing. All were found, says Davis, “to be consistent and contemporary to Roosevelt’s paleoindian dates from Caverna da Pedra Pintada.”23 His conclusion, therefore, is that the initial artworks of Painel do Pilão were created at “around the time that the area was first inhabited 13,000 years ago, and that those earliest images, which were probably retouched or traced more recently, were positioned in the most prominent wall locations and height.”24
Davis suggests that the rock wall itself, as well as the floor at its base, were deliberately leveled by the ancients to form a 90-degree angle to one another. The whole ensemble, he says, was “made straight and flat throughout” to configure a “platform stage from which an observer can view the rock art from a specific location.”25
Once standing in that location, Davis further notes, “the painting most central to the observer’s field of view is a grid image that has individual boxes marked with mostly repetitive (but some varying) tallies.”26
It looks like a calendar—and indeed, some years before Davis, Roosevelt was the first scholar to consider that possibility.27 While recognizing that “alternative theories not related to astronomy cannot be ruled out,” Davis re-investigated the matter over the course of a solar year and noticed a possible pattern to do with
the intersection of the setting sun to a rocky perch in the near distance above and to the right of the painted outcrop. The annual movement of the sun relative to the rocky perch allows for the intersection of the setting sun through the center of the perch approximately 18– 20 days before and after the winter solstice (which currently occurs on December 21). … If each box of the painted grid image represents one day of observing the setting of the sun relative to the rocky perch, 49 days after the day of the winter solstice, the sun sets too far to the north of the rocky perch, entirely missing the structure. The grid painting has 49 total boxes and the center boxes have tally marks that are simply vertical lines. Most other tally marks are crisscrosses. The rocky perch and the grid image might, therefore, have been a way for paleoindians to foretell the winter solstice and the passage of a new year.28
Painel do Pilão painted outcrop with its rock art surface in the center-to-left foreground, and a rocky outcrop with a window-like feature at a distance in the top right background of the photo. The sun intersects this “window” in the early afternoon 18 to 20 days before and after the winter solstice.
What adds to the likelihood that Davis is correct is that he and his team found other alignments at Painel do Pilão. For example, just as the orientation of what they call the “platform stage” suggests an ancient focus on the December solstice sunset, so, too, another prominent cluster of images aligns to the rising point of the sun on the June solstice.29
Meanwhile:
A third astronomy alignment occurs with a single red pictograph discovered above the excavation unit on a vertical ledge on the underside of the painted outcrop. The ledge may have been intentionally altered, but further investigation is needed for certainty. The painted circle itself faces 270° [the azimuth of sunset on the equinox], but the shelter walls block all views of the western horizon or sky from this location. However, just beneath the circle and ledge is an opening that allows one to see through to the other side of the outcrop and the horizon beyond. This vantage point beneath the painted circle aligns to ~90°, the position of the rising sun on the equinox, which occurs on March 20 and September 23 currently.30
At the very least, says Davis, the rock art and alignments at Painel do Pilão tell us that cultures in the heart of the Amazon 13,000 years ago “engaged and utilized sophisticated knowledge of astronomy maintained through rock art and possibly shared or reimagined by more recent cultures who either inherited or rediscovered the ancient paintings.”31
He’s right to draw attention to the legacy aspect of all this—the possibility, long after the original painters and horizon astronomers of Painel do Pilão were gone, that later cultures might have inherited and re-imagined the ancient ideas and obsessions manifested there. This is how we would expect carefully crafted and cleverly designed memes to propagate themselves down the ages, and it appears to echo exactly the process at Serpent Mound, which was likewise maintained, renovated, and re-imagined by successive cultures down the ages and which likewise signals the solstices and the equinoxes.
Painel do Pilão is important because it tells us that the “meme” of sacred structures aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, found in monumental art and architecture all around the world, has been present in the Amazon for at least 13,000-years and perhaps—we must await future discoveries in the unexplored reaches of the jungle—for far longer than that.
It also has wider implications. If people were capable of carefully marking, recording, and honoring these celestial events in South America 13,000 years ago, then there is no good reason to suppose they should not have done so in North America as well—and therefore no good reason to dismiss the possibility that Serpent Mound’s original alignments also go back to that distant epoch.
Archaeology says a firm NO to this, accompanied by guffaws of derision.
As we’ve seen, however, the archaeology of Serpent Mound is riddled with contradictions and uncertainties and appears to have produced dates marking various episodes of restoration and renovation rather than convincing evidence of when the monument was originally designed and founded.
HYPOTHESIS
IN HIS REPORT CHRISTOPHER DAVIS mentions Rego Grande, “presumed to be more recent” than Painel do Pilão, as another Amazonian site at which archaeoastronomical alignments have been investigated. 32 He draws no specific connection beyond that, but in my view the confirmation of a solstitial focus at both, as also at Serpent Mound in Ohio, and Stonehenge and other megalithic sites worldwide, is noteworthy.
Moreover, although there is no henge at Rego Grande, we’ve seen that the solstitialis aligned stone circle there shares the Amazon basin with huge numbers of hengelike earthworks. We’ve noted how these, too, have never been subject to any kind of rigorous archaeoastronomical investigation. Meanwhile, the total number of geometric ditched enclosures discovered in the southwestern Amazon survey area had increased from “over 210,” the figure on record in 2009, to “over 450” by 2017. 33
Then in 2018 a further study by Denise Schaan and colleagues reported an extension of the survey area across much of the southern rim of the Amazon basin:
The results show that an 1800 km stretch of southern Amazonia was occupied by earth-building cultures. 34
In one area alone, the Upper Tapajos Basin, 81 previously unknown pre-Columbian sites were discovered, with a total of 104 earthworks. 35 Among them were many complex enclosures including one, 390 meters in diameter, featuring 11 mounds circularly arranged at the center of the enclosure. 36
The researchers suggest that at least 1,300 further sites remain hidden within the jungles of the Amazon’s southern rim—a number, they add, that is “likely to be an underestimation” 37 while “huge swaths of the rainforest are still unexplored.” 38 They remind us that the terre firme forests “that account for ~95% of the Amazon are particularly uncharted” because “these areas have been archaeologically neglected following traditional views that preColumbian people concentrated on resource-rich floodplains. However, the discovery of large pre-Columbian earthworks in terra firme along the Southern Rim of the Amazon undermines the assumption that these areas were marginal in terms of past human impact and the development of complex societies.” 39
It is undoubtedly the case that many more structures remain to be found than have already presented themselves to science. Our entire understanding of this vast region is being transformed by new discoveries and, indeed, as we’ve seen, the notion of complex societies in the pre-Columbian Amazon is no longer anathema to archaeologists, some of whom now even dare to describe those societies as “civilizations.”
Given that such civilizations existed in ancient Amazonia, and clearly had the capacity to manifest their ideas in great public projects, it is intriguing that the end result was the vigorous, flamboyant, and extensive expression of the very same architectural, astronomical, and geometrical “memes” that characterize sacred architecture in many other parts of the world, and at many different periods.
An analogy between genetics and culture—genes and memes—can serve us well here.
Let’s say, purely hypothetically of course, that a system of ideas is transferred, by direct teachings, from one culture to another. The recipient society as a whole, however, may not yet be ready to put the teachings into practice. What is required, then, is that some sort of institution be set up that can recruit the brightest and the best from the local population. They, in turn, will draft new talent with each new generation, initiating them and training them in the essential details of the system—which will assume the character of a religion and will in due course integrate itself deeply into every level, even into the habits of thought, of the recipient culture. Eventually, when the right time for the next stage of the project is judged to have arrived—perhaps very soon, perhaps after thousands of years, depending on local circumstances—the religious leaders will mobilize the population to enact the great projects of sacred geometry that had for so long remained encoded, but unexpressed, within their cultural DNA.40
It is, I emphasize, only a hypothesis. In this context, though, it’s thought provoking to consider an ethnographic report from 1887 written by a certain Colonel Antonio R. P. Labre after he had ascended the Madeira, the Beni, and the Madre de Dios Rivers and then crossed overland to the Acre River. His journey took him right through the heart of the geoglyph territory of Acre and involved numerous encounters with its inhabitants, the Araona people— who had, by that time, been reduced to a tiny remnant after hundreds of years of devastating epidemics, slave raids, and murderous attacks by commercial rubber tappers seeking to drive them off their land. “It was not uncommon,” writes Denise Schaan, “for rubber tappers to capture native women for wives. The encroaching whites would frequently promote raids to enslave the native population for the rubber industry, a situation that 40 years later would result in the near-extinction of tens of thousands of natives.”41
Since all work on the geoglyphs had ceased hundreds of years previously, we can only guess how much of the past of their once great culture these harried, encroached-upon, and deeply endangered Aroanas remembered by the time of Labre’s visit. We cannot even be sure that they were the direct descendants of the geoglyph builders (rather than of more recent migrants to the area).
Nonetheless, what Labre tells us feels significant. He didn’t see the geoglyphs, which were then entirely overgrown by jungle, but he was in the midst of them on August 17, 1887, when he stayed overnight at an Aroana village called Mamuceyada. He describes there being, as well as plantations, “about 200 inhabitants … a form of government, temples and a form of worship”—from which, together with “knowing the name of the idols,” women were excluded. Of particular importance and relevance here is Labre’s report:
The idols are not of human form, but are geometrical figures made of wood and polished. The father of the gods is called Epymara, his image has an elliptical form, and is about 16 inches high. … Although they have “medicine-men” charged with religious duties and remaining celibates, the chief is nevertheless pontifex of the church.42
Consider the improbability of this if it does not arise from some real though forgotten connection. Here in a landscape mysteriously inscribed in antiquity with vast geometrical earthworks, at a time when the earthworks themselves had long since been swallowed by jungle, we find a Native American tribe whose gods take the form of polished wooden “geometrical figures.” The tribal chief is the religious leader but there are also “medicinemen” who likewise have religious duties.
It already sounds exactly like the sort of institution for the replication and transmission of geometric memes that I proposed as a hypothesis earlier, but it gets even more interesting when the shamans involved, and often the population, are drinking ayahuasca.
17
THE VINE OF THE DEAD
WHAT ARE THE AMAZONIAN GEOGLYPHS? Why did the ancients go to such trouble to make these colossal earthworks? Why is geometry their most obvious theme? And to what extent, if any, since stone circles are frequently associated with similar earthworks elsewhere, does the presence of stone circles in the Amazon help us to understand the geoglyphs?
So far we have considered only geometry and certain cosmic alignments, but my hypothesis in both cases, and in the case of the extraordinarily similar earthworks of the Mississippi Valley that we’ll explore in parts 5 and 6, is that we are dealing with “memes” here. Moreover, it is a phenomenon in itself that the same memes appear again and again among seemingly unrelated cultures of both the Old World and the New World, separated sometimes not only by thousands of miles but by thousands of years.
Much more work will be required to establish when the memes of geometry and cosmic alignment first took root in the Amazon. Archaeology on its own is of limited use to us here, since so little has been done even at the sites already discovered and since so much of the region has never been investigated at all. What would help would be a much more thorough and detailed archaeoastronomical survey of Rego Grande, and of other stone circles in its vicinity, than has already been undertaken. In parallel, as I argued earlier, an equally thorough archaeoastronomical survey of the Amazonian geoglyphs is a must if we are to refine not only our understanding of their geometry but also to tease out any cosmic alignments they may contain. Since no such study has yet been undertaken all we can say for sure is that some of the geoglyphs reviewed in chapter 15 are, definitely, cosmically aligned.
We’ve seen, for example, that both Fazenda Parana and Severino Calazans consist of square geoglyphs. The first features two squares, one 200 meters along each side and the second exactly half that size, with an interconnecting causeway. Meanwhile, the second site has side lengths of 230 meters, giving it the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Egypt. All four of these squares —the two at Fazenda Parana, the one at Severino Calazans, and of course the Great Pyramid itself, are cardinally oriented, that is, their sides face true north, south, east, and west. The most basic and obvious of the cosmic alignments shared across these sites are therefore to the celestial north and south poles (the points on the celestial sphere directly above the earth’s geographic north and south poles, around which the stars and planets appear to rotate during the course of the night 1 ), and to the points of sunrise and sunset on the spring and autumn equinoxes (when the sun rises perfectly due east and sets perfectly due west).
We’ve also seen that other great earthworks of the Amazon feature strong northwest-to-southeast orientations. This would put the investigation of possible solstitial alignments and also of “lunar standstill alignments” (of which more in part 5) at the top of the list of priorities if any proper archaeoastronomical survey should ever be undertaken.
I think it likely that such a survey of the Amazonian geoglyphs, as of the stone circles, would reveal many more (and far more intricate) cosmic alignments, perhaps even as subtle and complex as the multiple alignments found at the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and Serpent Mound. There’s little point in speculating further on such matters when we don’t yet have the necessary data from the Amazon. For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the memes of geometry and cosmic alignment are part of a connected system there, as they are in so many other parts of the world where the required research has already been done. In that case we can say, on the basis of the equinoctial and solstitial alignments at Painel do Pilão, the single Amazonian site where something approaching a thorough archaeoastronomical study has been undertaken, that the system must have reached Amazonia at least 13,000 years ago. That it should then have later iterations in different media, such as the stone circle at Rego Grande and the great cosmically aligned geoglyphs at Severino Calazans and Fazenda Parana, should not surprise us.
We are dealing, I believe, with deliberately created memes here—memes that have a deeply mysterious purpose and that function in ineffable ways. They are transmitted by repetition and replication, which explains their similarities. But cultures, once separated, tend to evolve and develop in their own distinctive and quirky fashion. We can therefore expect that not only the media and materials through which the memes are made manifest, but also their local interpretation, will vary greatly through time and between one part of the world and another while nonetheless retaining a constant core of unvarying central ideas.
WESTERN SCIENCE WADES IN
THE FIRST EFFORTS OF WESTERN scientists to interpret the geoglyphs of Amazonia were predictably utilitarian and reductionist, with attempts being made to persuade us that the great geometrical earthworks must have been built for defensive purposes. But with no evidence of warfare around them, with the ditches clearly not “moats” (since so many of them are placed within the earthen embankments rather than outside them), and with no evidence of palisade walls (for example, in the form of post holes or wooden remains), this theory soon lost favor.2 Not only was there no evidence of warfare, but actually very little at all in the way of archaeological materials—pottery, figurines, refuse, et cetera—that would help to decipher the use, meaning, and purpose of the geoglyphs. The consensus now, therefore, is that they were created for “ritual,” “spiritual,” “religious,” and “ceremonial” purposes.3
William Balée, professor of anthropology at Tulane University, is a supporter of this new consensus, but is doing no more than stating the obvious when he suggests that the spiritual/religious role of the Amazonian glyphs must in some way have involved “geometry and gigantism.”4
Well, yes, professor. Obviously! But in what way? And to what purposes?
If we seek useful answers to such questions, rather than easy inferences or mere descriptions of these gigantic geometric patterns, then we are going to have to do what a very few Western scientists, to their credit, are now doing —and that is to consult indigenous peoples still living in the Amazon today.
Finnish scholars Sanna Saunaluoma and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen have led the way in this fresh approach. The cultural destruction of the past five centuries has wiped many of the tribal memory banks clean—the ongoing process of imposed amnesia that has left us so bereft of knowledge about the ancient Amazon. It is clear, however, that all is not yet lost.
In 2013, for example, Saunaluoma and Virtanen brought a group of five Manchineri—an indigenous tribe living today in the region of the earthworks —to visit Jacó Sá. This immense geoglyph, depicting a circle within a square, as the reader will recall, is located about 250 kilometers from their territory. The investigators report that the Manchineri “immediately reported feeling sensations of being in an ancient ritual atmosphere.” Moreover, “They said that their ancestors had talked about these types of places, although they could not offer any explanation as to why the earthwork ditches were so deep or even why they had been constructed.”5
A second local tribal group, the Apurinã, “narrated that their parents had advised them to pass by the earthworks quickly and avoid their vicinity when possible because they signify difference, promote avoidance, and are regarded as ‘enchanted,’ or ‘miraculous’ places.”6
Certainly, then, at least the traces of a memory of how significant the earthworks must have been in their prime, and of the awe that they formerly inspired, lingers on in local superstitions and folklore.
But a reservoir of much more detailed information has been stored away in the Amazon and here, too, Saunaluoma and Virtanen are pioneers in finding links to the earthworks.
THE SHAMANISTIC COSMOS
SOME OF THE CLUES THEY have drawn on have been available for more than 130 years.
They’re found in the account, given in the last chapter, of the worship of “geometrical” gods by the Aroana people in the vicinity of the geoglyphs when Colonel Antonio R. P. Labre stayed among them in 1887. From Labre we also learn that the Aroanas had “temples and a form of worship” and that their religious officiants were “medicine men.”
During the twentieth century the term “medicine men” went out of fashion and, where indigenous systems of spirituality are still practiced in the Amazon today, the majority of ethnographic and anthropological studies define the officiants as “shamans.” This word is NOT derived from, or used, in any Amazonian language. It comes, instead, from the Tungus-Mongol noun saman, meaning, broadly, “one who knows.”7
Its widespread use by anthropologists today—not only with reference to religious ritual functionaries in the Amazon but also to similar figures who are found in tribal and hunter-gatherer societies all over the world—has not come about because the Tungus mysteriously contacted and influenced other cultures but because Tungus shamanism was the first example of the phenomenon to be studied by European ethnologists. The Tungus word entered Western languages through their enthusiastic written reports and has subsequently continued to be applied in all parts of the world where systems very similar to Tungus shamanism have been found.
It is the shaman—usually a man but sometimes a woman—who stands at the heart of these systems. And what all shamans have in common, regardless of which culture they come from or what they call themselves, is an ability to enter and control altered states of consciousness. Often, but not always, psychedelic plants or fungi are consumed to attain the necessary trance state. Shamanism, therefore, is not primarily a set of beliefs, nor the result of purposive study. It is, first and foremost, mastery of the techniques needed to attain trance and thus to occasion particular kinds of experiences—shamans call them “visions,” Western psychiatrists call them “hallucinations”—that are then in turn used to interpret events and guide behavior:
The true shaman must attain his knowledge and position through trance, vision and soul-journey to the Otherworld. All these states of enlightenment are reached … during a shamanic state of consciousness, and not by purposive study and application of a corpus of systematic knowledge.8
Such a method of knowledge acquisition seems absurd and fantastical to the “rational” Western mind. And indeed, underlying the whole notion of soul-journeys to the otherworld is a model of reality that is diametrically opposed in every way to the model presently favored by Western science. This remotely ancient shamanistic model holds our material world to be much more complicated than it seems to be. Behind it, beneath it, above it, interpenetrating it, all around it—sometimes symbolized as being “underground” or sometimes “in the sky”—is an otherworld, perhaps multiple otherworlds (spirit worlds, underworlds, netherworlds, etc.) inhabited by supernatural beings. Whether we like it or not, we must interact with these nonphysical beings, which, though generally invisible and intangible, have the power both to harm us and to help us.
THE GEOMETRICAL PULSE
THE BIG PICTURE OF SHAMANISM, altered states of consciousness, and their immensely important place in the human story—was the focus of my 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. 9 I refer the reader to that book for a comprehensive body of data that reinforces and underlines what I have to say in this chapter.
Meanwhile, the key point, standing right at the heart of the matter and nonsensical to “rational” Western minds, is the notion that the human condition requires interaction with powerful nonphysical beings. Across much of the Amazon the nexus that facilitates such interaction is the extraordinary visionary brew ayahuasca, a plant medicine that has been in use among the indigenous peoples of this vast region for unknown thousands of years. Its active ingredient, derived from the leaves of the chacruna shrub (botanical name Psychotria viridis) is dimethyltryptamine—DMT—an immensely potent hallucinogen. It is from the other ingredient, however, derived from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, that the brew gets its name. The function of the ayahuasca vine in the brew is to transmit a monoamine oxidase inhibitor into the bloodstream of the recipient so that he or she may gain sustained access to the extraordinary effects of DMT—a substance that is normally neutralized in the gut by the enzyme monoamine oxidase. There are other ways of accessing the visionary power of Amazonian plants rich in DMT—notably by snorting them as snuff—but the effects are short-lasting. Taken orally, in the form of the ayahuasca brew, however, the experience can last up to 6 hours, permitting a much more sustained and immersive trance “journey.”
It is, in my view, a remarkable scientific feat that such a highly effective combination of just 2 out of the estimated 150,000 different species of plants, trees, and vines in the Amazon was discovered by mere trial and error. Nor if you ask Amazonian shamans, as I have done, how their ancestors made this discovery, will they admit to trial and error at all—or indeed to any other method that Western science would recognize as rational. What they claim, very simply—but unanimously—is that a variety of “plant spirits,” among which ayahuasca is paramount, have taught them everything important they need to know about the properties of other plants in the jungle, thus allowing them to make powerful medicines, to heal the sick, and, in general, to be good “doctors.”10
Ayahuasca itself is said to be a “doctor,” possessing a strong spirit, and is considered to be “an intelligent being with which it is possible to establish rapport, and from which it is possible to acquire knowledge and power.”11 The anthropologist Angelica Gebhart-Sayer, who studied the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Amazon, notes that under the influence of ayahuasca “the shaman perceives, from the spirit world, incomprehensible, often chaotic information in the form of luminous designs.”12 As Gebhart-Sayer sees it, it is the shaman’s function to decode and “domesticate” this raw, unprocessed data beamed at him by the plant spirits by “converting it” into therapy for the tribe as a whole.
Very often these luminous designs, rich in data, take the form of geometry. I speak from experience, having participated in more than seventy ayahuasca sessions since 2003, continuing to work with the brew for the valuable lessons it teaches me long after Supernatural was researched, written, and published. Here’s part of my account of the first time I drank ayahuasca in the Amazon:
I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach. … Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor. …
Time passes but I don’t keep track of it. I’ve improvised a pillow from a rolled up sleeping bag and I now find I’m swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I’ve ever seen—dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of spiral galaxies on the move. Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll—as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.13
Other notes I made following my ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon refer to a “geometrical pulse,”14 to “a recurrence of the geometrical patterns,”15 to “a background of shifting geometrical patterns,”16 and to “complex interlaced patterns of geometry. … I zoom in for a closer view. … They’re rectangular, outlined in black, like windows. There’s a circle in the centre of each rectangle.”17
PATHS
THOSE SESSIONS TOOK PLACE IN January and February 2004 some years before I first learned of the existence of the great geometrical geoglyphs of the Amazon. The reader will understand, therefore, that when I began to research the glyphs in 2017 and to wonder about their meaning to whichever unknown peoples created them, it was natural for me to consider ayahuasca as an inspiration. I can’t confirm whether any circles within rectangles are among the more than 550 glyphs discovered by 2018, but Jacó Sá (where the Manchineri group brought by Saunaluoma and Virtanen reported sensations of being in an ancient ritual atmosphere) certainly gives us a circle within a square. And, while the geometrical patterns that I likened to “multiple square screens” and “banks of windows” might be described and manifested using very different materials in very different ways by people from different cultural backgrounds, what seems to stay constant throughout is the geometry.
Tukano sand painting of patterns seen in an ayahuasca vision. (After G. ReichelDolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar, 1975, p. 46.)
It is the fundamental motif of the earthworks but it turns up in much else besides—for example in the ayahuasca-inspired art of the Tukano of the Colombian Amazon (where the brew goes by the name of yajé).18
The Tukano create geometrical patterns and abstract designs in sand, on fabrics and musical instruments, on their houses and on the communal malocas where they consume yajé. 19 Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff reported the results of an intriguing experiment he carried out in which he asked members of a Tukano community to make crayon drawings of what they saw when they were drinking yajé. (The drawings were of course made from memory, after the drinkers had returned to everyday consciousness.)
The results, broadly identical to the designs on the houses and fabrics, included a triangle flanked by vertical lines ending in spirals, a rhomboid, a rectangular design filled with parallel lines, patterns of parallel undulating lines drawn horizontally, a number of different oval- and U-shaped elements, rows of dots or small circles, a vertical pattern of little dots, grid patterns, zigzag lines, nested rectangles, nested parallel arcs (catenary curves), and so on.20 Significantly, the Tukano also paint identical shapes and patterns on rock faces in the hills of the northwest Amazon.21
More than seventy different indigenous Amazonian cultures use ayahuasca —many giving different names to the brew (yajé, natema, caapi, cipo, shori, etc.).22 Since almost all report seeing geometrical visions, I wasn’t surprised to discover that Saunaluoma and Virtanen were already far ahead of me in contemplating a connection between ayahuasca visions as expressed in indigenous art and the immense geoglyphs now emerging from jungle clearances along the southern rim of the Amazon.
Of the contemporary Manchineri, for example (who live much closer to the ancient earthworks than the Tukano), they note in a 2015 paper that “certain geometric motifs,” often expressed in ceramics and body paintings, “have meaning as signs of specific ancestors. Some ancestors possess their own geometric designs that may appear in shamanic ayahuasca visions, transmitting ancestral knowledge and power.”23
They therefore conclude that “not only using but also constructing geometric earthworks may have been important social intra-group or intergroup events.”24
In a follow-up paper, published in American Anthropologist in August 2017, Saunaluoma and Virtanen take their analysis much further, proposing that the geoglyphs “were systematically constructed as spaces especially laden with visible and invisible entities.”25 Their argument is that, regardless of scale or medium, the whole process of materializing visionary iconography, in particular geometric patterns, is “related to the fluid forms inhabiting the Amazonian relational world. Different designs ‘bring’ the presence of nonhumans to the visible world of humans for a number of Amazonian Indigenous peoples, while perceiving geometric designs in Amerindian art as paths from one dimension to another allows a viewer to shift between different worlds, from the visible to the invisible.”26
Citing the work of their colleague Luisa Belaunde, Saunaluoma and Virtanen note that for the Shipibo-Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon, “the lines embody a package of ways in which beings move, travel, communicate between themselves, and transmit knowledge, objects, and powers. These paths exist everywhere, from macro to micro scales. Geometric designs are thus about certain ways of thinking, perceiving, and indicating invisible aspects so they can be seen.”27
Saunaluoma and Virtanen further establish that, to the Shipibo-Conibo, the geometric lines open “a window to the macrocosmos” and allow “macrocosmic order” to be “iconically sketched in the microcosmos here, in landscape designs.”28
As above, so below.
PORTAL
BY TAKING THE WORLDVIEW, INSIGHTS, and philosophies of indigenous peoples seriously in efforts to understand their past, Saunaluoma and Virtanen’s research marks a refreshing change of note for Western science and offers rewarding insights into the realm of ideas underlying the geoglyphs. It is by no means a realm of “primitive” ideas. On the contrary: with its notions of pathways between dimensions, and of making visible the presence of usually invisible entities, there are aspects of thought surrounding the traditional use of ayahuasca that would not be out of place in a quantum physics laboratory.
Once again I suggest we are looking at the remnants of an advanced system that propagates itself through time and across cultures with powerful memes among which geometry and cosmic alignments take a large share. We do not know where or when this system originated. In the ancient Amazon, however, to a greater degree than anywhere else, its dissemination became integrated with the use of vision-inducing plants—and there, up to the present day, the secrets of how to use these plants have been preserved and passed down within indigenous shamanic traditions.
The origin myth of the Tukano speaks of the time, eons ago, when humans first settled the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It seems that “supernatural beings” accompanied them on this journey and gifted them the fundamentals upon which to build a civilized life. From the “Daughter of the Sun” they received the gift of fire and the knowledge of horticulture, pottery-making, and many other crafts. “The serpent-shaped canoe of the first settlers” was steered by a superhuman “Helmsman.”29 Meanwhile other supernaturals “travelled by canoe over all the rivers and … explored the remote hill ranges; they pointed out propitious sites for houses or fields, or for hunting and fishing, and they left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future 233 generations would have ineffable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.”30
The slow, methodical progress of the serpent canoe, setting down its cargo of migrants here and there, explains anthropologist Gerardo Reichel Dolmatoff:
Was marked not only by the successive spots of debarkation but also by an advancing scale of human achievement. …
The rules for the initiation into shamanism were laid down, accompanied by a large body of prescriptions, regulations and prohibitions that, from now on, were to guide and govern the life of the people.
But above all … if mankind was to prevail and survive as part of nature, and was to pass on a true legacy to new generations, people had to assume responsibilities and find ways to control the organization of society so as to procure a balance between human needs and the resources available in nature.31
In this period “the spirit-beings prepared the land so that mortal human creatures might live on it.”32 Once that task had been completed, however,
the supernatural beings returned to their otherworldly abodes. Before leaving … they took care to provide mankind with the means of communication, of establishing contact with them whenever there should be need. Mortal men could not be left alone without the possibility of communing with the spirit-world. … It was essential, then, for the welfare of mankind to have at its disposal a simple and effective means by which, at any given moment, an individual or a group of people could establish contact with the supernatural sphere.33
It is rather brutally to compress many colorful and thought-provoking details to say that at the end of the lengthy myth, the “effective means” of contacting the spirit-world turns out to be … ayahuasca:
A plant that opened the door into another dimension, a drug that produced visions in which the spirit-beings revealed themselves to men—talking, teaching, admonishing and protecting.34
There are multiple different elements intertwined in the Tukano story but three of them stand out for me.
First, what’s being described is dressed up in the language and imagery of myth and may of course be “just a myth.” What it sounds like, however, is a mythologized account of a settlement mission in the Amazon in which a group of migrants were accompanied by a number of more sophisticated people considered to be “supernatural” or “superhuman.”
Though I don’t want to put undue weight on it, I would be negligent if I failed to mention in passing that the Tukano, and the closely related Barasana, are among a number of Amazonian tribes whose distinctive “men’s cults” are paralleled by virtually identical institutions in Melanesia, on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. As the reader will discover in appendix 1, the same secrecy surrounding male initiation rituals is found in both areas, the same exclusive possession of sacred flutes and trumpets that women are forbidden to see,35 the same belief that there was a time when women dominated men, and the same belief that men, either by trickery or force, had subsequently wrested power from women.
Second, the Tukano origin myth makes it completely clear that the “supernaturals” departed after they had completed their work of preparing the Amazon for settlement by the migrants in the serpent canoe.
Third, we are led to understand that direct contact between humanity and the spirit world would thereafter be broken. However a portal—ayahuasca— through which humans could still travel to the spirit world, and benefit from its teachings, would be left open.
THE LEAP TO THE MILKY WAY
ALTHOUGH ANY MEMBER OF THE Tukano community may drink ayahuasca, the deeper mysteries of the brew are primarily the work of the shaman—the payé —whose responsibility it is to travel through the portal whenever required to negotiate with powerful supernaturals on behalf of his community. Where matters of the greatest importance must be resolved, a group of payé will work together, consuming massive quantities of ayahuasca until they reach a point, lying in their hammocks, where they
feel they are ascending to the Milky Way. … The ascent to the Milky Way is not easily accomplished. An apprentice will hardly ever be able to rise immediately to this … region but rather will learn to do so after many trials. At first he will barely rise over the horizon, the next time perhaps he will reach a point corresponding to the position of the sun at 9 a.m., then at 10 a.m., and so on until at last, in a single, soaring flight, he will reach the zenith.36
In summary, therefore, the shaman’s visionary journey through the ayahuasca portal involves a leap or, after sufficient practice, a “soaring flight,” to the Milky Way. It is not the final goal, however, but a way station. “Beyond the Milky Way” lies the entrance to the Otherworld. As Reichel Dolmatoff explains:
It is said that the individual “dies” when he drinks the potion and that now his spirit returns to the uterine regions of the Beyond, only to be reborn there and to return to his ordinary existence when the trance is over. This then is conceived as an acceleration of time, an anticipation of death and rebirth.37
HIDDEN HAND
THE TUKANO OTHERWORLD IS DIVIDED into regions or districts and one of these, of particular interest to shamans, is the domain of Vai-mahase, the supernatural “Master of Animals.” It is a strangely geometrical “hill” in the form of a square with its four sides oriented to the cardinal directions.38
Is it an accident that geometry arises spontaneously in ayahuasca visions? And is it an accident that it does so not only among Amazonian peoples in the Amazon itself, but—as my own experiences and multiple scientific studies have proved—among peoples from industrialized cultures as well?39 Whether you drink the brew in the rainforest, or in New York, London, Frankfurt, or Tokyo, it is a plain fact that sooner or later you are going to see geometry.40
Is the presence of some deeper enigma hinted at here—an enigma that the ancients had plumbed when they devised their memes and sent them ringing down the ages? Just because our high-tech civilization has demonized psychedelics for the last 50 years doesn’t mean that other societies in the past did so. Indeed it’s likely that these powerful agents of transformation were used by ancient civilizations for profound and far-reaching inquiries into aspects of reality about which our own high-tech civilization remains willfully ignorant.41
We’ve seen that ayahuasca has many different names among the many different peoples who use it across the Amazon, but the word ayahuasca itself is from the Quechua language of the high Andes overlooking the western edge of the Amazon basin. This is the language that was spoken by the remarkable Inca civilization of Peru in the few short centuries before its destruction by the Spaniards. In that language what ayahuasca means is the “Vine of the Dead” or the “Vine of Souls.”
The memes of geometry and cosmic alignments are not the only ones to have propagated from a so far unidentified common source. Intimately connected to them are other ideas that went “viral” in both the Old World and the New, and that therefore somehow transcended the Ice Age separation of peoples.
The central focus of all these ideas concerns the mystery of death, and anthropologists have long been aware that the Quechua name ayahuasca is entirely appropriate since “in the indigenous context Ayahuasca is intimately related to death.”42
In parts 5 and 6 our investigation returns to North America, where eerie doppelgängers of the great earthworks of the Amazon haunt the Mississippi Valley. As we’ll see, it’s almost as though what we’re dealing with are the faint surviving traces of an immensely ancient and deeply thought-through system of knowledge and initiation, perhaps arising from direct investigations using vision-inducing plants, in which profound notions of the afterlife destiny of the soul were stitched together with the geometry and cosmic alignments into a single “blueprint” that was then hastily replicated and urgently distributed to the remotest corners of the earth.
next
sun
source and footnotes here
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/america-before-key-earth-lost-civilization.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment