Tiahuanaco

*Amazing Stories, June 1947, pp. 168—171*
Sirs:
Was very much interested in Mr. Hansen's
treatise concerning the Apaches and Tiahuanaco.
Would you kindly communicate the following to
him, with which he may or may not be familiar.
When I passed through Tiahuanaco, which is on
the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, sometime in
the fall of 1943, I bought from an Indian boy a
baked clay statue which he had made to represent
the original stone statues which may still be seen
there from the windows of the train while en route
to Guaqui. The boy used as sales talk the legend
which he says lies behind those monuments which
stand there towering above the lofty plateau
(about 12,500 feet altitude) as mysteriously as
those of Easter Island. Legend has it (according
to the Bolivian boy) that in pre-Incan times the
Tiahuanaquenos were a great people, endowed
with certain gifts of the gods, but that they became
wicked and so angered their deities that many
were turned into stone. The stone statues are
supposed to perpetuate a sort of warning to all
men not to be wicked.
Take that for what it's worth. I still have my
little statue which shows a series of pyramids in its
design. Unfortunately the artist was no doubt
uninformed concerning the symbolical importance
of the exact number of pyramids on the original
and I cannot trust the copy, nor have I the oppor-
tunity now to return to Tiahuanaco and make a
closer inspection of the statues in the light of
Mr. Hansen's article.
However, with reference to the two horns, one
may read in several works concerning Incan cere-
monial dress, particularly in the Comentarios

Reales de los Incas, by Inca Garcilasso de la Vega,
that two feathers of the coraquenque bird were
always placed in the Incan emperor's Uautu, or
turban (the colors of the turban being, incident-
ally, symbolical of the rainbow, meaning that the
wearer was a Child of the Sun.)
There is no clue as to where the practice orig-
inated, so one can only conjecture. They might
have borrowed something from the Tiahuana-
quehos just as the Aztecs borrowed certain
(gentler) religious precepts from those who existed
before them in the land of Anahuac. At any rate,
this could serve to add the Incans to the list
of those who used the two horned symbol, al-
though my own conjecture would be that they
knew far less about its real significance (at least
in the latter days of the empire) than did the
people who brought the symbol to this region, if,
indeed, it is a borrowed symbol. On the other
hand, the two feathers might represent the
heavenly parents of the first Incas, Manco Capac
and his sister wife, Mama Ocllo, who were sup-
posed to have come from the sun (Incan version
of Adam and Eve?), symbolical of the duality of
the sexes, embodying the forces of creation. In the
pre-Incan god, Pachacamac, we see two faces, one
of a woman and one of a man, in this case a
deliberate symbol of creative powers. Then
again, the two feathers could stand for the Sun
and the Moon, the two most conspicuous heavenly
bodies, both of which were adored by the Incas.
(Note : Incas refers to the Incan kings or emperors,
supposedly children of the Sun; Incans refers to
the subjects of the Incas). I forgot to mention,
for those of you who may not know it, that
Tiahuanaco and Cuzco (capital of Incan civiliza-
tion) are just across Lake Titicaca from each
other (Cuzco being some slight distance back from
the lake).
In regard to the underground passages at Cuzco,
I have been told again and again by natives and
some foreign investigators that there are sub-
terranean passages in the neighborhood of Cuzco
which are still guarded. Men have actually been
known to try to enter these passages and either
disappear or turn up dead. Rather than attribute
this to deros (this is not sarcasm, as I find Shaver-
ism very much worthy of study) I would attribute
it to the zeal of the Indians to guard the treasures
of the past to which they feel they are the rightful
heirs. Separately, someday, I hope to present a
treatise on why I believe the Treasure of the
Incas exists today near Cuzco and that it could
not be valued at much less than seventy-five
millions of dollars, but that is a lengthy subject.
There is much to support the possibility of the
existence of the underground passages to which
Mr. Hansen refers, because, among other evi-
dences, it is known that the Incas had secret ways
of traveling great distances under ground. A
friend of mine (a Peruvian miner with twenty
years of experience among the Quichua Indians in
the Andean highlands) has actually discovered the

entrance to one of these royal passages. The floor
is paved with tile. He went back as far as he could
go without suffocating. The air is too stale and
there is considerable danger of caverns. The In-
cans were very clever, but I don't believe at all
that they had the means to bore tunnels for thou-
sands of miles through the mountains. Rather, if
they covered such distances underground, it can
only mean that their man-made passages were
only entrances into a series of caverns. After
earthquakes in the hills and in Lima (as long as
twenty minutes after) you can sometimes hear
subterranean rumblings, as though the sound were
the result of subterranean landslides in deep
caverns below. Indeed one time in lima I heard
a subterranean landslide without the accompani-
ment of earthquake. The ground merely vi-
brated in a light and curious fashion for perhaps a
minute, to the accompaniment of the muffled, sub-
terranean sound of sliding rocks. Ask the Indians
in the hills. They'll tell you at once about the
rumblings under ground.
The most interesting phase of the study of
antiquities is the legends among many races of
people concerning extra-terrestrial origins. The
Cara-Mayas believed in a sort of Snake Mother
(this calls to mind Merritt's "Face in the Abyss")
descended from the stars (Naga). The Incas
strongly supported the idea of their origin in the
sun. Mr. Hansen has told us much about the
ancients' repeated reference to flying machines.
Here is a hypothesis which I believe is original,
merely because I have not read of a similar idea
anywhere else. Take it for what it's worth. Science
says that hair and feathers evolved from scales.
If this is true, it means that occurrence of hair in
a race of human beings would be correlated with
proximity to the ape and earlier forms. Let us
consider the case of Indian and Polynesian races,
precisely those of Whom it has been suspected that
they belong to the older races which existed be-
fore the Diluvium. They are characterized by a
very infrequent occurrence of bodily hair. Chest,
arms, legs and face are practically free of hair, in
the Polynesian, the present day Quichuas of Peru,
the North American Indians, and many other
peoples not belonging to the vaunted Aryan line.
Ourselves, however, are too often characterized
by busby arms, legs, chests and backs of an al-
most atavistic degree! (Don't get sore, fellows,
I'm just as much a monkey as anybody.) Ques-
tion: Who is closer to the ape?
There is just the faint possibility that those
people whom we Aryans, with our puny historical
tradition of a few millenniums, have considered as
"primitive" are actually the lost and scattered
children of ancient, superior races who evolved
on other worlds "when you were a tadpole and I
was a fish!"
The snake symbol is interesting in this regard.
Some say that it was often used to represent the
"waters." In other cases it was symbolic of for-
bidden knowledge (Eve and the Serpent). So if
an ancient people have a legend about a serpent

ancestor coming from the stars (the Cara-Mayas),
it could well mean that the "Bearers of the Ancient
Knowledge" came from the stars to Earth, just
as all of us must one day carry our own knowledge
to other worlds when Earth can no longer support
,us.
Where can I see the papers of Charles Fort?
Here's one item to add to the collection. When
I was seventeen I built myself a four-inch New-
tonian telescope. In examining the moon one
night I distinctly saw five symmetrical bodies
travel slowly in formation across the moon's disc,
as though they were gigantic bodies traveling
closer to the moon than to the Earth. My wife
laughingly accuses me now of having mistaken
flies on my mirror for space ships, but if she knew
more about optical laws she would know that flies
on my mirror would have been far more invisible
to me than if she had put them in my soup.
Another time I was walking down the street
one night in Los Angeles when I heard a hissing
sound above me. I looked up to see a trail of
red fire and sparks spread rather slowly from one
horizon to the other, all the while accompanied by
a low hissing and sputtering sound. I am glad
that in the Oklahoma case there were witnesses!
I had none, or at least we didn't get together.
Evidently everybody thought what I saw was a
meteor. But what meteor is it that can travel
slowly frorn horizon to horizon, have a red color
instead of incandescent white, sputter, throw
sparks, and hiss at you?
"There are stranger things in Heaven and Earth
than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my dear
 Marx Kaye,
Lima, Peru, S. A.

*We thank you very much for your letter. It*
*just adds more to the amazing story we have*
*been accumulating from letters such as yours. —*
*Ed.*