Monday, September 27, 2010

A Cosmology?



The video clip above from Shift of the Ages, "Tata and Titicaca", features the guide Rose Marie, who led our small group in 2004 on an excursion through the lake, to the Island of the Sun, and to Tiahuanaco which was possibly constructed in 15,000 BC. I wrote earlier about the monumental ruins and excavations, and it turns out that Tiahuanaco is an old port city miles from the lake, and there are more ruins below the surface of the lake itself.

Some of the old ruins and temples are on the Island of the Sun, and Rose Marie took us to many sacred places and taught us the blessings, the use of the flowers and the scattering of pure alcohol into the ground - a version of holy water. Remember that the ancient practitioners had to distill the alcohol using simpler and more primitive methods, so it was comparatively difficult to obtain and relatively expensive.

The Bolivians have ancient Andean legends about the lake, about how it was the birthplace of civilization. Viracocha, the creator deity, lightened a dark world by having the sun, moon, and stars rise from the lake to occupy their places in the sky. Life in the Incan empire was measured by a thousand year cosmic cycle called an Inti, which means 'Sun'. There is also talk of the legend and carved formation known as "Gate of the Gods".

Myriad archaeological, astronomical and NASA satellite earth studies have unearthed some highly unusual theories about how these legends and remnants of ancient history may be linked together in a cosmological fashion to larger structures in the solar system and its consequential impact on planetary systems. It's an expanson of the view of the earth as not in isolation as a planetary system, but as an integral part of a much larger system that is playing out in an unusual fashion at this particular point in time. Hence, the "Shift of the Ages".