Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials (9 page)

Maybe, but this can only be speculation, this was some kind of "concrete casting," and-again maybe-was where the urns lay that the constructors left for the generations of the distant future. I have looked for this "uncommonly ugly" block and have not been able to locate it-not in the Open-air Museum of La Paz, nor in the junkyard of Puma Punku.

Arthur Posnansky was somewhat perplexed by his first views of Puma Punku: "One is somewhat shocked by that which one sees and it seems almost as if one were standing in front of a cyclopean workshop." ("En el primer momento unoqueda aturdido al ver algo que pareceria taller de ciclopos.")55 Later, Posnansky allocated the rubble yard of Puma Punku to the first and oldest period. Although he suspected that Puma Punku was some kind of Moon temple, he finally conceded that the ruins will probably always remain an enigma. The translation of Puma Punku, by the way, is "gateway of the puma." Posnansky asked the older men about their histories, and they assured him that the original name had been "Winay Marca," which meant "eternal city." An ideal name for the ruins of Puma Punku.

The quintessence of Posnansky's research culminates in the following:

It is attestable beyond doubt that the main temple [of Tiwanaku; author's addition] was an observatory which was aligned to the astronomical meridian and also, at the same time, an ingeniously devised stone calendar.... And the hieroglyphic and symbolic inscriptions on the sun gate are nothing less than a detailed description of the calendar's various functions .16

limate Change? Nothing New

Posnansky's findings were not accepted blindly-even back in those days. Like Hans Horbiger, Posnansky was convinced by the idea of "glacial epochs." He had discovered an ancient building with walls that were almost 12 feet thick in a bay at Lake Titicaca. He wrote about it in the Bolivian daily El Diario from July 14, 1931: "It is well known that the Earth has gone through several ice ages during which broad lakes and meltwater accumulated that once covered the entire Bolivian-Peruvian high plain.. .this building must have been built before the ice age at a time when Lake Titicaca was not as big as it is now...."

Everyone has heard of the concept of climate change-nowadays! But back in Posnansky's day they were already talking about climate changes-in the plural! We're not talking about examining ozone holes-we didn't have the technology back then-or taking ice cores in the Antarctic. A hundred years ago, it was all about picks and shovels and good sense. The results were the same as now. Edmund Kiss, who admittedly was a follower of Horbiger and researched in Tiwanaku after Posnansky, confirmed what others after him were also forced to concede: "The fact that Tiwanaku was once completely under water is certain. The large stairway in Tiwanaku is covered in a thin layer of calcium that was must have been deposited by water. It is so firmly attached that you need to take a knife to scratch off a sample...."57

Kiss believed that Tiwanaku had been destroyed by a flood and cited bone remains as his proof:

The bones of people and animals, including many species that are now extinct, lie in wild confusion in Tiwanaku's alluvial sediments. This bone sediment is at one point 3.5 meters thick.... At one point, the railroad track runs through a gully with sides 3.5 meters high and this does not even break through the bone sediment. Under the rails, the same sediment can be seen, consisting of millions upon millions of smaller and larger bones, fragments of glazed ceramic malachite pearls and much more .... 11

Like Posnansky, Edmund Kiss also confirmed the existence of "tidemarks" that ran along the cliffs for many miles. Posnansky had assumed that the highlands of Bolivia had been flooded many times because the Earth's axis had changed pushing the entire Andes region upward. Kiss, however, rejected this standpoint. But he remained convinced that Tiwanaku had been flooded at some point. The attentive observer Kiss also noted that it was not only the village church of Tiwanaku that had been built from stone stolen from the ruins of Tiwanaku, but also the great cathedral of the capital La Paz.

n Ice Age Calendar

Edmund Kiss then concentrated on the depictions on the Gateway of the Sun. He noted that-without exception-the winged forms on the frieze all had just four fingers on each hand and only three toes on each foot. After many years of study, Kiss came up with a theory that was so oddball that he felt compelled to apologize before even mentioning it:

...let me beg you now, do not just set the book down. And let me also implore you, after reading the information which I am about to impart...not to call the doctor and beg him to prescribe the poor author a course of cold-water treatments. He assures you that he is indeed healthy and it is not easy for him to proffer his broad shoulders for the inevitable crushing laughter to come .... 11

At least the man had a sense of humor! So which impossible theory are we talking about here?

1. That the Gateway of the Sun in Tiwanaku is a calendar marking 12 periods of the year. It also displays the solstices and the equinoxes.

2. Each of these 12 periods has 24 days. Only the months February and April have 25.

1.12. An excerpt from Edmund Kiss's calendar. Public domain image.

3. Each of these days has 30 hours.

4. Each of these hours has 22 minutes.

At first glance, it does seem a little crazy. But Kiss backed up every single infinitesimal detail on the frieze of the Gateway of the Sun. ("Frieze" here means the lower part, not the 48 winged forms above.) Kiss calculated backward and forward; he neglected nothing-not even the tiniest detail: Everything was correct. Every tiny circle had an exact meaning; every "puma head" or "snake tail" fit exactly into his calendar theory. Kiss showed pictures of the frieze to many of his scientific colleagues, and asked them to count it for themselves and disprove his calculations. Not one of them could. It only worked, though, on the premise that a year actually did have 12 months made up of 24 days at 30 hours, and every hour of 22 minutes. Did the ancient residents of Tiwanaku really use a calendar like this? And if they did, when? How many thousands of years ago? Before the last ice age?

I would love to give you Edmund Kiss's variation on the calendar right here, but I would have to quote at least 30 pages from his book, and that's just not possible. Those of you who really want to know will just have to go and seek out the book for yourselves. It always helps to have a picture, to give yourself an idea of what Kiss was actually talking about. Kiss himself concluded:

Can it really be a coincidence? Or is it the deluded invention of a man who-come what may-is determined to decipher the calendar on the Gateway of the Sun in Tiwanaku? Well, in that case the number of coincidences is piling up at an alarming rate! No, the interpretation of these pictograms is not forced: it came about almost of itself as soon as the hieroglyphs on the base had been deciphered. The three references indicating where the lunar cycles are to be found depending on the year and the month, as well as how they are to be counted, are of such a compelling logic that the way they are depicted on the calendar can only described ingenious.60

Was everything that the worthy doctors Edmund Kiss and Arthur Posnansky claimed to have discovered all just bunk? Well, put it this way: They weren't the only ones. After the Second World War a number of others followed. And let's not forget that we really should treat these two as completely separate figures, not least because of their wildly different ideologies. Hans Horbiger, propagator of the World Ice Theory, was known as a Nazi sympathizer and hated Jews. Arthur Posnansky, on the other hand, was no follower of Horbiger, but he did support the theory that Tiwanaku had been destroyed by flooding at the end of the last ice age. The oldest building phase in Tiwanaku, at least, is from before the last ice age. Edmund Kiss, on the other hand, was certainly a follower of Horbiger-at least inasmuch as the World Ice Theory was concerned, I've never read anything about him being an antisemite. The next man in our list of researchers actually was a Jew: Prof. Hans Schindler Bellamy. In 1974, this highly educated and dear old man handed me a copy of his book with a personal dedication and begged me to make sure that researchers never turned their backs on Tiwanaku. I'm still doing that to this day.61

Colossal Discovery

Archaeologists working under the patronage of the American Museum of Natural History in New York started excavations at Tiwanaku in 1932. Accompanying them, as a kind of coordinator, was Professor Arthur Posnansky. In the earth of the so-called "old temple" the Americans found a block of stone that they initially were unable to lift out. As they dug deeper they realized they had found a huge statue that had been worked from a single monolithic column. (See images 1.13 and 1.14.) The diggers estimated its weight to be around 20 tons. The block was made of reddish sandstone, and it was damp and covered in a mixture of dirt and clay soil. It must have been lying in its moist bed for thousands of years. Using beams and rope pulleys, they heaved the statue out of the mire and set it initially on a wooden plinth to dry.

A few weeks later, after they had gently scraped away the dirt with soft brushes, they discovered that the column was covered in fantastic messages. On its head it wore a hat, and on both sides of its long nose there were two rectangular eyes. The hands converging on the figure's chest were holding objects that look like cups. Underneath were two winged beings of the same kind as on the Gateway of the Sun. Finally, there were indefinable scales on the thighs and feet, each of which bears five toes. The diggers stared in amazement as they saw the rear side of this mighty form. It appeared to be a message from the ancient past! There were engraved faces, like those on the Gateway of the Sun, and to the right and left there were winged beings, crowns, scepters, snakes, condor heads, and so on. (See image 1.15.) The more than a thousand engravings are all aligned in perfect symmetry; not a 10th of a millimeter is free on either side. The master of engraving who committed his ideas to stone all those millennia ago must have used some sort of stencil; otherwise this work would just not have been possible. But what was the message he or they were trying to convey? What was it all supposed to show?