Page 63 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Before me was a passage from Fr. Jose de Acosta’s Natural and Moral
History of the Indies, in which the learned priest set out ‘what the Indians
themselves report of their beginning’:

They make great mention of a deluge, which happened in their country ... The
Indians say that all men were drowned in the deluge, and they report that out of
Lake Titicaca came one Viracocha, who stayed in Tiahuanaco, where at this day
there are to be seen the ruins of ancient and very strange buildings, and from
1
thence came to Cuzco, and so began mankind to multiply ...
Making a mental note to find out more about Lake Titicaca, and the
mysterious Tiahuanaco, I read the following passage summarizing a
legend from the Cuzco area:
For some crime unstated the people who lived in the most ancient times were
destroyed by the creator ... in a deluge. After the deluge the creator appeared in
human form from Lake Titicaca. He then created the sun and moon and stars.
After that he renewed the human population of the earth ...
2
In another myth
The great Creator God, Viracocha, decided to make a world for men to live in. First
he made the earth and sky. Then he began to make people to live in it, carving
great stone figures of giants which he brought to life. At first all went well but
after a time the giants began to fight among themselves and refused to work.
Viracocha decided that he must destroy them. Some he turned back into stone ...
the rest he overwhelmed with a great flood.
3
Very similar notions were, of course, found in other, quite unconnected,
sources, such as the Jewish Old Testament. In Chapter six of the Book of
Genesis, for example, which describes the Hebrew God’s displeasure with
his creation and his decision to destroy it, I had long been intrigued by
one of the few descriptive statements made about the forgotten era
before the Flood. According to the enigmatic language of that statement,
‘There were giants in the earth in those days ...’. Could the ‘giants’
4
buried in the biblical sands of the Middle East be connected in some
unseen way to the ‘giants’ woven into the fabric of pre-Colombian native
American legends? Adding considerably to the mystery was the fact that
the Jewish and Peruvian sources both went on, with many further details
in common, to depict an angry deity unleashing a catastrophic flood upon
a wicked and disobedient world.
On the next page of the sheaf of documents I had assembled was this
Inca account of the deluge handed down by a certain Father Molina in his
Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Yngas:

In the life of Manco Capac, who was the first Inca, and from whom they began to

1 José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Book I, Chapter four, in
South American Mythology, p. 61.
2 Ibid., p. 82.
D. Gifford and J. Sibbick, Warriors, Gods and Spirits from South American Mythology,
3
Eurobook Limited, 1983, p. 54.
4 Genesis 6:4.

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