Page 64 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

boast themselves children of the Sun and from whom they derived their idolatrous
worship of the Sun, they had an ample account of the deluge. They say that in it
perished all races of men and created things insomuch that the waters rose above
the highest mountain peaks in the world. No living thing survived except a man
and a woman who remained in a box and, when the waters subsided, the wind
carried them ... to Tiahuanaco [where] the creator began to raise up the people
and the nations that are in that region ...
5
Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish nobleman and an Inca royal
woman, was already familiar to me from his Royal Commentaries of the
Incas. He was regarded as one of the most reliable chroniclers of the
traditions of his mother’s people and had done his work in the sixteenth
century, soon after the conquest, when those traditions had not yet been
contaminated by foreign influences. He, too, confirmed what had
obviously been a universal and deeply impressed belief: ‘After the waters
of the deluge had subsided, a certain man appeared in the country of
Tiahuanaco ...’
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That man had been Viracocha. Wrapped in his cloak, he was strong and
august of countenance’ and walked with unassailable confidence through
the most dangerous badlands. He worked miracles of healing and could
call down fire from heaven. To the Indians it must have seemed that he
had materialized from nowhere.

Ancient traditions

We were now more than two hours into our journey to Machu Picchu and
the panorama had changed. Huge black mountains, upon which not a
trace of snow remained to reflect the sunlight, towered darkly above us
and we seemed to be running through a rocky defile at the end of a
narrow valley filled with sombre shadows. The air was cold and so were
my feet. I shivered and resumed reading.
One thing was obvious amid the confused web of legends I had
reviewed, legends which supplemented one another but also at times
conflicted. All the scholars agreed that the Incas had borrowed, absorbed
and passed on the traditions of many of the different civilized peoples
over whom they had extended their control during the centuries of
expansion of their vast empire. In this sense, whatever the outcome of
the historical debate over the antiquity of the Incas themselves, nobody
could seriously dispute their role as transmitters of the ancient belief
systems of all the great archaic cultures—coastal and highland, known
and unknown—that had preceded them in this land.
And who could say just what civilizations might have existed in Peru in
the unexplored regions of the past? Every year archaeologists come up

Fr.. Molina, 'Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Yngas', in South American Mythology,
5
p. 61.
6 Royal Commentaries of the Incas.

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