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The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time

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William Sullivan decodes the myths of the Incas.

Secrets of the Incas chronicles how Dr Sullivan first learned to decode ancient Andean myths. These myths - which were recorded by the Spanish at the time of their conquest of the Incas - are, according to Dr Sullivan, a 'message in a bottle' from the Incas to future generations. Dr Sullivan describes how he decoded the myths and how this led him to certain important dates in Andean prehistory and history. A glossary defines and explains various Andean mythological and historical terms, and a timeline shows what Dr Sullivan believes to be the correspondence between mythological, astronomical and archaeological events in the high Andes - how, in effect, what was happening in the heavens was mirrored by what was happening on Earth

On the evening of 15 November 1532, a band of 175 hardened Spanish adventurers crossed a pass in the high Andes. Looking down upon a broad, fertile valley in northern Peru, they became the first Europeans to make contact with the Incas, whose highly developed empire stretched 3,000 miles from Chile to Colombia and had a population of six million. On the following day, in what ranks as one of the strangest events in all recorded history, the Spaniards managed to seize the Inca king Atahuallpa and, in the ensuing panic, used the advantage of their 120 warhorses to kill and wound 10,000 Inca warriors. From that day onward, through luck and guile, and with reinforcements soon pouring in from Panama, the Spaniards - who came in search of gold and glory, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church - never relinquished the edge they seized in that first fateful encounter.

What the Spaniards never knew, and what history does not record, was the reason for the apparently inexplicable collapse of the greatest land empire on the face of the Earth.

Secrets of the Incas explores the baffling and tragic vulnerability of the Inca empire and comes to a startling conclusion: the Spanish had appeared at precisely the right place and at just the right time to fulfil an ancient, astronomically based prophecy of doom.

This conclusion is the result of two decades of research by American scholar Dr William Sullivan into the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of the Incas and how they encrypted this in their myths. Secrets of the Incas presents completely new evidence taken from an Inca myth. In this, Dr William Sullivan believes, lies the key to the basis of the old man's prophecy and, indeed, to the formation of the Inca empire itself. This myth is nothing less than a dire warning of an impending precessional event that, to the Incas, predicted future ruin.

The 'gate' or 'bridge' to the land of the ancestors - that is, the rising of the December solstice Sun with the Milky Way - was about to be washed away. Drawing on their ancient mythological database, the Incas reasoned - from the principle 'as above, so below' - that loss of contact with the ancestors, upon which their religious beliefs were founded, would mean their way of life would be destroyed on Earth.

It was this prophecy that stirred the first Inca emperor to action: if time was merciless, it had to be stopped. So the entire Inca empire, which was less than a century old when the Spanish arrived, became involved in an attempt at cosmic regulation - to change the course of the stars by changing the course of human history on Earth: 'as below, so above.'

William Sullivan decodes the myths of the Incas to reveal an astoundingly precise record of astronomical events. The Incas accepted their fate as written in the stars.

Sullivan's book follows in the path of Santillana and Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill". That famous work set the foundations of a completely new paradigm in mythographical thinking: the astronomical interpretation of myth. What Sullivan presents here is a brilliant application of Santillana and Dechend's thesis to a specific geographical and historical context: the precolumbian Andean world (more specifically, the Tiahuanaco, Huari and Inca cultures). Part of the reason why Hamlet's Mill has not been accepted with general enthusiasm among the majority of mythographers, historians, and anthropologists may have been that book's style: a decorated, visionary prose which, while loaded with an impressive amount of references, perhaps lacked somewhat in academic rigor and scepticism. "The Secret of the Incas" does not fall in this mistake. With exemplary lucidity, irrefutable syllogisms, considering the pros and cons of each argument, Sullivan proves his points without the semblance of being biased. The argumentation of this book satisfies all academic standards right until the very last chapter. (In the last chapter the author loses his self-control and writes a great deal of nonsense from all fields of science from chaos theory to the Gaia hypothesis -but this can be pardoned in view of the previous chapters.)

William Sullivan has presented me with one of the most convincing "alternate history" books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Building upon the theories first explored in the landmark "Hamlet's Mill" by De Santillana and von Dechend, Mr. Sullivan takes what little is known about the history of the Incas and the Andean peoples and helps those interested make sense of it all. Thankfully, "The Secret of the Incas" is written in a much more digestable manner than "Hamlet's Mill".

The Inca Empire peaked for a brief moment and was then crushed by the invading Spanish in a very short period of time. There have been many theories as to how the Spanish were able to conquer most of the South American continent in such a brisk stroke, one of which involves the natives mistaking the invaders for "gods". The facts presented by Sullivan point to an even more mind-boggling fate.

The Andean peoples (and the Incas who followed) were convinced that their fate was intertwined with the movements of the stars and planets. Astrology, as the Andean people interpreted it, was an unalterable fate, as impossible to deny as the need of air to breathe. These beliefs incorporated everything from their historical writings to their political attitudes towards their neighbors.

Mr. Sullivan has impressed me with his interpretations of Andean thought. His work is conservative and he checks and re-checks his conclusions well. I had a lot of fun reading his theories, although some sections seemed to drag a little. His ending thoughts on "how" the Andean people might have originally become so obsessed with astrological readings and their terrestrial consequences are not so great, and I skimmed the last chapter which dealt with "chaos theory" and the like. He's not the first author who's gone off on a tangent to conclude a theoretical book though; I'll just pretend I didn't read those sections, haha.

"The Secret of the Incas" is a concise, well-presented book and I would recommend it VERY highly to those searching for "alternative" history books that don't insult the reader.

The Secret of the Incas : Myth, Astronomy,
and the War Against Time
by WILLIAM SULLIVAN
Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition (May 20, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN: 0517888513

COSMIC RELATIONS

'The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time' is an incredible collection of research by William Sullivan on ancient myths and their relationship to animals, ancient cultures and astronomical bodies aligned with world events. This book is delightful in knowledge and majorly intense. The following paper was written as an introduction to his work. I am always pleased to bring only the higest quality
research for the reader's enjoyment and education.

Dr. Colette M. Dowell
Circular Times

SECRET OF THE INCAS

By William Sullivan

In 1969 a book was published which figured to revolutionize the study of human history. This was Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, written by two historians of science, Giorgio de Santillana of MIT and Hertha von Dechend of Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. The startling hypothesis of this book was that myth, on one level, constitutes nothing less than a technical language created to encrypt and pass on very sophisticated astronomical observations related to the precession of the equinoxes.

The precession is a gyroscopic-like wobble of the earth's axis of rotation requiring 26,000 years to complete a single cycle. Two aspects of this work - which the authors themselves styled a "first reconnaissance" into the subject - were pure dynamite. First, if the ideas in the book were true, then those myths which are astronomically encrypted are self-dating, that is they carry a record of a moment in precessional time that is at least as accurate as a radio carbon date. This view renders obsolete the concept of "prehistory" which is defined as "before the written record."

Second the authors found that a very precise and idiosyncratically expressed religious cosmology, linking world ages to the gain or loss (due to precessional motion) of "access" to the Milky Way at solstices and equinoxes is found in cultures all over the world. The clear implication of these ideas was that an unexplored, and highly dramatic history of the human race awaits engagement by students of the human legacy.

I was so bowled over by these ideas when I first encountered them - in 1974 - that I eventually realized I had to know if they were true. The very first thing I learned was that there is no university in world where you can go to learn anything whatsoever about these ideas. The academy, for reasons of its own, has chosen to ignore the profound implications of this work for going on 25 years now.

My own book, The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time (Crown 1996), is an account of my own twenty year journey of exploration into the astronomy of myth, and I am happy to report that this odyssey was not undertaken in vain.

The Gateway God of Tiahuanaco Courtesy: 'Secret of the Incas' copyright 1996 William Sullivan

I am now certain that Hamlet's Mill will, sooner or later, revolutionize our understanding of our past and even who we are as human beings. I have taken rather a long time in setting up a brief discussion of my book because I want to make clear that what I found out about the Incas came as a complete surprise. I didn't set out in search of esoteric prophecies or experiments in geomancy on the scale of empire. I had initially chosen the Incas to study because they had no writing and hence relied largely on oral tradition - myth - for the transmission of information across time.

Furthermore, it seemed to me that if the cosmology described in Hamlet's Mill really was operative in the southern Andes, then truly we must be looking at a world-wide phenomenon. From the beginning of my research, however, I was constantly made aware of the strangeness of the events surrounding the formation and destruction of the Inca Empire.

Few people realize that this empire was less than a century old when it was utterly destroyed by a handful of Spanish conquistadors. In 1532 a Spanish expeditionary force of 175 hardened adventurers, under the command of Francisco Pizarro, ascended the Andean massif in search of a fabled Empire of Gold. Unknown to them as they approached two great Inca armies were engaged in the climactic battle of a great civil war of succession. When, on November 15, the Spanish force reached the ridgeline overlooking the valley of Cajamarca the victorious Inca king Atahuallpa was completing the third day of a fast of thanksgiving for his victory. What the Spanish saw was an encamped army of 40,000 men. That night the Spanish made out their wills and said confession. Yet on the morrow, given the advantage of surprise and horses, they would engage this army, capture the Inca and kill or wound 10,000 men.

Only years later would I realize that the legends that the Inca Empire was born under the shadow of a prophecy were all true. About the year 1432 the father of the first Inca Emperor foretold that after five generations of Kings the Empire and its religion would be utterly destroyed. The fifth and last king to rule the Empire unmolested was Huayna Capac, father of Atahuallpa.

In my research I first found that Inca myths did indeed encrypt precessional information. The first stories which I came to understand concerned a "flood" which destroyed the entire "world" but which was survived by a peasant along with his family and flocks who ascended the "highest mountain in the world" to weather the storm. Applying the "tool kit" of Hamlet's Mill, I regarded mythical animals as representing the constellations named after them; topographic references as analogues for positions of the sun on the celestial sphere; and mythical "gods" as planets.

As a result I learned that these flood myths yielded a date of 650 A.D., which corresponds precisely to the latest archaeological findings in the Andes that a repressive, secular and militaristic empire, known as Wari, suddenly conquered the greater portion of the Andean Highlands beginning in the early 7th Century.

The astronomical, or precessional event which took place at this time was the failure (for the first time in 800 years) of the Milky Way to be visible at sunrise on June solstice. In cosmological terms, this meant that the gates of the land of the gods had slammed shut. Years later I would find the myth - the foundation document of the Inca Empire, really - that formed the theoretical basis for the Inca prophecy.

In 1432 the Inca priest astronomers could see that a predictable precessional event loomed in the future, only this time it was the gates to the land of the dead which were about to slam shut. It was this predictable event which gave rise to prophecy. Since the foundations of Andean religion rested upon ritual interchange with the ancestors at December solstice, the closing of the "gate," if taken literally, would indeed bode the end of everything.

Finally, I learned that the Inca Empire was conceived and formed for the sole purpose of stopping this event from happening. The Inca Empire was an experiment in sympathetic magic, designed to stop time in the sense of precessional motion. The primary means for achieving this end were the ritual uses of warfare and of human sacrifice. Since each tribe in the Empire had from the most ancient times considered itself descended from a particular star or constellation, the Incas offered a yearly sacrifice of a child from every tribe in order to send emissaries back to the stars with a single message: "May the earth not turn over, may the sun and moon stay young, may there be peace." a plea to the creator to keep open the bridgehead to tradition that spanned the Milky Way.

The creator's response was a terrible one, for he sent the Spanish, who arrived precisely on time. The Incas were never able to regain the edge which they gave up initially on that first day in Cajamarca, and so the prophecy came true. Now, this is a strange story, a story so powerful in fact that it threatens to swamp what I think is the real significance of the research I have done. The Incas were a test case.

By applying the tools of Hamlet's Mill to a single culture, and in depth, the history of a so-called "prehistoric" people has been rewritten. Along the way I found that the Incas shared with peoples all over the world access to a peculiar meta-language - the technical language of myth - which is so distinctive and so idiosyncratic that no mechanism other than seaborne contact appears adequate to explain its wide diffusion. The implications of this finding are staggering. It means that we are all heirs a world-wide civilization of great time-depth of which we have virtually no notion. The histories of the individual peoples who participated in this great tradition lie gathering dust on dark library shelves, classified as "myths."

Meanwhile the academy continues to turn its back on this, the heritage of the human race, a system of thought which gave rise simultaneously to the human scientific tradition and to human religion as well. Indeed all the world's great religions, including Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism, Shamanism and Native American Great Spirit religion, make frequent, respectful reference to this ancient system of thought. From Newgrange in Ireland (ca. 3200 B.C.) to Angkor Wat, from Tiahuanaco to Babylon, from Giza to Hawaii, we live in the ruins of a civilization whose very existence we only dimly suspect.

As the precessional clock ticks onward - a clock whose rhythms the ancients were convinced gave clues to the rhythms of human history - perhaps it is past time that we humans reclaim our history, which is our birthright, and with it perhaps reclaim some of the more sacred aspects of our human nature.

by William Sullivan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Sullivan is a native New Englander. Educated at Harvard College, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Rajasthan India, and later studied the History of Religion under J.G Bennett at Sherborne House in Gloucestershire, England. In 1988, after several years of fieldwork in Peru and Bolivia, he received a doctorate in American Indian Studies from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He lives in central Massachusetts with his wife Penelope and their children Phoebe and Jonathan. There are bears in the backyard.

DR. Colette M. Dowell

I have admired the "Lords of the Andes" since I was young, and puzzled at how such a capable people could have been defeated by a few hundred european invaders. The explanation we got in school was that the Incas cowered before gunpowder, horses and steel. Sullivan's book presents a much more credible explanation for the Inca's collapse, and along the way shows us the tragic and touching humanity of perhaps the greatest pre-columbian culture.

While this work does not provide absolute or concrete evidence, it does contain enough documented information that a very small leap of faith in the thought process of the Andean populations present in pre-Columbian SA will convince you of the truth of Mr. Sullivan's meritous effort.
Numerous reviews refer to this as an alternate history work, however off hand there is nothing I remember about it necessarily contradicting accepted history. Mr. Sullivan provides diagrams and star charts (which I later verified w/my own software) to solidify his claims. His years of research paid off with a in my opinion a viable answer to one of history's most difficult-to-answer questions. A definate must buy if you are interested in archaeoastronomy or just an extremely interesting read.

This book is every bit as entertaining as the run-of-the-mill speculative/paranormal UFO-from-Atlantis books with which it is unfortunately cross-listed on Amazon, but the author's scholarly rigor makes it much more satisfying. Sullivan supports his fascinatingly unconventional conclusions with evidence, sound reasoning, and a bit of self-critical skepticism.

But the real charm of this book is the fact that he pursued such a crazy theory in the first place. Behind the scholarship is a "guy-with-a-crazy-dream" human-interest story (e.g. Fitzcarraldo, Field of Dreams). This would make perfect film material for Werner Herzog. To hear the author tell it, he spent several years in the academic wilderness (as well as the Andean wilderness), chasing after the (wholly-unsupported) hypothesis that Incan myth encodes both astronomy and Andean history. To his advisers, this must have sounded a lot like writing a grant to study the pyramids of Mars. For a lesser intellect, this would have been a career-killer and the reader gets the sense that Sullivan knew it. One of the best parts of the book recounts Sullivan's meeting with Owen Gingerich and "the Vatican Astronomer" at the Harvard planetarium. He's clearly terrified that these eminent astronomers will think he's a kook. But when they conclude: "he's done his homework," Sullivan breathes a sigh of relief.

A word of warning: get the hardback. I got the paperback edition and the binding was defective and the first 50 pages fell out the first time I read them.

An excellent book which challenges many of the basic assumptions about ancient civilisations. It shows that they were highly interested in the skies, which dominated their day-to-day lives. This goes against the majority materialistic view. However, the structure of the book is sometimes not all that clear and the reader is left wondering what is the point the author is making, before it being stated only a couple of pages further on. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in slightly non-orthodox popints of view. It is a book backed by both Hancock (Keeper of Genesis fame) and Brian Fagan (orthodox archaeologist)

The author examines Inka and Mayan myths using a variety of tools, and many, many words. To the first myth he applies the theories in Hamlets Mill to explain why the Foxes tail is black and pinpoint AD 650 as the rise of warfare in the Andes. From here it's mostly downhill.

The author then drags us through his own internal mental processes of doubt and disbelief as he looks at other myths. Through this long process he forcefully and unnecessarily brings up many biases such as there is no proof that a matriarchal society ever existed anywhere in the world. Period. He returns to the subject of matriarchal disbelief many times calling it a big 'red flag'. He leads us through his admitted internal stubborness of this and many other issues.

Although I believe the author is correct in his assocation with the Fox's tail being black being a celestial event ala Hamlets Mills, he spends so many words looking at other myths from a plethora of angles that you are forced into a single conclusion. That no one outside of a culture has any clue at what a given myth really means. The entire book is like running naked through the forest yelling out conclusions about myths which rightly are interpreted only by their creators.

At one point in the discussion of 'finding father' he claims that the Andean man lacked a true heart with the ability to love while he was primarily a hunter within a matrilinear horticultural society. Andean man only gained his heart and full ability to love when the culture changed to fully agriculture and he had to stay at home with the wife and kids. Give me a break. To any Andean person alive this is rubbish. What kinds of conclusions and judgements can we make living outside the cultural box. It is this kind of subtle talk that is a jaguars hair short of prejudice and racism.

Ultimately, although if you like reading from the 'academic' view, this book does lead you through enough alleys to make you feel like the author knows what he is talking about, ultimately it fails from it's biases and from being rooted in a combination of sexism and western scientific dogma.

If the author wanted to really understand the Andean mind then he would have had to undergo a process of breaking open his head and surrendering to the mystery of myth reather than trying to break open the myths using the rational mind. Myth is mythic. A view which ultimately escapes the author. It might be worth it to take this book on if you have a university paper to write. It will certainly scintillate your professor being of the same vocabulary and possibly biases. But if you are looking to expanding your understanding of the Inka or Andean cultures from a spiritual or mythic perspective then look elsewhere. Get yourself to South America, Peru, spend time with the shamans. Then you can learn what myth is really about. And how it lives today.

If you are not educated in mythology and the like, skip this book. I thought it would describe the history of the Inca Empire and mention mythology while doing so, but this book is MAINLY about the mythology itself. Only for experts in the field if you ask me, not for the general public. Written in a boring style.