Chapter 9
During my travels in the Andes I had several times re-read a curious variant of the mainstream tradition of Viracocha. In this variant, which was from the area around Lake Titicaca known as the Collao, the deity civilizing-hero had been named Thunupa:
Thunupa appeared on the Altiplano in ancient times, coming from the north with five disciples. A white man of august presence, blue-eyed, and bearded, he was sober, puritanical and preached against drunkenness, polygamy and war.1
After travelling great distances through the Andes, where he created a peaceful kingdom and taught men all the arts of civilization,2 Thunupa was struck down and grievously wounded by a group of jealous conspirators:
They put his blessed body in a boat of totora rush and set it adrift on Lake Titicaca. There … he sailed away with such speed that those who had tried so cruelly to kill him were left behind in terror and astonishment – for this lake has no current … The boat came to the shore at Cochamarca, where today is the river Desguardero. Indian tradition asserts that the boat struck the land with such force it created the river Desguardero, which before then did not exist. And on the water so released the holy body was carried many leagues away to the sea coast at Arica …3
Boats, water and salvation
There are curious parallels here to the story of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian high god of death and resurrection. The fullest account of the original myth defining this mysterious figure is given by Plutarch4 and says that, after bringing the gifts of civilization to his people, teaching them all manner of useful skills, abolishing cannibalism and human sacrifice, and providing them with their first legal code, Osiris left Egypt and travelled about the world to spread the benefits of civilization to other nations as well. He never forced the barbarians he encountered to accept his laws, preferring instead to argue with them and to appeal to their reason. It is also recorded that he passed on his teachings to them by means of hymns and songs accompanied by musical instruments.
While he was gone, however, he was plotted against by seventy-two members of his court, led by his brother-in-law Set. On his return the conspirators invited him to a banquet where a splendid coffer of wood and gold was offered as a prize to any guest who could fit into it exactly. Osiris did not know that the coffer had been constructed precisely to his body measurements. As a result, when the assembled guests tried one by one to get into it they failed. Osiris lay down comfortably inside. Before he had time to get out the conspirators rushed forward, nailed the lid tightly closed and sealed even the cracks with molten lead so that there would be no air. The coffer was then thrown into the Nile. It had been intended that it should sink, but it floated rapidly away, drifting for a considerable distance until it reached the sea coast.
At this point the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, intervened. Using all the great magic for which she was renowned, she found the coffer and concealed it in a secret place. However, her evil brother Set, out hunting in the marshes, discovered the coffer, opened it and, in a mad fury, cut the royal corpse into fourteen pieces which he scattered throughout the land.
Once more Isis set off to save her husband. She made a small boat of papyrus reeds, coated with pitch, and embarked on the Nile in search of the remains. When she had found them she worked powerful spells to reunite the dismembered parts of the body so that it resumed its old form. Thereafter, in an intact and perfect state, Osiris went through a process of stellar rebirth to become god of the dead and king of the underworld – from which place, legend had it, he occasionally returned to earth in the guise of a mortal man.5
Although there are huge differences between the traditions it is bizarre that Osiris in Egypt and Thunupa–Viracocha in South America should have had all of the following points in common:
• both were great civilizers;
• both were conspired against;
• both were struck down;
• both were sealed inside a container or vessel of some kind;
• both were then cast into water;
• both drifted away on a river;
• both eventually reached the sea.
Are such parallels to be dismissed as coincidences? or could there be some underlying connection?
Reed boats of Suriqui
The air was Alpine cold and I was sitting on the front of a motor launch doing about twenty knots across the icy waters of Lake Titicaca. The sky above was clear blue, reflecting aquamarine and turquoise tints inshore, and the vast body of the lake, glinting in copper and silver tones, seemed to stretch away for ever …
The passages in the legends that spoke of vessels made of reeds needed to be followed up because I knew that ‘boats of totora rush’ were a traditional form of transport on this lake. However, the ancient skills required to build craft of this type had atrophied in recent years and we were now headed towards Suriqui, the one place where they were still properly made.
On Suriqui Island, in a small village close to the lakeshore, I found two elderly Indians making a boat from bundled totora rushes. The elegant craft, which appeared to be nearly complete, was approximately fifteen feet long. It was wide amidships, but narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern.
I sat down for a while to watch. The more senior of the two builders, who wore a brown felt hat over a curious peaked woollen cap, repeatedly braced his bare left foot against the side of the vessel to give additional leverage as he pulled and tightened the cords that held the bundles of reeds in place. From time to time I noticed that he rubbed a length of cord against his own perspiring brow – thus moistening it to increase its adhesion.
The boat, surrounded by chickens and occasionally investigated by a shy, browsing alpaca, stood amid a litter of discarded rushes in the backyard of a ramshackle farmhouse. It was one of several I was able to study over the next few hours and, though the setting was unmistakably Andean, I found myself repeatedly overtaken by a sense of déjà vu from another place and another time. The reason was that the totora vessels of Suriqui were virtually identical, both in the method of construction and in finished appearance, to the beautiful craft fashioned from papyrus reeds in which the Pharaohs had sailed the Nile thousands of years previously. In my travels in Egypt I had examined the images of many such vessels painted on the walls of ancient tombs. It sent a tingle down my spine to see them now so colourfully brought to life on an obscure island on Lake Titicaca – even though my research had partially prepared me for this coincidence. I knew that no satisfactory explanation had ever been given for how such close and richly detailed similarities of boat design could occur in two such widely separated places. Nevertheless, in the words of one authority in ancient navigation who had addressed himself to this conundrum:
Here was the same compact shape, peaked and raised at both ends with rope lashings running from the deck right round the bottom of the boat all in one piece … Each straw was placed with maximum precision to achieve perfect symmetry and streamlined elegance, while the bundles were so tightly lashed that they looked like … gilded logs bent into a clog-shaped peak fore and aft.6
The reed boats of the ancient Nile, and the reed boats of Lake Titicaca (the original design of which, local Indians insisted, had been given to them by ‘the Viracocha people’7), had other points in common. Both, for example, were equipped with sails mounted on peculiar two-legged straddled masts.8 Both had also been used for the long-distance transport of exceptionally heavy building materials: obelisks and gargantuan blocks of stone bound for the temples at Giza and Luxor and Abydos on the one hand and for the mysterious edifices of Tiahuanaco on the other.
In those far-off days, before Lake Titicaca became more than one hundred feet shallower, Tiahuanaco had stood at the water’s edge overlooking a vista of awesome and sacred beauty. Now the great port, capital city of Viracocha himself, lay lost amid eroded hills and empty windswept plains.
Road to Tiahuanaco …
After returning from Suriqui to the mainland we drove our hired jeep across those plains, raising a cloud of dust. Our route took us through the towns of Puccarani and Laha, populated by stolid Aymara Indians who walked slowly in the narrow cobbled streets and sat placidly in the little sunlit plazas.
Were these people the descendants of the builders of Tiahuanaco, as the scholars insisted? Or were the legends right? Had the ancient city been the work of foreigners with godlike powers who had settled here, long ages ago?