Cusco, Peru - Ancient Wisdom for the Modern World

I introduced myself to two friends, Chris, a Canadian tourist, and Paul, a Peruvian historian, while buying my entrance ticket to the Museo Inka. In this moment began two days of lessons on the ancient civilizations of the region, furthering my awe for the history of the Andean peoples and whetting my appetite to explore it further. 

We began with the pre-Incan civilizations on the ground floor. Paul took us from artifact to artifact, pointing out styles, symbols, and materials, painting a picture of the lives of these people. For example, Chan Chan, a mud city located north of modern-day Lima, is the largest known mud city in the world, larger than Buruk, the famous mud city of Mesopotamia. There lived the Mochica who developed renowned pottery representing daily life and people. They portrayed the dead with no eyes or mouth, making pots that were hollow, allowing water to flow through the pot to create a musical sound. While there may be no evidence of books or scriptures, pottery served as books in ancient times. Whole stories painted onto a pot used in everyday life was how how historical events passed between generations.

South of modern-day Lima lived the Paracas people who are now famous for their elaborate tapestries. These tapestries were used to cover their dead, each corpse covered in up to 400 hand-embroidered tapestries upon burial. Most of these tapestries are intact today. They believed the dead were seeds that would come back energetically in different Pachas, epochs of time and space. A complete pacha is roughly 500 years and it is when the wisdom of the dead return to the living who need it. This belief was pervasive in the region and was adopted by the Incas.

Cusco was the heart of the Incan Empire. Not only the City of the Sun, it was also the place to study the stars because of its proximity to the cosmos at 3,400 meters above sea level. The Incan empire spanned southern Chile to northern Colombia. It used knowledge systems developed by all prior civilizations to build its own great civilization and then spread its style of music, language, textiles, and agricultural practices over the continent.

The Inca’s process of invasion looked like this: an army of thousands entered a village and spoke with its leaders. “Become Incas,” they would say. If the leaders said no, the army would dance for the villagers, demonstrating coordination, creativity, power, and grace. They would present their domestication of animals, their farming practices, their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. “Become Incas now that you see how great we are.” If still not willing to become Incas, and only as a last resort, the army would conquer the village by force. 

The Incas believed in right and wrong in the universe, similar to the concept of Karma. Sami was good energy and Haucha was bad energy that came about as a result of greed. Humans were the only life in the universe, or Causa Pacha, that could create Haucha with their actions. The army only killed others when deemed necessary, because taking another’s life brought Haucha. 

To become a leader in Incan times, one had to first abolish one’s ego through the practice of meditation and the study of the cosmos. A Pachacute is an emperor who is balanced and therefore brings peace and knowledge to the people. The term Inca refers to those who studied and practiced the way of the Inca and other people in the empire were known as Yanati, meaning Incan follower. As the empire expanded, it incorporated the cultures, traditions, myths, languages, and gods of the conquered, ever expanding its own cultural complexity and body of knowledge. From studying the stars, the Incas deduced that the world is round and even made boats to trade with places as far as Easter Island and Indonesia, bringing back with them the sweet potato. There is no evidence they went East over the Atlantic, but through studying the stars they predicted there must be more land to the East and one day, those people would come.

When the Spanish arrived, the Incas greeted them and showed them their rich society. They had stores of food for sixty times their population; no one was poor or hungry. Everyone had a purpose and contributed to society. They had mathematics, architecture, art, astronomy, and advanced agriculture. They had developed over 3,000 varieties of potatoes, some able to withstand drought or floods, all rich in nutrients, in addition to as many complex varieties of corn.

All of this was of no interest to the Spanish - they wanted gold, slaves, and land. They brutally murdered the emperors and local leaders, enslaved the people, and murdered those who refused enslavement. The history of the bloody conquest is well-documented.

The Spanish arrived and could only see savages in their way of expansion. As they raped and tortured the women, they wrote that the way of the Indian was degrading to women. They were unable to see the equal role women played in the society because in their own society, women were never seen as equal. As they destroyed buildings and urban infrastructure, they undervalued the advanced architecture and complex water systems of the Incas. They wrote the history books on a civilization they wanted to destroy through their insatiable appetite for land and gold. These are the books we still study in Peru and over the world. These are the narratives most guides know and teach to tourists. These are the stories told to children learning about their ancestors. 

The purpose of the conquest was to obliterate the Native, their knowledge, their power.

And yet, they survived - through the whispers of grandmothers; the villages that buried their roads to remain isolated; the constellations in the stars; in song, dance, and music; within the walls of the ancient sacred temples; within rituals under the guise of another religion. 

Five hundred years since the invasion and the immense loss of lives, stories, languages, and traditions, what remains is seeping back into the minds and hearts of the people trying to become whole again and teach us what we need to learn. We need to learn again the wisdom of the ancient world: how to listen to the spirits of the earth, how to read the stars, and how to live in balance with ourselves and our planet. 

The Incas believed their dead to be seeds that return every 500 years in the form of wisdom and knowledge. Paul told us that the time is coming, the ancient wisdom is returning to the modern world. Will we pay attention and be open to knowledge beyond our own? Or will we make the same mistakes as the Spanish, intentionally blind to the truth because it inconveniences our greed for more?