Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials (10 page)

The Great Idol during and after its excavation. Public domain images.

Arthur Posnansky deciphered the engravings as a calendar and promptly became a figure of scorn. One reason was that Posnansky's calendar stretched back more than 15,000 years into the past, which is something that could never be accepted by the "guild" of archaeology. As far as they were concerned, the oldest cultures belonged to the Egyptians and Sumerians, and certainly not some unknown South Americans. This was the same logic behind the criticism of the calendar variant on the Gateway of the Sun, as deciphered by Edmund Kiss. It was just not acceptable that any culture on the South American continent could be older than those of the Near East. If you thought that archaeo- and other-ologists didn't start getting in each other's hair until our times, then think again! You should read some of the polemic and ridicule being propagated in pamphlets between 1910 and 1945. Back then, as now, no trick was too low. The interpretations developed by Posnansky, Kiss, and others were subjected to academic scorn, without anyone taking the time to actually check out the facts. Kiss and Posnansky (and a number of later researchers) clearly showed the existence of the tidemark of a former major body of water on the Bolivian high plateau-it can still be seen today!-but this was ignored. Posnansky and Co. revealed the thick layer of bone-bearing sediments through which the Lake Titicaca railroad still runs today. That didn't interest any of the academic critics. Posnansky, and many after him, clearly demonstrated the glacial trails in Tiwanaku and the ruins that lay under them. But who cares about that? (Any tourist who visits the Inca city of Cuzco in Peru can marvel at such "glacial chutes" next to the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman. And they are not hundreds of thousands of years old; otherwise they'd be just as weathered as the other rocks all around.)

1.15. Detail of the unbelievably precise work on the back of the statue the "Great Idol. " Public domain image.

Without exception, all of the geologists who examined Tiwanaku between 1900 and 1950 confirmed that the area-along with some of its ruins-must have stood underwater at some time. The residues show it too clearly. I can remember the great staircase well. It is covered in a layer of lime scale (calcium) that is so hard you need a knife to scratch it off. That didn't interest any of the critics who-and this is the greatest irony-never even visited the highlands. Back then, it was standard practice to fudge, lie, fake, and suppress-anything to avoid destroying the image of beatific archaeological evolution. Geological facts are ignored by archaeology when they don't fit into the establishment's rigid view of the world. It was so back then, and it often still is today.

Of course, Posnansky and Co. did make the odd mistake, and their interpretations of the calendar did sometimes stretch the imagination. Nevertheless, it can be clearly seen that Tiwanaku and Puma Punku could never in a million years fit in with a Stone Age culture. And it's easy enough to substantiate this claim.

After Posnansky's death, Professor Hans Schindler Bellamy and Dr. Paul Allen picked up the work on the engravings on the huge statuecommonly known as the Great Idol. This was already a few years after the Second World War. And again, the conclusion was that it was a kind of calendar. Professor Schindler Bellamy even believed that the engravings on the statue were older than those on the Gateway of the Sun. He presented tables and lists; every minute detail was calculated forward and backward; more than a thousand engravings were taken into account, and not a single one was ignored. It didn't change anything. The illustrations on the Great Idol still constituted the most phenomenal calendar imaginable, and the astronomical dates depicted on it reach back as far as 27,000 years before the birth of Christ.

1.16. Excerpts from the calendar calculations by Dr. Hans Schindler Bellamy. Public domain image.

Professor Schindler Bellamy knew the problems that were likely to be stirred up with any dating that stretched that far back into the past. He knew of the ancient cultures of Egypt and Sumeria. Nevertheless, the engravings on the Great Idol show immutable periods. What could be done to solve this discrepancy? Professor Schindler Bellamy argued for a rise and fall of prehistoric cultures. There must have been, he argued, other high cultures before the Egyptian culture that had foundered and disappeared for whatever reasons. Unthinkable? Not really. After all, that is exactly what Plato reported two and a half millennia ago in his Laws. Back then he wrote of "earlier, frequent breakdowns of mankind caused by floods" from which "only a fragment of the human race was able to save itself. 1161 Anyone who knows Plato's writings also knows that the concept of earlier civilizations-including of course Atlantis-apocalypses and new civilizations did not arise with Hans Horbiger. This kind of lore is already thousands of years old.

rrefutable Evidence

Curiously enough, it is not even necessary to squabble about Tiwanaku's age. And not necessary to pick sides regarding the calendar theories, glacier melts, or cosmic catastrophes. Why not? It's because there is one extremely solid and incontestable argument-a piece of proof that is inarguable and inerasable. It is a marvel, that not even the most hard-nosed critic could ignore.

Geologist Alphons Stubel took precise measurements from some of the stone blocks from Puma Punku during the 1870s. These highly exact, technical drawings still exist. They can be seen in Stubel and Uhle's book, Die Ruinenstatte von Tiahuanaco im Hochland des alten Peru. I present some of them here so you can see for yourself: the pieces are measured with extreme precision.

Take a close look!

1.17. This picture shows a level of precision of measurement and workmanship that simply would not be possible with Stone Age tools. Public domain image.