The Incans, a people and culture that extended from about the 13th century to the early-to-mid 1500s, built things that have survived earthquakes, mudslides, and the yearly three month period from January to March in which the chance of precipitation on any given day is 100%. They did so with extensive slave labor, of course, but also with a sort of ingenuity and precision that is really awe-inspiring. What they built was designed to last, and no doubt much of what they constructed would still be standing today had the Spanish not disassembled much of it to build their churches.
Yesterday, I went to a set of ruins called Qorikancha, which is Quechua (the most predominant native language in Peru) for "Golden Courtyard." It was a temple devoted to worship of, primarily, the sun, though within the temple are rooms dedicated to the moon and the stars. Apparently much of it was actually plated in gold and silver, which was mostly melted down by the Spanish. It was supposedly the wealthiest temple in all of the Incan empire, and every June 24th it's one of the sites in Cusco where a massive solstice festival takes place. True to form, the Spanish built a church on top of it, but fortunately they left many of the structures within alone. I guess even they knew good work when they saw it.
As predictably happens at every Incan site, as soon as you walk through the front door you're set upon by tour guides hawking their tour-guiding skills, informing you that if you walk through the site uninformed by them, you're missing about 90% of what is important and that you will alwaysalwaysalways regret it. Which is probably true. This time I shelled out the 20 soles asked by one of the guides, and it was probably worth it. Within the site are several small structures, most of them with three doors of entrance. The stones used to build these structures are huge, but are fitted together with astonishing precision. In one room you can stand on a small stone pedistal and look through a window, beyond which are windows into other structures that are shaped identically and are in fact perfectly symmetrical within the frame of the first window. At some point soon I'll put up a picture on flickr.
At one point during the tour the guide showed me some stone blocks with small protuberances set in a wall. They seemed to be clustered together in one spot. He said that the shadows cast by the protuberances during each solstice cover perfectly protuberances in stones lower down in the wall, and that the wall is essentially a huge sundial. It's not known for sure if this is the purpose of the protuberances, but it seems a good theory.
This puts me in mind of a trip I took with the Sierra Club several years ago to the American southwest. There I was involved as a volunteer with the excavation of an archeological site once occupied by Native Americans. The site was bordered on one side by the face of a small cliff, and on this cliff were inscriptions, drawings, hieroglyphics, and engravings. Interestingly, an outcropping of stone high up in the wall cast a shadow against the wall that covered certain markings perfectly during each solstice. Awareness of nature's intrinsic rhythms is a common feature of preindustrial and aboriginal peoples. This is, of course, not new, and not unknown.
I spend a little time dwelling on this because it resonates a little with what I've been reading lately. The author I've been reading, a Jungian psychologist named Robert A Johnson, writes extensively about the unconscious as a source of creativity and energy. In fact, he suggests, the unconscious is THE source of creativity and energy, and finding ways of healthily accessing, encountering, living with, drawing energy and wholeness from the unconscious is essential to living as a healthy and intrinsically whole human being. If you don't, if you neglect the hidden forces within you that nevertheless shape who you are, you are almost certain to live unhappy and disconnected, or at least with the pervasive sense that something is missing. He broadly terms the work of discovering and healthily integrating your unconscious self, "inner work." Inner work takes a multiplicity of forms, including ritual, dream interpretation, spiritual journeys, and the like.
His mentor, Carl Jung, apparently spent a great deal of time with aboriginal peoples. He makes the observation that many such peoples spend much of their waking life - and their dreaming life, for that matter - engaged in inner work of one form or another. The days, the seasons, the years all had intrinsic rhythms to which they were attuned, and rituals of one form or another were common. Dreams were felt to be important and were openly discussed, and the unseen world of the spirit was felt to be close at hand, and was sought out and directly interacted with.
It's easy to reflexively believe that because aboriginal people were "closer" to nature that they were intrinsically better or happier people than us modernites. I don't want to make that claim. Like I said, the Incans built their amazing temples on the backs of countless slaves. But I do think that there are reasons that prehistoric people, those who lived lives not unlike the very first humans, invested so much time and energy in things like ritual and other sorts of access to the unseen world. One gets the sense that such things were not done apart from everyday life, but rather were directly integrated into everyday life. How many of the ills of Western modernity, both individual and collective - the depression, the anxiety, the alienation - have arisen because we have devalued and ignored as unimportant or without scientific validation things we cannot see but know intuitively are there?
Enough for now. Hope all is well at home. Scott Walker is, it turns out, a bigger tool than anyone anticipated, and with any luck he'll be recalled next January. Wish I was there to join the fight. This is actually not a bad website for on-the-ground updates.
By the way, here's my flickr photostream.
Be well, everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment