Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [100]
If there were a Geiger counter for geographic sacredness, the topographically rich site of Machu Picchu would bury the needle. Mountain worship was one of the cornerstones of Inca religion. Among the pantheon of apus scattered throughout the Andes, the Incas revered two peaks above all others. One was Ausangate, which stands above Cusco and the glaciers of which are the source of the sacred Urubamba River. “The Urubamba does a very unusual thing at Machu Picchu,” Reinhard said. “It loops around the promontory that the site is built on.” The other key apu is Salcantay, which not only overlooks Machu Picchu but is directly linked to it by a long ridge, like the tip of a root on an old oak tree. Salcantay’s glaciers are the source of the sacred Aobamba River—which unites with the Urubamba near where it folds itself around Machu Picchu. “Wherever you have water coming out of a mountain slope, people perceive it as coming out of the mountain’s own body,” Reinhard said. Machu Picchu was also “situated in the transition zone between the highlands and the Amazon jungle,” which heightened its importance.
All of these natural convergences would have made Machu Picchu’s site “especially powerful,” says Reinhard, but the Incas also, of course, worshipped the sun. The Sapa Inca—“not only a secular ruler but also the head of the state religion,” according to Reinhard—relied on his status as the son of the sun to support his claim to power. For this reason, the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) were crucial to Inca beliefs, according to the Spanish chronicles. “The particularly unusual thing about Machu Picchu,” Reinhard explained, “is that in all the cardinal directions, you had sacred mountains.” I’d seen this when I’d climbed Huayna Picchu with John. Because Huayna Picchu was due north of the city, an Inca priest standing atop its peak would have faced south toward the major apu of Salcantay. Similar important peaks stood directly to the east and west of the city.
The night sky above Machu Picchu held even more clues. The Southern Cross, one of the most important constellations in the Incas’ religion, appears directly above Salcantay on the December solstice—the longest day of the year and the start of the rainy season. The Milky Way was a celestial river mirrored by its earthbound counterpart, the winding Urubamba. Or as Reinhard put it to me, “Machu Picchu is sort of like the Inca cosmos written on the landscape.”
Looked at through the telescopic lens of archaeoastronomy, the question isn’t why Pachacutec chose to build Machu Picchu where it is, but rather how he could have placed it anywhere else.
The structures and carvings at Machu Picchu, too, were designed to complement all this sacred geography. The Intihuatana stone, carved out of solid granite attached to the Salcantay massif, connects Huayna Picchu to the main peak of Salcantay. Bingham’s Temple of the Three Windows looks due east toward the rising sun. The building that intrigued me most was the Torreon. The upper curved part seems to have been modeled on the Koricancha sun temple, the most sacred building in the city of Cusco. The cave below, with its psychedelic stonework and carved stone stepladder, faces the sunrise on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. One small east-facing window is positioned perfectly to observe the Pleiades cluster of stars, whose appearance heralded the turning of a new agricultural year. This was the same window that I’d been told cast a beam of light onto the carved rock within. (Reinhard had also heard of this phenomenon, but hadn’t witnessed it.) It occurred to me that making a return trip to Machu Picchu to see that solstice alignment—visible for only a few days in June—might be my one chance to see the sacred center theory in action.
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