Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [99]
I went to Machu Picchu in Peru with a man who said he had had a love affair with an extraterrestrial. He said he was still being guided by her and could call on that guidance anytime. He proceeded to do just that.
Still, I had to admit that when I stood atop Mount Machu Picchu and saw how the site aligned with the natural features surrounding it, I’d felt a twinge of . . . something. Awe? Transcendence? I felt ridiculous even trying to think in such terms.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know any extraterrestrials who’d have sex with me, but there was one obvious way to find some of the answers I was seeking. I called Johan Reinhard.
Reinhard is the author of Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center, the book that had sent John searching for alignments all over Peru (and which had kept me waiting for over an hour at a Cusco bookstore). He also happens to be an explorer who has summitted more than a hundred seventeen-thousand-foot peaks. He’s probably best known for finding the Ice Maiden, the mummy of an adolescent girl who had been left hundreds of years ago atop Peru’s 20,700-foot Mount Ampato as a human sacrifice to the all-powerful mountain gods. Reinhard had been searching for Inca ruins amid the apus south of Cusco when he realized that the heat from a volcano erupting nearby might have revealed new artifacts beneath Ampato’s ancient snowcap. When he and his climbing partner, Miguel Zárate, scaled the mountain, they found the frozen body of a young woman, laid out on a burial platform and surrounded by unbroken ceramics and gold and silver figurines of humans and animals. She wore a feather headdress. Reinhard intuited immediately what they had found. “We were looking straight into the face of an Inca,” he later recalled.
In addition to Reinhard’s mountaineering and academic credentials—he has a PhD in anthropology—he specializes in the emerging field of sacred geography. This is but one of many disciplines grouped together under the umbrella term “archaeoastronomy,” or the study of how ancient peoples incorporated the sun, moon and stars into their daily lives. (Amateur practitioners devote a lot of time to trying to prove that the Mayas predicted the world would end in 2012.) Reinhard has spent much of his life in South America and Asia studying how mountain peoples integrate the landscape in which they live into their spiritual beliefs. He drew on this experience to formulate his sacred center theory.
“The Western idea is that you look at something like a mountain and you see a physical object,” Reinhard told me when I reached him at his home in West Virginia. (I’d assumed that anyone named Johan Reinhard would speak like Henry Kissinger; as it turned out, Reinhard had grown up outside Chicago, like me.) “Among traditional peoples—in the Andes, in China, in the Himalayas—we’ve found that certain features of the landscape—mountains, rivers, lakes, caves—are seen as physical, but they’re also imbued with sacred power in one way or another. For example, a mountain might be the place where their ancestors originated, or the place where the dead go. A mountain might be perceived as the deity that controls fertility in all its different aspects, everything from the welfare of animals to the fertility of humans and, of course, the fertility of crops.” Which makes sense on a purely phenomenological level—in the Andes, Reinhard said, elements such as rain, snow, thunder and lightning all seem to originate in the mountains. The effect is multiplied by