LET'S BUILD A STAIRWAY TO THE STARS
by
Ralph Fujimoto
Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club and Ther Fortnightly of Chicago
March 3, 2000
A popular song of the 1940's, evokes memories of Ella Fitzgerald as she
sings:
Can't we sail away on a lazy daisy petal over the rim
of the hill.
-a lyrical metaphor as we leave Cuzco, Peru on a lazy train zig-zaging up a steep
slope in the Andes over the rim of the hill and down into the Sacred Valley where
we begin our journey into the past
Rio Urubamba flows through the Sacred Valley. According to some Andean
legend, the turbulent river ultimately joins the celestial Milky Way, forming a
bridge or passage to the "Other World". From there the souls of the dead return
each year to commune with the living during the December Solstice. The event is
celebrated as the Inca Festival of the Dead.
Andean civilization was classically prehistoric, relying on oral or graphic tradition
for transmission of knowledge.
Much of Andean history was based on writings in the Spanish Chronicles which
were compiled by priests and administrators of the Spanish Crown after the
Spaniards captured the Inca ruler and enslaved the population in the 16th century.
As Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a chronicler of Andean civilization, summarized
it:
The people of the First Age lived in caves, contended with wild animals
and wandered lost in an unknown land leading a nomadic life.
Those of the Second Age lived in crude round houses, wore animal
skins, broke virgin earth and lived in fixed settlements.
People in the Third Age multiplied like the sands of the sea, wove
clothes, built houses, practiced marriage customs, lived by agriculture, utilitzed
system of weights and measures, and shared a tradition of living harmoniously
together.
The Fourth Age or the Age of the Warrior began with
internal conflicts that spread rapidly. Warriors left their fields and family behind;
bridges were cut and human sacrifice undertaken.
The Fifth Age was the age of the Incas.
Among the Inca myths recorded by the Spanish priest, Cristobal de Molina, is this:
"In the Provence of Ancasmarca, which is five leagues from Cuzco, the Indians
have the following fable. They say that a month before the flood came, their sheep
(llamas) displayed much sadness, eating no food in the daytime, and watching the
stars at night. At last the shepherd who had charge of them asked what ailed them,
and they said that the conjunction of stars showed that the world would be
destroyed by water. When he heard this, the shepherd consulted with his six
children. They agreed to collect all the food and sheep they could and to go to the
top of a very high mountain called Ancasmarca. They say that as the waters rose,
the hill grew higher, so that it was never covered by the flood, and when the waters
subsided, the hill also grew smaller. Thus the six chidren of that shepherd returned
to people the province."
De Molina adds, "the chief cause of the invention of these fables, was the
ignorance of God and the abandonment of these people to idolatries and vices. If
they had known the use of writing, they would not have been so dull and
blind".
Hamlet's Mill, a book co-authored by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta
Von Dechend, is an essay investigating the origin of human knowledge and its
transmission through myth. In the book, Santillana writes "whatever is true myth has
no historical basis. Myth is essentially cosmological. As heaven in the
cosmos is so vastly more important than our earth, it should not be surprising to find
the main functions deriving from heaven. He raises the question-" what if
we could prove that all myths have a common origin in the celestial
cosmology?"
Inspired by the two authors, William Sullivan, an astronomer/historian, realized that
the de Molina fable is about the celestial world and that the Llama in the myth
refers to the dark space within the Milky Way which resembles it in shape. As the
Milky Way descends to the West, the Llama is perceived to be looking back East
in the direction of the Heliacal rise---the locale of the mythical flood. Sullivan
began investigating the Andean lore concerning the Milky Way and the priest-astronomers' insight into the cosmic universe. In his book, The Secret of the
Incas, he postulates that "the records embody an astoundingly thorough
knowledge of astronomical events-a record so precise it can be checked against a
modern computer program" .
Sullivan believes that the "flood" in the fable alluded to the cessation of the heliacal
rise of the Milky Way at the June solstice in the year 650AD. In other words, an
observer at some place in Peru waiting to see the Milky Way's reappearance along
the horizon at the point where the June solstice sun rose, would not have seen the
Milky Way. This event was of great importance to the priest-astronomers of the
Andes for it meant the destruction of the passage to the land of the Gods. At some
pre-dawn moment on this particular June solstice, in the year 650AD. the Andeans
believed that the Milky Way had gone under the horizon, signalling the end of a era
in Andean history.
Sullivan, however, claims that the change in celestial coordinates was caused by a
scientific phenomenom known as precession of the equinoxes.
Scientists explain the precession of the equinoxes" as a slow wobble of
the earth's axis--that it takes 26,000 years for this wobble to make a complete
rotation. For those who wish to know, 13,000 years from now, the earth's polar star
will be Vega, not Polaris.
Implicit in Sullivan's observation is the notion that identities of the celestial objects
described in the story were employed in making astronomical observations over and
above those related to the yearly agricultural and ritual calendar-observations
undertaken, rather, to monitor the flow of time on the vast scale of precession.
However, others in the scientific community are not convinced that Sullivan's
interpretation of the "flood" myth is accurate. An astronomer at the Adler
Planetarium, Phyllis Pitluga, finds it difficult to believe in Sullivan's hypothesis for
two reasons:
Firstly, the Milk Way is not a sharp image but is visually soft. In early dawn of
650AD. June Solstice it would have been difficult to pin-point its position.
Secondly, the shift in position of the Milky Way along the horizon over a period of
centuries is too subtle to be noticeable by the Andeans.
The twentieth century philosopher, Joseph Campbell, in responding to commonly
held belief that we tend to use the word "myth" to mean something that is
untrue or errorneous, replied: "I can understand why that idea arose. However,
myth is really metaphor. The imagery of mythology is symbolic of spiritual powers
within us. When these are interpreted as referring to historical or natural events
which science, in turn, shows could not have occurred, then you throw the whole
thing out".
The intersection of science and myth crosses many lines -- scientific facts as we
know them t today vs. myth transmitted through preliterate astronomy.
In cosmic time frame, it was only yesterday when Copernicus conceived the theory
that the planets revolved around the Sun; not the other way around. Galileo, an
outspoken advocate of this theory, was censured by the Church for endorsing the
system which was in direct opposition to the Church's doctrine. Facing trial and
possible execution by the Inquisition, he wisely recanted.
In just a few centuries since then, modern scientists have gained knowledge and
technical skill which enables them to probe the cosmos beyond the imagination of
anyone living in the past century.
In the last four decades and more, we have sent people to the moon. We have
launched several unmanned planetary missions including a probe of the Mars
atmosphere.
From a historical perspective, the first moon landing was a great technical
achievement because it marked the first time people had walked on another world.
In that sense, the Mars mission would not be a first. But landing on Mars would be
significant in that it would be the first time we would be leaving the earth's orbit.
The moon is a few seconds away at the speed of light. Mars is 20 minutes away at
the speed of light. In travel time, the moon is a few days away. Mars will take a
good portion of a year to get to; our people will have to stay there for a couple of
years and then take a year to get back.
In a publication of the Adler Planetarium, Dr. Paul H. Knappenberger, Jr. writes-- "
The Mars Millennium project will challenge students throughout the U.S. to
envision and design a permanent colony on Mars in the year 2030 and to create a
scientifically sound, suitable, livable and aesthetic environment for 100
people".
Much of the cosmos still remains a mystery. What will our space travel be like in
the future? Will we be travelling as a beam of light envisioned by science-fiction
writers of today?
James Trefil, Professor of Physics at George Mason University and a Fellow of the
American Physics Society, founding member of the Society for Scientific
Exploration and recipient of many awards, writes in his book The Dark Side of
the Universe:
"We live in a universe in which the behavior of familiar forms of matter, such as
the Sun and the Milky Way, is completely determined by stuff we cannot see, but
which we call dark matter'. We'll learn enough about how bad ideas get eliminated
in science so that I won't feel guilty telling you about my own sentimental favorite
in the dark matter' sweepstake: cosmic strings. As the name implies,
these are supposed to be long, one-dimensional cords of dark matter'.
Unimaginably dense, they were formed when the universe was a fraction of a
second old. Later they served as nuclei around which visible matter collected, and
today some theorists suggest that they are to be found in the superclusters that
stretch across the sky. If this is so, then the universe is truly stranger than anything
we have been able to imagine up to now. It would be possible, in principle, to ride a
spaceship to one part of a cosmic string, get out and walk for a billion light years-about a tenth of the way across the universe".
The Andean Priest/Astronomers believed the Milky Way to be the passage-way to
the other world-their "stairway to the stars".
Will Cosmic Strings be our "stairway to the stars" in the next millenium?
Who knows? But then, who cares?
The end
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