Last Inca at Machu Picchu

The world and reality of the Inca existed 500 years ago. It was a magnificent society made up of more than 10 million people—most of them were from nearby nations that the Inca had conquered. Cuzco was the richest city in the New World, the center of Inca life, and the home of its leaders.

With the arrival from Spain in 1532 of Francisco Pizarro and his entourage of mercenaries or “conquistadors,” the Inca empire was seriously threatened for the first time. Duped into meeting with the conquistadors in a “peaceful” gathering, an Inca emperor, Atahualpa, was kidnapped and held for ransom. After paying over $50 million in gold by today’s standards, Atahualpa, who was promised to be set free, was strangled to death by the Spaniards who then marched straight for Cuzco and its riches.

What remains of the Incan empire is limited, as the conquistadors plundered what they could of Inca treasures and in so doing, dismantled the many structures painstakingly built by Inca craftsmen to house the precious metals.

Remarkably, Machu Picchu, a last bastion of the Inca empire remained unknown to the Spanish conquerors and was not found until explorer Hiram Bingham discovered it in 1911. He had found Machu Picchu, a citadel atop a mountainous jungle along the Urubamba River, in Peru. Grand steps and terraces with fountains, lodgings, and shrines flank the jungle-clad pinnacle peaks surrounding the site. It was a place of worship to the sun god, the greatest deity in the Inca pantheon.

While the physical Inca of antiquity are gone, their consciousness survives in the air we breath and in the soul of those artists who give them life in the present moment.

How did the Inca wake up in the morning? Perhaps the early morning call of a rooster was their alarm clock. Time flows. Time is fluid with many eddys and possible futures.

They knew life, love, and what the gods expected of them.

Still, there were those who knew they were caught up in a culture not of their choosing.

These souls knew they belonged in another age, a future time where the gods represented evolved consciousness.

In their dreams they would ride up river, up the river of time.

And in time, they would become the future.

In the highlands of Peru, there are ancient temples yet to be discovered.

In the highlands, the night sky is unfettered by city lights. There is magic in the stars, in the constellations. The universe is above and around you. The Inca looked up, too, and had marveled in creation.

The jungle reflects the starlight. I am Inca and the way is clear.

Most certainly, the Inca knew love and all the wonder that feeling, that emotion, generated.

They were conquerors who would rule their world in the Americas. But how did they express love? Did they fall in love? They had poetry. They had hymns to the both creation and to the end of all things. They were of their time. Who are we to judge as we look about our own society?

During one extraordinary year, there was a summer of love—an Inca Woodstock. Young people going after another way of life. No wars. No more conquest for more useless power. But that was one summer in a time long past.

Francisco Pizarro was born in about 1475 in Trujillo, a small town near Caceres, Spain. The illegitimate son of a Spanish captain, he spent his childhood with his grandparents in one of Spain’s poorest regions.

The conquest of Peru by an obscure adventurer is one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the New World. Until he was nearly 50 years old, Francisco Pizarro, who apparently never learned to read or write, served as a minor Spanish official on the Isthmus of Panama. He had nothing to show for years of toil and peril but a small holding of land. Little more than a decade later, he had conquered the wealthy empire of the Incas and had bestowed on Spain and his sovereign gold and silver plundered from the native Americans. He also founded the city of Lima, now the capital of Peru.

In his lust for riches, Pizarro destroyed an empire and its culture. In the end, greed did Pizarro in as his fellow Spaniards assassinated him in a dispute over even more turf.

The lesson of self-righteous imperialism should not fade away as some romantic episode.

The late afternoon paints its way across the pristine sky in the high Andes.

The Inca cultural region encompasses parts of what is now Peru, Chile, and Ecuador. It is home to many archeological and cultural sites such as Ayacucho, Moche, and Nazca (Nasca). The topography and land formations of this region are extremely varied. Deserts, lakes, mountain regions, and jungles are all included within the area that once housed the Inca culture.

The Inca referred to their realm as Tahuantinsuya, which means the Land of the Four Quarters. Lake Titicaca was the bread basket and the control headquarters of highland Tahuantinsuya. The great Inca city of Cuzco in modern day Peru was located between the lowland desert and jungle. The region of Collasuya reaches from the western Pacific shores of the Atacama Desert over the Andes Mountains and into eastern tropical forest.

The Inca lived high in the Andes and in the rainforest jungles.

In that age, the rainforests produced medicines and the biodiversity was a sign of health.

Today, the rainforests are disappearing and soon they will exist no more—that is, if we sit watching television as the good earth disappears out from under us.

What will the future think of us?

There were some among the Inca who knew real magic.

We have read about the priests and their seemingly magic powers to predict rain and dry spells—invaluable information for the farmers and the population they had to feed.

There were others who knew real magic. They were the artists whose talents were co-opted for use by the state religion—not unlike the artists to come during the Renaissance when the Catholic Church footed the art bill.

But there were times when they could create their own art without concern of the state.

Where are those lost artworks now?

They are not lost; these works move about the collective consciousness awaiting other artists willing to receive.

She had a gift of music.

She played her strings throughout the court and her charms had led her to the king.

Her mother had told her to play for the people. She wouldn’t listen.

Now that she had the king’s ear, she now also knew fear. After all, how long could she engross him with her playing and what were her wiles when he had access to so many women?

She talked the king into letting her give a concert to all the people of city. Her mother’s words were beginning to make more and more sense.

Could she pull it off?