Landmarks

Little Blue Birdie's Diary

Machu Picchu, Peru's sacred site

Dear Diary,

As we had promised the week before last, we are back in our journey through the Modern World Wonders. This time we thought of visiting Machu Picchu in Peru. In spite of its tongue-twisting name, this place is almost a heaven on Earth.

Machu Picchu means 'Old Peak' in the Quechua language. Surrounded by the high mountains which add to the scenic beauty of the area, Machu Picchu has archaeological importance as well. It is popular as one of the most beautiful archaeologically important places in the world.

The ruins of Machu Picchu were rediscovered in 1911 by Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham. While the Inca people certainly used the Andean mountain top, which is situated 9,060 feet above sea level, erecting many hundreds of stone structures from the early 1400s, legends and myths indicate that Machu Picchu was worshipped as a sacred place from a far earlier time. Whatever its origins, the Incas turned the site into a small (five square miles), but extraordinary city.

This place is invisible from below and is completely independent. It is also surrounded by agricultural fields, which are sufficient to feed the population, and watered by natural springs. Machu Picchu seems to have been used by the Incas as a secret ceremonial city.

Located two thousand feet above the Urubamba River, the ruins include those of palaces, baths, temples, storage rooms and some 150 houses, all in a remarkable state of preservation.

These structures, carved from the gray granite of the mountaintop, are both architectural and aesthetic wonders. Many of the building blocks weighing 50 tons or more are so precisely sculpted and fitted together with such accuracy, that the joints will not permit the insertion of even a thin knife blade.

Not many details have been found about the social or religious use of the site during Inca times. The skeletal remains of ten females to one male had led to the casual assumption that the site may have been a sanctuary for the training of priestesses and/or brides of the Inca people.

One of Machu Picchu's primary functions was that of an astronomical observatory. The Intihuatana stone, which means 'Hitching Post of the Sun', has been shown to be a precise indicator of the date of the two equinoxes and other significant celestial periods.

At midday on March 21 and September 21, the Sun stands almost directly above this pillar, creating no shadow at all. At this precise moment, the Sun "sits with all his might upon the pillar", and is for a moment 'tied' to the rock.

At these periods, the Incas held ceremonies at the stone in which they 'tied the sun' to halt its northward movement in the sky. There is also an Intihuatana alignment with the December solstice, the summer solstice of the southern hemisphere (Solstice is either of the times when the Sun is farthest from the equator, on or about June 21 or December 21.

The summer solstice falls in June in the northern hemisphere, but in December in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa for the winter solstice), when at sunset the sun sinks behind the Pumasillo (the Puma's claw), the most sacred mountain of the western Vilcabamba range, but the shrine itself is primarily equinoctial (to do with the equinox).

Shamanic legends, legends which are related to a range of traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spirit world, say that when a sensitive person touches his/her forehead to the stone, the Intihuatana opens his/her vision to the spirit world.

Intihuatana stones were the supremely sacred objects of the Inca people. The Incas believed that if the Intihuatana stone at an Inca shrine was broken, the gods of the place would die or depart.

The mountaintop sanctuary was neglected and abandoned forty years later, after the Spanish took Cuzco in 1533. The Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, even though they suspected its existence, thus the Intihuatana stone and its resident spirits 'remained in their original position'. Supply lines linking the many Inca social centres were disrupted and the great kingdom ended.

That is the story of Machu Picchu. I hope to fill in more pages of this diary with details from more World Wonders. Till then, bye!

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