This is a book you’ll see so<\/em> many guides using today as a reference as they take visitors through the Sacred Valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember I bought a copy in 1997, and found it a hugely entertaining read. It ties together Andean mythology, solar alignments and is chock full of illustrations to make a case for mystic images and hidden iconography contained in the megalithic architecture and surrounding landscapes of Inca and pre-Inca sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Elorrieta brothers identify, among other things, a lizard, two pumas (one upright, one crouching), and a cosmic bird at Machu Picchu; a flying condor at Pisaq; a guanaco at Tiwanaku; and at Ollantaytambo, a condor, a sacred tree, two llamas, a corn cob and, most impressively, Wiracocha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I never thought to scrutinize too closely their interpretation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is another book, which I cannot recommend highly enough, Exploring Cusco<\/strong><\/em> by Peter Frost. It has just been released in a 6th revised edition. Frost, in the politest, low-key manner, notes that it has “become fashionable, almost dominant” to interpret that craggy rock formation at Ollantaytambo as representative of Wiracocha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “While Elorrieta’s book offers some interesting observations concerning solar alignments and man-made features,” Frost writes, “the grand overarching symbolic scheme proposed here seems fanciful to this author.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Fanciful” is arguably an understatement. But I’m no iconoclast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As is often the case when I read Peter Frost’s writing, my interest was piqued. So I went searching for any scholarly reference I could find to Wiracocha and the mountainside of Pinculluna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I found one!<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a paper by Hern\u00a0n Amat Olaz\u00a0bal published in 1994, Arqueologia y Etnohistoria de Ollantaytambo<\/strong><\/em>, there is a citation of a “little-known passage” in the chronicles of the Augustinian friar Antonio de la Calancha<\/a> (1584\u20141684).<\/p>\n\n\n\n “He says that the first survivor of the deluge was Wiracocha or the Tunupa of the Titicaca highlands, ‘that those of the provinces of Cuzco recognized him as his Father, his father and his God, and that he appeared in Tambo, a town next to Cuzco, and that he went out through a window, and became a stone to which they made great veneration<\/em>‘ (Calancha, 1974: I, 210).”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Later on, Calancha says that the tradition of those of Cuzco and Tambo reported that Manco C\u00e1pac had founded the first town in Tambo,” Olaz\u00a0bal continues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then Olaz\u00a0bal poses the question, “The image of a long-lived human head that stands on the slope of Pinculluna, would it not be the perpetuation of that primal personage who ‘had divided the world into four parts’?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the one reference I found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/www.fertur-travel.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/exploring-cusco-6th-edition.jpg\")
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