Is staggering beauty sacred? Then this place is one of the most sacred you'll ever visit. But it's not clear to me after we've spent the last few days travelling around the Valle Sagrado and its environs that there's anything distinctly transcendent about it. I'm inclined to agree with the author, filmmaker, and all-around skeptic Hugh Thomson that the sheer physical attractiveness of the place inspired the Incas to be aesthetes as much, if not more, than they were devotees of spiritual enlightmentment, despite modern claims to the contrary. Thomson, who spent an extended time here in the 80s as an explorer and returned again a few years ago before writing the book The White Rock, is particularly vicious toward the New Age worshippers drawn by the presence of Machu Picchu who have invaded the valley in recent years; he makes particular fun of one traveller he encountered who told him he had dropped an acid tab upon entering MP and promptly "discovered" that the site was merely a portal to the crystal city below Machu Picchu. "No one has yet taken ley-line directions from Glastonbury to Machu Picchu, but it's only because the string isn't long enough," writes Thomson.
The biggest person to blame for this, of course, is Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who "discovered" Machu Picchu in 1911. Reading the various contemporary histories of the Incas and the Conquest, you learn that Bingham, for all the good he did in bringing Incan culture to the attention of the world, was a serial exaggerator whose greatest skill wasn't exploration or archaeology but self-publicity. (No wonder he made it all the way to the U.S. Senate.) One way Bingham sold his tale to American audiences was to sex it up with fanciful stories of the "Sacred Virgins" who assisted the Inca in his religious role and who were supposedly the main inhabitants of Machu Picchu. Totally untrue, it turns out. Much of Bingham's claptrap been thoroughly debunked by the scientic research, but that word hasn't filtered down to many of the people in the tourist industry here. Or if it has, they've recognized there's a big buck to be made off gullible gringo spirit hunters, and have forthrightly ignored it.
The Incas' version of "Art for Art's Sake" would be "Rock for Rock's Sake." You can't fully appreciate the culture's wizardry at masonry until you see firsthand, in site after site as we have over the last couple days, how much effort they put into making their buildings as beautiful as the rocks in the landscape they mined for their construction materials. It's not just the way their mortarless joints fit together so tightly; it's the way each rock in their best walls is lovingly shaped to meet the rock next to it, including the natural rocks left in place in many locations to be built around. Just look at the way these stones, particularly the lower ones fit together, for example, in a randomly selected photo from the ruins at Chinchero we visited yesterday:
Surrounded by staggering physical beauty, its as if they believed their landscape demanded that they strive to match that beauty. Now you could argue that the source of that demand was spiritual - that their gods asked for them to match the world the gods had blessed them with. But the sheer skill of the work betrays a pride of artistry. And is there anything more decadent than hauling a 10-ton rock to the perfect spot for it high on a hillside, just because you can? The image below is from the Temple Hill portion of Ollantaytambo:
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