Rather than being burial chambers, the chullpas of Sillustani and Cutimbo were used for a secret, near-death simulation in which candidates returned ‘risen’.
Conventional history claims the Inka appeared suddenly during the 15th century, and within ninety years their ability to fashion stone advanced at meteoric pace, from mere river rock with mortar to megalithic tongue-and-groove monuments featuring masonry so tightly arranged that an alpaca hair cannot not be inserted between the blocks.
Inka burial tower of obviously inferior quality below older, more advanced chullpa. (Photo: Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 4.0)
It was well known throughout the region that the Inka were not a dab hand at monolithic masonry, as proved when 20,000 men attempted to haul a gargantuan stone off the temple of Saqsayhuaman, only for 3000 of them to be crushed to death when the ropes failed. Indeed, wherever one travels the Andes there is no shortage of proof that additions made by the Inka to existing structures pale in both quality and scale.
View of Saqsayhuaman , a citadel on the northern outskirts of the city of Cusco. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Two places where this difference is highlighted are Cutimbo (or Kutimpu) and Sillustani, where exist some very unusual towers called chullpas. In reconsidering their construction technique, we can also reveal how an ancient ritual, once practiced on a global scale, took place here, reappraising the misguided idea that these unusual towers were built with burial in mind.
Mistaken for Tombs
Even back then local chroniclers suspected these megalithic towers far predated the Inka, but provided the inspiration for their later funerary practices. During a recent trip to the Andes I too was amazed by the chullpas, and equally found them at odds with funerary function — that their original concept had become misunderstood by the time of the Inka. For one thing, most chullpas contained no burials, and where they did, the bodies were at odds with the remote age of the buildings.
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The situation has its parallel in Egypt. Not a grain of evidence exists to support the theory that pyramids were ever used as tombs; Herodotus himself recounts how pharaoh Khafra “built himself a subterranean tomb, on the hill where the pyramids stand.” And yet early archaeologists side-stepped this account (the subterranean chamber has since been found under the causeway leading to ‘Khafra’s pyramid’), then compounded the issue by misinterpreting Egyptian concepts of living and dying by taking them literally. To this day, by virtue of repetition, their misunderstanding remains engrained within this very conservative field.
No written record survives to offer an insight into the purpose behind the chullpas, yet by comparing them to a ritual in other parts of the world, a solid picture emerges. In erecting these unusual towers, the unknown builders, like their Egyptian peers, were indulging in a ritual known only to adepts of Mysteries schools from China to Ancient Egypt: the ritual of raising the dead, also described by the apostle Philip as ‘living resurrection’.
Living Resurrection
Before we look at the chullpas, let’s quickly examine the perception of resurrection in the western world and how it was falsified. Back in the time of Jesus, virtually every esoteric cult, including Gnostic Christianity, claimed how the Catholic Church gerrymandered the resurrection of Christ and used it to further an ersatz religion. These cults, as history attests, regarded resurrection as a metaphorical concept: a secret ritual involving a voluntary near-death experience by a candidate inside a restricted chamber, whereby he or she accessed the Otherworld and returned fully aware of everything they had seen and experienced. It marked the highest level of initiation, and adepts such as Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato and Pythagoras regarded the experience as the pinnacle of a person’s spiritual development.
Even the suppressed Gospel of Philip makes it very clear that the concept of resurrection — as it has been popularized — was misinterpreted by the emerging Church for its own ends: “Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.” Philip even goes on to chastise this new religion as “the faith of fools,” for anyone who believes in the animation of a body after physical death is confusing a spiritual truth with an actual event.
Entering the Otherworld
Throughout Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor there are numerous ‘tombs’ where this ritual was practiced, and although typically described by orthodox archaeology as burial places, no bodies have ever found inside them.
One of the most anomalous is the subterranean passage chamber of Thutmosis III, least of all because it features a well — a redundant feature for a dead person — and an empty sarcophagus of superlative craftsmanship. Since Thutmosis had earlier built himself a funerary chamber a mile away (where his mummy was actually found) why on earth should one man need two tombs?
Passage Chamber of Thutmose III, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt. (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The chamber is also unique for the time because it is covered from floor to ceiling with a unique text describing the method for ascending into the Otherworld, with one notable difference: the instructions are meant for a person who is alive: “It is good for the dead to have this knowledge, but also for the person on Earth…. Whoever understands these mysterious images is a well provided light being. Always this person can enter and leave the Otherworld. Always speaking to the living ones. Proven to be true a million times.”
The circa 2600 BC ‘tomb’ of the pharaoh Sekhemkhet was likewise found sealed, along with its sarcophagus, yet no body was found inside it. A few miles to the south at Saqqara, pharaoh Unas also built himself an anomalous chamber circa 2400 BC. Here, the text covering the entire subterranean complex describes the moment the pharaoh reaches the Otherworld: “Unas is not dead, Unas is not dead,” followed by the return of Unas’ soul back into his living body, whereupon the pharaoh resumes his daily duties.
The Egyptians claimed that pyramids and certain temples were places of rest but necessarily a person’s final resting place, leading to the conclusion that they originally served a ritual purpose. The term they coined for the unusual ritual is ‘raising’, a term still employed two thousand years later when the Essenes Church practiced the same ritual in secret chambers under Mount Sion, and according the testimony of Ezekiel, under Temple Mount too. At the conclusion of such initiations, adepts were declared “risen from the dead.”
Living resurrection refers to an out-of-body experience whereby the initiate returns alive with first-hand knowledge of celestial mechanics, his eyes opened to the bigger picture, aware, awake — ‘risen’ — in contrast with the uninitiated, who stumble through life as though asleep — ‘the dead’. The ritual survives today, albeit symbolically, in the Third Degree of Freemasonry, in which the candidate is still raised from a figurative grave to be pronounced “risen.”
Classic chullpa. Silustani. © Freddy Silva
The ritual may have been played out in the Andes, the chullpas offering a continuation of this ageless ritual, perhaps even contemporary with Egyptian times.
Hill of Sillustani
The hill of Sillustani is, to all intents and purposes, an island, linked to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, and around 5000 BC, when the level of nearby Lake Titicaca was at least 36 feet (11 meters) higher, it would certainly have been so. Surviving accounts by Greek scholars mention how the prerequisite for the journey of the candidate or the soul into the Otherworld is via a voyage to an island in the West.
Panoramic view of the archaeological site of Sillustani, next to the Titicaca lake. (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Silustani stands on what originally was the western side of a major body of water, much like its counterpart in England, Tintagel, along with its legend of Arthur and the Grail, essentially a retelling of the journey of Osiris, the resurrected god of the Egyptians; ritual chambers along the Nile, such as those of Unas and Thutmosis, even require the crossing of the Nile and into the west.
The west was regarded as the symbolic entrance into the Otherworld because it follows the path of the descending Sun into the shadow world. Upon reaching their island destination, candidates would enter a restricted chamber, remain inside for a prescribed period, then exit towards the east to face the newly risen Sun, symbolically imitating the state of the purified soul just returned to the living body. The entrance to such ritual chambers traditionally references the Equinox, the moment that defines the astronomical state of balance between light and dark, a perfect description of the candidate’s reborn spiritual state. As it happens, the entrance on every chullpa is perfectly aligned to the Equinox sunrise.
Silustani’s position on a flat-top hill of iron-bearing andesite, packed with magnetite and surrounded by water, appears to have been deliberately chosen to assist the experience. These elements by themselves generate a geomagnetic field, and when combined with a variation in the adjacent soil, plus an accompanying fault line, produce on the hill what is known in science as a conductivity discontinuity.
Most of the world’s sacred places, particularly those associated with altered states, lie precisely at such junctions — Petroglyph Mesa in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Carnac, France; and Loughcrew, Ireland, to name a few. Simply put, the harnessing of geomagnetic fields inside a man-made structure amplifies forces already present that facilitate a hallucinatory state. A dead person has no use for any of this, but a person lying in a state of meditation inside an artificially-constructed womb, does.
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One clue that initiates once used the chullpas for the living resurrection ritual is a carving on the outside of one tower of what appears to be a lizard. The creature may in fact represent its cousin, the salamander, the traditional symbol of regeneration in ancient Mysteries schools, due in part to the reptile’s ability to survive a trial by fire. And surviving accounts of the initiates’ harrowing journey, in what was essentially an induced near-death experience, strongly suggests the experience was not an easy one to begin with, yet candidates such as Lucius Apuleius in the second century AD describe the benefit of accessing the Otherworld while living as “in a certain sense reborn and brought back on the road of a new beginning.”
Cutimbo’s Houses of the Soul
An hour’s drive south of Sillustani lies another group of chullpas, at Cutimbo, which differ from those at Sillustani inasmuch as they are fitted to the same precision yet are carved like billowing pillows. Again they were placed atop an imposing mesa, this time composed chiefly of limestone. When the level of Lake Titicaca was much higher some 12,000 years ago it too formed an island in the west. Precedents for this identical spiritual technology include the dense concentrations of sacred sites in Yucatan, Wiltshire (England), The Burren (Ireland), and the ritual chambers of the Tewa in New Mexico.
Chullpa at Cutimbo. © Freddy Silva
Again the choice of location was deliberate. Water percolating through limestone creates adsorption, a natural phenomenon that generates a low-lying electrical field. In ancient times Cutimbo would have been electrically charged, very useful for activating that essential component that induces shamanic journeying, the pineal gland.
Lying inside a chullpa’s light-deprived environment offers a further advantage in that it promotes the chemicals melatonin and pinolene, which allow for the creation of the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT), further assisting out of body journeying. After a period of time in the dark, the body also adapts to a new biological rhythm, the Moon’s, explaining why in so many cultures the deity presiding at the gate to the Otherworld is a lunar god or goddess.
If you happen to stand outside the main chullpa around midday, with the Sun at its zenith, the light cast upon the façade reveals relief carvings above the doorway of what appear to be a male and a female couple. The central, and recurring, theme of living resurrection ceremonies is the description of the initiate crossing the threshold into the Otherworld to couple with a celestial bride, for it is within the divine virgin that all knowledge is said to reside. It is for this reason that such restricted rooms were called bridal chambers.
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Either side of the narrow entrance at Cutimbo there also come into view the reliefs of two large dogs, which at first seems an unusual choice of creature to etch on a ritual chamber. But not to the Aymara, whose religious system taught that a soul experiencing resurrection undergoes an ordeal while finding its way to the Otherworld. The Andean account of this journey uses the symbol of a bridge across a raging river. As the soul crosses the river into the void it is assisted by black guide dogs capable of seeing in the dark. The motif is identical to the one used in Greek and Egyptian resurrection rituals, namely the Hounds of Hades, and Anubis and Upauat.
Close-up of the carved reliefs of two dogs and the initiate coupled with his divine bride. © Freddy Silva
Chullpas are referred to by Andean people as uta amaya, ‘houses of the soul’. Notice ‘of the soul’ and not ‘for the soul’, a seemingly innocuous difference yet a major one: it defines the chambers not as final repositories but places of facilitation.
Symbolic Architecture
The entrance is a tiny rectangular hole, forcing even the smallest of people to scramble on all fours as though humbling the ego — one of the pre-requisites in ritual initiation. The entrances still bear their stone plugs, which made me wonder: if these were graves, why add an entrance, and a bloody inconvenient one at that? A stone plug allows air and just enough light into the chamber, effectively sealing the candidate inside, to be removed by officiating priests at sunrise, when the light of the rising Equinox sun casts its beam directly into the chullpa. And every entrance is aligned this way.
Entrance to chullpa, Sillustrani, Peru. (CC BY 2.0)
The cylindrical design of the towers masks their interior shape. When one of them partially collapsed it revealed how the core masonry is fitted in the shape of a beehive, and in doing so offers another indication these places were designed with ritual resurrection in mind.
Chullpa at Sillustani, Peru. (CC BY 2.0)
The use of the beehive chamber in initiation follows a world tradition of association with the bee. Since the bee and the honeycomb effortlessly characterize the manifestation of divine harmony in nature, bees were considered a link between life and afterlife. Regenerative nature gods such as Vishnu, Pan and Aphrodite are depicted as honey bees.
Bee-goddesses. Gold plaques, seventh century BC. (Public Domain)
More tellingly, priestesses who presided over initiates during their out-of-body experience inside the restricted bridal chamber were nicknamed bees. That honey and honeycomb were potent symbols of personal insight and divine wisdom is immortalized in the Bible: “Jonathan…put forth the end of the rod that was in his hand, and dipped it in a honeycomb, and put his hand to his mouth; and his eyes were enlightened.”
Cutaway drawing showing the beehive construction of a chullpa. © Freddy Silva
Such characteristics shaped the architectural blueprint of ritual chambers around the world, from the beehive domes of the Cuchama in southern California, to the interior passages of Celtic stone chambers in Britain and Sardinia. The beehive shape was reintroduced two-dimensionally into Europe from Asia Minor in the shape of the Gothic arch, by a group conducting raising rituals inside bridal chambers, the Knights Templar.
The ancient architects of the Andes may have left no record of their practices except what remains etched in local tradition, yet by comparing their artifacts to similar cultural practices elsewhere we begin to understand the function these unusual structures originally served. As ancient shamanic traditions around the world all agree, the Otherworld is to be experienced while alive, and to do so one must build a place set aside from the everyday world, an island in the west.
Just like Sillustani and Cutimbo.
Further research into this topic can be found in the book The Lost Art of Resurrection. Visit the author’s website.
Top Image: Chullpas near Manu National Park, Peru. (CC BY 2.0)
By Freddy Silva
FullwidthSillustani, Cutimbo, Kutimpu, Peru, chullpas, ritual, initiation, resurrection, bees, Egypt, tomb, pyramid, death, risen, mystery school, masonry, near death, simulations