A well-built road covers the hundred miles from Teresina to Piripiri. The landscape is flat and dark green; the verges of the road are covered with undergrowth that is bordered by dense jungle. Wild pigs, wild cows and wild horses make the journey somewhat dangerous. Although the district is almost on the equator, the climate is bearable. A gentle breeze blows constantly from the coast some 200 miles away. From Piripiri you travel to Sete Cidades by a rough ten-mile road that can be used by cross-country vehicles. Suddenly and without warning you are confronted by the first ruins.
Well, ruins is not quite the right word here. There are no disordered remains of stones that were once built up in layers. There are no monoliths with sharp edges and artificially carved furrows as on the Bolivian plateau at Tiahuanaco. Even after making an intensive search and using your imagination to the full, you can find neither steps, nor stairs, nor streets which could have been lined with houses. Sete Cidades is one monstrous chaos, like the biblical Gomorrah that was destroyed by heaven with fire and brimstone. Stone has been dried out, destroyed, melted by apocalyptic forces. And it must have been a very, very long time since the titanic conflagration raged.
No one has ever excavated here.
Science has never attempted to uncover the different strata of this primordial stone past.
Here bizarre stone shapes, articulated monsters, shoot from the ground like question-marks.
An educated guide, attached to me by the Governor of Piaui, told me that the Seven Cities’ strange contorted shapes had been formed by glacial deposits. As I know perfectly well from my home-country Switzerland, when glaciers all over the world withdraw, they leave behind an unmistakable broad band of eroded stone. There are no such traces here. Sete Cidades describes a fairly accurate circle with a diameter of 12 miles. My guide put forward another speculation. In the past there had been a sea-basin here and the Seven Cities were simply the remains of washed out stone; wind and temperature changes had sculpted the strange picturesque “ruins.”
It might be true. Why not?
I have seen with my own eyes some of the fantastic structures which have come into being through the inventiveness and inexhaustible potentialities of nature. Death Valley in the USA, the Salt Cathedral in Colombia, the granite cauldron in Bolivia and the bizarre, almost architecturally articulated rock fissures on the Dead Sea—they were all wonderful and bizarre enough. There are many strange follies made by the great master-builder, nature.
But in some inexplicable way everything seemed to be quite different at Sete Cidades.
The arrangement of the “ruins” into seven districts can be clearly seen on the “official map” of Sete Cidades. Coincidence? A caprice of nature? I cannot accept that so much
deliberate
arrangement was caused by natural forces and I felt it much more likely that a definite plan lay behind it all. But what disconcerted me most were the crumb-like bits of metal squashed between the layers of rock and protruding from them that left traces of rust like long tears on the walls. This feature occurred too often and too regularly in the midst of all the chaos. It is possible that there may be a geological explanation for the “tortoise,” the special attraction of Sete Cidades, but in the absence of research we know nothing.
Although the origin of the Seven Cities is still unexplained, the rock paintings are an established fact. You can see them and photograph them. And there can be no doubt that the paintings are considerably more recent than the rough weather-worn stone monuments. Sete Cidades has two “pasts”: one a dark primordial past that can probably never be reconstructed, and a “modern” one, although even that dates to prehistoric times.
Once again not even the cleverest man on earth knows
who
painted the paintings on the walls. Yet it very soon becomes clear that the prehistoric artists, with few exceptions, liked to use the same motifs and symbols as are found in cave and rock paintings all over the world. Circles, wheels (with spokes), the sun, concentric circles, squares inside circles and variations on crosses and stars. Just as if all prehistoric artists, even those in the most remote parts, had visited the same art school!
In his book
Kult Symbol Schrift
, Oswald O. Tobisch has shown in tabulated form that rock drawings in Africa, Europe, Asia and America are related to each other. At the end of his comparative studies Tobisch asks in amazement:
“Is it possible that once there was a unified concept of God on an international scale simply inconceivable to our present way of thinking and that mankind in those days was still in the ‘field of force’ of the ‘primordial revelation’ of the one and almighty creator, to whom mind and matter, the whole universe with the heavenly bodies and living creatures, were and are subordinate?”
Here I am only going to introduce a few examples of the rock paintings at Sete Cidades, but I shall be glad to place my extensive collection of color photographs at the disposal of research workers.
The
red and yellow circles,
which are obviously some kind of signal, are noteworthy, especially because rock paintings in two colors are rare. Undoubtedly they were intended to transmit some special message.
The technical sketch shaped something like a test-tube in the lower half of which two ropes with signal flags are recognizable, is remarkable (and so far has no counterpart elsewhere). On a sturdy blood-red staff, 12 1/2 inches high, there are five ovals like the balls on Christmas trees. Nothing from the real world of prehistoric men-animals, plants, stars-can have served as a model for them.
Then there is a line, below which
four balls
dangle like notes of music. As prehistoric men did not know any musical notation—who can deny that? —they must also be meant to convey a message. There is an ancient Indian relief with nine “notes of music” below and two above the central line that is almost a counterpart to it. Indian research workers easily identified the relief from descriptions in Sanskrit texts as the representation of a
Vimaana
, i.e. a flying machine. (
Gods from Outer Space
.)
Another very remarkable example, in my opinion, was a
flying machine
that might have been drawn by a child. Prehistoric painters stylized everything they saw in an extremely simple way. What served them as a “model” here?
But to me the most extraordinary and impressive painting was a wall with
astronauts
on it. It shows two figures with round helmets, and floating above them a thing that visionaries would call a UFO. A spiral winds between the figures. Next to it a form is reproduced that an imaginative mind could interpret in a limitless number of ways.
A difficult kind of rebus. What can it be?
A space station in orbit?
A circular band with little windows on the side facing us . . . a band with a protuberance . . . with a bifurcation above it. Last but not least, a primitive drawing which shows an
astronaut
in a complete spacesuit. In the company of Ernst von Khuon, I ask the question: were the gods astronauts?
The place where these rock paintings were found is also very strange and (so far) inexplicable. All the examples of rock drawings reproduced here float at a height of 26 feet on a very inaccessible wall. I think that the painters (provided there were no giants!) stood on a platform of stone blocks while they were working. But with the passage of time this platform must have been worn away by weathering because there is absolutely no trace of it to be found below the high wall. The weathering away of the platform
could
be a clue to the great age of the rock paintings at Sete Cidades.
The reserves of the Hopi Indians, members of the large Pueblo group, are located in Arizona and New Mexico. Today there are still about 8,000 Hopis in existence. They weave extremely beautiful baskets, following an ancient handicraft tradition, and make magnificent pottery. In spite of the pressure of the blessings of civilization, the Hopi Indians on their reserves have preserved their age-old rites and customs, as well as their orally transmitted legends in an astonishingly pure form.
White Bear is chieftain of the Coyote clan by right of birth. He can still read most of the ancient “drawings” carved in the rock. Thus White Bear knows that a hand with outspread fingers next to the paintings means that the tribe who once executed the drawings is still in possession of the whole traditional wisdom. White Bear is capable of interpreting widely separated rock and cave drawings that he has never seen before. Unfortunately the chieftain is very reticent and extremely skeptical of white men (with good reason). The Petroglyphs in the reserves are of remarkable design and sometimes whole rock faces are covered with them.
What have the legends of the Hopi Indians to tell us?
They say that the first world was Toktela. (Toktela literally means
infinite space
.) Only Taiowa, the creator, originally dwelt in the first world before he created men. The ancestors had been in contact with various worlds before they found their home on this planet. Taiowa told them that the supreme law was “Thou shalt not kill.” If there were any differences of opinion or disputes between the Hopis, the opposing parties separated, went off in different directions and sought new hunting grounds. But both sides stuck to the traditional laws and kept on covering rocks and caves with the same paintings during their long marches. (They still observe this practice today.)
In the
Book of the Hopi
(the first revelation of the Hopi’s historical and religious world-view of life) the following legend is told:
“In ancient times there was a battle for the Red City in the South. Wherever they came from, all the tribes were accompanied by Kachinas, beings who were reputed not to be of the ‘fourth world,’ indeed, they were not men at all. Nevertheless, they always proved themselves to be protectors and advisors of the tribe and frequently helped them out of tricky situations with superhuman powers and arts. This was what happened in the Red City in the South when some Hopi tribes were suddenly attacked from all sides. With the speed of the wind, the Kachinas built a tunnel through which the Hopis were able to flee into the open behind the enemy lines without shedding blood. When they said goodbye, the Kachinas said to the chieftains: ‘We are staying to defend the city. The time for the journey to our distant planet has not yet come!’”
If we follow the Hopi traditions, all the red rock drawings are simply very early messages with precise instructions to tribe members who might happen to pass through that particular bit of territory at any given time.
It would be an interesting experiment to show Big Chief White Bear my color photographs of rock and cave drawings at Sete Cidades. Who knows, perhaps he would “read” in the remarkably similar symbols and motifs that the mysterious Red City of the South had been rediscovered at last.
Back in Teresina, I looked forward keenly to a meeting with Felicitas Barreto, a Brazilian who is an Indian scholar of high standing. Her book
Danzas Indigenas del Brasil
(Native Dances of Brazil), with descriptions of the ritual dances of various wild Indian tribes, had made a deep impression on me. We had been in correspondence for some years and now I was going to meet her in person. Mrs. Barreto, “lost” to civilization for 20 years, came from the godforsaken region of the Upper Rio Paru, on the borders of Brazil and French Guiana. The Brazilian Air Force was bringing her to Belem. I had guaranteed a return flight from there to Teresina.
“Good heavens, how noisy it is in this town! Can’t we creep into some quiet corner?’ said Mrs. Barreto, a middle-aged lady with a wiry figure. I found the quietest room in the Hotel Nacional. Below I reproduce some of the conversation I took down on my tape recorder:
“How long is it since you have been in a town?”
“About twenty months, but one day will last me for a very long time. Already I’m homesick away from my Indians in the virgin forest.”
“Homesick?”
“Yes, for nature. I’ve learnt to converse silently with the sticks and stones, with animals and dewdrops. The Indians don’t talk much, but we understand each other perfectly.”
“You live among wild Indians. Why don’t they kill you, since you’re a white woman?”
“The Indians don’t live up to their reputation, and anyway I am a woman, and a woman is like a snake without venom, like a weapon without a point. They call me ‘pale half-moon’ because of my blonde hair. All the tribes know about me, they all know me by that name and if I move on to another tribe, I am always given a friendly reception.”
“What do you wear? Jeans?”
“Good lord, no! Mostly I go about naked or in a grass skirt. The chief of the tribe I’m studying now has invited me to be his third wife.”
“For heaven’s sake! Surely you haven’t said yes?”
“Not yet, but it would be nice to be a chief’s third wife. As third wife I should have the least work to do. Besides, three of us could give the chief a sound thrashing.”
“Really?”
“Yes, why not? If an Indian does not treat his wives properly or plays tricks on them, his wives beat him. After he has had his beating, he has to leave the house, go to the river and stay there in a kneeling position. If none of his wives fetch him before evening, he has to spend that night and all the following nights in the men’s house and look for new wives. Perhaps these strict customs are the reason why Indians are perfect gentlemen. And I must add that the tribe never deserts anyone, even if he is being ostracized or is seriously ill. Twice I was bitten by poisonous snakes, I lost consciousness for several days and the Indians looked after me and cured me with plants which they chewed and applied to the wound.”
“You know my books. What do the Indians have to say about the idea that man comes from the universe?”
“Let me answer your question with a legend that is told by the Kaiato tribe. They live on the Upper Xingu in the State of Mato Grosso. Incidentally all the tribes know this legend or similar ones.