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The Secret of the Incas
DR WILLIAM SULLIVAN
William Sullivan was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946. He
attended Harvard College (BA History, 1968), and went on to serve two
years as a US Peace Corps volunteer near Udaipur, Rajasthan, India as
a village-level agricultural worker. 

He studied the history of religion at Sherborne House (Glos.) under
the directorship of the late mathematician and philosopher J G
Bennett. He holds an MLitt degree from the Centre for Latin American
Linguistic Studies at the University of St Andrews (thesis topic:
'Quechua Star Names' based on ethno-astronomical fieldwork into the
star names known by present-day Indians of Peru and Bolivia), as well
as a PhD from the Centre for Amerindian Studies at the University of
St Andrews (1987) for research on which Secrets of the Incas is based.

He has lived and worked in the United States, India, Britain, Turkey,
Peru and Bolivia, and has lectured in many venues including the
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC and the Hayden Planetarium, New
York. He now makes his living as a writer and a carpenter, and lives
in rural Massachusetts with his British wife Penelope (née Milner), an
expressive arts psychotherapist, and their children Phoebe and
Jonathan.

Dr Sullivan writes:

Once in while, I'm asked to give a talk about what I've learned, and I
like to start with a question:

How would you have felt if your parents had come to you on your 21st
birthday and said, 'Look, we're really sorry about this, darling, but
just before your grandfather died, when you were a baby - he really
adored you, you know - he gave us a letter to give to you today, and
we, well, we can't find it - sorry'?

This is how I feel about what I've learned so far, and this is really
the essence of what I hope my work can convey.

Secrets of the Incas is a story that just gives a hint of a far
greater saga, one that includes our forebears from every corner of the
Earth. And yet we remain almost totally ignorant about what
Grandfather so wanted to tell us.

When I began to understand how Andean myth encrypts sophisticated
astronomical observations, the realisation soon descended on me like a
hammer that I was looking at the ludicrous spectacle of a cosmology in
search of a religion.

According to the weight of Andean scholarship at that time, the only
planet for which the Incas had a name was Venus. Where were the other
'gods' (planets)? Having read what I thought were the definitive
treatments of the etymologies of the names of various Andean gods,
including the old, bearded god Wiraqocha, who carried a staff, I
thought it pointless to search for clues in that direction. Instead, I
looked up the most frequently used alternative title for Wiraqocha:
'Tunapa'. Within 90 seconds of opening a conquest-era Quechua
dictionary, I learned that this word means 'he who carries the mill'.
I had found the Andean Saturn. From there, I was able to work out and
rigorously test the identity of all five planetary gods in the Inca
pantheon.

The importance of all this is that the characteristics of the Andean
planetary gods are virtually identical to those of the planetary gods
of Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, the Hopi, the Polynesians and so on. For
the Incas, Saturn was the old, bearded god who carried a staff; Venus
was a beautiful woman with dishevelled hair; Jupiter was the king;
Mars the god of war; and Mercury the messenger. To me, the single,
most urgent question raised by this research is not how this
idiosyncratic way of looking at the sky was carried to every corner of
our globe, but why it was so readily accepted everywhere.

What did Grandfather want to tell us? This remains my question.

If you are still young, and if this is your question, too, remember
that what is at stake is nothing less than the history of who we are.
Take heart. And don't take no for an answer.

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