Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Machu Picchu — built at approximately 2,430 meters above sea level on a narrow mountain ridge above the Sacred Valley of the Incas, constructed around 1450 CE under the Sapa Inca Pachacuti, abandoned approximately a century later as the Spanish conquest destroyed the civilization that built it — was unknown to the outside world until the American explorer Hiram Bingham was led to it by a local farmer in July 1911. What Bingham found was a city that appeared never to have been looted: 172 structures arranged in distinct sacred, agricultural, and residential zones, their dry-stone construction of such precision that the joints between irregularly shaped granite blocks cannot accept a sheet of paper. The Inca built without mortar and without metal tools. They built in an active seismic zone, and their architecture has survived major earthquakes that would destroy modern constructions — because the buildings sway rather than crack, their irregular stones locking more securely under stress....

On the arid pampa of southern Peru, between the towns of Nazca and Palpa, a pre-Columbian culture created between approximately 500 BCE and 500 CE one of the most mysterious bodies of art in human history: the Nazca Lines — thousands of geometric forms (straight lines, spirals, trapezoids) and figural geoglyphs (animals, plants, human figures) etched into the desert surface by removing the reddish surface stones to reveal the lighter ground beneath. The largest figures extend over several kilometers. They were created with an accuracy that astounds modern engineers, who have replicated them only with significant effort using modern tools. And they were created with a full understanding that they could not be seen from the ground — the monkey's tail, the spider's legs, the condor's wingspan are only comprehensible from the air. The civilization that made them had no aircraft. The most enduring question is not who made them (the Nazca culture) or how (with stakes, ropes, and ...