The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time

by William Sullivan and William L. Sullivan

Book Overview

'This book is the story of an experiment, ' to quote the author (p. 12). Focuses on myth as the key to understanding the Incas' past. Many conclusions differ from those of standard scholarly literature. Some examples that run counter to orthodox views onAndean peoples are the notion that Andean myt

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517594684
• ISBN13: 9780517594681
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 413 Pages
• Weight: 1.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Cosmic Relations Incas and Stars

The Secret of the Incas : Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time by WILLIAM SULLIVAN Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition (May 20, 1997) Language: English ISBN: 0517888513 COSMIC RELATIONS 'The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time' is an incredible collection of research by William Sullivan on ancient myths and their relationship to animals, ancient cultures and astronomical bodies aligned with world events. This book is delightful in knowledge and majorly intense. The following paper was written as an introduction to his work. I am always pleased to bring only the higest quality research for the reader's enjoyment and education. Dr. Colette M. Dowell Circular Times SECRET OF THE INCAS By William Sullivan In 1969 a book was published which figured to revolutionize the study of human history. This was Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, written by two historians of science, Giorgio de Santillana of MIT and Hertha von Dechend of Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. The startling hypothesis of this book was that myth, on one level, constitutes nothing less than a technical language created to encrypt and pass on very sophisticated astronomical observations related to the precession of the equinoxes. The precession is a gyroscopic-like wobble of the earth's axis of rotation requiring 26,000 years to complete a single cycle. Two aspects of this work - which the authors themselves styled a "first reconnaissance" into the subject - were pure dynamite. First, if the ideas in the book were true, then those myths which are astronomically encrypted are self-dating, that is they carry a record of a moment in precessional time that is at least as accurate as a radio carbon date. This view renders obsolete the concept of "prehistory" which is defined as "before the written record." Second the authors found that a very precise and idiosyncratically expressed religious cosmology, linking world ages to the gain or loss (due to precessional motion) of "access" to the Milky Way at solstices and equinoxes is found in cultures all over the world. The clear implication of these ideas was that an unexplored, and highly dramatic history of the human race awaits engagement by students of the human legacy. I was so bowled over by these ideas when I first encountered them - in 1974 - that I eventually realized I had to know if they were true. The very first thing I learned was that there is no university in world where you can go to learn anything whatsoever about these ideas. The academy, for reasons of its own, has chosen to ignore the profound implications of this work for going on 25 years now. My own book, The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy and the War Against Time (Crown 1996), is an account of my own twenty year journey of exploration into the astronomy of myth, and I am happy to report that this odyssey was not undertaken in vain. The Gateway God of Tiahuanaco Courtesy: 'Secret of the Incas'

Not exactly alternate history

While this work does not provide absolute or concrete evidence, it does contain enough documented information that a very small leap of faith in the thought process of the Andean populations present in pre-Columbian SA will convince you of the truth of Mr. Sullivan's meritous effort. Numerous reviews refer to this as an alternate history work, however off hand there is nothing I remember about it necessarily contradicting accepted history. Mr. Sullivan provides diagrams and star charts (which I later verified w/my own software) to solidify his claims. His years of research paid off with a in my opinion a viable answer to one of history's most difficult-to-answer questions. A definate must buy if you are interested in archaeoastronomy or just an extremely interesting read.

An exploration of the "Hamlet's Mill" theories

William Sullivan has presented me with one of the most convincing "alternate history" books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.Building upon the theories first explored in the landmark "Hamlet's Mill" by De Santillana and von Dechend, Mr. Sullivan takes what little is known about the history of the Incas and the Andean peoples and helps those interested make sense of it all. Thankfully, "The Secret of the Incas" is written in a much more digestable manner than "Hamlet's Mill".The Inca Empire peaked for a brief moment and was then crushed by the invading Spanish in a very short period of time. There have been many theories as to how the Spanish were able to conquer most of the South American continent in such a brisk stroke, one of which involves the natives mistaking the invaders for "gods". The facts presented by Sullivan point to an even more mind-boggling fate. The Andean peoples (and the Incas who followed) were convinced that their fate was intertwined with the movements of the stars and planets. Astrology, as the Andean people interpreted it, was an unalterable fate, as impossible to deny as the need of air to breathe. These beliefs incorporated everything from their historical writings to their political attitudes towards their neighbors.Mr. Sullivan has impressed me with his interpretations of Andean thought. His work is conservative and he checks and re-checks his conclusions well. I had a lot of fun reading his theories, although some sections seemed to drag a little. His ending thoughts on "how" the Andean people might have originally become so obsessed with astrological readings and their terrestrial consequences are not so great, and I skimmed the last chapter which dealt with "chaos theory" and the like. He's not the first author who's gone off on a tangent to conclude a theoretical book though; I'll just pretend I didn't read those sections, haha. "The Secret of the Incas" is a concise, well-presented book and I would recommend it VERY highly to those searching for "alternative" history books that don't insult the reader.

The Secret of the Incas : Myth, Astronomy, and the War Again

William Sullivan decodes the myths of the Incas.Secrets of the Incas chronicles how Dr Sullivan first learned to decode ancient Andean myths. These myths - which were recorded by the Spanish at the time of their conquest of the Incas - are, according to Dr Sullivan, a 'message in a bottle' from the Incas to future generations. Dr Sullivan describes how he decoded the myths and how this led him to certain important dates in Andean prehistory and history. A glossary defines and explains various Andean mythological and historical terms, and a timeline shows what Dr Sullivan believes to be the correspondence between mythological, astronomical and archaeological events in the high Andes - how, in effect, what was happening in the heavens was mirrored by what was happening on EarthOn the evening of 15 November 1532, a band of 175 hardened Spanish adventurers crossed a pass in the high Andes. Looking down upon a broad, fertile valley in northern Peru, they became the first Europeans to make contact with the Incas, whose highly developed empire stretched 3,000 miles from Chile to Colombia and had a population of six million. On the following day, in what ranks as one of the strangest events in all recorded history, the Spaniards managed to seize the Inca king Atahuallpa and, in the ensuing panic, used the advantage of their 120 warhorses to kill and wound 10,000 Inca warriors. From that day onward, through luck and guile, and with reinforcements soon pouring in from Panama, the Spaniards - who came in search of gold and glory, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church - never relinquished the edge they seized in that first fateful encounter.What the Spaniards never knew, and what history does not record, was the reason for the apparently inexplicable collapse of the greatest land empire on the face of the Earth.Secrets of the Incas explores the baffling and tragic vulnerability of the Inca empire and comes to a startling conclusion: the Spanish had appeared at precisely the right place and at just the right time to fulfil an ancient, astronomically based prophecy of doom.This conclusion is the result of two decades of research by American scholar Dr William Sullivan into the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of the Incas and how they encrypted this in their myths. Secrets of the Incas presents completely new evidence taken from an Inca myth. In this, Dr William Sullivan believes, lies the key to the basis of the old man's prophecy and, indeed, to the formation of the Inca empire itself. This myth is nothing less than a dire warning of an impending precessional event that, to the Incas, predicted future ruin.The 'gate' or 'bridge' to the land of the ancestors - that is, the rising of the December solstice Sun with the Milky Way - was about to be washed away. Drawing on their ancient mythological database, the Incas reasoned - from the principle 'as above, so below' - that loss of contact with the ancestors, upon whi

Excellent argument for the astronomical basis of Andean myth

Sullivan's book follows in the path of Santillana and Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill". That famous work set the foundations of a completely new paradigm in mythographical thinking: the astronomical interpretation of myth. What Sullivan presents here is a brilliant application of Santillana and Dechend's thesis to a specific geographical and historical context: the precolumbian Andean world (more specifically, the Tiahuanaco, Huari and Inca cultures). Part of the reason why Hamlet's Mill has not been accepted with general enthusiasm among the majority of mythographers, historians, and anthropologists may have been that book's style: a decorated, visionary prose which, while loaded with an impressive amount of references, perhaps lacked somewhat in academic rigor and scepticism. "The Secret of the Incas" does not fall in this mistake. With exemplary lucidity, irrefutable syllogisms, considering the pros and cons of each argument, Sullivan proves his points without the semblance of being biased. The argumentation of this book satisfies all academic standards right until the very last chapter. (In the last chapter the author loses his self-control and writes a great deal of nonsense from all fields of science from chaos theory to the Gaia hypothesis -but this can be pardoned in view of the previous chapters.)