ñawpa pacha

The Ancient World

Chakana

Every spring, to our little country school, there came a day when we knew it was time to bring out the marbles and play the game we seemed to know in our blood. It had always been that way, back to the days of horses and hoops.

Years later my sister, three grades ahead, told me that one day a couple of students, maybe in Education, from the state university came by and taught the school kids how to play that game. All in Ike's administration. I learned a lot about origin myths from that.

There is a thing happening around here that bugs me. It is called the "Chakana." It is a motif that occurs now and then in Andean art, mostly in textiles and pottery of the Pre-Inka Ica and Wari peoples, which has been co-opted, squirted with a lot of totally made-up new age horse pucky, and fed to the tourists and the people of Perú itself as "ancient spiritual wisdom." This has made money for some writers, and a lot more for purveyors of trinkets.

It bothers me because it is just not true. The Inkas and their predecessors had their own deeply rooted, complex culture and this "chakana" bit is no part of it. 

But it took off like wildfire, and it is everywhere now - on Amazon dot Com, in the markets, all over the web. the descendants of the ancient peoples don't even seem to know that it is bullshit. 

Someday, if there are archaeological anthropologists a thousand years from now, it might not be. It will have become real. Heck, it's real now; it's just not real Andean history.

And do you know where the source language comes from that is copied all over the web? Wikipedia. It bothered me too that Wikipedia let itself become an outhouse for charlatans. 

So I counterattacked by editing the Wikipedia article "Chakana," and was immediately slapped down. One of the wikigods took my edit down; I put it back up, I got a notice on my Talk Page that I was in danger of being blocked for engaging in an edit war. My work violated Wikipedia standards because it lacked citations.

So, months later, after gathering data here and there in the interim, I put up a "controversy" section and sat back waiting to be chastised. But, days go by and it stands untouched. Maybe it made the grade. And now when someone comes to Wikipedia to see what it all means, there will be another voice.

I'm just going to link to the article: too long-winded otherwise. My contribution follows under the heading "Controversy."  Chakana: Wikipedia

Method of Construction

In truth, I would have liked to have kept it short and punchy , but this had to be documented up the waz to stay up there, and I'm still surprised that it stands unbattered. But as long as it does, when the world comes to Wikipedia's door to pick up some gospel, they are going to get some accuracy with it.

Note:

The question to put to them is, all these declarations you impute to that simple motif, how do you know? Who told you? If you have some oracle stashed away in the hills for that one sign, what can you do for all the other symbols, found, for instance, on the Dumbarton Oaks Unku - the Inka tunic showing rows of repeating tocapu, abstract geometrical forms that some Andeanists speculate to be logographic, word-pictures? Can you impose whole ideologies onto these as well? We'd like some insight!

Dumbarton Oaks Unku