(urth) Nazca Lines
Lee Berman
severiansola at hotmail.com
Fri Jul 23 20:51:22 PDT 2010
I was just watching a National Geographic special on the mystery
of the gigantic, many kilometers-long Nazca desert drawings in
southern Peru. I thought about the Sun series, mostly because they did a
lot of re-enactment with local, native actors and it made me think of
Apu-Punchau, as this is pretty much his territory.
The general anthropological conclusion is that these people resorted
to massive head-chopping sacrifices and probably ever increased-sized line
drawings to influence the weather. The area spent several hundred
years as a rather verdant, well-watered place allowing a thriving
culture to establish itself. Then the desert started relentlessly asserting
itself. They tried in vain to placate the gods with more intense religious
expressions each year as they realized the previous year's head chop
sacrifices and line drawing were not sufficient to please the deities.
The research conclusions are too recent to have influenced Wolfe to create
Urth with its dying sun or The Whorl and its progressive drought. But
perhaps the South American native propensity for head chopping had an impact
on him.
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