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Misc. source - The Lines of Nazca and Pampas de Jumana
Identifier
006596
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The Nazca Lines are a series of marked paths and geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert, a high arid plateau that stretches more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana in Peru. The area encompassing the lines is nearly 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi), and the largest figures can be nearly 270 metres (890 ft). They are believed to have been created by the Nazca culture between 200 BCE and 700 CE.
The paths were made by removing the reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles that cover the surface of the Nazca desert to reveal the whitish earth underneath. Hundreds of lines and star patterns link up the geometric shapes. There are hundreds of individual figures, ranging in complexity from hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks or orcas, llamas, and lizards, more than seventy are natural or human figures.
Personally I think this was a sacred landscape. The figures were symbolic but could also be used to befuddle like a sort of labyrinth, but the paths linked sacred sites with symbolic meaning and provided 'flight paths' for out of body shamans.
It is clear from the Wikipedia quote that the majority of those who postulate theories have had no contact with shaman or shamanic cultures – and probably have never used hallucinogenic drugs either otherwise they would have known exactly what it was like to fly. Despite this, however, their theories are very close to what I [and others] believe the truth to be.
There is no need for the ‘gods in the sky’ to see the tribes because the shaman can meet the gods anytime he wants by using a quick dose of peyote cactus, but although the astronomic connections may be weak the astrological ones probably aren’t. Reinhard’s theory concerning the importance of mountains, rivers, pools, and so on in the landscape is spot on, but what he failed to understand is that they are only important because in the spiritual landscape they have a meaning and large numbers of people in other cultures attempted to reproduce these too.
But because none of the scientists has ever seen a spirit or a spiritual landscape they are unable to grasp the essence of what is being portrayed – this is a vast spiritual map overlaid on the physical landscape. These are flight paths, but the flight paths of the out of body shaman.
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A description of the experience
Wikipedia
One theory of the purpose of the lines is that the Nazca people's motivations were religious and that the images were constructed so that gods in the sky could see them. Kosok and Reiche advanced one of the earliest reasons given for the Nazca Lines: that they were intended to point to the places on the distant horizon where the sun and other celestial bodies rose or set. This hypothesis was evaluated by two different experts in archaeoastronomy, Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni, and they both concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support an astronomical explanation.
In 1985, the archaeologist Johan Reinhard published archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrating that worship of mountains and other water sources played a dominant role in Nazca religion and economy from ancient to recent times. .... The lines were interpreted as being primarily used as sacred paths leading to places where these deities could be worshiped, and the figures as symbolically representing animals and objects meant to invoke their aid. However, the precise meanings of many of the individual geoglyphs remain unsolved as of 2009.