Are Inca Temples in Chile & Peru remants of Nephite/Jaredite civilization? George Potter says Yes! Find out more in out next conversation…
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Case for Chile
GT 00:22 What is the time period for the Incas? When did they start and end or whatever? Or have they ever ended?
George 00:31 No, no. There are tribal groups in the Andes. The Incas were centered around Cusco, before Kore de Mendocino other Spanish conquerors. There were 25 Inca kings, 25 that they record. Go back 25 Different reigns. Take a typical reign, 25 years or whatever, and you’re back to Book of Mormon times. So, the Incas believed, now what we call the Inca Empire, that was only from 1200 to 1400 until Pizarro landed, 200 years.
GT 00:51 AD?
George 01:04 Right, 200 AD. But these are the Incas who came back to Cusco. They re-took Cusco. Their forefathers go back 25 different reigns. People in the modern-day Inca period, the current period Incas, all they were trying to do is recreate the golden age of their ancestors from far back. They are trying to recreate their golden age. They were not the golden age of actual Incas. If you go to Cusco, what do you find? Look at the early stonework, pre-Inca stonework. It’s fantastic. Then you get the Inca stonework, which is still pretty amazing. You can’t put a knife between the rocks, but much it’s cruder. Then you have the Spanish era on top of that. The early Inca, they were just incredible. So, all the Incas were doing is trying to recreate their ancient times. So, who were the Incas? Who were the early Incas? Four brothers.
GT 02:30 Okay.
George 02:32 Four brothers. Any Peruvian can tell you, where the Incas started. There are four brothers that came to the land. They were white. The oldest brother was mean and wicked. And the people hated him.
GT 02:48 His name was Laman?
George 02:51 Well, you have to understand, they have two different languages that are spoken of, by the Incas. They had their private language, which they only spoke to themselves. But the people who they conquered, the people who they worked with, they had what they called popular language. So, you understand, what did King Mosiah have to do? He had to teach his sons how to read the language of their fathers, because they spoke a different language, so they could interpret the books. So, the Book of Mormon people had two languages, too. The one that was in the plates, and the one that they used on a daily basis. So, the four brothers that come here, the youngest brother was beloved, he became their king. He taught them how to live. He taught them how to be clean. He taught them a new religion. He taught them how to make weapons, how to make buildings, all these things he taught. They go to Cusco. He taught them how to plant, how to plant corn. So, this youngest brother teaches them. If you go to Cusco, corn was introduced in the Cusco Valley in 500 BC, mas o meno (more or less] 50 years carbon dated. So that’s the younger brother.
GT 04:13 But they didn’t eat corn in Israel. Did they? Corn is a very American food. It’s not really a middle eastern food though. Is it?
George 04:22 Well, we have adapted the corn, the name corn, from the Middle East. We’ve applied it to corn that grows here. I mean to the native corn. Actually, corn was not domesticated in Mesoamerica. It was domesticated first in Peru. I’m just saying, the City of Nephi, Cusco introduced corn there 500 BC, by the youngest brother. It was so bad, before they got to Cusco, these four brothers, the youngest brother had to separate himself from the older brother because the older brother was so violent and wicked. So, he set up a scheme to tell the older brother, “Oh, I left the staff,” the Nephi actually called the nephistaff, “back in a cave,” which is the sign of sovereignty, the youngest brother was a king. So, he told the older brother, according to the Inca legend, go back to the cave, get the staff and please bring it back. I left it there.” So, of course, Laman, the oldest brother, would have loved to come back and gotten the staff that shows he’s the ruler. Right? While he’s gone, Nephi takes off. Well, excuse me, Maco Copa takes off and eventually ends up in Cusco, where they settle. So, there’s all sorts of archaeological evidence down there. That’s in my book. We can’t possibly go through it tonight.
GT 04:23 What’s the name of your book?
George 05:46 Nephi in the Promised Land.[1] I go through. I look at possible site for Cusco, possible site for Zarahemla, possible sites for Bountiful, possible sites for the City of Jared or the Jaredite cities, the Land Northward, the Land of Desolation. All of them carbon date to that era. All of them are fairly consistent with what you would think of as a Book of Mormon civilization. So, I can’t possibly go through all the archaeological information they have. But just think of, for example, and we will go into the narrow neck of land, all that stuff if you want. But just think for a second. When Pizarro’s army got down to where Lima is today, the Rímac Valley, the Incas called it the land of the people of desolation. That’s what they actually called it, the land of the people of desolation. The Book of Mormon, why was it the land Desolation? Not because it was desert, but because what happened to the people there. That’s William Sullivan’s book here. He is not LDS. He’s an archaeologist, mythologist. He’s the one I’m quoting here on that.
Jaredites in South America
George 07:11 Think again about the Jaredites. They landed in the same area as the Nephites. They’re in the same basic area. Archaeologists will tell you the Ziggurats in Mesopotamia were—and the clay brick that they used in the first mortar and stuff, that all dates back—these are the Bible scholars and archaeologists, that if there ever was a tower, it would have been built around 3000 BC. That would have been the tower. So, let’s say then that the Jaredites left 2900 BC, 2800 BC, they come to the Americas. Where are the Jaredite cities? Where are they? Where’s any single civilization in the Americas that dates back to that period?
GT 08:07 I don’t care. Let’s talk about South America.
George 08:10 Guess what, 1300 BC, at earliest 1300 BC.
GT 08:16 So, you’re still comparing yourself to Meso too much.
George 08:20 But if you go to Lima, Peru, get on a tour bus or rent a car and drive up to Caral. There are 12 pyramids up there, Ziggurat looking pyramids. They date back to 2700 BC. You have a civilization. They have irrigation. They have mathematics. They have engineering. They have religion. They have sail boats. They have all sorts of things that are consistent with Mesopotamia [in] 2700 BC. The brother of Jared was told that your seed will become the greatest civilization on earth. There’s a book called 1491 by Charles Mann.[2] It describes the Americas before Columbia.
GT 09:12 Columbus.
George 09:12 [Yes,] before Columbus, excuse me, before Columbus. So, he says that Caral is a parallel civilization to Mesopotamia. They can’t understand, archaeologists, how that took place. All of a sudden you have civilization in two different places in the world popping up at the same time, Mesopotamia, Peru. But Peru became larger than Mesopotamia, larger than Sumer. And the brother of Jared was told, “Your seed will become the greatest nation in the world.” And it did. It was the greatest civilization in the world, the largest at that time. [It had] 25 different cities all around there in a religious center of 12 different pyramids. But I didn’t want to compare with anywhere else. I’m just saying that fits Book of Mormon narrative. And they believed in a white God. And they had metalwork and that’s where they found the plates.
GT 10:18 Because I know that that’s been a big thing. And there are proponents of the Book of Mormon that point to South American or North American pyramids or mountains or whatever. Nephi, when he built his temple, he built it like unto Solomon. And so that would not be a pyramid shape, I wouldn’t think. It should be more of Israeli. I mean, I don’t know if you saw, they had, a movable tabernacle in Saratoga Springs, Eagle Mountain, I can’t remember, recently. And so, when I look at a South American pyramid, I’m like, that looks nothing like the tabernacle of Israel.
George 11:06 I cannot comment about Mesoamerica or North America, because I’ve been told not to.
GT 11:11 No, no, no. But you were talking about pyramids. You were talking about pyramids. And I’m just trying to point out that the step pyramids, which do look a lot like Egyptian pyramids, I’ll grant that, but they don’t look like Israeli architecture. That’s what I’m trying to say.
George 11:28 Okay. What is a temple? Where you would have a functioning temple, it’s a building with rooms in it, and curtains, and things like that.
GT 11:42 Or even the Temple of Solomon, I mean, that wasn’t mobile, but it was, I mean, we know what that looked like.
George 11:46 It has to be something like a temple. It’s not a bunch of burial mound, made out of stone or made out of Earth. It’s actually a building. It’s a temple. So, have you been to the Coricancha in…
GT 12:01 I’ve not been to South America at all.
George 12:03 I told you.
GT 12:04 Tijuana is as far south as I go. {Rick chuckling}
George 12:07 I won’t comment on why you went to Tijuana. {both laughing} I used to go there as a student at UC San Diego. {laughter continues} I did go there to go to church, actually, in Tijuana because I just wanted….
GT 12:18 I’ve been to Australia. I guess that’s farther south. But yeah, it as far as North America, Tijuana is as far south.
George 12:22 I served my mission in South America, in Peru and Bolivia. So, I’d go from San Diego, La Jolla, there where the university is located. I’d go down, go to church in Tijuana, just to feel the spirit in Spanish and the good people there. Getting back to this point about the Coricancha and Cusco. John Gorriman was here last night in my house, and he was talking about the Coricancha. The Coricancha is the main Inca temple in Cusco. He says inside there’s windows. There are the rooms and there are windows. You can look right through those windows, just like the mirrors in the temple. It’s a building. It has rooms in it. There are altars in it. There’s what’s called the macucapac or, I believe, Nephite shield in there. It looks like the tree of life. It’s an actual building with a room in it. That was a functioning temple, and they had statues, a statue of the white God in pure gold, a man, in a robe with sandals, with a beard. It’s just like going to Temple Square in Salt Lake City. You have statues of the Lord there at the visitor’s center. I mean, it was a functioning building. It was not a burial place at all.
George 12:36 There is a guy named Val Evans, who’s from Salt Lake. He has a foundation that he has up in the Sacred Valley of the Incas for orphans. He was a missionary in Peru, too, and he spent months and months in Peru. One of the things he does is he goes and he talks to the native priest and tries to understand what their religion [is,] where it came from. When Christ or let’s say the white guy, Viracocha, their white God, he has always been the primary God of the South America. When he appeared to the people there, he came to Lake Titicaca. That is what they believe and then he went north. He traveled, healing the people, teaching them to love one another, teaching them how to do things. He even taught them how to store food. They should store food. It sounds kind of LDS. Anyway, he comes, and he walks from Lake Titicaca, he serves his mission. He goes all the way up to Ecuador. Then he leaves by walking out on the sea. He leaves by walking out on the sea. Every village in Peru is aligned to the course of the direction of that mission of the white God. He’s coming up near Cusco. And he’s at Racha, this village.
George 15:22 People come out and they try to attack him. They don’t know who he is. He’s white, and they’re not white. They come out to attack him, the Lamanites, we’ll say. And they throw stones at him and throw spears at him. And so, the white God brings down fire from heaven on top of a hill. The people immediately recognize that he’s the Lord. And they bow down and they ask for forgiveness of their sins. All right, at that site, you can still go there today and see the ruins of the biggest building in the Americas. It was a temple, that they had built to Viracocha. Val Evans has studied there. He’s written a book called House of the Lord. It talks about where they did their washings before they went in, the way they went through the rooms of that building. That was an actual temple type structure in Peru, again, by modern Incas, not ancient Incas. But it’s their tradition. But Coriconcha is ancient, the one in Cusco, and I love the story of that.
George 16:29 He continued then, Viracocha, walking through, healing the people. When he got to Cusco, which I believe is the City of Nephi, where Nephi would have died and been buried. They mummified their kings. According to the Inca tradition, Viracocha, raised from the dead, Manco Capac, Nephi. If that’s true, by the way I interpret it, I think it’s the most beautiful thing. Nephi was such a wonderful person, just an amazing, faithful, person, prophet, that Jesus Christ gets to the city of Nephi, he personally resurrects Nephi, brings him back to life. I love that story.
George 17:16 But the story of the four brothers, there’s pottery down there where you see the white skinned people and the brown skinned people, the Quechua versus the Aymara people. The Incas were fair skinned people. The Aymara weren’t. I mean, they’re not white, but they’re fair skinned. I could show you in my book. [They have] pottery down there. We have these fair-skinned warriors complete with cloth shields, which are described by Moroni. General Moroni had them build these med shields of cloth. They had head coverings. They had armor, all the way up them, it was just thick cloth. Then you have them fighting the dark-skinned people who are simply wearing a G string. They’re just wearing a cloth around their loins, totally naked trying to fight these guys who have swords, or had wooden swords, probably wooden swords, and with their full armor on. So, I mean, yeah, we can go back, and we can say, nowhere have we found a complete model right now of where, of all where Nephi civilization or Jaredite civilization would have been. But we have a lot of the attributes found in South America. It’s very impressive. And there’s just wonderful stories down there. David [Calderwood.] I can’t remember his name right now. He wrote a book called, Voices from the Dust.[3] It was his dissertation at the University of Texas in Austin.
George 19:04 He accumulated all the folktales of the white gods, or whatever in North America, South America Mesoamerica. And he wrote the book. I went and researched all the Spanish reports or histories on my own. He had done this, but also in other areas. I called up David and I said, “David, I’m not going to tell you–I do research on the Book of Mormon in the Americas. Where do you think it took place?” Without hesitating, he said, “Peru.” The traditions down there are just so beautiful about the white God. He wore robes. He had sandals, that when the Spanish heard the details, they thought he was St. Bartholomew. It had to be somebody from the Middle East, the way he was dressed, the way he looks.
George 19:57 I went to the Island of the Sun one time, and I’d never been there. I was there as a missionary, I’d had been to Cusco, Machu Picchu, all these other places, Shan Shan, but I’ve never gotten to the island of the Sun, in Lake Titicaca where the Lord supposedly appeared. They have a temple there to him and they have an altar. It’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. The Lake Titicaca, these mountains in the background are 22,000 feet high. This lake where you can’t even see the end of it, it goes for 150 miles or something. It’s an unbelievably beautiful place. And so, I land there with my son. And I said, “We’re here. Let’s just find someone who can show us where this temple was.” So, I met a man in town, and I said, “Could you show me where this was?” He said, “Oh, I would love to.” So, he takes us up this trail. We come to this door. There’s no wall, it’s just the door. The trail went through this door, and he said, “This is one of three doors that you had to go through before you got to where the altar was.”
George 21:04 And I said, “You don’t like the Incas do you?”
George 21:08 “Oh, no, we hate the Incas.” He’s got darker eyes, darker skin, and shorter and all this. And he said, “Those Incas, they were like your son.” My son is six foot two, fair skinned. “They were like him. Yeah, we don’t like them. They took away our island because the Inca’s built this most sacred place. This is where the white God appeared.” After Cusco, it was the second most important place to them.
George 21:31 He takes us on up. There are three of these gates you had to go through to get to the altar. We got to what he called–what do they call that? This is what the temple would have been, but there’s this like a cliff face. It’s not very high. It’s maybe 30 feet high, maybe 150 feet long. It was when the Incas had it, when the Spanish got there, it was completely paved with gold. They had a fabric that went from the top of that cliff face all the way down to the shoreline made out of vicuna, covering up this holy place. I mean today that’d be worth millions of dollars. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. He says, “Here’s the face of Viracocha, the white God. Here’s his crown. Here’s his beard.”
George 22:26 It’s like, whoa, and that’s why. It was completely covered with gold and then they have an altar there, where– I don’t know. I said, “If I were to get married in a temple, that’s where I’d get married, right there.” It’s the most beautiful place in the world. But the legends are just incredible about the white God. He taught them. When the Spanish got there the Incas had an 11 year supply of food, clothing and other essentials. He, the white God even told them how to preserve them. You can still see where they stored their food. Now, the El Nino effect is very strong there. It takes years to get the crops back. You have rain, then you don’t have rain down there in the Andes. So, what other religion tells its people to store food?
George 23:21 But anyway, there’s a great story that I love to tell. It’s in my book. When the Incas would conquer different civilizations, they would take the gods of these pagans, because they practiced Viracocha, the one God. They’d take the pagan gods and they’d put them in the temple in Cusco, in the Cori concha temple, just like they did, and Solomon did. You’d take the gods of the people he was conquering and stick them in the temple in Jerusalem, because then maybe you’d control their God. They had to behave, or you’d destroy their God, whatever. So, it was a ploy that they used to use to control people back in the old days. So, the Incas, they conquer this one tribe. They had these golden dishes that tried to represent the sun. And they said that the sun was their God. And they brought that symbol to the temple in the Cori concha, in Cusco. So, the Inca, one of the Incas there, one of the last Incas, he decides that this is a cool symbol. I’m going to start worshipping the sun and I am going to call myself the son of the sun. But guess what happened to him? He’s at night and the white God, Viracocha, appears to him and tells him, because you have become a pagan and you’re worshipping the sun and not me, your son will be the last Inca. There will never be an Inca after him. Viracocha’s, white people, will come and they will persecute and do great harm to your people. The Inca is so taken aback by this revelation that he’s had. He spreads this throughout all the land. He tells all the people, and the people are on eggshells, that their world’s going come to an end, even though they were the most powerful people that they know. No one could challenge them in their domain. The Inca told about this revelation they had.
George 25:50 So, he dies, his son takes over. His son is up in Ecuador, battling some rebel people they’re trying to put down. He’s there with his son, and he’s there with Aqua kappa Aqua Aqua Hapa.
GT 26:08 That’s easy for you to say. {Rick chuckles}
George 26:09 I’ve been talking too long. Atahualpa, excuse me. So, smallpox hits all of a sudden, because before the Spanish got to Peru smallpox reached it. The son of this guy that had the revelation, he dies. His son dies, the crown prince. The line is broken. So, half-brother, Atahualpa and Manco Capac, another brother down in Cusco, now the one brother Atahaulpa, he’s up in, Ecuador. Manco Capac is in Cusco. Each of them wants to become the next Inca. So, there’s a civil war, and Atahaulpa, he’s coming down on his way to Cusco, and he gets the Cajamarca. And on the way, he’s destroying anybody who supports his half-brother, just being ruthless.
George 27:03 So, they get to Cajamarca, and he says to some of his entourage, “There is a shrine to the white God, up on the hill here. Go up there and take an unspotted sheep or alpaca, an unspotted alpaca. Take it up there and sacrifice it to Viracocha, the white God, for giving us good tidings and success and blessings for our campaign against my brother.” They go up there and the priest in the temple area of shrines says, “I will not do it. The white God is not pleased with what you’ve been doing. You have been persecuting your people, killing them, doing harm to them, when you don’t have to. I will not do that.” Atahualpa is so mad, he goes up to the shrine he takes his battle axe, chops off the head of the statue of the white God, in the form of a man, cuts off the head of the priest, comes down to his tent. That day, a messenger comes up from the coast and tells Atahualpa, “White men have landed in our land, white men.” When Atahualpa went to Cajamarca to meet Pizarro, he went unarmed with 40,000 men. And the Spanish butchered them because they were unmanned [unarmed] and they were basically self-defeated. They knew that [this was] the end of their reign. So, it’s just very interesting. But part of the other revelation, the same revelation that the original grandfather had received said that after the white people come, who are going to destroy you, other white men will come and they will bless your people. As a missionary down there, I thought maybe that had to something with us.
{End of Part 3}
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