Paranormal, Conspiracies, Occult, Ancient History, Magick, Supernatural, Spiritual, Metaphysical, New Age

Author: geoffrey templar

INTRODUCTION
There is a region of Paraguay where overwhelming evidence exists of Viking occupation in the period 1000-1300 AD. The decrypted runic inscriptions indicate a dialect very close to the language spoken by the inhabitants of the Schleswig peninsula.

Archaeological examination of the territory was conducted in the latter part of the 1970s by a professorial team in collaboration with the Paraguayan Government and Army, and the Instituto de Ciencia del Hombre of Asuncion. There can be no doubt that the Vikings settled this region of South America. The reason why they did so is rather more elusive, as is the explanation why modern historians might want to distance themselves from any discussion of Schleswig Vikings in Paraguay.

The first post-Columbian expedition to South America from the Atlantic westwards to the Andes was in 1521 before the Spaniards established themselves in Paraguay. Alejo Garcia, a Portuguese in the service of Castile, survived a shipwreck off Santa Catalina, Brazil, and from natives ashore he learned about the inland territory of "the White King", the owner of immense riches in silver and gold. With three companions, Garcia crossed the Guayra, the region separating the Atlantic from modern Paraguay, along a track in perfect repair. There is no doubt about this account, for in 1542 the Spanish explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote a chronicle confirming it in all details.

The track followed the north bank of the river Paranapanema and crossed the great Rio Parana to a settlement marked on the oldest maps as Ivinheima. (IVIN - Old High German Iwa, HEIMA - Old German heim - country) . This place is now known by the Guarani name "Yguarey" ("River of the Dwellers of Antiquity") . The iva was a tree whose red wood, tough but flexible, was used by the Norsemen to make their bows: in this region the Gyauaki Indians used the acrocomia-tatai palm for the same purpose. From Ivinheima the track crossed the mesopotamia and Cerro Cora ridge (the central location of this article) to San Fernando mountain on the east bank of the River Paraguay just above a settlement marked on the oldest maps as Weibingo: after crossing the river the traveller followed the path north west to Potosi. The name Weibingo comes from the Norse vej (path) and vink (sign) or vinkekl (angle) and therefore means either "signpost" or more probably "bend in the track", the point where the traveller, following the route from present-day Asuncion, had to turn left for Potosi in Bolivia. A third interesting location mentioned in the earliest published account (Schmidel, below) is Froenirtiere where there was a ruined fortification with palisade. Neither Ivinheima nor Weibingo nor Froenirtiere are names which might have roots in native Amerindian languages or Spanish.

On 6 January 1536 a fleet of about 14 ships under the flag of Castile arrived in the River Plate. This was a private expedition led by the wealthy adventurer Don Pedro de Mendoza. 300 sailors and 3250 soldiers of foot had embarked at Seville, including 150 Dutch and Germans, one of the former being Ulrich Schmidel of Straubing, Bavaria, an explorer of 18 years experience. Although listed as "a lancer", Schmidel was clearly a man of erudition, and it is probable that he was an agent of King Carlos V of Castile: he was received at court as "an adviser to His Majesty" upon his return. In Paraguay, Schmidel took part in one of the four expeditions from Asuncion to Bolivia, as his chronicle relates (Wahrhaftige Historien einer wunderbaren Schiffahrt, publ. Hulsius 1602). In Chapter 23 he mentions a stay at Weibingo, and in Chapter 24 a meeting near there with a tribe of natives, the Paiembos, from whom he solicited information regarding a people known as the "Caracarais". He received the answer that the Paiembos knew only what they had heard, that the Caracarais lived some distance away, that they "had much gold and silver", furthermore that they were "a very wise people like us Christians and had lots to eat."

In a recent newspaper article ("La Nacion", Buenos Aires, 6 February 2006, p15/Sec. I) , the President of the Argentine Academy of History, Don Juan Jose Cresto, remarked, in connection with the foundation of Buenos Aires in 1536, that the true objective of Mendoza had been to reach the domains of the "White King" in the region of Sierra de la Plata (the mountain-range of silver) or Cerro Rico de Potosi, and this had been the reason why Mendoza had sent the main bulk of his force northwards from the River Plate.

In the 1930s, Major Marcial Samaniego was a young engineer and officer in the Paraguayan Army ,stationed in a relatively unpopulated frontier zone of which Cerro Cora (close to the modern town of Pedro Juan Caballero on the border with Brazil) formed part. He had a passionate interest in ethnic affairs. Every night in his tent he recorded on magnetic tape the interminable stories told him by the aged local natives whose confidence he had won. His main aim was to preserve knowledge of the ancestral traditions likely to be soon lost with the onward march of civilisation and Christianity. One particular extract of the Tupi-Guarani tradition - "The Great King of Amambay" intrigued him. He copied down:

"In days gone by there reigned in this region a powerful and wise king called Ipir. He was a white man and wore a long blond beard. With men of his race and indigenous warriors loyal to him he lived in a large settlement on top of a small mountain. He had much-feared weaponry and possessed great riches in gold and silver. One day, however, he was attacked by savage tribes and disappeared for ever. That was what I was told by my father, and he was told it by my grandfather."

All the Guarani tribes of Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia recall this White King of antiquity. Major Samaniego was aware that indigenous traditions may distort facts but never invent them. The name Ipir has no meaning in Guarani; it is not a Guarani name and is foreign to the structure of the Guarani language, whose words (with few exceptions, none of which end in -ir) finish in a vowel.

Our knowledge about Fritz Berger is sketchy. He must have been born around 1880 and died in 1948. He was a mechanical engineer from the Sudetenland who had spent many years drifting across South America: he had a lady-friend in Munich to whom he communicated some of his experiences by letter. During the War of the Chaco between Paraguay and Bolivia from 1932 to 1935, Fritz Berger gave "good and loyal service" to the Paraguayan Army as an engineer at a weapons repair workshop in Asuncion. In 1936 he left for Brazil. All that is known of how he spent the next four years is a brief reference to the fact that he "prospected for petroleum in Parana State." Berger had no knowledge of geology, and found no petroleum deposits, but it provided a plausible reason as to why he spent so much time investigating the terrain. In 1940, "in the course of one of his customary rides through the forest on horseback", and having just forded the River Ypane about 25 kilometres south-west of the town of Pedro Juan Caballero in Paraguay, he saw extending before him a natural plain surrounded by hills, on the edge of which was the Cerro Cora mountain ridge. It was in this place, so the Indian natives had told him, that King Ipir had lived.

During his four years' absence from Paraguay, Fritz Berger's mental state had deteriorated. He saw visions, and was probably hearing voices which appear to have given him occult information. He knew facts for which no evidence existed, but which always turned out to be true. For the detection of subterranean metals he used instrumentation unknown to engineers. Berger knew that he had developed some kind of mental aberration, for he admitted it in his letters to Munich: "....they are going to say one day or other, that engineer Berger is crazy, I know that", and again, "...last night loud cries woke me up. There was nobody there. Can it be an oscillation, or is it all in my head?". The strange thing was, he wrote, that he knew "how to escape from the Land of the Sleeping Beauty of the Forest" when he had technical problems to solve. He would then use his strange measuring meter and slide rule to make sketches of great precision. General, formerly Major, Marcial Samaniego, by 1975 the Paraguayan Minister of Defence, assured the professorial researchers in that year that the leading role in the Viking discoveries had been played by the Sudeten engineer.

Berger claimed to have discovered a city called "Atlantik" of which the dimensions were "50 kilometres diameter and 150 kilometres long, a grandiose Phoenician installation" which had "large deposits of helium and petroleum, the piping still usable" and "monuments which looked like cathedrals and great palaces, and temples to the horizon." These might have been built by the Phoenicians "anything from 6,000 to 500, 000 years ago". Cerro Ipir, Fritz Berger continued, "was the centre of a vast region densely populated aeons ago."

It is interesting to note that Austrian professor Ludwig Schwennhagen had for decades been researching an alleged Phoenician presence in Brazil in the pre-Christian era, the results being revealed in his book "The Ancient History of Brazil 1100 BC - 1500 AD" published in 1928. Schwennhagen claimed to have found Phoenician inscriptions in Piaui State in the Amazon area in which there were references to Tyre and Sidon (887-856 BC) . He believed that the Phoenicians had used Brazil as a base for at least 800 years. Brazil is apparently full of vestiges which corroborate the Phoenician presence in the north-east. The Tupi tribe native to the region from about 3000 BC split in two in about 500 BC, one branch migrating to north east Paraguay where it became known as the Tupi-Guarani tribe.

At what stage in 1940 Fritz Berger contacted Major Marcial Samaniego is not revealed, but as a result of the meeting a company was set up under the name Agrupacion Geologica y Arqueologica (AGA) which used engineer units of the Paraguayan Army for excavation work and enlisted Fritz Berger as a technical consultant. A statement of the findings was released to the world Press in 1944, but there was no interest, and AGA was wound up the following year.

In this article only the three major locations which contribute to the greater mystery of the Paraguayan Vikings are described. Other sites, which include several more mountains with runic inscriptions, the foundations and lower stone and wood structure of a temple, and a Nordic sacred grove similar to that found in Piaui State by Professor Schwennhagen, also exist.

In January 1973 an edition of the Asuncion daily newspaper "ABC Color" carried a long article announcing the discovery by Ministry of Public Works geologist Pedro Gonzalez of 157 caves and grottoes in the mountainous jungle region of Amambay. On some of the cave walls he had found numerous engravings in a strange script. He had removed a number of boxes filled with engraved stones. The Amambay plateau is 70 kilometres in diameter about 100 kilometres from the town of Pedro Juan Caballero.

On the Amambay plateau, Cerro Guazu alone has five caves or rock shelters with thousands of chiselled inscriptions. Of these, 71 were eventually decrypted by the expedition runologist. The whole complex contains the largest collection of rune writings in the world. Most are in the classic futhark, some in Anglo-Saxon or the local futhark of continental Germany. It was deduced from the translated material that the Paraguayan Vikings were not pure Danes but originated principally from Schleswig, speaking a dialect of Norse and Old Low German. This may have developed locally over the estimated 300 year period in which the Vikings were in South America, cut off from Europe.

In a rock shelter known as Abrigo de Odin is a fine chiselled image of Odin riding his six-legged horse, Sleipnir, who is leaping from one world to another: the god holds the javelin Gungnir in his right hand. Before the Abrigo de los Altares are to be found two blocks of roughly tailored stone of approximately equal size. The investigators considered that they formed a sacrificial altar. Both had on one side a number of deep grooves whose purpose might have been to drain off the blood of victims. Other engravings were three simple runes: the death rune, hagalaz (h) and solewu (S) , an ideogram which may transliterate to "At death have faith in the Sun". The second sacrifice-stone has the runes eihwaz (e) fehu (f) and uruz (u) (justice, property, virility) , and below the altar is a single rune, mannaz (man) .

Two inscriptions in the rock shelter confirmed that the blocks in question do compose a sacrificial altar. One of them, a cryptogram engraved in a medallion of much darker colour than the surrounding rock, reads thurisaz + isa + odala + ansuz + solewu + solewu (thi o as s) which the runologist professor transliterated as "To Thee, Odin, God of the Sun".

Another lithograph in the same shelter dispels any doubt as to the practice of sacrifice there: ofak/les that uile/ifuil, literally "May this sacrifice endure". Ifuil may be a signature. Another word, indecipherable, is engraved lower down the stone. At the foot of Cerro Guazu is a 10-metre high dolmen having the engraving of a radiant sun and the runic inscription os leuo liuth - "Hymn of the Sun God Odin."

The Cerro Cora range is a ring of mountains about five kilometres in diameter and 25 kilometres west of the modern town of Pedro Juan Caballero. It lies within a national park and a prohibited military zone. At one time in the past the area had been sub-tropical afforested jungle. A straight ridge to the north-east is Cerro Itaguambype (a Guarani word which means "fortress") . It is two kilometres long and 100 metres in height in relation to the interior plain, aligned north-south and on its crest has a path 300 metres long and three metres broad. At the south end of this path is a rounded raised platform and the ruins of a watchtower. About thirty metres from the south end of the path is an opening 20 metres wide leading into the interior of the mountain.

The base of Cerro Itaguambype is natural rock to which vertical walls had been added, and where necessary the natural rock tailored vertically. The walls are constructed of stone blocks of unequal size but fit into one another for a smooth surface. This method of construction is exactly similar to pre-Inca walls in Peru and Bolivia where the irregularity is a deliberate defence against seismic movements. Since Paraguay is not an earthquake zone, it seems logical to infer that the method must have been imported, for the native Guaranis never built in stone before the Jesuits arrived in Paraguay, while the Jesuits followed a different style of building and never settled in the area. The men who built this wall must have learnt the technique in the Andes Altiplano and prior to the founding of the Inca empire, since the procedures were lost after the fall of Tiahuanacu in about 1290.

Over the period 1940-1944 this mountain was thoroughly investigated by AGA, and again by the Instituto de la Ciencia del Hombre professors thirty years later, but until very recently nothing was ever revealed as to what was found in its interior. In the last interview before the professorial team-leader's death in 1990, he revealed to the Delphos Foundation of Argentina, an organisation interested in pre-Hispanic history in South America, that the interior of the mountain had contained "a silver-resmelting plant". Here is the first mystery. What classified secret could possibly exist about a 13th century silver re-smelting plant in a remote mountain of Paraguay?

The second mountain in which Fritz Berger had a particular interest lies within five miles of the first, no more than forty metres in height, a rocky hump with a central depression, covered over its lower regions with dense vegetation and above it with none, and thus called by the Guarani natives "Yvyty Pero" - Bald Mountain. Later it was renamed "Cerro Ipir" by the Paraguayan Government. Curiously, there is a similar mountain with the name "Yvyty Pero" 300 miles to the south, at the foot of which archaelogists have found some splendid runic inscriptions. Where Berger gained the conviction that Bald Mountain was so important is not known, but he became convinced that the hill was a tumulus and contained a subterranean palace built around the funeral chamber of a Viking king.

He used a "metal detector", an instrument impossible to identify but which two AGA soldiers, an officer and a sergeant, have testified "looked like a theodolite with a large clock which Berger used to detect different metals." A shaft was found in the depression between the two humps of Cerro Ipir, and here the theodolite-clock indicated the presence of gold. Excavation work began and two items were soon discovered: a triangular pice of gold "which looked like the broken corner of a table", and then a staff decorated with a gold hand. Winter rains hampered the work which had proceeded no deeper than 18 metres by the end of 1941: by the end of 1942 a pneumatic drill had been brought in and a ventilation shaft sunk obliquely to meet up with the first.

At 23 metres calculated from the head of the vertical shaft, the drillers encountered a continuous slab found impossible to break. The bits of the drill broke off one after another. Explosives did not even scratch the surface of what Berger considered to be "the roof of the palace". The witnesses stated that the material was undoubtedly artificial, and infinitely more durable than cement. Berger stated that it was "a superior Portland unknown to modern science". A third attempt was undertaken in 1944 about 10 metres up from the base of the hill and an outer wall discovered which bore an indecipherable insciption, its characters eroded but definitely not the Latin alphabet. The strange cement of the wall impeded any further progress and the project was then abandoned.

Besides the two gold artifacts mentioned above, the AGA team also found "a 14 x 10 cm plaque, unidentifiable for certain as stone or metal, brilliant as diamond" which Berger mentioned in a letter in 1941. There were also various representations of heads, some amphoras, other artifacts "of high artistic value", some found in the rubble, others set out "displayed as if in a museum." These included the figurine of a woman 1.2 metres in length "of alabaster or porcelain of the finest kind" found buried, suggestive of a recumbent statue from a mediaeval sepulchre, and two dice bearing the images of persons unidentifiable but which in structure were "similar to worked diamond." The subsequent whereabouts of these items is not known.

Fritz Berger spent considerable time in making a survey of the ridge. "It is very big, " he wrote in October 1941, "and I have not been able to estimate it completely. It is probably 80 components, perhaps more. I have found it interesting to see how these people worked geometrically, to the centimetre. I found polygons so exact, from the arithmetical point of view, that the best of engineers could not reproduce it. Today when they dynamited inside the shaft, at a distance of some 200 metres I felt the vibrations in the cavities below me."

When the professorial team investigated the hill in 1977, at first glance archaeologist Professor Pistilli reported that nothing about the hill suggested a tumulus. On further exploration, the shaft and trenching were found intact but poorly preserved. After having seen a five-character undecryptable runic inscription on a wall, the runologist continued the excavation to the concrete inner wall. This was a whitish shade and contrasted with the reddish sandstone of which the ridge is composed. It was found impossible to chip or even mark the material in any way with a pick or geologist's hammer: the interior sounded hollow. To determine whether the underground construction had the extension which Berger alleged, small explosive charges were detonated. It was noted that the vibrations radiated outwards at the same speed as in normal atmosphere to the 200 metre mark, the distance indicated by Berger; beyond that the compacted sandstone had a muffling effect. Efforts to find the entrance to the subterranean chamber were undertaken with teams of sappers, but could not be discovered.

In his letters to Munich in 1940, Berger stated having found the entrance to four tunnels, the location of which he was not disposed to reveal. These were "over 150 kilometres in length" he said: the dimensions were small, each entrance being less than a metre broad and 1.47 metres high.

IN CONCLUSION

What conclusions can be drawn from the above? Large scale silver-ore mining in the pre-Inca period, begun about 1000 AD, has been proven scientifically by carbon-dating material found in Laguna Lobato at Potosi in Bolivia. Findings published in the journal Science of 23 September 2003 confirm a major technology for its time, partly destroyed later by extensive Spanish plundering. Dr Mark Abbott of Pittsburgh University stated that the Potosi silver industry was "up and running from about 1000 AD", but who was responsible for it, and where the silver went, remain a mystery.

The obvious answer is that the Potosi silver mines were run by the Vikings, for whose presence in the region from the tenth century onwards much physical evidence exists. They are the leading candidates for having mined and refined and smelted the silver at Potosi. But here is our mystery. If it was then shipped from Potosi down "the soft track" to the mountain fortress at Cerro Cora, why was it re-smelted there? And why was the re-smelting considered a secret to be kept from the reading public of the 20th century? And is this all part of the same reason why the presence of the Vikings in Paraguay seven hundred years ago is also a fact to be supressed?

The only certain answer to the silver mystery is that re-smelting would only need to be done at the destination point. One idea that comes to mind is the manufacture of a silver alloy in some mysterious process. The second mountain, Cerro Ipir, provides a possible pointer as to who might have been interested in receiving all this silver.

Major Samaniego rose to the rank of general and became Paraguay's Minister of Defence. Of Fritz Berger he said, "Despite his mental aberrations, whatever he said, and whatever he predicted, always turned out to be true."· Berger must have been psychic, for no other explanation seems logical as the source for his information - "he got it from the natives" appears highly improbable. Unfortunately, respecting the fate of the precious artifacts found at Cerro Cora and to which Berger referred in his letters, all one can know is that they disappeared, and only the managers of the AGA organisation know to where. The identity of the original artisans is likewise a mystery. We might take the easy way out and discount the possibility that such fantastic items ever existed, were it not for the one thing which remains in situ and unexplained - the great subterranean structure which cannot be entered, made of a material which appears similar to that lining the mysterious underground tunnels of Ecuador as described by von Daeniken in his book The Gold of the Gods.

Which race of South America centuries before Columbus could construct an underground palace in "a Portland cement far in advance of what we have today", a palace within a mountain extending for more than 200 metres underground, the material of its fabric being resistant to chipping or scratching by every modern drill and possibly by conventional explosives too? None.

San Borondon, the strange disappearing island described in "A Pagan Place - I", and Cerro Cora, in Fritz Berger's own words "The Land of the Sleeping Beauty of the Forest" present modern science with a dilemma.

In the 1960s, many investigators were agreed on the possibility of a parallel universe, primarily to explain mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft. In the September/October 1966 edition of the magazine Planeta, French physicist Jerome Cardan reported that since 1965, according to CERN nuclear scientist Robert Gouiran, the United States had been conducting "serious investigations" towards admitting "the existence of at least one other universe co-existent with our own, and that a scientific announcement was to be made soon."

In August 1965, Dr J H Christenson of the University of Columbia and a member of the Academy of Science of New York, published in Science Journal an article entitled "Time Reversal" which began: "An audacious hypothesis suggests that there exists a ghost universe similar to our world. There is only a very weak interaction between the two universes such that we do not see the other world, and they do not interfere with ours." After that - silence.

The problem for science is that a parallel world is not consistent with the mathematics of Einstein's theories of relativity, the bedrock upon which much of Western science is founded. Einstein is on record as having said that should the existence of a parallel universe be proved, his theories of relativity would have to be consigned to the waste-paper bin, and all manner of anomalies such as UFOs and time travel would become possible. San Borondon and Cerro Cora suggest a parallel universe which can be entered at certain times at certain "weak points" when the "vibrations" change. The repercussions of abandoning Einstein are something which modern science is most anxious to avoid.

Ultimately, however, is there a useful solution to be derived from the foregoing for Paganism? In my opinion, most decidedly. The Druid teachings, for example, are based on the doctrine of reincarnation and the knowledge of the deities who preside over the Underworld, an unknown space situated "in continental land or an island". According to Druid doctrine, these localities are where the deceased finds him/herself at the first death. To enter the Underworld unprepared psychically will result in mental aberrations, which probably explains the experience of Fritz Berger. In the third and final part of "A Pagan Place" I would like to explore this avenue, which may be of the greatest importance for Pagans.