Pictographs and Katchinas
© Unknown
Katchinas in Argentina? Uncanny similarities between pictographs, Katsinam and... robots!

The pictographs shown above are found in Argentina, in "The Cave of the Spirits", one of several grottos in Cura Malal, part of Sierra de la Ventana, a mountain range rising East of La Pampa, in the Buenos Aires province.

Argentinian scholar Fabio Picasso wrote about them in an essay on Mapuche spiritual traditions published in the Latin American Fortean Files website. There is a striking similarity of the pictograph on the left with a Hopi Masa'u Katsina from Harvard's Peabody Museum katsinam collection. In both the "techno-pictos" and the wood carving we are faced with designs that look a whole lot like our contemporary idea of a robot.

Is that what they were meant to represent? We have no way of confirming it, but we do know that, to this date, people from the Sierra de la Ventana area keep witnessing lights in the sky, with UFO watchers continually informing about it in Argentinian publications and websites, as well as USA and European sites. Here we use as a backdrop for the art inserts, a photo of a UFO over the La Ventana mountain range, published by Raúl Oscar Chavez from CIUFOS, La Pampa.

We also know that the Hopi Elders spoke to researcher Frank Waters (Book of the Hopi, Penguin Books, 1977) of how, upon arriving to the Fouth World, their ancestors were asked to follow Masau's star all the way to the South before they could go up North to Oraibi, their promised land, which was at that time deep under ice.

These amazing examples from the Mapuche and the Hopi legacies are indeed suggestive of ancient Indoamerican connections. In the quoted essay by Fabio Picasso, the author establishes a relation between the "power stone" of the Mapuche chiefs, the Cura Malal cave, and the uncanny spiritual and physical power of Calfucurá, the Mapuche leader who reigned and loved and fought until he died resisting occupation at his very vigorous 108 years of age, and then only because he was betrayed. Researcher Picasso includes what seems to be a lead to a deeper understanding of the subject, found in a traditional Mapuche poem:

Song to Nahuelcheu
Brother, my dear brother,
Let's go to Curamalal,
Let's extract remedy from the portal
Then, then we shall be valiant
Brother of mine, dear one,
If we extract the remedy from the portal,
Then we shall be valiant,
Brother of mine, dear one.