re: geoglyphs and thinking in 3D

jumpingjacktrash:

people who insist geoglyphs like the nazca lines must have been intended to be seen from above are failing to put themselves in the shoes of people who never once saw ‘up’ as a direction you could go.

imagine you’ve never even been up a tall tree, let alone in an airplane. you might have some idea of what birds see, maybe, but it’s going to be incredibly inaccurate. gods might be ‘in the sky’ but they can see you perfectly well without you having to do big landscaping projects; they’re gods, for fucksake.

so why would you build weird loopy hummingbirds

and leaping horses

and a guy with a really big dick

flat on the ground or on a shallow slope if you didn’t intend for it to be seen from above?

well, for the same reason you build the other really popular kind of geoglyph, the labyrinth:

to get mazed.

being down in a shape that you know is bigger than you can see is an altered state, just like the trances brought on by dancing or chanting or ritual sex.

even when the labyrinth is small enough to see all at once just by standing on a chair or going upstairs, it’s not designed to be looked at as a whole. it’s designed to be followed, by walking it or simply with your eyes, to induce a meditative state. and the bigger the maze gets, the more you’re forced to give up on the idea of comprehending the whole thing, and simply put one foot in front of another.

but modern people have forgotten that perspective. we’re so used to seeing things from above that it doesn’t even occur to us that not being able to see the whole drawing at once is the whole point.

one more thought: even when people theorize that the nazca lines are intended to be walked on, they talk about ‘ritual roads’, they assume the path has to lead somewhere, so the lack of any obvious destination makes them tend to discard the idea. but you know what i’ve noticed about the nazca figures?

they’re a closed loop. just like the meditation mazes and mystic labyrinths of europe.

if you walk on that line, you go a long long way without going anywhere at all, and you come right back where you started, but different than when you left. the spider in your mind is not the spider on the ground. it’s liminal, uncertain. because ‘up’ was never an option, and the gods don’t need a billboard, they can hear you whisper behind your hand. the spider isn’t a picture, it’s a trip.