©1999 Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges
Republished with permission of Jay Weidner.
Let’s go back to the inscription. On the cross it reads:
OCRUXAVES
PESUNICA
The middle ‘X’ in the word OCRUXAVE becomes the symbol for the cross itself. Therefore it is necessary – if we are to follow the symbolic motif of the pedestal – to circle this central X or cross. That leaves us with four words, each with four letters, surrounding the central X. Just like the pedestal, this X has four sides. Each side has a word with four letters. There are four letters in the inscription on the other side of the Cross (INRI), four stars around the sun in panel three on the pedestal, and four groups of two bursting rays each in the great Star of panel one. There are sixteen rays, a multiple of four, bursting out from the sun in panel three. There are four A’s in panel four, and so we are not surprised to find that without the X, there are four words within the Latin inscription.
Split in this pattern, the inscription looks like this:
OCRU X AVES
PESU NICA
No matter how one jumbles the letters, there are no interpretations that make sense of all four words in this layout, although “save” and “Inca” jump out at us from the right side. There is no certain answer to the inscription’s riddle to be found in this first move. There are other steps involved.
From Fulcanelli’s clues, we know that the next step involves exchanging K’s, or a hard C sound, for S. The new phrase now possesses four C’s. This is interesting because the word foresee is mimicked by the clue. The major purpose of the Cross at Hendaye is to “foresee” the future. To solve the puzzle, it is necessary to make sure that it has ‘four ‘C’s’.
Our inscription now looks like this:
OCRU X AVEC
PECU NICA
This is not much better, but we are making progress. The next step is to reciprocate the transformation and turn the X into an S:
OCRU S AVEC
PECU NICA
Now we have a simple anagram. Exchange the R and the C on the left side of the S and rearrange the right side with a few simple transpositions and we have:
OCCU S CAVE
PERU INCA
Then, finally, do the same transposition of the top word on the left side, including the extra S, and the meaning becomes clear:
CUSCO CAVE
PERU INCA
Or:
INCA CAVE, CUSCO, PERU.
While this is clear and simple in several languages, we still haven’t found the importance of the displaced S. Merely changing it to a C in an anagram doesn’t tell us why it is important. But there is more. There is another message encrypted within the inscription. This addition is another interpretation of the Latin inscription’s place of refuge and uses the displaced S to point to a specific place, the “single space.” It uses only the top line of the inscription as originally written:
OCRU X AVES
The only major shift in the letters is done by taking the S off of the end of the phrase and placing it at the beginning. It now reads:
SOCRU X AVE
Now we have three words, read outward from the central cross. The first word is ‘AVE’, the second word is the X, or cross. The third word must be read backwards. So instead of SOCRU the word now reads as ‘URCOS’. The line now look like this:
AVE X URCOS
Or:
HAIL (TO THE CROSS AT) URCOS
At first this is somewhat obscure. Consulting the World Atlas, provided the answer. Looking closely at a map of Peru, we found a town called Urcos, in the Peruvian province of Cusco, only about twenty miles from the city itself. The inscription’s message is pointing to the city or the province of Cusco, Peru. It is also pointing to a cross that is in, or near, the town of Urcos. The conclusion must be that this is our place of refuge.
Spurred on by this interpretation of the Latin inscription, we began to research the country and history of Peru. Fulcanelli mentions the Inca briefly in his discussion on the Green Language, but gives us no other obvious pointers. Mevryl mentions the Andes, but avoids any other suggestion of South America or its cultures. Van Buren of course thinks, on very slim evidence, that the place of refuge is Rennes-le-Chateau, not Peru.
One of the first volumes we consulted, The Chronicle of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala written by one of Pizarro’s conquistadors, presented us with an incredible synchronicity concerning the images on the Cross at Hendaye. One of the very first drawings in de Ayala’s chronicle of Peru is called “The Symbols of the Incas: The Sun; the Moon; Lightning; the hill of Guanacaure and the caves at Pacarictambo.” These four symbols are astonishingly close to the four symbols found on the pedestal at Hendaye.
Mevryl implies that the A’s represent mountains with caves in them in either the South American Andes or the Himalayas. This suggests “the caves at Pacarictambo” of de Ayala’s sketch. The other three panels correspond directly to the Sun, Moon and Star images at Hendaye. The juxtaposition of similar concepts between de Ayala’s sketch and the Cross at Hendaye is astonishing.
A few months after deciphering the message of the inscription, we met with Dr. Juan del Prado, professor of Anthropology at Cusco University in Peru. He was touring the United States with William Sullivan who had just recently published the ground breaking book The Secret of the Incas. Dr. del Prado is a pleasant man who has spent his life studying the Quechua Indians. From his research, he has learned many profound things about the Inca and their survivors, the Quechua, including their legends and myths about the center of the galaxy. These topics were discussed thoroughly that night over several bottles of good red wine. As the long conversation began to end, we asked about the town of Urcos, and the possibility of a cross of some kind being there. Dr. del Prado looked surprised.
“There is a strange cross in Urcos. No one knows where it came from or who built it,” he answered thoughtfully.
Right then and there, we realized that a trip to Peru was the next step in our investigation.