4

The Original Discoveries of Juan Moricz

It is said the Tayos Cave was discovered before Juan Moricz’s discovery of it in the 1960s. The first description of the caves came from a man called Salvador Festa, an Italian who lived in Ecuador in the nineteenth century. He didn’t go inside, but he described the entrance to the Coangos Cave, pointing out its depth.

During the bloody and surreal presidency of Gabriel García Moreno in Ecuador (1861–1875), a precursor of the dictators who would later shape Latin America, there was a general called Proanyo who was confined to eastern Ecuador. There he befriended some Jíbaros who dwelled on the other side of the Upano River. During this period, Proanyo tried to stay in one place and started exploring the surrounding area. He left the Macas region with his Jíbaro friends and started exploring the Upano River area. Proanyo never went down the caves, but it is likely he entered other caves that had easier access from the river.

Some accounts mention Festa, others, General Proanyo, but in our circle, we agree that the real discoverer was Moricz. Geographical and archaeological sites always have countless local stories about people who allegedly have seen them, but the discovery is not acknowledged as such until someone takes possession of the place or records its discovery.

Ecuador is divided into regions and subregions. The Tayos Cave is located in the Amazon-Andean region, meaning the eastern side, which borders the upper Amazon River basin. The coordinates of the Tayos Cave are lat 78°13' W, long 03°05' S; its elevation is approximately 2,556 feet. It is a part of the mountain range of Cutucú and Cóndor, but it does not reach such high elevations. It is surrounded by rivers, and from an explorer’s point of view, this makes it interesting but also rather problematic. It is close to the Coangos River, a tributary of the Santiago River. The area is plowed by streams that drain and create picturesque waterfalls. Small rivers multiply here, eroding the inside of the cave, but the products of this erosion must not be confused with the architectonic structures also found inside.

The entrance is almost invisible from the outside; the bushes hide a small and slippery slope that slides almost like a chute toward the dark interior. If you peek over the edge, you can perceive the deep fall; the vertical cave entrance is a couple of feet wide, 229 feet deep, and another 265 feet long after passing through von Däniken’s Arch, a well-known stone formation named for author Erich von Däniken in 1976.

JUAN MORICZ: FROM HUNGARY WITH A BIRD ON HIS SHIELD

Though there are alleged sightings that are said to have occurred before his discovery, the story of the Tayos Cave and its mysterious treasures probably begins with Moricz; at any rate, there is no way to tell the story without talking about him. It is also not easy to imagine the wild jungle setting that was Ecuador back then, where fate would keep Moricz until his dying day. You almost feel as if you could see or feel him in certain parts of the suburbs or deep within the Ecuadorian provinces. Without Moricz, the Tayos Cave would never have been revealed. But who was this enigmatic character? Where did he really come from? Why was he here?

We don’t know much of Moricz’s first years. His claim that he came from a noble famly whose coat of arms showed a bird resembling the oilbird hasn’t been proven. Born in 1923 in Hungary and known in Europe as Janos, he became known as Juan only after he moved to South America, a name that stuck with him until his last day. We know he was in the Hungarian army and spent some time in Russian concentration camps. He had shown an interest in multidisciplinary knowledge ever since he was young. His interest in the theories of Hanns Hörbiger and other Nazi scientists who were part of the Thule Society spiked his interest in the subterranean worlds and in traveling to South America.

Nazi theories held that the Andes were a place linked to the gods or demigods that created them. Nazi archaeologists and anthropologists were moved by the large ruins of Tiwanaku in Bolivia and by the monumental constructions of the Incas, such as the ones found around Cusco and in Peru’s Sacred Valley of Urubamba.

The inner circle of the Third Reich had a philosophy and had made several plans to search for sacred artifacts, including the Holy Grail. They also searched the sanctuary of the Black Madonna at the Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia. The Nazis were looking for a contact with a mysterious figure known as the King of the World.

Moricz didn’t have to fight because he was considered an Aryan prototype. His allegedly perfect Aryan anatomy gave him a better standing than other Hungarians. It is possible he participated with German scientists in Eastern Europe, not in South America. He got married in France and had a daughter, Veronica, who was missing for a long time but was found recently; apparently she lives in Britain.

According to some sources, the best seller from the sixties The Twenty-Fifth Hour was inspired by Moricz’s life, because Moricz and the book’s author, Orthodox priest Virgil Gheorghiu, had shared prison time together.

Moricz arrived in Argentina after World War II. Julio Goyén Aguado always said he had met Juan Moricz by the late fifties, when he worked as a customs officer. At the time, Moricz was thirty-six years old and Aguado was seventeen. This is how their master-disciple relationship came to be: one wanted to learn, the other needed someone to help him in his search through a country that was new to him.

The first thing Moricz told Aguado was that he was studying the Magyar presence in prehistoric America, thus his interest in the books by Florencio de Basaldúa. This author, of Basque origins, lived in Argentina, and his main theory talked about an Atlantean red race linked to Basque roots. Nineteenth-century authors believed the cradle of that red race was a southern continent (usually known as Lemuria) that disappeared after the last great deluge. The last traces of that race can now be seen in the indigenous population of the Americas, whose roots lay in the prehistoric humans that took refuge in the high peaks of the mountains.

Moricz believed the Magyar had traveled from what is now Eastern Europe and reached America through the Pacific. Agreeing with Basaldúa, he believed the continent of Lemuria served as a land bridge toward what today is the Ecuadorian coast. These two taciturn researchers were connected by their theories, which claimed advanced civilizations from other continents reached America by sea in prehistoric times.

Moricz believed in the existence of a tribe of white indigenous people who dwelled in several places in the Amazon jungle. (A similar belief had led Percy Fawcett to search for these people.) Moricz then started getting interested in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) after Aguado told him that its doctrines talked about a white-skinned race in prehistoric Central and South America.

Moricz arrived in Ecuador in 1964 with introduction letters from his Argentinian friends to sell cattle and to interact with historians and intellectuals, mainly in Quito. Andrés Fernández Salvador Zaldumbide remembers him with a certain irony: “I realized he knew nothing of cattle or animals and that he was really looking for something else.” His idea was to sell a large number of cattle, which would be transported upriver from Argentina. I looked at the original contracts, which were for thousands of dollars—another financial endeavor in this man’s life that would sadly never come to fruition.

It didn’t take long for Moricz to reveal his real purpose, which some believed to be naive. “I came to find a subterranean world and kingdom that probably extends from Venezuela to Chile and Argentina,” he said.

Moricz believed that fate sent him to the Coangos River. Apparently, during one of his adventures digging for precious minerals and exploring lost cities, Moricz met a witch doctor named Nayambi, who told him of the existence of the caves filled with nests of a bird found on the coat of arms of the Moricz family: the tayo or oilbird, for which Moricz had searched during his first years in Ecuador. These Shuar friends told Moricz that “it was time a white man learned of the reality of the subterranean world.” They were speaking of the Tayos Cave. Moricz said, “Some famous caves had been talked about by travelers, but never one of this magnitude, like the Guácharo, which Humboldt visited but didn’t disclose the secret of its depth.” Jules Verne, in one of his novels, wrongly said the caves’ location was in Colombia (and at the time Jules was writing, Colombia was Venezuela). This country, like many other South American countries, has Guácharo Caves.

Moricz spent long days and even weeks inside the cave. How did he orient himself while exploring this lost world? Is there something capable of illuminating that black abyss, which so carefully hides its secrets? Moricz said he entered the Tayos Cave in Ecuador and came out in Peru. He did not say where exactly, but we believe he was telling the truth. His conclusions were sensational, and this thrilled many scientists.

The history of Homo sapiens and Cro-Magnon man, from which some of us are descended, does not go back further than 40,000 years, according to strict scientific reasoning. But Moricz asserted that the Tayos Caves were inhabited by the mysterious tribe of the Belas more than 250,000 years ago, and that this tribe was the successor of a superior culture of unknown origin. Moricz also called them the Taltos—immortal beings who might have come from a distant solar system, possibly Ursa Major. They lived in large caves and were protected by a sacred bird that lived in the entrance of these subterranean worlds. There are many caves in the Andes, and quite a few of these are connected to legendary stories about strange beings living inside them.

QUINARA AND THE SPANIARD’S TREASURE

Moricz had had no results in the exhumation or rescue of the treasure of the metallic library, so he decided to do another expedition financed by the Peña Matheus brothers. This time, the expedition was connected to the Quinara treasure. Pio Jaramillo Alvarado spoke of Quinara in his book History of Loja and Its Province, and in the area of Vilcabamba there were more recent traces and legends of its existence.

Moricz and the Peña Matheus brothers (Gerardo and Carlos) went for 15 days to Vilcabamba, an area known as the Golden Cross; there they rented a house with a bathroom and a shower. They hired a group of excavators They dug for over 65 feet and found a heart-shaped stone and a series of tombstones called guajalaches.

“Juan Moricz used a pendulum and radiesthesia rods . . . but in the end we didn’t find anything,” Carlos Peña Matheus told me once. They used a system of pulleys that dug out buckets of soil, a standard procedure for archaeological excavations. Peña Matheus noticed the pendulum spun twelve times, clockwise. “Three years after we left, some explorers found an oven used to melt golden bricks, and there is golden sand in the place, where the earth changes and becomes soft. You know, in those places there are higher beings looking over these things, and they also distort your reality. Moricz had good intentions. He wasn’t looking for a treasure or for glory, he just wanted to know the truth, and sometimes doors open for you where you can share things that are not seen in plain sight.” Moricz said many times that he received messages and orders from the nonvisible beings in the caves that he called the Taltos or Belas. Many people have had strange experiences and visions of beings as well as have taken pictures of cloudy concentrations of vapor taking the shape of phantasmagorical figures.

THE TÁLTOSOK BARLANGJA

After exploring the caves with Aguado, in 1969 Moricz took part in an official civil military expedition with the Ecuadorian Corporation of Tourism (CETURIS). This expedition is also known as the Táltosok Barlangja (barlang means caves in Magyar). The purpose of the expedition was threefold: (1) find the caves and caverns that hold the artifacts, (2) prove the existence of these artifacts, and (3) inform the truth of the discovery.

Following the 1969 expedition, it didn’t take long for Moricz to return to Argentina looking for help from private or official centers. This would lead him to meet Captain Enrique Green Urien and Colonel Carlos María Zavalla, a sociology professor at the University of Buenos Aires. Moricz always tried to get support from both countries, Ecuador and his beloved Argentina. Moricz knew it was important to make his discovery public, something he would also do in 1969. His written testimony appears below.

Janos “Juan” Moricz during “Táltosok Barlangja,” the first organized civil military expedition in 1969

First official expedition to the Tayos in 1969. This expedition is the one known as “Táltosok Barlangja.” Here, army soldiers inspect clean cuts of massive blocks.

THE NOTARY ACT OF JANOS “JUAN” MORICZ

Register of title in the year 1969 by the 4th notary of the canton of Guayaquil, July 21, 1969

Dear Minister of Finance,

I, Juan Moricz, citizen of Argentina by settlement, born in Hungary, passport number 4361689, by my own right and by your mediation with the office of his Excellency, the President of the Republic, do hereby declare that in the eastern region, in the Province of Morona-Santiago, within the boundaries of the Republic of Ecuador, I discovered valuable objects of great cultural and historical value of mankind. These consist of metal panels that were created by human hand and contain a summary of the history of a lost civilization, of which mankind has currently neither inkling nor proof. I have made this discovery through my own good luck while I was carrying out investigations in my capacity as a scientist specializing in folkloric, ethnological and linguistic aspects of Ecuadorian tribes. The objects I discovered can be described as follows:

1. Objects of various shapes and sizes made of metal and stone.
2. Metal panels engraved with symbols and ideographic scripts.

This is a genuine metal library which contains a summary of the history of mankind; the origin of man on Earth, as well as scientific knowledge about a lost civilization.

The fact of this discovery makes me the legal owner of these objects in concordance with Article 665 of the Civil Code. However, because these are items of immeasurable cultural value and I did not discover them on my own land or property, here applies Article 666 of the Civil Code.

As the land and the caves in which I made the discoveries belong to the State of Ecuador in accordance to Article 55 of today’s political constitution, I am required to share my discovery with the aforementioned state. In concordance with the Civil Code, the owners of the land are accorded rights over the discovery.

Therefore, in accordance with the Article 58 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador I have turned to you.

Article 58 states that the artistic and archaeological value of a find remains under control of the State.

In accordance with Articles 3 and 9 of the Agricultural legislation, it is the task of the Finance Ministry to monitor the laws regarding the property of the State, and to inform the President of the Republic.

As a sign of my honesty and willingness to protect the rights of the State of Ecuador, I am registering my discovery with your Excellency, the President of the Republic. I am doing this to ensure that the Republic of Ecuador is in a position to secure both its own and my rights. I would like to request that you set up an Ecuadorian commission of control. I will show this commission the correct and exact position and location of the right caves as well as the objects within. I reserve the right to show the people nominated your photographs, films, and also original drawings.

Furthermore, I would like to state that—in the fulfillment of my rights as the discoverer and owner of this find and in accordance with the law—I will not reveal the very exact location of the find until the members of the commission have been appointed. This commission should also contain members that I may be allowed to appoint.

SEALED AND SIGNED BY PENA MATEUS , ESQ., AND JUAN MORICZ OPOS

The lawyer Gerardo Peña Matheus

Gerardo Peña Matheus, Juan Moricz, and Julio Goyén Aguado at a press conference after Moricz announced his findings to a notary public in 1969

MORICZ IN THE EYES OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Moricz’s story is a legend of survival and courage, as well as of superstition, adaptation to the environment, and transition in Latin American politics that cannot be ignored. Although it is a sad story, it has epic dimensions, with undeniable hints of the supernatural.

Aguado also remembers: “Moricz had an adventurous spirit. He was an adventurer, but an honest one. His objective was to share one of the stories he received with mankind to make known this line of thought about the origin of mankind on the planet. This turned him into a very private and untrusting person.”

When Moricz was poor, he had many debts, and people would often come to him to demand that he pay them back. When his situation improved, he believed he needed to do right by the people who had helped him. Many were grieved at his death, because he was a very loyal friend. No one could say he was dishonest or a bad friend.

Descriptions of Moricz may seem ambiguous, but there is no doubt that his reserved personality, his willingness to give his all, and his fear that he would either create or be forgotten led him to fall into silent desperation and oblivion. Moricz was a giant with feet of clay, not without his weaknesses and flaws. Many of his hypotheses bordered on the speculative or fantastic, which led him to be either admired or hated from the ivory tower.

Guillermo Aguirre, the personal biographer of Julio Goyén Aguado, said that Moricz was investigated by the secretary of state intelligence of Argentina, who considered him a con artist. Aguirre also believes many of the important artifacts found their way to Argentina through a Father Arana, a priest who was an early friend of Moricz and Aguardo and who took several of the metallic plates after they had chosen him as their custodian.

Alberto Borges, one of the best journalists in Ecuador and a friend of mine from Guayaquil in the sixties and seventies, thinks that “there is no doubt that Moricz was a remarkable man. It is believed that during World War II he was part of a mysterious German-Hungarian group dedicated to parapsychological phenomena. Then he shows up in Argentina as a speleologist and explores countless caves from Jujuy to the Tierra del Fuego, and later he was spotted in Bolivia and Peru doing geology studies.” Moricz has been described as a very private man who almost seemed to have the gift of bilocation—of being in two places at the same time. We need only look at the television show he did in 1976 (on the Guayaquil channel of the Ecuavisa network) to see his passion and conviction.

Héctor Burgos Stone, a Chilean linguist he met close to his death, said Moricz was a real gambler, a man who believed in giving it all or nothing, who loved or hated, who would shut down or light up, who was all passion or all ice. Moricz had a prodigious mind, but his emotional side was damaged; he was a megalomaniac chased by his own paranoia, according to Carlos Peña Matheus, president of Cumbaratza, one of the bigger mines in eastern Ecuador’s Oriente region.

Even though Moricz was generous, he was only generous with those he liked. He was surely out of touch with his feelings and emotions, though he knew how to love, how to accept, and how to lose. In many aspects he was a winner, in many others a conscientious loser, like those who fool others by fooling themselves, making themselves believe legends they have heard or read from others.

Other questions are why Moricz stopped talking about the metallic library by the late seventies, even after the pact he made with Aguado to protect the real site of the treasure from the Mormons and the British, and why he was so hostile to those who approached him, like the explorer Stan Grist or the journalistic researcher Andreas Faber-Kaiser.

The story of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization started becoming popular around the sixties and seventies. Fantastic realism was a literary-philosophical movement originally in France, created by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier with their book The Morning of the Magicians and the journal Planète, which resounded throughout Spain and even South America. Many of these books, by authors such as Peter Kolosimo and Robert Charroux, would discuss South America in relation to possible influences from both Atlantis and extraterrestrial civilizations. They spoke of a civilization that took refuge in the Andes and left behind a library with information recorded in stone or metal that could bring light to the blurry past of mankind.

Moricz believed these ancient civilizations used insect-shaped machines that roamed the depths of the Earth and connected continents from beneath—a subterranean Gondwana. Moricz did not fully develop his theory, which was connected to other, more orthodox ones, and that was starting to become popular. He believed the origin of cultures took place in the Amazon-Andean region, and from there migrated to Asia Minor. Moricz supported this theory with linguistic theories, mainly based on his experience with the Hungarian language.

Like Moricz, other researchers identified terms similar to Magyar in the Quechua, Aymara, Tupí, and Guaraní languages, as well as in many Brazilian dialects. This is how Moricz managed to communicate with the natives without knowing their language. Moricz believed their ancient ancestors, the Belas, or Taltos, were superior, even if no evidence of their existence had been firmly established.

In their dubious book, Les Intra Terrestres Marie-Thérèse Guinchard and Pierre Paolantoni claimed to have interviewed Moricz. They say he confirmed what had been published in the magazines of the seventies. In that interview he said the Taltos, who were short people and whom he identified with the grays (with large, oblique, stretched eyes) that would be known to the world in the late eighties, had many metallic plates.

MORICZ VERSUS CRESPO

Hernán Crespo Toral was an anthropologist and the director of the Museum of the Central Bank of Ecuador, and his meeting with the Hungarian explorer was inevitable. Moricz and Crespo were two illustrious characters who were mortal enemies—one rational, the other irrational; one, a left brain, the other, a right brain.

Crespo never forgave Moricz for speaking with such grandiloquent terms when he “compared the discovery of the caves to the discovery of the Amazon—real nonsense.” Crespo would ask me, “So then, where are the artifacts he claims he found? Like the engraved metallic plates that were kept in a large library. If he notified the Directorate of National Heritage of this discovery, what is he waiting for?”

There is no doubt this lack of physical evidence was one of the weakest links of the whole Tayos saga, one I knew about, even after I confirmed it through the testimony of Crespo, a pillar of the Ecuadorian cultural past. I had the opportunity to visit him for the last years of his life; I would visit him after his slow recovery from surgery. I met a brilliant person, who undoubtedly belonged to the classic school of thought of anthropology and culture, in spite of his education in arts and architecture.

Even if I was a skeptic since the beginning, I had to face what I least expected when the team of Father Pedro Porras found remains of a culture that had been inside the cave for eight hundred or one thousand years. Crespo was the official supervisor to Father Porras.

In 1976 Moricz had no other option but to come out of his self-imposed retirement when in Guayaquil, the city he was living in, the memoirs of the Moricz-Táltosok Barlangja Expedition of 1969 were being brought back up.

While Stanley Hall’s expedition of 1976 explored the Coangos Cave, Moricz was getting ready to dig out his old hypothesis and come up with some new ones. “You can cross through all of South America underground,” Moricz said. He also noted, “I have been in Peru and in the tunnels that communicate with Cusco. In Machu Picchu alone there is one tunnel that reaches the ocean. I don’t deny there are natural formations, but there are testimonies of monumental constructions made by man, used as shelter from cataclysms.”

MORICZ’S THEORIES

Jules Verne used Alexander von Humboldt’s explorations as inspiration for the classic book, beloved by all those who are passionate for the subterranean world, Journey to the Center of the Earth. This novel would definitely have an influence on Moricz. Beyond exploring the caves, Moricz was interested in many aspects of prehistory.

The treasure of Atahualpa, last emperor of the Incas, was also a recurring theme for Moricz, who sometimes linked it to the Tayos. The tomb of Atahualpa was never found, but a legend says that a relative of Atahualpa took his wife through open rock passageways to subterranean gardens. Here they walked through trees and animals represented in pure gold, as was the king’s palanquin. It has been said that the remains of the emperor were in the Tingo María Cave, where the famous Lechuza Cave was located, and this is why no one dared go inside.

Tunnel to Atahualpa’s palace and possible gravesite

When Moricz was asked about the Nazca lines, or sun-oriented paths, he said, “They are a part of the immense picture of a lost civilization. Nazca was an exterior sign, but there are other signs. Just 6.2 miles from the entrance to one of the Tayos Caves, there are several rocks placed in a special position. The stones show ideograms and low-relief figures with instructions. I made this discovery not long ago, from what I found in the caves. I followed the inner path, but if I had found those stones before, the task would have been much easier.” Between 1964 and 1968 Moricz made explorations following his insight and intuition, but he was also showing signs of being a treasure hunter and gold seeker.

I found this statement by Moricz in the journal El Telégrafo from Guayaquil, thanks to the Argentinian journalist Jorge Blinkhorn: “The subterranean world exists, and in its chambers I have found objects and archives of great historical and cultural importance for mankind.” Moricz believed that the turul birds were “sacred birds of the seven hordes” of the Scythian and Magyar nations. Turul is the name of a Hungarian bird, but also the name of the main plaza in Sígsig, in the Azuay Province of Ecuador. Moricz was interested in connections between Magyar, the ancient language of his native Hungary, and languages of the natives of South America. Similarities between words and place names drew his attention.

Moricz already had many theories forming when he lived in Buenos Aires. Later he would take these with him to Guayaquil, serving as a self-proclaimed master for young Ecuadorians, who were impressed by his physical and intellectual stature.

With a strong, almost supernatural conviction, Moricz developed and dispersed a tale of a library of metallic books that told of the history and scientific knowledge of an unknown advanced civilization. This hidden civilization of the sacred subterranean world of the Andes was said to speak ancient Magyar, the mother tongue of the Cara, Maya, Euskara, Quechua, Sumerian, Sanskrit, and other languages. He believed there were some ancestors connected to Atlantis who called themselves “Antis.” He developed an early hypothesis of a relation between the Huns and South America, a view revised through the work of Father Gregorio García.

Juan Moricz on horseback

For over two hundred years it has been said the barbarians from the East traveled great distances to the West and reached the Americas as well as Europe. Reinhold Forster, in his book History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North, suggests that the real founders of the pre-Columbian kingdoms of Peru and Mexico were descendants of troops sent by Kublai Khan to conquer Japan.

On a television show, Moricz declared that the metallic library had extraterrestrial origins and that it belonged to the first culture to inhabit the zone, the Atlanteans, who had a mainly Magyar language and had come from Ursa Major. I have confirmed that, like other ancient peoples such as the Egyptians, many Andean cultures, especially the pyramid and huaca (monument) builders in the Ecuadorian coast and mountains, oriented their structures toward Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, as I witnessed at the site of the Cochasquí pyramids north of Quito.

Moricz believed that after the universal deluge, or the Great Flood, the Americas became, or were reborn as, the “Mother of Ancient Civilization.” Atlantean theories of dispersion and transmigration describe that groups of humans took refuge in the Andes, 9,850 feet above sea level, and after surviving they descended to the valleys and dispersed thousands of miles over continents and across oceans.

Between 8000 and 7000 BCE they arrived in Lower Mesopotamia using totara and balsa tree rafts to get to such places as Shumir, Zumir, and Mosul. They also traveled to Shamar in the Ecuadorian region of Azuay.

Ecuadorian and other Andean people, especially around the Amazon basin, share the same languages and words in addition to sharing legends and myths, many of them predating the deluge. This is why Moricz started studying which aboriginal groups spoke ancient Magyar, such as the Salasakas, Cayapas, Tschachis, and Shuar. Shared words and phrases such as Nap, “sunlight”; Ur, “mister”; and Isten, “god”; are not mere coincidences.

At the end of the eighth century CE, a specific Magyar group who would evolve into the Karas (a name that coincides with the white Huns) migrated from Hindustan to South America. According to Father Juan de Velasco, the Karas (or Caras) arrived at a bay that today is Manabi in Ecuador.

Experts believe the Magyar language may have had a musical perfection; perhaps it was organized by a mathematical code. The mystery of the Hungarian language is a divine secret that could shine a light on many ethnographic and archaeological enigmas. Magyar is one of the most ancient languages, and it is also one of the most advanced and elaborate, like Sumerian and Egyptian.

Sumerians wrote in pictographs and pictograms called cuneiform, much like the Egyptians, who used simplified figures and effigies shaped like lettered symbols that would develop into hieroglyphs.

The relationship between the alphabet and the Sumerian writing was connected to the Glozel Stones, which in turn were connected to Atlantis, since the stones date back to 10,000 BCE. The names inscribed in them, such as Funotian, Funo, Huno, Hunnotian, Fenice, and Funno, are connected to the prehistory of the Huns and Magyars, as well as to the South American Andes, the Anteans, and the Atl-Anteans, because they show a correlation between how the word sounds and what it means. The Phoenician alphabet is considered one of the nearly perfect ones from ancient times. It was influenced by proto-alphabets and other alphabets were born from Phoenician, like Hebrew, especially biblical Hebrew.

The most ancient Hebrew inscription is in the Moabite Stone (900 BCE), which is written in Hebrew, but with Phoenician characters. The Hebrew letters recognized actually belong to the Aramaic alphabet, one of the oldest languages that connects Magyar, Basque, and other languages of the Andes with the mystery of the connection to the diaspora of Hebrew.

Comparative charts leave no doubt of the connection between prehistoric and protohistoric cultures from Europe, such as the Iberian and Azilian alphabets, with the Numidian and Berber, regions that were connected to the Masmudas (Masmas).

Despite much analytical research and actual exploration, the main characters in the saga of the Tayos did not leave behind many written testimonies, even if the discovery of these caves have a unique and complex nature that is deserving of a monumental book.

This has always perplexed me. I remember when my friend Aguado sent me a book about the forgotten tenor Florencio Constantino to see if another acquaintance of mine, Plácido Domingo, would agree to share some words of support during the book launch, which would take place at the Colon Theater in Buenos Aires. Aguado’s book was monumental—the perfect coffee-table book, including many illustrations and unique photographs. I couldn’t help but wonder why Aguado would publish such a book when his most important task was speleological exploration and when the expeditions to the Tayos Caves deserved something as grand as the monumental book he was working on. There are only a few pages left of Aguado’s personal travel journal, mainly from the time of the Mormon expedition.

Another mystery is that Moricz never really published any extensive material in his life, not even about the Tayos. As an explorer and scholar, he only published texts about the cultural connections between the New and Old Worlds. As you will see here, ancient texts, written mostly by Jesuit chroniclers, explained the theory that Ecuadorians descended from Hungarian and Mongolian slaves—barbarians from the East—who had arrived from Eurasia to the South American Andes.

Here, translated and edited for the first time in English, is the transcription of Moricz’s revealing essay under the title, “The American Origin of European Civilization.”

THE AMERICAN ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION ACCORDING TO JUAN MORICZ

Every Story Begins in Sumeria

The exclusion of the American continent from the cultural and historical movement of civilizations is the cornerstone of the distortion reflected by our current knowledge of prehistory.

The complex issues behind the origin of civilization and cultures cannot be solved because the American continent has been excluded from our globe. In our planet, prehistoric civilizations made many travels; they moved, formed, and diffused our current cultural heritage.

Thus current researches on our prehistory have a lack of global vision of the civilizations that intervened in the for mation and diffusion of our history.

The confusion around this topic grows worse as we study other disciplines, each one of which daily announces new discoveries. Today a good archaeologist must discover at least one or two new cultures. In this wild race they are only searching for vases, plates, and so on to find new hints of cooking, color, engraving, prints, polishing, or a new horizon or time of some of the already classified cultures.

This is how we have come to record hundreds of cultures in relatively small areas. No one would dare say two cars were produced by two different cultures, one built on our continent with the engine in the front, and the other manufactured on the other side of the globe, with the engine in the back.

This would be like mixing up the style of Louis XIV with the style of two different cultures, and this happens nowadays.

Linguistic research is doing no better. For the American continent there are 396 classified languages, arbitrarily divided in groups and subgroups. Thus in the linguistic map we find little-known regions in the Amazon that harbor a large array of different languages in a very small area, so that it seems that a different language is spoken under each tree.

Regarding the supposed arrival of men to the American continent, there is a surprising general agreement on the migration theories of the Bering Strait.

Cultural Unity

The American continent has a fascinating cultural unity that extends to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. It goes further along the equator all the way to India and lower Mesopotamia, and then on to Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula.

Mankind wrote its history along this line, which follows the path of the sun. As we move farther north and south, we see fewer and fewer large cultural hubs.

That same path of the sun was used by the ancient inhabitants of America for their large ocean migrations. Every ancient tribe could see the same constellations along the latitude of the equatorial line, and by day they all sailed following the path of the sun.

Their extraordinary knowledge of the four basic elements—earth, water, air, and fire—is evident because the American continent is the only one with temples built for each one of them, which confirms the cultural unity of the prehistoric cultures of the continent. Two of the temples are located in the southern hemisphere and two in the northern hemisphere.

Transoceanic trips, even if they took a long time, were common feats thanks to the knowledge of the tides and winds, as well as the precious tools they used to sail, such as balsa poles.

American cultures have a rich marine tradition that is embedded in their oral traditions, and until recently they still made long trips on rafts along the Pacific coasts, from Tumbes in Peru and Guayaquil in Ecuador to Panama and Mexico, and carried loads of over one hundred tons.

They demonstrated great mastery of ships suitable for transoceanic travels.

So far these cultures have not given us any clues that would lead us to believe they crossed the frozen ice floes of the Bering Strait to reach America; if they had, they would surely have left behind indelible evidence in their traditions and legends.

Of course, even today an expedition of this magnitude, using the necessary equipment and knowing where the journey will end, is a feat worthy of admiration.

Cultural Diffusion from America

Today it is important to give the American continent the place it is due in the history of the migration of the cultures, recognizing its part in our cultural heritage.

The high peaks of the Andes are practically inaccessible today because of the lack of oxygen in the area, but they are the home of an extraordinary culture that flourished and cultivated the land, a remarkable civilization that survived the fateful days of the universal deluge in the cities and fortresses that crown the high peaks of the Andes.

Groups of humans survived in other areas of the planet, but the antediluvian culture found shelter in the American continent, as shown by its later diffusion.

In 8000 to 7000 BC an Andean civilization, sailing on rafts, reached and settled lower Mesopotamia. They later spread out and were absorbed by other cultures, which in turn passed on the acquired knowledge.

This culture has been called Sumir, Shumir, or Sumer. They are reckoned as the first humans because they learned ideographic writing and later cuneiform writing. Their cradle has not yet been found, and as so often happens, their origin is attributed to the great Asian deserts, where all medieval tales place the origin of civilization.

The Sumer culture originated in America, and from this continent they sailed to lower Mesopotamia. In the provinces of Azuay, Cañar, and Loja in Ecuador, many names still subsist related to the Sumer, Zumer, Shumir, Sumir, and Zhumir.

In the north of Peru, in the department of Libertad, there is a city in ruins covered by desert sand: Chan Chan. It covers an area of approximately 12.5 square miles. In spite of the time gone by and the ravages of time and men, the ancient city with its irrigation channels and decorated city walls that still stand are an example of an urban planning that we often fail to see in our modern cities.

Chan Chan and its culture survived with the Sumerians. Their extraordinary ornamental richness, ceramics, golden embossing in their jewels; their tombs, seals, and painting; their urban planning; and their concept of life are faithfully reflected in lower Mesopotamia.

The Two Progenitors: The Magyars

In India, lower Mesopotamia, Asia, and Europe are many cultures that originated on the [South] American continent, from which some migrated thousands of years ago. In this new environment, they grew apart from their linguistic and racial roots, but others who left more recently still keep their American languages and traditions.

One of these cultures is the Magyar, which today can be found in Europe in the Carpathian basin. The Magyar go back to only two progenitors—Gog and Magog^*5 —and their traditions place the ancestral father sun in the center of the world. This tradition was still present in the city of Quito, which called itself the “center of the world,” and its name preserves the tradition of its progenitors, because its story goes back to the ancient kingdom of Kitus, which in the Magyar languages means two progenitors: kid = two, us = progenitors. In present-day Magyar it would be ket-os.

Guayaquil, one of the largest cities in Ecuador, keeps a beautiful and meaningful memory in its name. The correct etymology of its ancient name, Uaya, is from: u = ancient, ancestral; aya = mother, in ancient Magyar. Thus its meaning is ancestral or ancient mother. In current Magyar it corresponds to o-anya.

Toponyms and patronyms in America still keep their ancient Magyar denominations. This is more evident in the regions where the original names are still preserved, such as Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, but in an in-depth study, we would be able to connect Ushuaia to the Bering Strait.

The famous captain Quisquis, who fought the Spaniards, had a purely Magyar name, in spite of phonetic distortions: quisquis = kis = small or little. This would be kis-k in modern Magyar.

The name of the capital of the Incan empire, Cusco, corresponds to the province of Veszprem in Hungary, which is written indistinctly Usko or Osko, and means us = os = ancestral and cu = ko = stone; hence, ancient stone.

Today in Ecuador there are autochthonous cultures that speak ancient Magyar, such as the “colored Indians” from Santo Domingo de los Colorados. This tribe, although it is close to a highway that connects Quito to Guayaquil, has kept its traditions and ancient language intact.

The Cayapas too, who live next to the Santiago, Cayapas, and Onzole Rivers, keep their Magyar language, like all groups that live far away from civilization, in the eastern foothills of the mountain range and the Andes.

The ancient Magyar language still spoken today in America is easier to understand for those who know the Magyar that existed before the linguistic reforms of the beginning of the [twentieth] century, or for those who lived in Hungary, where the vowel u is still used instead of o and i instead of e, and so on.

The ancient American toponyms and patronyms are found all over India, lower Mesopotamia, and especially Hungary. They were disseminated in these areas by transoceanic migrations, as happened with the Spanish language, which today covers almost all the American continent, and which was introduced in the continent by a maritime route.

In India there were always large hubs of Magyar populations, and they constantly kept in touch with the American continent, as remembered by the annals of India: the Puranas, Rigveda, Avestas, and so on. These Magyar hubs are usually called White Huns, or Kunos, Hephtalites, Sakas, or Kmer. Even in the eighth century CE a large part of India went back to being a kingdom of the White Huns.

Of Basques and Mayas

This is the reason Magyar researchers focused their attention on India, where they spent all their efforts but never found the origin of their culture and were overwhelmed by the mysterious appearance and disappearance of cultures that appeared out of nowhere, or disappeared without leaving a trace.

The Basque researchers have followed this same process to trace their heritage back to India but never have elucidated their origin, which is also American.

The Basques belong to the same racial and linguistic branch as the Huns.

In the final stages of the eighth century CE, a Magyar tribe, the Karas, which were royal Escites, returned to India and prepared a fleet that sailed to return to the ancient motherland of the Magyar.

The mysterious disappearance of the Karas worried researchers for years. They knew if they found this tribe, they would solve the problem of Magyar origins, because they returned to their motherland.

In 1965, as I continued studying prehistory, I arrived in Ecuador, where I learned that one of the biggest conundrums that worried Ecuadorian historians and researchers was the mysterious arrival by sea of the Kara tribe by the end of the eighth century CE, verified in Caraquez Bay in Manabi province.

One of the biggest mysteries the arrival of the “Karas” posed was the introduction of the vowel o, according to historian Juan de Velazco, because before then they didn’t know it and used the u, as still happens in many regions of Hungary.

Juan de Velazco (1727–1792): History of the Ancient Kingdom of Quito

The annals of India narrate in great detail that the Kunos come from America, where they traveled often by sea.

Certain annals say Bappa [a royal Hun with similar names found in the Pacific], aware that he had left the foundations for his dynasty, returned to Transoceania, to the land of his forefathers, Kanisha and Kamaksen, the true land of the Scythian Khomanos (Kunos—Magyar).

The autochthonous population of Colombia is purely kun, meaning the ancient inhabitants of Colombia are the Scythian Kunos.

The annals of India, aside from mentioning the Maya, state that these are excellent builders who arrived in Transoceania. The ancient cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in India [Pakistan] are irrefutable proof of this.

No researches on prehistory have been done because, aside from excluding the American continent from the cultural unity and diffusion on Earth, they also extracted the oral traditions and legends of the tribes, claiming these were just nonscientific creations.

An example of this is the story of Schliemann, discoverer of Troy, using the oral traditions compiled by Homer. His theories were marked as fantasies. This is why we have been stuck, and many Magyar tribes that have a real ancient history told in their mythology would have found the origin of their cultures if people had paid more attention to their traditions, which their elders kept for centuries.^*6

I have often confirmed that research that seems to be scientific is in fact not at all related to reality or to the real events that took place.

A very sad and unfortunate episode casts a shadow over the Spanish conquest of America. The Spanish Crown knew for some time of the historic truth of America, but, probably for political reasons, they stopped the revelation of the real findings of Christopher Columbus.

Once the Spanish Crown had secured its control, it closed off the borders of the New World and took to the task of erasing the linguistic and cultural traces found in it, in turn promoting the idea of the New World. This political fact is confusing still today and distorts reality, blurring the vision of researchers.

When Spanish researchers do a more in-depth study of the Iberian civilization, which gave its name to the peninsula they now live in, they will find that they are descendants of American tribes, and the confusion and destruction they did in America they did to their own ancestors.

Even if they try to hide it, in America there are precious documents that serve as evidence of these statements.

The Diocesan Synod of Quito

In 1593, there was a synod presided over by Brother Luis López Solís. Only sixty years after the arrival of Benalcazar to Quito, he said: “Experience has taught us that in our district there is a diversity of languages that are not found in Cusco and Aymara, and in order to bring Christianity to them, it is important we translate the catechism and the confessional into their own languages.”

The corresponding translations were made, but the Christian faith was never propagated in these languages, which were different dialects of the Magyar language. On the contrary, when the Spanish Crown heard of this laudable initiative, Brother López ordered a linguistic modification, which was inexorably complied with, as evidenced in the Royal Letters of Orders and Decrees.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Puruhá (Magyar) was a living language, because in 1691 it had to be used, by royal decree, over the teaching of Spanish and “in the places where not even the Inca language is spoken, and only their mother Puruha tongue is spoken, more effort must be done, even punishment, for those who do not speak Spanish.”

Chronicler from the Indies

During the conquests of the Indies, many eyewitnesses tried to share the events and the real facts of what happened during the Spanish conquest of the American continent. One of these was a Brother Gregorio, who lived for many years among the sugarcane plantations in Ecuador. It is surprising that if he was dedicated to research into the languages of the indigenous populations of the area, he wrote no more than a few words about the place he knew so well.

In the 1729 edition of Brother Gregorio’s book, the reader is told that certain changes were implemented to improve the work, because there were doubts surrounding this extraordinary text, which gave the impression that the church censored what they did not want to be known.

Nevertheless, his work is worthy of study, and I will quote some passages that will help us understand more about the Huns, the Kunos, and the Magyars, which are autochthonous cultures from America and were very well known to this priest.

Fourth Book, Chapter XI: About the Scythians and other nations that descended from them who populated the West Indies from the north and east

The first reason behind this assumption is the incredible multitude of Huns, whose names propagated in the conquered nations. They came to have 103 hordes or clans, which at first were only seven. This was the reason why Nikephoros Kallistos called them Chagano, “King of Seven People, Seven Weathers, or Regions.”

They spoke Magyar. Cedreno calls Moageres the brother of Gordas, king of the Huns of Bosporan, who arose with the kingdom.

The Tartars were said to have the same origin as the Scythians, in seven lineages, hordes, or clans from which they all descended, and who disseminated in Europe and were the last Scythians, according to Krantzio. Like those who moved to the East, called Magores, they were not that much different from the Magiaros or Huns, and their proper names are similar, as Hornio says.

Fourth Book, Chapter XII: About the time the Huns and Scythians traveled to the East and West Indies

The Huns, Avars, Tartars, Mongolians, and Parthians, and other nations mixed with the Huns, made a recent and numerous entrance. They seem to have inhabited the farthest coasts of Asia, near the Mongolian Empire. In the provinces of Cunad and Ung the dwellers are called Huns, Cunads, or Cunadians, as they were called in Hungary.

The name Funotian, if spoken softly, sounds like Hunotian. Unchia is similar to the name Tuchan, the neighboring tribe of Quivira. The Huyrons, Scythians mentioned by Vicente Bellovacente, are undoubtedly the Hurons, Indians of the Five Nations of Canada, whose main tribe was the Carragouiba. The Umitasaston tribe of the Neutras Indians begins with the name of the Huns.

The name of the Uros, who were a very wild tribe, according to Garcilaso, is a clear corruption of the name Huns; they were so happy with their name that if someone asked them if they were men, they would answer that no, they were Uros. The same thing happened with the Chuchos and Contales: they seem to be mixed Chinese and Alans, like the Hungarians.

Unitan, in Brazilian, is a name imposed by the Huns that populated this land through the Magellan Strait, and the Five Nations of the Ennos Indians are in it, the Huns.

The Hipice Ierva [herb] that Pliny describes—and it is doubtful whether this is the same plant Theophrastus mentions in his History of Plants—was used by the Scythians, who would put it in their mouths and would not feel hunger or thirst for twenty-eight hours. They would have it with some mare’s-milk cheese for twelve days. This is a mixture they called Hipace, or the heaviest from the mare’s milk, and they drank it in wooden glasses. The foam they called lard, according to Hippocrates. His contemporary Herodotus states more clearly: “The Alima Ierva is said to also take away hunger”—the use the indigenous people gave to coca and other chewable herbs.

The Huns were also described by ancient chronicles as “short, deformed, and wild-looking, with yellow, flat, and beardless faces. The weird shapes and incomprehensible language repelled the Latin people. Where were they coming from? Popular belief has named them the sons of countries from the other side of the world.”

Their feats were constantly told in Chinese chronicles. “They made brief and terrible appearances in dynasty life, and historians attributed a mysterious origin to these strange beings that came from Kuei-Fong, or the Country of the Spirits. Their race was divided into numerous independent tribes; the most important one was ruled by an ancient imperial family that lived on the plateau of the Danube river valley.

Our Cultural Heritage

The generous cultural contribution of America to the world, which today is diffused throughout the globe, and which laid the foundations for the development of our civilization, must not continue to go unrecognized.

Political reasons are not good enough any more. Even if they represent the truth of a civilization, a dynasty, or kingdom in the past, today the truth of the way in which these tribes forged our history and gave us our cultural heritage must prevail above all.

Men have now looked up to the stars, but they must not forget about the small planet they live on, which has been the setting of the fights, blood, and fires that wrote human history.

This story must be known by the people of the world, and the sun that illuminated the path of the brave American tribes will shine more the day the people of the world witness these majestic peaks of the Andes Mountain range, the ancestral homeland where the culture we all inherited was born.

JUAN MORICZ, BUENOS AIRES, JULY 1967