A sign facing the sea
In 1982, aboard the sailing yacht Bohic Ruz, after an 11,000-mile voyage from Spain, Anselm Pi Rambla was sailing along the coast of Peru. In the bay of Paracas, some 160 nautical miles south of Lima, he saw a strange and enormous geoglyph on a headland of the bay.
“As I looked at it, I knew I was contemplating something very important. My first intuition was that this geoglyph held a mystery belonging to a civilization lost in the mists of time.” That same year the measurements of its arms and base, its astronomical orientation and its grooves began. Many years of research and exploration followed. That intuition did not let him down.
The Trident / Candelabra of Paracas is the representation of the World Tree, the Axis Mundi. Its central axis was aligned with the South Celestial Pole, and all its geometry is born from the constellation of the Southern Cross.
The geoglyph
It is drawn on a hill facing the sea, on Cerro Colorado, near the Paracas Necropolis, and it can be seen from the sea on clear days. Its shape is that of a Trident, although it has become known as the Candelabra because of the two side branches that seem to support its central axis.
The walls of its grooves are made of clods of tightly packed sand. The floor is sand consolidated by the wind and the sea's humidity. This sand can be removed easily and, a metre down, there is a surprise: the base of the geoglyph is a layer of crystalline salt, yellowish white in colour, 50 centimetres or more thick, extraordinarily smooth, with undulations of barely a centimetre. The measurements of the grooves, of this layer and of the rectangle's trench and pit were first published in 1978 by the aeronautical engineer Josef F. Blumrich. Anselm Pi Rambla's team checked them in the field in the 1980s, together with Felipe Benavides, creator of the Paracas Reserve.
It was already visible when the conquistadors arrived. The Spaniards called it “the miraculous sign of the Three Crosses”. José de San Martín believed it was a Masonic symbol and a sign for navigators. In 1926 the Frenchman Victor Forbin wrote that it had been drawn by the Atlanteans, and María Reiche measured it without reaching any conclusion. It has even been said that it marked human sacrifices, and it is often repeated that it points to the Nazca Lines. It does not: as Blumrich calculated in 1978, its axis differs by 43°50' from that line.
That same year of 1926, drawing on Forbin's notes, the thinker René Guénon wrote that it must be a representation of the “Tree of Life”. Anselm Pi Rambla did not come across that text until many years after deciphering the Candelabra. Tribute to René Guénon →
Three functions
There is no other like it on the whole continent. It was built with a precise purpose, at this strategic spot in the bay, to be seen from the sea by any navigator reaching these shores: the sign of entry to the Mythical Land that ancient cartography called the Dragon's Tail.
Deciphering it requires combining archaeology, astronomy, mathematical and geometric calculation and the study of ancient symbolism. With all these data, its design and orientation reveal three complementary functions:
The South Celestial Pole
When it was built, the central arm of the geoglyph was aligned with the South Celestial Pole: the point in the sky around which all the stars turn, from east to west, at 15° an hour, because of the Earth's rotation.
All the native peoples of the Americas called that point the Navel of the Sky: a synonym of above, ahead and foremost, the true north of all pre-Columbian cultures.
The long axis of the Southern Cross, formed by the stars Alpha and Gamma Crucis, is a gigantic pointer that always indicates the same point in the sky. Extending the long arm of the Cross four and a half times from its foot, we find the South Celestial Pole. Looking straight down to the horizon, there lies the South.
“Fundamental is the indigenous astronomical system of orientation, which faces south, not north as in Western civilization, so that the region of the South Pole becomes ‘up’ for them.”Dick Edgar Ibarra Grasso · 1982
Sources: UTN Astronomical Observatory, San Francisco; Peruvian Olympiads of Astronomy and Astronautics, 2018.
Every 3 May, when the Southern Cross stands upright, its long axis and the axis of the Candelabra are perfectly aligned. It is the night of the Cruz Velakuy, the Andean New Year, a rite more than 5,000 years old; on the same day, Christendom celebrates the feast of the True Cross.
“To the right hand I turned, and fixed my mind upon the other pole, and saw four stars ne'er seen before save by the primal people. Rejoicing in their flamelets seemed the heaven. O thou septentrional and widowed site, because thou art deprived of seeing these!”Dante Alighieri · Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, canto I (tr. Longfellow)
The Navel of the Sky
In that place of the Cosmos, where the arm of the Southern Cross points, many cultures placed the origin and order of the universe, and gave it many names.
For Ibarra Grasso, Ticci or Ticsi means bottom, foundation, abyss: the Nadir, the point opposite the Zenith. Wiracocha is the lord of the Night Sky, the last and extreme form of the Celestial Jaguar, conceived as the creative force of Nature.
The geometry
The geoglyph stands on a rectangle at its foot, measuring 20.40 × 14.40 metres, formed by a trench 2.5 metres wide. Inside it, about 5 metres from its upper edge and in line with the central arm, there is a circular cavity 3 metres in diameter.
The rectangle was built from a square with 14.40-metre sides and its 20.40-metre diagonal: the same proportion as the arms of the Southern Cross. In the Andean tradition it is called the Harmonic Rectangle. The triangle joining the three arms was built with the Pythagorean constant (√2): its equal sides are those of a square, and its base the diagonal. The lengths of the three arms keep the same proportion.
Calculating the square and its diagonal is as ancient and universal as calculating the solstices and equinoxes: it is found in temples and pyramids in Mexico, China, Sumer, Greece, Peru and Bolivia, and the Egyptians used it to derive the Royal Cubit. In the Andes, a unit of measurement was born from the arms of the Southern Cross: the tupu, the length of the short arm of the Cross. The diagonal of the square, proportional to the long arm, was called Chekkaluwa, “the True”. The square and its diagonal were the Sacred Proportion.
The Chakana and the Qhapaq Ñan →
The Enigma of the 175 Degrees
Progress of the Pi Heritage Foundation research on the orientation, the geometry and the material of the geoglyph.
1. The orientation
The central arm of the geoglyph does not point exactly south, but about 5° further east: at 175°. This is no oversight. Our analysis of the terrain indicates that the hill on which it was laid out rises precisely in that direction, and that its builders drew the axis straight up the hillside, following its steepest slope. That is why anyone approaching from the sea, facing the hillside, sees the figure perfectly upright and symmetrical, as if it were standing on the hill.
In 1978, the engineer Josef F. Blumrich had already obtained, with compass and map, an orientation of about 5° west of north, which agrees with the 175° measured in 2018 with drone and GNSS. Extended northwards, its central axis passes through Isla Blanca (Los Ovillos), an alignment already noted by Blumrich in 1978 and known to our team since its earliest work in Paracas.
2. The Southern Cross and the era
The Southern Cross, guide of the Andean peoples, points with its long arm toward the Celestial South Pole, the point in the sky around which all the stars turn. Today it culminates about 41° above the horizon of Paracas. But the sky changes slowly: because of the precession of the equinoxes, some 2,200 years ago the Cross stood higher, near 52°, and its axis pointed to the Pole with a margin of less than 2°. Those who laid out the geoglyph looked up at that sky, not at today's.
3. The date
Today the Cross reaches its upright position around 9:45 pm on 3 May, the date of the Cruz Velakuy rite. In the time of the geoglyph, that same moment of the sky occurred a month earlier, around early April, because precession shifts the calendar of the stars by roughly one day every 72 years.
4. A deliberate geometry: the numbers 17 and 12
The rectangle at the base of the Candelabro, marked in gold in the aerial photo, measures 20.4 by 14.4 metres: a ratio of 17 to 12. It is almost identical to the ratio between the diagonal of a square and its side, the square root of 2 (1.41421…). The difference is less than two parts in a thousand. It is not a measurement taken by eye: it is exactly the result given by one of the oldest geometric procedures known.
The ladder of “side and diagonal numbers”:
1/1 · 3/2 · 7/5 · 17/12 · 41/29 · 99/70 …
Rule: new side = side + diagonal; new diagonal = 2 × side + diagonal. Each step comes closer to √2, and 17/12 is the fourth.
The problem of the diagonal. According to tradition, the Pythagoreans discovered in the 5th century BC (the discovery is attributed to Hippasus of Metapontum) that the diagonal of a square cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two whole numbers. Builders, who measure with cords and count units, therefore needed a practical approximation made of whole numbers.
Side and diagonal numbers. The Greek solution is a ladder of simple additions, without decimals or roots. Start with a side of 1 and a diagonal of 1. To climb one step, the new side is the sum of the side and the diagonal, and the new diagonal is twice the side plus the diagonal. The ladder yields 3/2, 7/5, 17/12, 41/29… each time closer to the true diagonal. At the fourth step: a square with a side of 12 units has a diagonal of 16.97, practically 17.
Who used it. Plato alludes to it in the Republic (c. 375 BC) when he speaks of the “rational diameter of five”: the diagonal of a square of side 5 is almost 7, the step 7/5. Theon of Smyrna (2nd century AD) describes the complete method in his Mathematics Useful for Understanding Plato, under the name of “side and diagonal numbers”, and Proclus (5th century AD) explains it again in his commentary on Plato's Republic.
Not only in Greece. A Babylonian clay tablet (YBC 7289, Yale University, c. 1800–1600 BC) shows the diagonal of a square with an accuracy of six decimal places. And the Sulba Sutras of India (c. 800–500 BC), whose name means “rules of the cord”, give 577/408 for laying out altars: another step of the same ladder.
What it means for the Candelabro. It does not imply contact with Greece: it is a path that any builder working with cords and counting carefully can reach. What it does reveal is that the rectangle was laid out with a deliberate geometric method. With a cord of 12 measures for the width and 17 for the length, one obtains without any calculation a rectangle whose sides are those of a square and its diagonal. Those who laid out the Candelabro knew that method.
5. A signal for the sea
Beneath the sand that now covers the furrows lies a saline layer, white and extraordinarily smooth. With the furrows cleared, the Candelabro would shine in full sunlight and could be seen from the sea many miles away, appearing about the size of the full Moon in the sky. On its steepest parts, around midday at the December solstice, the salt could even reflect the Sun like a mirror toward sailors.
Preliminary results of the Pi Heritage Foundation research team (2026). The orientation of the slope will be confirmed with a high-resolution 3D terrain model, and the reflection of the saline layer with observation from the sea.
The World Tree
Its design represents the Cosmic Tree of Life: the World Tree, the unchanging Axis that runs through and joins the three regions of space.
When we are in the presence of a tree with a threefold form, with its central column and its two side columns of analogous and opposite duality, joined in balance by a triangle into a single tree, then that tree represents the true Axis of the World, known as the Axis Mundi.
The triangle joining the three axes is one of the signatures of the Celestial Pole and represents the Unity that contains the three worlds: the Cosmos, the Earth and the Inner World, the three Pachas of the Andean tradition, Hanan Pacha, Kay Pacha and Ukhu Pacha. Its two side columns are the two cosmic currents that in many traditions coil around the axis, like the serpents of the caduceus. In the Andes it is the Tupac Yauri, Wiracocha's staff of command, blazing like lightning.
The circle inside the rectangle at the base represents the enclosure of the Earthly Paradise, the centre from which the Tree is born.
Coincidence, or the bond with one and the same Primordial Mother Culture?
One axis in every people →Candelabro Project 2027
Work is planned to begin in 2027 to restore the Candelabra to its original state.
- Clearing the grooves of the sand accumulated over the centuries, down to the layer of crystalline salt at its base.
- Recovering the geoglyph as its builders drew it, with its original proportions and brilliance.
- Verifying on the ground what we state: the orientation, confirmed with a high-resolution 3D terrain model, and the light signal, observed from the sea.
With its grooves cleared, the white, astonishingly smooth salt layer would produce brilliant flashes in the sun, changing with the angle of the rays. According to our navigation analyses with the yacht Bohic Ruz, they could be seen from some 10 nautical miles out to sea on a clear day. That is how the navigators arriving in the bay of Paracas must have seen it.
Paracas, port of the transpacific voyages →
This research is set out in full in chapter 3 of Umbilicus Mundi, “The World Tree”, by Anselm Pi Rambla.
Download chapter 3 (PDF) → See Umbilicus Mundi →