Candi Sukuh

7.6272°S, 111.1311°E.

Candi Sukuh on the western slope of Mount Lawu in Central Java, Indonesia — a fifteenth-century Hindu-Tantric temple dated by chronograms carved on the western gateway to 1437 CE. The structure is unique in Javanese religious architecture: a stepped pyramidal platform 6 metres tall on a base approximately 15 by 15 metres, with a flat-topped sanctuary on the summit rather than the more typical Javanese candi tower-and-cella arrangement. The architectural form has frequently been compared to Mesoamerican stepped pyramids — a comparison made by archaeologists since the nineteenth century without proposing any actual cultural connection. The site preserves a distinctive iconographic programme of Tantric symbolism: large stone phalluses (lingams), depictions of human reproductive anatomy, and reliefs of the smithing of magical weapons by the dwarf-god Bhima. The temple was constructed during the final decades of the Hindu Majapahit empire in Java, immediately before the Islamisation of the island that eliminated public Hindu worship within a century.

A late-Hindu Javanese stepped pyramid that resembles a Mesoamerican monument across the Pacific by no documented mechanism.