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'The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanors,
by an all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second
world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and
everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal
flood. The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on
whether its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator's
plans.'
[Hopi Myth]
The above quotation comes from the tradition
of the North American Hopi tribe - through what remains of the oral
tradition brought down from their ancestors. There are mysteries
relating to this investigation scattered throughout the North American
continent. But for the source of the New World's ancient traditions
scholars have ever turned their gaze southwards, to the faded traditions
of the Aztecs, the elder Maya, Olmecs, and, farther south in the
Andes - to the civilization of the early Incas.
No thanks to the Iberian-Catholic occupation of South and Central
America however, the vast majority of the 'literary monuments',
marvels and artefacts of the New World were destroyed in fits of
religious hysteria, stolen, or - like the massive gold and silver
calendars of Mexico were - melted down and sent back to the Old
World for coin.
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What could not be stolen, excavated, sold
to museums, or destroyed was left as silent testimony to the brilliance
of the long-faded civilization. And that which was not buried or
destroyed by cataclysms or the hand of civilizations, was overwhelmed
and lost to the jungle. But time, and the hand of civilization have
once again uncovered them, revealing monuments on the same scale
of magnificence as those found at the more famous Giza complex,
in Egypt.
On the spring and autumn equinoxes of every year a mysterious phenomenon
takes place upon the 365 steps of the pyramid at Kukulcan, in Chiten
Itza, Mexico. Patterns of light and shadow combine to create the
illusion of a huge serpent undulating up the staircase towards the
top of the pyramid. It lasts exactly three hours and twenty-two
minutes.
Tenochtitlan, now the old part of Mexico City, when discovered by
Cortes in 1519, was an Aztec city of vast pyramids and temples,
palaces and canals and was built in the middle of a massive lake.
It was as sophisticated as Madrid or Venice. The Aztecs told Cortes
that the city was modeled on the original capital of their lost
homeland, standing in the middle of the lake and surrounded by concentric
canals.
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Teotihuacan, a city the Aztecs tell was built
by their earliest ancestors, lies fifty kilometers north-east of
Mexico City and was called the 'city of gods', or 'city where gods
are born'.
'The vast area that the city covers means
that it must, in its day, have been the largest metropolis in all
the Americas. Indeed, even in the Old World there would have been
few cities to match it. Teotihuacan, like Mexico City today, was
built on a grid system of streets. Its most imposing feature, however,
besides the great pyramids, is a grand avenue that runs for some
ten kilometers before culminating in front of the Pyramid of the
Moon.'[3]
The first excavations in 1883, at the Temple
of Quetzalcoatl, unearthed pottery and masks portraying an incredible
variety of different faces - including those of Caucasians, Greeks,
Japanese, Negroes and Mongols. At some point in history, it seems,
the land of the Aztecs and the earlier Mayas was a cosmopolitan
centre on par with such great cities as Constantinople.
'The great Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at
Teotihuacan have, rightly, been compared with the pyramids of Giza.
Colossal in size, it is almost beyond belief that their builders
were able to erect such huge monuments with the primitive tools
then available.'[2]
Remember, academics hold that the wheel was
never discovered in the Americas, and beasts of burden such as the
horse went extinct in the New World some time around the end of
the last Ice Age. (The American archeologist Matthew Stirling discovered
children's toys in the form of little wheeled dogs in Tres Zapotes,
a site associated with the early Olmecs, but like similar evidence
that doesn't fit into the 'archeological picture', the discovery
has largely gone ignored.)
'The city flourished throughout the classic
period, at the time that the Maya built Palenque, and was abandoned,
for reasons unknown, in about AD 750. In his dig Bartres found evidence
that the city had been destroyed by a great fire. At first sight
this suggested that it had met its end at the hands of invaders,
for who else would have put it to the torch? Yet there was another
curious anomaly: many of the buildings also showed evidence that
they had been deliberately filled with rubble and buried so that
even the roof timbers were still intact. It was as if they had been
preserved in aspic.'[3]
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Burned and then buried by man, or perhaps
by nature. In 1884 an ex-soldier and self-styled archeologist Leopoldo
Batres persuaded his brother-in-law, the infamous dictator Porfiro
Diaz, to allow him to excavate at Teotihuacan.
'Bartres was less interested in archaeology than in finding treasure,
or pottery and artefacts that could be sold to European museums.
He was puzzled by the sheer quantity of earth and rubble that covered
the city - as if, he speculated, the inhabitants had deliberately
buried it to protect it from sacrilegious invaders. His excavations
revealed that the city had probably been abandoned after some catastrophe
that had set it on fire; many buildings were full of charred skeletons.'[4]
On the flat top of the Pyramid of the Sun, under the rubble in the
remains of a temple were found human figures of jade, jasper, alabaster
and human bone. He also found a kind of flute that produced a seven
note scale unlike the European scale. An entrance into the pyramid
was discovered accidentally in 1971, which led to a spacious cave
close to it's geometrical centre. The cave has four adjoining chambers,
much like the leaves to a four-leaved clover, each about sixty feet
in circumference. There was also a complex drainage system of interlocking
segments of carved rock pipes.
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An American engineer, Alfred E. Schlemmer,
whose field was technological forecasting, with specific reference
to the prediction of earthquakes, studied the city from his technical
perspective. His proposal regarding a part of the function of the
'Street of the Dead' at Teotihuacan is of interest ion this matter.
I will quote Graham Hancock, who includes his own observations:
'Schlemmer's argument was that the Street
of the Dead might never have been a street at all. Instead it might
originally have been laid out as a row of linked reflecting pools,
filled with water which had descended through a series of locks
from the Pyramid of the Moon, at the northern extreme, to the Citadel
in the South ... it seemed to me that this theory had several points
in its favour. For a start the 'Street' was blocked at regular intervals
by high partition walls, at the foot of which the remains of well-made
sluices could clearly be seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would
have facilitated a north-south hydraulic flow since the base of
the Moon Pyramid stood on ground that was approximately 100 feet
higher than the area in front of the Citadel. The partitions could
easily have been filled with water and might indeed have served
as reflecting pools, creating a spectacle far more dramatic than
those offered by the Taj Mahal or the fabled Shamilar Gardens.
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The Teotihuacan Mapping Project had demonstrated
conclusively that the ancient city had possessed 'many carefully-laid
out canals and systems of branching waterways, artifically dredged
into straightened portions of a river, which formed a network within
Teotihuacan and ran all the way to Lake Texcoco, now ten miles distant
but perhaps closer in antiquity'.
There was much argument as to what this vast hydraulic system had
been designed to do. Schlemmer's contention was that the particular
waterway he had identified had been built to serve a pragmatic purpse
as 'a long-range seismic monitor' - part of 'an ancient science,
no longer understood.' He pointed out that remote earthquakes 'can
cause standing waves to form on a liquid surface right across the
planet' and suggested that the carefully graded and spaced reflecting
pools of the Street of the Dead might have been designed 'to enable
the Teotihuacanos to read from the standing waves formed there the
location and strength of earthquakes around the globe, thus allowing
them to predict such an occurence in their own area'.[1]
Schlemmer's argument is supported by the fact
that the Pyramid of the Moon has an even more complex system of
sluices inside it than the Pyramid of the Sun. It is also reinforced
by what remains of the 'literary monuments' of this ancient culture.
The Mayan priests were fascinated - to the point of preoccupation
- with the seasons, planets, solar ages, precession of equinoxes,
and the cycles of destruction they believed accompanied them. In
fact, of all the 'star gazing' and calendar-making civilizations
of the ancient world, those of the Maya and their predecessors appeared
pre-eminient. Schlemmer writes:
'In the Maya scheme the road over which time
had marched stretched into a past so distant that the mind of man
cannot comprehend its remoteness. Yet the Maya undauntedly retrod
that road seeking its starting point. A fresh view, leading further
backward, unfolded at every stage; the mellowed centuries blended
into millennia, and they into tens of thousands of years, as those
tireless inquirers explored deeper and still deeper into the eternity
of the past. On a stela at Quiriga in Guetemala a date over 90 million
years ago is computed; on another a date 300 million years before
that was given. These are actual computations, stating correctly
day and month positions, and are comparable to calculations in our
calendar giving the month positions on which Easter would have fallen
at equivalent distances in the past. The brain reels at such astronomical
figures...'
Why they should be possessed to study the
stars, the cycles of the planet and the mechanics of their calendar
with such urgency remains a matter of bafflement and endless speculation.
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The 'great pyramid' of the Mayas at Cholula,
by Mexico City, covers an area of 45 acres and is the largest building
on earth. It is three times as massive as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The conquistadors were not gentle with this, the most ancient and
massive of all of Americas pyramids.
'In Cholula, a great centre of pilgrimage
with a population of around 100,000 at the time of the conquest,
the decapitation of ancient traditons and ways of life required
that something particularly humiliating be done to the man-made
mountain of Quetzalcoatl. The solution was to smash and desecrate
the temple which had once stood on the summit of the ziggurat and
replace it with a church.
Because the Cholulans thought Cortez and his men to be Quetzalcoatl
and his followers, returning from across the 'Eastern Sea' as prophesied,
the conquistadores were give permission to enter the great courtyard
of the temple. There troupes of gaily bedecked dancing girls greeted
them with platters of bread and delicate cooked meats.
One of the Spanish chroniclers, an eyewitness to the events that
followed, reported that adoring townsfolk of all ranks, 'unarmed,
with eagre and happy faces, crowded in to hear what the white men
had to say'. Realizing from this incredible reception that their
intentions were not suspected, the Spaniards closed and guarded
all the entrances, drew their weapons of steel and murdered their
hosts. 'Those of Cholula were caught completely unawares. With neither
arrows nor shields did they meet the Spaniards. Just so they were
slain without warning. They were killed by pure treachery.' Six
thousand died in this massacre.'[1]
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The rage lives on, in silence. But the mystery surrounding the pyramid
gets stranger yet. Diego de Duran, a Franciscan collector of indigenous
traditions, visited Cholula in 1585 and interviewed a venerated
elder of town, said to be more than a hundred years old. The elder
told him the following story about the building of the ziggurat:
'In the beginning, before the light of the
sun had been created, this place, Cholula, was in obscurity and
darkness; all was a plain, without hill or elevation, encircled
in every part by water, without tree or created thing. Immediately
after the light and the sun arose in the east there appeared giant
men of deformed stature who possessed the land. Enamoured by the
light and beauty of the sun, they determined to build a tower so
high that it's summit should reach the sky. Having collected materials
for the prupose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen with
which they speedily commenced to build the tower ... And having
reared it to the greatest possible altitude, so that it reached
the sky, the Lord of the Heavens, enraged, said to the inhabitants
of the sky, 'Have you observed how they of the earth have built
a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamoured of the
light of the sun and it's beauty? Come and confound them, because
it is not right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should
mingle with us.' Immediately the inhabitants of the sky sallied
forth like flashes of lightning; they destroyed the edifice and
divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth.'[2]
A familiar legend, reminiscent of the biblical
account of the Tower of Babel, which is itself a reworking of a
much older Mesopotamian legend. It would appear that another reworking
of the same tradition lived on in it's own version in America. Though
academics do not yet recognize a connection beween the pyramids
of the Americas and those of Egypt, it is clear that in the mythological
tradition, they have a connection strong enough to pass on almost
exactly the same story. Legends of giants are also, of course, to
be found in the biblical Book of Gensis.
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'Isn't it odd that the symbolic language keeps
cropping up in ancient traditions around the world? How can this
be explained? Are we talking about some vast, subconscious wave
of telepathy, or could elements of these remarkable universal myths
have been engineered, long ages ago, by clever and purposeful people?'[1]
It almost appears as if, though there was
little or no direct connection in the time that the pyramids in
both the New and Old Worlds were actually built, the peculiar tradition
that motivated cultures on either side of the Atlantic to build
them does spring from a common source. A common source that perhaps
also painstakingly executed maps of an ice-free Antarctica before
crustal displacements ultimately buried it under a mile-thick mantle
of ice. A source that was once reckoned to be a maritime civilization
of expert navigators, architects, mathematicians, and astronomers.
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CONTINUE
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