Are we a species with amnesia? Is it possible that we could have forgotten an entire epoch in our own history? Could it be that a race of technologically advanced `supergods’ flourished during the last Ice Age and were destroyed in a global cataclysm more than 12,000 years ago, vanishing almost without trace?
For five years, best-selling author GRAHAM HANCOCK travelled the globe seeking the answers to these questions and writing a provocative book which challenges the existing wisdoms about our past. He collected evidence which he says points to a lost civilisaton which ruled some 15,000 years ago, and which was ultimately responsible for the technology behind such monumental edifices as the Great Sphinx of Egypt and the temples of the Andes.
Yesterday he explained how his quest took him to Peru and Bolivia, where he investigated the legends of a mysterious man called Viracocha, a `bearded, pale-skinned teacher’ who came in `the time of darkness’ after a great flood `bringing with him all the gifts of high civilisation’.
In the second extract, he tells what happened when he flew north to Central America…
Who was Viracocha? I had exhausted my studies in the Andes. There, the legends were so ancient and the obliteration of records by the Spanish conquerors so complete that the trail had gone cold. So I headed some 2,000 miles north, to Mexico, where I could pick up his traces again. I already knew that there were great similarities between the legends of the two parts of the Americas.
The ancient peoples who inhabited what is now Mexico had their own version of Viracocha. The name had changed, but his appearance remained the same – bearded and pale skinned. Clearly this `god’ was not one of the indigenous Central Americans, who were usually darker skinned and often beardless. Furthermore, the legends which had been preserved from the days long before Columbus set foot in the New World indicated that he was a seafarer and navigator who had come to Mexico `from across the sea, in a boat that moved by itself without paddles’, after an earth-destroying flood.
I had exhausted my studies in the Andes, so I headed some 2,000 miles north, to Mexico , where I could pick up the traces of Viracocha again, writes GRAHAM HANCOCK
The name of Viracocha’s Mexican twin was Quetzalcoatl, meaning `Feathered Serpent’. He was depicted as having brought to central America all the skills and knowledge necessary to restore civilisation. His mission was said to have been undertaken with the help of 20 men – `they wore flowing robes and sandals on their feet, they had long beards and their heads were bare’.
This takes us on to one of the great unsolved mysteries of Central American archaeology. Despite exhaustive excavations, archaeologists have never been able to find statues or carvings of native Central Americans in the most ancient strata. All that has come down to us from these very early periods – thousands of years before Christ – are the images of bearded Caucasians and of strong and charismatic African men.
Yet neither Caucasians nor Africans are supposed to have reached the New World before Columbus. Naturally, I was anxious to see whether such images could be linked to the myths of Quetzalcoatl and to the lost civilisation I was seeking. So it was that late one afternoon I arrived, after a long journey through the hot, fly-infested lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico, at a spot now called San Lorenzo.
THE OLMECS OF SAN LORENZO AND LA VENTA
Thousands of years ago, at the dawn of history in Central America, this same spot was clearly of great significance. Then, a people whom archaeologists refer to as `the Olmecs’ (but whose real name and identity are unknown) had heaped up an artificial mound more than 100ft high as part of an immense structure almost a mile long and half a mile wide.
Now I climbed the main mound, heavily overgrown with thick tropical vegetation. From the summit I was able to see for miles across the surrounding countryside. A great many other lesser mounds were also apparent, and around me were several of the deep trenches that the American archaeologist Michael Coe had dug when he had excavated the site in 1966. Coe’s team unearthed a number of puzzles here.
Most perplexing of all, however, was the way five hulking pieces of sculpture had been buried (deliberately, though we still do not know why), along certain specific alignments.Â
‘Olmec heads’ like this one can be found at several sites in Mexico
Archaeologists call these `Olmec heads’. And such heads can be found in other Olmec sites, notably La Venta on the Gulf of Mexico. The La Venta site also yeilded an imposing monolith almost 15ft high, decorated with carvings showing an encounter between two tall men, both dressed in elaborate robes, and wearing elegant shoes with turned-up toes. One of the figures has been defaced – either by erosion, or deliberate mutilation (quite commonly practised on Olmec monuments).
The other, however, was intact – and what it shows is a male with a high-bridged nose and a long, flowing beard. This figure so bemused archaeologists that it was promptly christened `Uncle Sam’. Common sense suggests that the artist did not invent this figure but used a human model. Could it have been Quetzalcoatl, the legendary law-giver, the bringer of civilisation and science? And if so, what kind of science did he bring?
CALENDAR OF DESTRUCTION
Most of us know that the peoples of ancient Central America – the Maya, the Aztecs and the Toltec – had developed fantastically intricate calendars. What is less well-known is that their calendars were based on the one used much earlier by the Olmecs, the first culture recognised by historians to have made use of such a calendar.
The Olmec calendar, which insists that time moves in great cycles accompanied by successive destructions and remakings of the world, was passed down over the generations and remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years. The reason we know about it today is largely because it was best preserved among the Maya and passed on to us in the form of Mayan inscriptions and codices. For years the Maya have intrigued the world’s leading academics.
Their general achievements were unremarkable, yet their astro-calendrical knowledge was highly advanced. Sir J. Eric Thompson, one of the leading authorities on the archaeology of Central America, put the dilemma most elegantly when he wrote in 1954: `What mental quirks led the Maya intelligentsia to chart the heavens, yet fail to grasp the principle of the wheel; to visualise eternity, as no other semi-civilised people has ever done, yet ignore the short step from corbelled to true arch; to count in millions, yet never to learn to weigh a sack of corn?’
Perhaps the answer to these questions is much simpler than he realised. Perhaps the astronomy, the deep understanding of time, and the long-term mathematical calculations, were not ‘quirks’ at all. Perhaps, instead, they were a coherent and very specific body of knowledge that the Maya had inherited, more or less intact, from an older and wiser civilisation.
Perhaps the Maya had inherited the ability to chart the heavens, but not the principle of the wheel. Certainly, such an inheritance would explain Thompson’s contradictions. And we already know that the Maya received their calendar as a legacy from the Olmecs (because, a thousand years earlier, the Olmecs were using exactly the same system).
The real question, therefore, is from whom did the Olmecs get it? What kind of level of technological and scientific development would have been required in order for a civilisation to be able to devise a calendar as good as this one?
Take the case of the solar year. Today, we still use the famous Gregorian calendar, first introduced in Europe in 1582 and based on the best scientific knowledge then available. The Julian calendar, which it replaced, was based on the belief that the earth revolved around the sun once every 365.25 days. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform substituted a much finer and more accurate calculation: once every 365.2425 days.
Thanks to advances in our science since 1582, we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days. The Gregorian calendar therefore incorporates a very small `plus error’, just 0.0003 of a day – pretty impressive accuracy for the 16th century.
Yet the Mayan calendar, whose origins are wrapped in the mists of an antiquity far deeper than the 16th century, achieved even greater accuracy. It calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days, a minus error of only 0.0002 of a day. Why did the `semi-civilised’ Maya need this kind of high-tech precision? Or did they somehow inherit, in good working order, a calendar that had been engineered to fit the needs of a much earlier, entirely different, and far more advanced civilisation? Consider the crowning jewel of the Mayan calendar, the so-called `Long Count’.
This system of calculating dates also expressed beliefs about the past – notably, the very widely-held belief that time operated in Great Cycles which witnessed recurrent creations and destructions of the world. According to the Maya, the present Great Cycle began in darkness on the day which they wrote in their famous code as 4 AHAU 8 CUMKU, a date that corresponds to August 13, 3114 BC, in our own calendar. Interestingly, it was also believed that the cycle would come to an end, amid global destruction, on 4 AHAU 3 KANKIN – December 23, 2012 AD in our calendar.
The function of the `Long Count’ was to record the elapse of time since the beginning of the current Great Cycle – literally to count off, one by one, the 5,125 years allotted to our present Creation. I was still pondering the calendar of destruction when I moved on to one of the great archaeological sites of Central America, Chichen Itza in Mexico’s northern Yucatan.
CHILDREN OF THE FIFTH SUN
Few sights in the world are more awe-inspiring than Chichen Itza. In front of me, towering almost 100 feet into the air, was the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, a perfect ziggurat – a pyramidical stepped tower. Each of its four stairways has 91 steps each.
Taken together with the top platform, which counted as a further step, the total number of steps is 365 – clearly meant to depict the complete days in a solar year. But the architects of the Temple were far more subtle than that.
Few sights in the world are more awe-inspiring than Chichen Itza
Each spring and autumn equinox, regular as clockwork, triangular patterns of light and shadow combine to create the illusion of a giant serpent undulating on the northern staircase
Somehow they had managed to calibrate, with Swiss-watch precision, the design and orientation of the ancient structure to achieve an illusion as dramatic as it is esoteric. Each spring and autumn equinox, regular as clockwork, triangular patterns of light and shadow combine to create the illusion of a giant serpent undulating on the northern staircase. Each time the illusion lasts exactly three hours and 22 minutes. It is clearly deliberate – but the geometric knowledge required to produce the effect challenges even today’s top scientists. I walked away in an easterly direction towards the steep steps that led up to the neighbouring Temple of the Warriors.
At the top of these steps, becoming fully visible only after I had begun to ascend them, was a giant figure. This was the idol of Chacmool. It half lay, half sat in an oddly stiff and expectant posture, its bent knees protruding upwards, its thick calves drawn back to touch its thighs, its ankles tucked in against its buttocks, its elbows planted on the ground, its hands folded across its belly encircling an empty plate, and its back set at an awkward angle as though it were just about to lever itself upright.
I walked away in an easterly direction towards the steep steps that led up to the neighbouring Temple of the Warriors
At the top of these steps, becoming fully visible only after I had begun to ascend them, was a giant figure. This was the idol of Chacmool
Even reclining, coiled and tightly sprung, it seemed to overflow with a fierce and pitiless energy. Its square features were thin-lipped and implacable, as hard and indifferent as the stone from which they were carved, and its eyes gazed westwards, traditionally the direction of darkness, death and the colour black.
Lugubriously, I continued to climb the steps of the Temple of the Warriors. Weighing on my mind was the unforgettable fact that the ritual of human sacrifice had been routinely practised here before the arrival of the Spaniards in the 15th century.
The empty plate that Chacmool held across his stomach had once served as a receptacle for freshly extracted hearts. `If the victim’s heart was to be taken out,’ reported one Spanish observer in the 16th century, `they conducted him with great display . . . and placed him on the sacrificial stone. Four of them took hold of his arms and legs, spreading them out.
Then the executioner came, with a flint knife in his hand, and with great skill made an incision between the ribs on the left side, below the nipple; then he plunged in his hand and like a ravenous tiger tore out the living heart, which he laid on the plate.’ What kind of culture could have nourished and celebrated such demonic behaviour?
Here, in Chichen Itza, amid ruins dating back more than 1,200 years, a hybrid society had been formed out of intermingled Maya and Toltec elements. This society, however, was by no means exceptional in its addiction to cruel and barbaric ceremonies. On the contrary, all the other great indigenous civilisations known to have flourished in Mexico had also indulged in the ritualised slaughter of human beings. And they did so with fanatical zeal.
Take the Aztecs. It is recorded that Ahuitzotl, the eighth and most powerful of the Aztec royal dynasty, `celebrated the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochitlan by marshalling four lines of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch them. On this occasion, as many as 80,000 were slain during a single ceremonial rite’.
In all, it has been estimated that the number of sacrificial victims in the Aztec empire as a whole had risen to around 250,000 per year by the beginning of the 16th century. What was this manic destruction of human life in aid of?
According to the Aztecs themselves, human sacrifices were carried out in pursuit of a lofty objective. They believed that only by human sacrifice could the end of the world be postponed.
They believed the world had already been destroyed four times before, and that they were a chosen people who had been charged with a divine mission to wage war and offer a steady diet of human hearts and blood to their gods in order to preserve the life of our current epoch of the world, which they called `the Fifth Sun’.
Like many different peoples and cultures that had preceded them in Mexico, the Aztecs had inherited a certainty that the universe operated in great cycles. The priests stated as a matter of simple fact that there had been four such cycles or `Suns’, since the creation of the human race.
At the time of the Spanish Conquest, it was the Fifth Sun that prevailed. And it is within that same Fifth ‘Sun’, or epoch, that humankind still lives today. The symbol of the Fifth Sun is the face of the Sun God himself, Tonatiuh. His tongue, fittingly depicted as a knife in Aztec sculptures, juts out hungrily, signalling his need for nourishment in the form of human blood and hearts.
His features are wrinkled to indicate his advanced age, and he appears within the symbol `Ollin’ which signifies `movement’. Why is the Fifth Sun known as `The Sun of Movement’? Because, according to `the elders’, `in it there will be a movement of the Earth and from this we shall all perish’. And the date of the next scheduled catastrophe? – December 23, 2012 AD.
THE LINK WITH EGYPT’S GREAT PYRAMID
Intrigued, I made my way to Mexico’s most famous edifice, the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City. There, I climbed more than 200ft up a series of flights of stone stairs to reach the summit and looked over the sacred city, dedicated since time immemorial to Quetzalcoatl, the bearded civilising `god’ whose image and emblems had been found here in profusion. What is even more interesting about this city is that the prehistoric architects built it to precise astrological guidelines.
The reason I had made the arduous climb in the heat of the day was to see the genius of their mathematical knowledge for myself. The date was May 19, and at noon the sun was directly overhead – as it would be again on July 25.
These two dates had something else in common – on both days (and not by accident) the west face of the Pyramid would directly face the position of the setting sun. An even more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the equinoxes, March 20 and September 22.
Intrigued, I made my way to Mexico’s most famous edifice, the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City
Then, the passage of the sun’s rays from south to north at noon resulted in the progressive obliteration of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western facade. The whole process, from complete shadow to complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds.
It had done so without fail, year in and year out, ever since the pyramid had been built, and it would continue to do so until the giant edifice at last crumbled away into dust. What this meant, of course, was that at least one of the many functions of the Pyramid of the Sun had been to serve as a `perennial clock’, precisely signalling the equinoxes.
In other words, the ancient master-builders of Teotihuacan (a people as yet unidentified by archaeologists) had, like the Maya, been obsessed with measuring the elapse of time. They had constructed their pyramid in such a way that it would make it as easy as possible for succeeding generations to check whether their calendar was accurate.
Was there a link between the wonders of Teotihuacan and Egypt’s Great Pyramid?
Clearly, such masterbuilders must have been the guardians of an enormous body of astronomic data. Without it, how could they have set the Sun Pyramid at the precise orientation necessary to achieve the desired equinoctial effects?
I was instantly struck by the similarities between the people who had built the Pyramid of the Sun and a second race of master geometrists who had lived in another time, and on another continent. Was there a link between the wonders of Teotihuacan and Egypt’s Great Pyramid? Were both Fingerprints of the Gods?
As explained, I am convinced that both civilisations knew the secret of pi, one of the most fundamental discoveries of mathematics. Could both have inherited their knowledge from a previous, forgotten people – an advanced civilisation that perished in some catastrophe long ago? There was only one way to find out. My next stop would be Cairo.
- Adapted from Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (Century, £22.99). © Graham Hancock 1995.
