Fingerprints of the Gods

  Virginia, 1992, p. 105.

  6 Ibid., p. 103.

  7 The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, p. 55.

  8 Mary Miller and Karl Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya,

  Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, pp. 96.

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  Children of the Fifth Sun

  Like the many different peoples and cultures that had preceded them in

  Mexico, the Aztecs believed 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 conquest, it was the Fifth Sun that prevailed. And it is within that

  same Fifth Sun, or epoch, that humankind still lives today. This account is

  taken from a rare collection of Aztec documents known as the Vaticano-

  Latin Codex:

  First Sun, Matlactli Atl: duration 4008 years. Those who lived then ate water maize

  called atzitzintli. In this age lived the giants ... The First Sun was destroyed by

  water in the sign Matlactli Atl (Ten Water). It was called Apachiohualiztli (flood,

  deluge), the art of sorcery of the permanent rain. Men were turned into fish. Some

  say that only one couple escaped, protected by an old tree living near the water.

  Others say that there were seven couples who hid in a cave until the flood was

  over and the waters had gone down. They repopulated the earth and were

  worshipped as gods in their nations ...

  Second Sun, Ehecoatl: duration 4010 years. Those who lived then ate wild fruit

  known as acotzintli. This Sun was destroyed by Ehecoatl (Wind Serpent) and men

  were turned into monkeys ... One man and one woman, standing on a rock, were

  saved from destruction ...

  Third Sun, Tleyquiyahuillo: duration 4081 years. Men, the descendants of the

  couple who were saved from the Second Sun, ate a fruit called tzincoacoc. This

  Third Sun was destroyed by fire ...

  Fourth Sun, Tzontlilic: duration 5026 years ... Men died of starvation after a deluge

  of blood and fire ...9

  Another ‘cultural document’ of the Aztecs that has survived the ravages

  of the conquest is the ‘Sun Stone’ of Axayacatl, the sixth emperor of the

  royal dynasty. This huge monolith was hewn out of solid basalt in AD

  1479. It weighs 24.5 tons and consists of a series of concentrically

  inscribed circles, each bearing intricate symbolic statements. As in the

  codex, these statements focus attention on the belief that the world has

  already passed through four epochs, or Suns. The first and most remote

  of these is represented by Ocelotonatiuh, the jaguar god: ‘During that

  Sun lived the giants that had been created by the gods but were finally

  attacked and devoured by jaguars.’ The Second Sun is represented by the

  serpent head of Ehecoatl, the god of the air: ‘During that period the

  human race was destroyed by high winds and hurricanes and men were

  converted into monkeys.’ The symbol of the Third Sun is a head of rain

  and celestial fire: ‘In this epoch everything was destroyed by a rain of fire

  from the sky and the forming of lava. All the houses were burnt. Men

  9 From the Vaticano-Latin Codex 3738, cited in Adela Fernandez, Pre-Hispanic Gods of

  Mexico, Panorama Editorial, Mexico City, 1992, pp. 21-2.

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  were converted into birds to survive the catastrophe.’ The Fourth Sun is

  represented by the head of the water-goddess Chalchiuhtlicue:

  ‘Destruction came in the form of torrential rains and floods. The

  mountains disappeared and men were transformed into fish.’10

  The symbol of the Fifth Sun, our current epoch, is the face of Tonatiuh,

  the sun god himself. His tongue, fittingly depicted as an obsidian knife,

  juts out hungrily, signalling his need for the nourishment of human blood

  and hearts. His features are wrinkled to indicate his advanced age and he

  appears within the symbol Ollin which signifies Movement.11

  Why is the Fifth Sun known as ‘The Sun of Movement’? Because, ‘the

  elders say: in it there will be a movement of the earth and from this we

  shall all perish.’12

  And when will this catastrophe strike? Soon, according to the Aztec

  priests. They believed that the Fifth Sun was already very old and

  approaching the end of its cycle (hence the wrinkles on the face of

  Tonatiuh). Ancient meso-American traditions dated the birth of this epoch

  to a remote period corresponding to the fourth millennium BC of the

  Christian calendar.13 The method of calculating its end, however, had

  been forgotten by the time of Aztecs.14 In the absence of this essential

  information, human sacrifices were apparently carried out in the hope

  that the impending catastrophe might be postponed. Indeed, the Aztecs

  came to regard themselves as a chosen people; they were convinced that

  they had been charged with a divine mission to wage war and offer the

  blood of their captives to feed Tonatiuh, thereby preserving the life of the

  Fifth Sun.15

  Stuart Fiedel, an authority on the prehistory of the Americas, summed

  up the whole issue in these words: ‘The Aztecs believed that to prevent

  the destruction of the universe, which had already occurred four times in

  the past, the gods must be supplied with a steady diet of human hearts

  and blood.’16 This same belief, with remarkably few variations, was shared

  by all the great civilizations of Central America. Unlike the Aztecs,

  however, some of the earlier peoples had calculated exactly when a great

  movement of the earth could be expected to bring the Fifth Sun to an

  end.

  10 Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, p.

  332. See also Aztec Calendar: History and Symbolism, Garcia y Valades Editores, Mexico

  City, 1992.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.

  13 Peter Tompkins, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, Thames & Hudson, London, 1987,

  p. 286.

  14 John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, William Morrow & Co.,

  New York, 1990, p. 134.

  15 World Mythology, (ed. Roy Willis, BCA, London, 1993, p. 243.

  16 Stuart J. Fiedel, The Prehistory of the Americas, (second edition), Cambridge University

  Press, 1992, pp. 312-13.

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  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  Lightbringer

  No documents, only dark and menacing sculptures, have come down to

  us from the Olmec era. But the Mayas, justifiably regarded as the greatest

  ancient civilization to have arisen in the New World, left behind a wealth

  of calendrical records. Expressed in terms of the modern dating system,

  these enigmatic inscriptions convey a rather curious message: the Fifth

  Sun, it seems, is going to come to an end on 23 December, AD 2012.17

  In the rational intellectual climate of the late twentieth century it is

  unfashionable to take doomsday prophecies seriously. The general

  consensus is that they are the products of superstitious minds and can

  safely be ignored. As I travelled around Mexico, however, I was from time
>
  to time bothered by a nagging intuition that the voices of the ancient

  sages might deserve a hearing after all. I mean, suppose by some crazy

  offchance they weren’t the superstitious savages we’d always believed

  them to be. Suppose they knew something we didn’t? Most pertinent of

  all, suppose that their projected date for the end of the Fifth Sun turned

  out to be correct? Suppose, in other words, that some truly awful

  geological catastrophe is already unfolding, deep in the bowels of the

  earth, as the wise men of the Maya predicted?

  In Peru and Bolivia I had become aware of the obsessive concern with

  the calculation of time shown by the Incas and their predecessors. Now,

  in Mexico, I discovered that the Maya, who believed that they had worked

  out the date of the end of the world, had been possessed by the same

  compulsion. Indeed, for these people, just about everything boiled down

  to numbers, the passage of the years and the manifestations of events.

  The belief was that if the numbers which lay beneath the manifestations

  could be properly understood, it would be possible to predict successfully

  the timing of the events themselves.18 I felt disinclined to ignore the

  obvious implications of the recurrent destructions of humanity depicted

  so vividly in the Central American traditions. Coming complete with

  giants and floods, these traditions were eerily similar to those of the faroff Andean region.

  Meanwhile, however, I was keen to pursue another, related line of

  inquiry. This concerned the bearded white-skinned deity named

  Quetzalcoatl, who was believed to have sailed to Mexico from across the

  seas in remote antiquity. Quetzalcoatl was credited with the invention of

  the advanced mathematical and calendrical formulae that the Maya were

  later to use to calculate the date of doomsday.19 He also bore a striking

  17 Professor Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992,

  pp. 275-6. Herbert Joseph Spinden’s correlation gives a slightly earlier date of 24

  December, AD 2011. See Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 286.

  18 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 286.

  19 World Mythology, p. 240. See also Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 9:855, and Lewis

  Spence, The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, Rider, London, 1922, pp. 49-50.

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  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  resemblance to Viracocha, the pale god of the Andes, who came to

  Tiahuanaco ‘in the time of darkness’ bearing the gifts of light and

  civilization.

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  Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

  Chapter 14

  People of the Serpent

  After spending so long immersed in the traditions of Viracocha, the

  bearded god of the distant Andes, I was intrigued to discover that

  Quetzalcoatl, the principal deity of the ancient Mexican pantheon, was

  described in terms that were extremely familiar.

  For example, one pre-Colombian myth collected in Mexico by the

  sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Juan de Torquemada asserted that

  Quetzalcoatl was ‘a fair and ruddy complexioned man with a long beard’.

  Another spoke of him as, ‘ era Hombre blanco; a large man, broad

  browed, with huge eyes, long hair, and a great, rounded beard— la barba

  grande y redonda.’1 Another still described him as

  a mysterious person ... a white man with strong formation of body, broad

  forehead, large eyes, and a flowing beard. He was dressed in a long, white robe

  reaching to his feet. He condemned sacrifices, except of fruits and flowers, and

  was known as the god of peace ... When addressed on the subject of war he is

  reported to have stopped up his ears with his fingers.2

  According to a particularly striking Central American tradition, this ‘wise

  instructor ...’

  came from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles. He was a

  tall, bearded white man who taught people to use fire for cooking. He also built

  houses and showed couples that they could live together as husband and wife;

  and since people often quarreled in those days, he taught them to live in peace.3

  Viracocha’s Mexican twin

  The reader will recall that Viracocha, in his journeys through the Andes,

  went by several different aliases. Quetzalcoatl did this too. In some parts

  of Central America (notably among the Quiche Maya) he was called

  Gucumatz. Elsewhere, at Chichen Itza for example, he was known as

  Kukulkan. When both these words were translated into English, they

  turned out to mean exactly the same thing: Plumed (or Feathered)

  Serpent. This, also, was the meaning of Quetzalcoatl.4

  There were other deities, among the Maya in particular, whose

  1 Juan de Torquemada, Monarchichia indiana, volume I, cited in Fair Gods and Stone

  Faces, pp. 37-8.

  2 North America of Antiquity, p. 268, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 165.

  3 The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 161.

  4 See Nigel Davis, The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p.

  152; The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 141-2.

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  identities seemed to merge closely with those of Quetzalcoatl. One was

  Votan, a great civilizer, who was also described as pale-skinned, bearded

  and wearing a long robe. Scholars could offer no translation for his name

  but his principal symbol, like that of Quetzalcoatl, was a serpent.5

  Another closely related figure was Itzamana, the Mayan god of healing,

  who was a robed and bearded individual; his symbol, too, was the

  rattlesnake.6

  What emerged from all this, as the leading authorities agreed, was that

  the Mexican legends collected and passed on by Spanish chroniclers at

  the time of the conquest were often the confused and conflated products

  of extremely long oral traditions. Behind them all, however, it seemed

  that there must lie some solid historical reality. In the judgement of

  Sylvanus Griswold Morley, the doyen of Maya studies:

  The great god Kukulkan, or Feathered Serpent, was the Mayan counterpart of the

  Aztec Quetzalcoatl, the Mexican god of light, learning and culture. In the Maya

  pantheon he was regarded as having been the great organizer, the founder of

  cities, the former of laws and the teacher of the calendar. Indeed his attributes

  and life history are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an

  actual historical character, some great lawgiver and organizer, the memory of

  whose benefactions lingered long after death, and whose personality was

  eventually deified.7

  All the legends stated unambiguously that

  Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan/Gucumatz/Votan/Itzamana had arrived in Central

  America from somewhere very far away (across the ‘Eastern Sea’) and that

  amid great sadness he had eventually sailed off again in the direction

  whence he had come.8 The legends added that he had promised solemnly

  that he would return one day9—a clear echo of Viracocha it would be

  almost perverse to ascribe to coincidence. In addition, it will be recalled

  that Viracocha’s departure across the waves of the
Pacific Ocean had

  been portrayed in the Andean traditions as a miraculous event.

  Quetzalcoatl’s departure from Mexico also had a strange feel about it: he

  was said to have sailed away ‘on a raft of serpents’.10

  All in all, I felt Morley was right in looking for a factual historical

  background behind the Mayan and Mexican myths. What the traditions

  seemed to indicate was that the bearded pale-skinned foreigner called

  Quetzalcoatl (or Kukulkan or whatever) had been not just one person but

  probably several people who had come from the same place and had

  belonged to the same distinctively non-Indian ethnic type (bearded,

  white-skinned, etc.). This wasn’t only suggested by the existence of a

  5 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 98-9.

  6 Ibid, p. 100.

  7 Sylvanus Griswold Morley, An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs

  (introduction by Eric S. Thompson), Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1975, pp. 16-17.

  8 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1989, pp. 437, 439.

  9 Ibid., p. 437.

  10 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 62.

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  ‘family’ of obviously related11 but slightly different gods sharing the

  symbol of the snake. Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan/Itzamana was quite

  explicitly portrayed in many of the Mexican and Mayan accounts as

  having been accompanied by ‘attendants’ or ‘assistants’.

  Certain myths set out in the Ancient Mayan religious texts known as the

  Books of Chilam Balam, for instance, reported that ‘the first inhabitants

  of Yucatan were the “People of the Serpent”. They came from the east in

  boats across the water with their leader Itzamana, “Serpent of the East”, a

  healer who could cure by laying on hands, and who revived the dead.’12

  ‘Kukulkan,’ stated another tradition, ‘came with nineteen companions,

  two of whom were gods offish, two others gods of agriculture, and a god

  of thunder ... They stayed ten years in Yucatan. Kukulkan made wise laws

  and then set sail and disappeared in the direction of the rising sun ...’13

  According to the Spanish chronicler Las Casas: ‘The natives affirmed

  that in ancient times there came to Mexico twenty men, the chief of

  whom was called Kukulkan ... They wore flowing robes and sandals on