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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 Guatemala a date over 90 million years ago is computed; on another a date over
300 million years before that is 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 ...26
Isn’t all this a bit avant-garde for a civilization that didn’t otherwise
distinguish itself in many ways? It’s true that Mayan architecture was
good within its limits. But there was precious little else that these jungledwelling Indians did which suggested they might have had the capacity
(or the need) to conceive of really long periods of time.
It’s been a good deal less than two centuries since the majority of
24 Ibid., pp. g, 275.
25 José Arguelles, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, Bear and Co., Santa Fe,
New Mexico, 1987, pp. 26; The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p.
50.
26 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, pp. 13-14, 165.
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Western intellectuals abandoned Bishop Usher’s opinion that the world
was created in 4004 BC and accepted that it must be infinitely older than
that.27 In plain English this means that the ancient Maya had a far more
accurate understanding of the true immensity of geological time, and of
the vast antiquity of our planet, than did anyone in Britain, Europe or
North America until Darwin propounded the theory of evolution.
So how come the Maya got handy with big periods like hundreds of
millions of years? Was it a freak of cultural development? Or did they
inherit the calendrical and mathematical tools which facilitated, and
enabled them to develop, this sophisticated understanding? If an
inheritance was involved, it is legitimate to ask what the original
inventors of the Mayan calendar’s computer-like circuitry had intended it
to do. What had they designed it for? Had they simply conceived of all its
complexities to concoct ‘a challenge to the intellect, a sort of tremendous
anagram’, as one authority claimed?28 Or could they have had a more
pragmatic and important objective in mind?
We have seen that the obsessive concern of Mayan society, and indeed
of all the ancient cultures of Central America, was with calculating—and if
possible postponing—the end of the world. Could this be the purpose the
mysterious calendar was designed to fulfill? Could it have been a
mechanism for predicting some terrible cosmic or geological catastrophe?
27 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:214.
28 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 168.
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Chapter 22
City of the Gods
The overwhelming message of a large number of Central American
legends is that the Fourth Age of the world ended very badly. A
catastrophic deluge was followed by a long period during which the light
of the sun vanished from the sky and the air was filled with a tenebrous
darkness. Then:
The gods gathered together at Teotihuacan [‘the place of the gods’] and wondered
anxiously who was to be the next Sun. Only the sacred fire [the material
representation of Huehueteotl, the god who gave life its beginning] could be seen
in the darkness, still quaking following the recent chaos. ‘Someone will have to
sacrifice himself, throw himself into the fire,’ they cried, ‘only then will there be a
Sun.’1
A drama ensued in which two deities (Nanahuatzin and Tecciztecatl)
immolated themselves for the common good. One burned quickly in the
centre of the sacred fire; the other roasted slowly on the embers at its
edge ‘The gods waited for a long time until eventually the sky started to
glow red as at dawn. In the east appeared the great sphere of the sun,
life-giving and incandescent ...’2
It was at this moment of cosmic rebirth that Quetzalcoatl manifested
himself. His mission was with humanity of the Fifth Age. He therefore
took the form of a human being—a bearded white man, just like
Viracocha.
In the Andes, Viracocha’s capital was Tiahuanaco. In Central America,
Quetzalcoatl’s was the supposed birth-place of the Fifth Sun,
Teotihuacan, the city of the gods.3
1 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, pp. 25-6.
2 Ibid., pp. 26-7.
3 Ancient America, Time-Life International, 1970, p. 45; Aztecs: Reign of Blood and
Splendour, p. 54; Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.
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Teotihuacan.
The Citadel, the Temple and the Map of Heaven
Teotihuacan, 50 kilometres north-east of Mexico City
I stood in the airy enclosure of the Citadel and looked north across the
morning haze towards the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Set amid
grey-green scrub country, and ringed by distant mountains, these two
great monuments played their parts in a symphony of ruins strung out
along the axis of the so-called ‘Street of the Dead’. The Citadel lay at the
approximate mid point of this wide avenue which ran perfectly straight
for more than four kilometres. The Pyramid of the Moon was at its
northern extreme, the Pyramid of the Sun offset somewhat to its east.
In the context of such a geometric site, an exact north-south or eastwest orientation might have been expected. It was therefore surprising
that the architects who had planned Teotihuacan had deliberately chosen
to incline the Street of the Dead 15° 30’ east of north. There were several
theories as to why this eccentric orientation had been selected, but none
was especially convincing. Growing numbers of scholars, however, were
beginning to wonder whether astronomical alignments might have been
involved. One, for example, had proposed that the Street of the Dead
might have been ‘built to face the setting of the Pleiades at the time when
it was constructed’.4 Another, Professor Gerald Hawkins, had suggested
4 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 67.
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that a ‘Sirius-Pleides axis’ could also have played a part.5 And Stansbury
Hagar (secretary of the Department of Ethnology at the Brooklyn Institute
of the Arts and Sciences), had suggested that the street might represent
the Milky Way.6
Indeed Hagar went further than this, seeing the portrayal of specific
planets and stars in many of the pyramids, mounds and other structures
that hovered like fixed satellites around the axis of the Street of the
Dead. His complete thesis was that Teotihuacan had been designed as a
kind of ‘map of heaven’: ‘It reproduced on earth a supposed celestial pl
an
of the sky-world where dwelt the deities and spirits of the dead.’7
During the 1960s and 1970s Hagar’s intuitions were tested in the field
by Hugh Harleston Jr., an American engineer resident in Mexico, who
carried out a comprehensive mathematical survey at Teotihuacan.
Harleston reported his findings in October 1974 at the International
Congress of Americanists.8 His paper, which was full of daring and
innovative ideas, contained some particularly curious information about
the Citadel and about the Temple of Quetzalcoatl located at the eastern
extreme of this great square compound.
The Temple was regarded by scholars as one of the best-preserved
archaeological monuments in Central America.9 This was because the
original, prehistoric structure had been partially buried beneath another
much later mound immediately in front of it to the west. Excavation of
that mound had revealed the elegant six-stage pyramid that now
confronted me. It stood 72 feet high and its base covered an area of
82,000 square feet.
Still bearing traces of the original multicoloured paints which had
coated it in antiquity, the exposed Temple was a beautiful and strange
sight. The predominant sculptural motif was a series of huge serpent
heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the facing blocks and lining
the sides of the massive central stairway. The elongated jaws of these
oddly humanoid reptiles were heavily endowed with fangs, and the upper
lips with a sort of handlebar moustache. Each serpent’s thick neck was
ringed by an elaborate plume of feathers—the unmistakable symbol of
Quetzalcoatl.10
What Harleston’s investigations had shown was that a complex
mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal
structures lined up along the Street of the Dead (and indeed beyond it).
This relationship suggested something extraordinary, namely that
Teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale
5 Beyond Stonehenge, pp. 187-8.
6 Cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 220-1.
7 Ibid.
8 Hugh Harleston Jr., ‘A Mathematical Analysis of Teotihuacan’, XLI International
Congress of Americanists, 3 October 1974.
9 Richard Bloomgarden, The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, Editur S. A. Mexico, 1993, p. 14.
10 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 215.
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model of the solar system. At any rate, if the centre line of the Temple of
Quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the sun, markers laid
out northwards from it along the axis of the Street of the Dead seemed to
indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid
belt, Jupiter, Saturn (represented by the so-called ‘Sun’ Pyramid), Uranus
(by the ‘Moon’ Pyramid), and Neptune and Pluto by as yet unexcavated
mounds some kilometres farther north.11
If these correlations were more than coincidental, then, at the very
least, they indicated the presence at Teotihuacan of an advanced
observational astronomy, one not surpassed by modern science until a
relatively late date. Uranus remained unknown to our own astronomers
until 1787, Neptune until 1846 and Pluto until 1930. Even the most
conservative estimate of Teotihuacan’s antiquity, by contrast, suggested
that the principal ingredients of the site-plan (including the Citadel, the
Street of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon) must date
back at least to the time of Christ.12 No known civilization of that epoch,
either in the Old World or in the New, is supposed to have had any
knowledge at all of the outer planets—let alone to have possessed
accurate information concerning their orbital distances from each other
and from the sun.
Egypt and Mexico—more coincidences?
After completing his studies of the pyramids and avenues of Teotihuacan,
Stansbury Hagar concluded: ‘We have not yet realized either the
importance or the refinement, or the widespread distribution throughout
ancient America, of the astronomical cult of which the celestial plan was a
feature, and of which Teotihuacan was one of the principal centres.’13
But was this just an astronomical ‘cult’? Or was it something
approximating more closely to what we might call a science? And whether
cult or science, was it realistic to suppose that it had enjoyed ‘widespread
distribution’ only in the Americas when there was so much evidence
linking it to other parts of the ancient world?
For example, archaeo-astronomers making use of the latest starmapping computer programmes had recently demonstrated that the
three world-famous pyramids on Egypt’s Giza plateau formed an exact
terrestrial diagram of the three belt stars in the constellation of Orion.14
Nor was this the limit of the celestial map the Ancient Egyptian priests
had created in the sands on the west bank of the Nile. Included in their
overall vision, as we shall see in Parts VI and VII, there was a natural
11 Ibid., pp. 266-9.
12 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 67.
13 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 221.
14 The Orion Mystery.
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feature—the river Nile—which was exactly where it should be had it been
designed to represent the Milky Way.15
The incorporation of a ‘celestial plan’ into key sites in Egypt and Mexico
did not by any means exclude religious functions. On the contrary,
whatever else they may have been intended for it is certain that the
monuments of Teotihuacan, like those of the Giza plateau, played
important religious roles in the lives of the communities they served.
Thus Central American traditions collected in the sixteenth century by
Father Bernardino de Sahagun gave eloquent expression to a widespread
belief that Teotihuacan had fulfilled at least one specific and important
religious function in ancient times. According to these legends the City of
the Gods was so known because ‘the Lords therein buried, after their
deaths, did not perish but turned into gods ...’16 In other words, it was
‘the place where men became gods’.17 It was additionally known as ‘the
place of those who had the road of the gods’,18 and ‘the place where gods
were made’.19
Was it a coincidence, I wondered, that this seemed to have been the
religious purpose of the three pyramids at Giza? The archaic hieroglyphs
of the Pyramid Texts, the oldest coherent body of writing in the world,
left little room for doubt that the ultimate objective of the rituals carried
out within those colossal structures was to bring about the deceased
pharaoh’s transfiguration—to ‘throw open the doors of the firmament
and to make a road’ so that he might ‘ascend into the company of the
gods’.20
The notion of pyramids as devices designed (presumably in some
metaphysical sense) ‘to turn men into gods’ was, it seemed to me, too
idiosyncratic and peculiar to have been arrived at independently in both
Ancient
Egypt and Mexico. So, too, was the idea of using the layout of
sacred sites to incorporate a celestial plan.
Moreover, there were other strange similarities that deserved to be
considered.
Just as at Giza, three principal pyramids had been built at Teotihuacan:
the Pyramid/Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Pyramid of the Sun and the
Pyramid of the Moon. Just as at Giza, the site plan was not symmetrical,
as one might have expected, but involved two structures in direct
alignment with each other while the third appeared to have been
deliberately offset to one side. Finally, at Giza, the summits of the Great
Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre were level, even though the former
was a taller building than the latter. Likewise, at Teotihuacan, the
15 Ibid.
16 Bernardino de Sahagun, cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 23.
17 Mexico: Rough Guide, p. 216.
18 The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 158.
19 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.
20 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utt. 667A, p. 281.
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summits of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon were level even though
the former was taller. The reason was the same in both cases: the Great
Pyramid was built on lower ground than the Pyramid of Cephren, and the
Pyramid of the Sun on lower ground than the Pyramid of the Moon.21
Could all this be coincidence? Was it not more logical to conclude that
there was an ancient connection between Mexico and Egypt?
For reasons I have outlined in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen I
doubted whether any direct, causal link was involved—at any rate within
historic times. Once again, however, as with the Mayan calendar, and as
with the early maps of Antarctica, was it not worth keeping an open mind
to the possibility that we might be dealing with a legacy: that the
pyramids of Egypt and the ruins of Teotihuacan might express the
technology, the geographical knowledge, the observational astronomy
(and perhaps also the religion) of a forgotten civilization of the past
which had once, as the Popul Vuh claimed, ‘examined the four corners,
the four points of the arch of the sky, and the round face of the earth’?
There was widespread agreement among academics concerning the
antiquity of the Giza pyramids, thought to be about 4500 years old.22 No