John shook his head. “There’s much more to it than that. The evidence strongly suggests a tremendous Mayan-Toltec convergence in the Yucatan near the end of the tenth century AD. Now it’s not entirely clear why the Toltecs suddenly migrated there but I’ve an idea it may be the same reason Teotihuacan was abandoned by AD 700.”
“And that reason being?”
“Precession.”
John caught the baffled glance shared between Lori and Eva. Derek must have read their confusion too, for he quickly explained, “Precession is basically the wobble in the earth’s axis which causes the positions of the stars to shift over time.”
“Precisely,” John said. “In the case of Teotihuacan, I’m sure the people realized over time that their great city had fallen out of alignment with the Pleiades. Their earthly alignment with the heavens had gone askew. So, perhaps the people moved on, looking for a true cosmic center.”
“Which the Toltecs found in Chichen Itza,” Lori added.
John nodded. “You see, while the Toltecs concerned themselves with the Pleiades and Quetzalcoatl’s rattle, the Mayans were watching the other side of the sky. They were concerned with the dark rift within the bulge of the Milky Way. I believe when these two cultures merged in Chichen Itza, they realized that they were both searching the skies for essentially the same thing—a cosmic center. When the Toltecs adjusted their calendars for their new latitudinal position, they must have realized they and the Mayans were tracking the same thing.”
“And that is?”
“The ages of the world.”
“Which is about to shift to Quetzalcoatl,” Lori mused. “Who will sit in the throne above Chichen Itza.”
“It would appear the Toltecs found their cosmic center,” John agreed.
The room fell silent while his words found weight in everyone’s minds.
“So the Mesoamericans were anticipating the Age of Quetzalcoatl as far back as a thousand years ago, or more,” Peet suggested.
John nodded. “The feathered serpent certainly dominated Mesoamerican art. Even the Pyramid of Kukulcan was constructed in Quetzalcoatl’s honor. Kukulcan, after all, is the Mayan translation for Quetzalcoatl.”
“And the snake’s shadow appearing on the pyramid during the March equinox pays tribute to Quetzalcoatl,” Lori added, her eyes glowing again.
John snapped his fingers. He liked the way her mind worked. “Not just a tribute, but an announcement, declaring the approach of a new age which will begin a full sixty days after this year’s spring equinox!”
Derek shook his head, his own excitement restrained. “All this means to me is that the Pleiades will meet the sun over Chichen Itza three days before the Pleiades pass over Teotihuacan. And it’s going to be that way for another two hundred years. How did the Toltecs know that May 20th of this year is the true start date of the Age of Quetzalcoatl?”
John smiled and turned the cell phone around to give Derek full view of the screen. “Because in the year 2012, not only does the sun conjunct with the Pleiades over the Pyramid of Kukulkan, the moon will be there too.”
Lori studied him intensely. “You mean…”
John’s lips spontaneously widened into a smile. “This year, there’s going to be an eclipse.”
PART V
Sunday, May 20, 2012
“When yet no sun had shone and no dawn had broken, it is said, the gods gathered themselves together and took counsel among themselves there at Teotihuacan.”
Fray Bernardino De Sahagún, Florentine Codex
New Fire
The brightness of the morning sun filled quickly over the plaza of the Agave Azul, receding the rain puddles to shallow cracks between the stones paving the walk. There was something sparkling about the morning after a rain. It had a way of refreshing the senses, aided considerably by breakfast flavors of a new land.
At least that’s what Lori thought as she nibbled on slices of fresh mango and jicama rubbed in lime and chili powder. As usual, she’d awakened early, and while she waited for the others from a chair nestled within a patch of morning sunlight falling through the hacienda facade, a cheery woman scurrying about the hotel brought her a curious cup of warm atole from the taqueria, another piece of Mexico to savor.
The morning quickly shed its charm, however, when Dr. Friedman approached with a Styrofoam cooler filled with ice and bottled water.
“It gets hot in Teotihuacan,” he said. “We’ll need water if we remain the entire day.”
That was all that was needed to snap Lori back to the long mission ahead. She’d taken heed to the professor’s words and dressed accordingly. She liked working in the heat and was glad she’d packed her favorite pair of khakis with their boxy thigh pockets, and a tank top which she now layered beneath a white, long-sleeved cotton shirt to ward off the chill of the early Mexican morning.
Strange how little events lead to new experiences. Lori had never been to Mexico before and yet, it wasn’t long before she was in the middle of the crowded back seat of Derek’s rental car barreling seventy miles an hour down MEX 132. Patches of civilization alternated with plots of corn and desert plunging toward the windshield in front of Derek and Dr. Friedman in the front seats. Somewhere ahead lay the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan and Lori marveled over the fact that she wouldn’t have been within a thousand miles of any of this had it not been for the stone etching of The Trader.
That single petroglyph baking beneath the Chaco sun had been the catalyst of it all. Had Lori not seen Dr. Peet’s one-of-a-kind discovery and the pot hunter’s pit just beneath it, she may have never found anything significant about the second petroglyph in Utah. She doubted she would have ever thought to dig within that particular alcove on her father’s ranch and therefore would certainly not have found the effigy buried within The Trader’s grave. It was The Trader that had opened the door to the effigy and now, because of the artifact’s theft, Lori found herself in Mexico wondering how such a blur of events could have landed her so deep in a foreign country.
She anticipated her first glimpse of Teotihuacan. Her curiosity couldn’t wait to see those pyramids that once aligned with the stars and her imagination toyed with the idea of Chichen Itza’s solar eclipse only hours away. A fascinating answer that, in typical archaeological fashion, only presented more questions.
If the cosmological event that announced the arrival of the new age was about to be witnessed in Chichen Itza, why didn’t Shaman Gaspar take the effigy there? Why did he come to Teotihuacan instead?
Eva was staring out of the car window when Derek turned off the toll highway. The landscape had opened up, but it wasn’t the desert scrub land that held her attention, Lori noted. Nor was Eva searching the horizon for ancient archaeological ruins. She was looking up toward the cloudless sky.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” she said, almost to herself. “If the Pleiades are supposed to be up there right now, how would the Toltecs have ever known? They couldn’t have seen those stars in the daytime.”
Eva had a point. To the naked eye only the moon was large enough to draw attention whenever its path crossed the face of the sun. Anything smaller, like the Pleiades, was blotted out by the sun’s intense light.
“It does seem like the Toltecs were celebrating an event they couldn’t even see,” Lori concurred.
Dr. Peet smiled. “Isn’t that the basis for most religions?” he asked.
He too had chosen his field clothes for the day, exchanging his slacks for a pair of jeans and his leather shoes for his Gore-Tex boots. He’d even thrown on his light-weight, chest-pocketed safari vest, and a weathered hat. But Lori and Dr. Peet weren’t the only ones who’d dressed for an outdoor excursion. Even Dr. Friedman abandoned his travel tie for an airy polo shirt and covered his silver head with a straw Panama hat.
“So they just had faith the Pleiades were up there?” Lori asked.
“Not entirely,” Dr. Friedman said. “The Toltecs were marvelous astronomers. By tracking t
he Pleiades movements at night, they could easily calculate their position during the day. In fact, I believe Mr. Gaspar may have still been tracking the Pleiades in this way.”
“How do you figure?” Derek asked.
“You mentioned that Mr. Gaspar went down to Chichen Itza last November. Was it by chance on November 18th?”
Derek thought a moment. “That sounds about right.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Eva asked.
Dr. Friedman adjusted his glasses. “November 18th is the binary opposite of May 20th. That is to say, the two dates are precisely six months apart. So if the Pleiades crossed the zenith above Chichen Itza at midnight on November 18th, then—”
“They’ll cross the zenith at noon on May 20th,” Lori interrupted.
“Precisely.”
Lori straightened in her seat. “As I recall, the Hopi were interested in the November night sky too. The way I understand it, they were watching the Orion constellation, but if the Pleiades are nearby, maybe they were watching them too.”
Dr. Peet was nodding. “The Pleiades were central to the Hopi Wuwuchim Ceremony, which was initiated by drilling a fire on a turquoise disk.”
Dr. Friedman shifted in his seat to get a better view of his audience sitting behind him. “Similarly, the Toltecs marked the midnight zenith passage of the Pleiades with the New Fire Ceremony.”
“And that would be...” Derek asked as he slowed the car down. The pavement came to an abrupt end and the tires crunched onto a gravel road. The triangular peaks of two gray pyramids broke the horizon ahead.
“The New Fire was an ancient ceremony based upon the fifty-two year Calendar Round. Fray Bernardo de Sahagún documented the ceremony as it was performed by the Aztecs during the time of the conquest. According to Sahagún’s report, at the end of the fifty-two year cycle of the Calendar Round, there was intense turmoil among the people that the world was coming to an end and would surely do so if the Pleiades failed to cross the zenith precisely at midnight.”
“And if they did?” Lori asked.
“Then at the moment the Pleiades hung directly overhead, the priests would cut out the heart of a their chosen sacrifice and burn it in the sacred New Fire drilled from the sunstone, thus guaranteeing that the world would continue for another fifty-two years.”
“So this disgusting ritual was meant to pacify the fears of a paranoid mob?” Derek asked.
Dr. Friedman laughed. “No, no. There was an alternative motive for it, though the priests may not have shared it with the common public. The New Fire Ceremony was just a symbolic way of tracking precession and predicting when the Pleiades would cross the zenith at noon, six months later.”
Eva’s face pinched. “My father never said anything about a new fire, let alone sacrificing someone over such nonsense.”
“I doubt that he would. Even if the old tradition was still with him, I highly doubt he’d follow through with the ceremony.”
“But his killer might,” Lori suggested.
“Indeed.”
Dr. Peet leaned forward. “How can we say the Equinox Killer is performing the New Fire Ceremony when his murders were all during March and May, not November? And none of his victims nor their hearts were burned over a fire.”
Dr. Friedman conceded with a nod. “True. But who says the killer isn’t taking variations of the ceremony to create his own sacrifices. They haven’t found Mr. Gaspar’s heart yet, so any assessment we make of the killer’s motives must be reduced to mere speculation at this point.”
Lori sat back in her seat. The more she thought about the New Fire Ceremony the more she began to understand the Toltec view of the sky. The sun and the moon—the ruler of the day and the matriarch of the night. At exactly noon above Chichen Itza, night and day were coming together to finalize their cosmic mating, to complete the gestation of the one conceived by the Pleiades and the zenith sun, to give birth to the new world age of Quetzalcoatl.
Lori’s mind was swimming. For the time being nothing was more interesting than the sun-Pleiades conjunction over an ancient Mayan pyramid. Nothing fascinated her more than today’s solar eclipse. The sky was brimming with life she’d never appreciated before and for the first time, she found something that paled her excitement for Anasazi ceramics. She was thinking like an ancient Toltec and it excited her. Perhaps it was the same feeling Dr. Peet talked about when he said that petroglyphs offered him a glimpse into the Anasazi mind.
As she considered her sudden interest in the fresh waters of archaeoastronomy, she realized the two pyramids in the distance had grown larger, now dominating the windshield and challenging the mountains looming in the distance. Her heart pounded in her chest. They were approaching the origins of the New Fire Ceremony. They had come to the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl and the current world age.
They had arrived at Teotihuacan.
Teotihuacán
When Eva stepped out of the car she felt an overwhelming rush of deja vu. Two large pyramids reached for the cloudless sky, one directly in front of her and the other towering at the end of a long, loosely groomed avenue beaded by smaller temple ruins.
She’d seen the pyramids before, though she’d never been to Teotihuacan. The massive structures didn’t cast a smooth profile like the Egyptian pyramids, but were instead jagged in huge talud-tablero steps ascending toward the peaks. Eva recognized the cobbled adobe construction from her father’s photographs. She spotted faint traces of stucco catching the sun’s rays above the shadows. It was all too familiar and for a brief moment she felt like a little girl in Disneyland who’d finally come to see Cinderella’s castle in person.
Derek stepped in beside her, pulling a strap over his head from which his camera dangled at his chest. The sun glinted off the purple lenses of his designer Oakley sunglasses.
“What do you need that for?” Peet asked, tapping the camera disapprovingly as he stepped by.
“A journalist must always be prepared for a big story,” Derek said. “I’ve already got ideas for my next article in the school paper. The title might read something like ‘Road to the Effigy.’”
“Or ‘Road to Prison,’” the professor snarled over his shoulder. “There won’t be no journalism career for you when they find out you stole the effigy.”
“Maybe, but I wasn’t the one who took it out of the museum in the first place,” Derek shot back, chasing after him.
Eva ignored the rest of their banter as they walked away. She was entranced by the panoramic ruins. “I know this place,” she said.
John Friedman cleared his throat. Until then, Eva hadn’t noticed him standing beside her. “Teotihuacan is a popular attraction in central Mexico,” he said.
“But I didn’t know this was Teotihuacan,” Eva said. “My father always referred to this as the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl.”
Something in Eva’s mood shifted. The magic of Cinderella’s castle faded as she reminded herself that she wasn’t there on vacation. She wasn’t even there to fulfill a childhood fantasy. She’d long grown out of the magic of Quetzalcoatl’s birthplace, despite the mysterious pull it had on her father.
In fact, it was only because of his unwavering fascination that she was standing in Teotihuacan now. This was her father’s holy ground—his Jerusalem, and even standing there seeing it for herself, she still didn’t understand it.
Were it not for Teotihuacan, Eva might have grown up listening to stories of unicorns and dragons. Her childhood fantasies may have been about princesses and castles, not the pyramids of lost civilizations. When she looked at the night sky she may have only found shooting stars upon which to cast her wishes, not mythological monsters and flying snakes. Were it not for Teotihuacan, Eva’s father might have been a respected Yaqui leader and she wouldn’t have had to hide in shame from those who scoffed at his outlandish Toltec ideas. As a mother she wouldn’t have felt compelled to protect her own son from the suspicious cult that had grown around them.
And in the
end, her father might still be alive.
A hand gently touched her arm, pulling Eva out of her thoughts. “Are you okay?” Lori asked.
Eva smiled. She liked Lori. There was something about the girl she found appealing. She was refreshingly practical, down to earth, and persistently observant. And although she doubted Lori would ever admit it, Eva saw a nurturing side to her that she appreciated. The more she came to know Lori, the more it surprised her that the girl wanted nothing more than to be an archaeologist, to grovel in the wasteland that was human history. Eva couldn’t help but wonder how much better served the world would be if Lori left the past where it belonged and devoted her talents to the present toils of humanity.
Lori was still watching her with that concern churning in her sea-green eyes. Eva forced a smile. “I’m fine.”
It wasn’t until then that she realized the men had moved on toward the Pyramid of the Sun. Peet led the way like a man on a mission. Derek stuck to John’s side, his camera at the ready. Only Lori had stayed behind.
“You seem to be in another world,” Lori pressed.
Eva sighed as she scanned the twin pyramids. Like the imposing volcanic mountains behind them, they rose above the Avenue of the Dead as it cut its arrow-straight path through the valley, a valley patched with desert and crop land and bound together by seams of concrete, food vending stalls and hotels.
I am in another world, Eva thought.
“I guess I was just thinking about a fairy tale my father told me when I was little.”
She started for the towering Pyramid of the Sun. Lori matched her stride for stride.
“You want to talk about it?”
Eva shrugged. “I’m not even sure I remember all the details,” she said. “It was about this boy—a Toltec boy, of course. Anyway, his father was murdered and the boy was forced to flee the city. He ventured far into the wilderness until he came upon a vast city far greater than anything he had ever seen. A city only the gods could build.”
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