by Colin Wilson
There are other clues. In the spring of 1997, I was in Mexico, making a television documentary based on my book From Atlantis to the Sphinx. We spent a day at the ancient sacred site of Tula (once called Tollan), 50 miles north of Mexico City. This was once the capital of the Toltecs, the predecessors of the Aztecs, whose empire flourished from about AD 700 to 900 (although their origins can be traced back to the pre-Christian era). According to legend, Tollan is significant as the site of the final battle between two gods, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, usually identified as the forces of good and evil (although the Toltecs would have felt that is an oversimplification). Quetzalcoatl, who is identified with Viracocha, Kon Tiki, Votan and other gods of Central and South America, is the white god who came from the east during some remote epoch. In From Atlantis to the Sphinx, I cited the views of the nineteenth-century scholar Brasseur de Bourberg, who believed that Quetzalcoatl was an Atlantis survivor who brought with him the arts of civilisation. The legend records that he was finally defeated by Tezcatlipoca, the ‘Lord of the Smoking Mirror’ (which, like some magic crystal, conferred visions of distant places), and sailed away on a raft with a promise that he would one day return.
I had also been greatly intrigued by a passage in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, which speaks of the curious objects held by the four great statues of Tula. These stone figures, 16 feet tall, stand on a platform at the top of a truncated pyramid, the Temple of the Morning Star, and once supported the temple’s wooden roof. In 1880 the discoverer of the sacred site, the French explorer Desiré Charnay, found blocks of black basalt that he thought were the feet of giant statues, which he called Atlanteans (‘Atlantes’) The four great statues of Tula were in fact discovered sixty years later, and the name was transferred to them.
What is significant about these statues is that they hold unidentifiable objects in their hands, which are pressed flat against their sides. The object on the right-hand side looks at first like a Western gunfighter’s six-shooter in its holster, but the handle by which the object is held, by two fingers, looks more like the handle of some power-tool. In the left hand there is something that scholars have described as a bunch of arrows and an incense bag, but since the parallel strands are curved it seems unlikely that they are arrows. Graham Hancock remarks that he had the feeling that the original devices were made out of metal.
On our return home further examination of photographs we took of these statues failed to yield any more clues to the purpose of these objects. It was certainly impossible to see how they might have been used as atl-atls, or spear-throwers, as many of the guidebooks state.
Shawn Montgomery later drew my attention to a passage about Tula in a book by Zecharia Sitchin, The Lost Realms (1990),16 the fourth volume of his Earth Chronicles series. Among respectable scholars, Sitchin’s name is not one to conjure with, for he is often associated with Erich von Däniken as someone who believes that the earth was once colonised by visitors from outer space. But Sitchin differs from Däniken in an important respect: the soundness of his scholarship. Whether or not we find his theories tenable, he is an endless mine of information. And in The Lost Realms he discusses the statues of Tollan and points out that one of the pilasters has a peculiar carving of a man wearing a segmented suit, with what looks like a kind of backpack. In his hands he is holding the same tool – the one that resembles a pistol in its holster – and is pointing it at the rock face in front of him; a surging flame is bursting out of the barrel of the ‘pistol’. Sitchin says he ‘uses it as a flame thrower to shape a stone’.
Whether or not we dismiss Sitchin’s theories as too farfetched, the fact remains that the strange objects held by the gods of Tollan are devices from which curving tongues of flame issue forth, and that Brown’s Gas could have been used for this purpose. It would seem that the Toltecs must have either possessed some technology, or at least known enough about it to ascribe it to their gods. Most gods in world mythology can hurl thunderbolts, but they are not depicted holding some kind of flame-spitting welding torch in their hands.
Sitchin has further interesting observations on Tollan. The pyramid was excavated again in the 1940s by the archaeologist Jorge Acosta, who also excavated Teotihuacan. It was Acosta who found a deep trench inside the pyramid, containing the 16-foot Atlanteans’ whose giant ‘feet’ had been found by Charnay in 1880. There were also four columns that had once stood in the corners of the roof.
An earlier pyramid lay under this Temple of the Morning Star. The site contained the remains of inner chambers and passages, which have still not been explored, and a carved stone pipe, made of sections that fitted together, with a diameter of about 18 inches. It was positioned at the same angle as the pyramid’s walls, and ran throughout its whole height.
Acosta assumed it had been intended to drain water, but, as Sitchin asks, why carve an elaborate stone pipe when a clay pipe would do just as well? The stone pipe was obviously part of the structure of the pyramid, and had a particular purpose. Sitchin says: ‘The fact that the remains of the adjoining multi-chambered and multistoreyed buildings suggest some industrial processing, and also the fact that in antiquity, water from the Tula river was channelled to flow by these buildings, raise the possibility that at this site, as at Teotihuacan, some kind of purification and refining process had taken place at a very early period.’ Such observations inevitably recall the speculations of John Dolphin and Lord Rennell about the possibility that the Libyan Desert glass was a by-product of some industrial process. Sitchin goes even further: ‘Was the enigmatic tool a tool not to engrave stones, but to break up stones for their ores? Was it, in other words, a sophisticated mining tool? And was the mineral sought after gold?’
Sitchin argues that the space visitors wished to mine earth for precious minerals, the most important being gold, which they needed for scientific purposes. He quotes reports of the Anglo-American Corporation, who engaged archaeologists to study ancient mines, to the effect that ‘mining technology was used in southern Africa during much of the period subsequent to 100,000 BC ’, and he points out that although gold was obtained in Peru and Mexico by panning in streams, ‘this could in no way account for the immense treasures’ of these countries. He quotes a Spanish chronicler to the effect that the Spaniards extracted from the Incas alone 6 million ounces of gold and 20 million ounces of silver annually. He believes, as did Yull Brown, that they had some far more efficient method of extracting precious metals from the ore.
He went on to point out that the four Atlanteans’ holding up the roof of the Temple of the Morning Star bring to mind the ancient Egyptian belief that the four sons of Horus hold up the sky at four cardinal points. These same four gods would accompany the deceased pharaoh up a ‘Stairway to Heaven’, depicted in hieroglyphs as a kind of step pyramid. This same step pyramid symbol, which decorates the walls around the Tollan pyramid, also became a major symbol for the Aztecs, who came after the Toltecs. Sitchin also suggests a connection between the ‘feathered serpent’, Quetzalcoatl, and the Egyptian winged serpent that helps transport the deceased pharaoh heavenward. One of Sitchin’s basic theses is that there is a close connection between the gods of ancient Egypt and the gods of Mexico.
On checking with Rand, I learned that Tula is located on exactly the same longitude as the more ancient site of Teotihuacan, emphasising again that the sites of sacred places seemed to be carefully selected, not chosen at random.
I was offered another clue to a possible connection between Egypt and Mexico as we made the same television programme. We drove from La Paz, Bolivia, across the immense plain called the Altiplano, to the ancient city of Tiahuanaco in the Andes. The sacred ruins are 2.5 miles above sea level although Tiahuanaco was once a port on nearby Lake Titicaca before some geological upheaval tilted the ground and caused the lake to move a dozen miles away.
Little remains of the great port now, except for the ruins of the port area, the Puma Punku (Puma Gate), where giant blocks lay scattered like ninep
ins; one has a long incision cut by a blade that seems to have been made with a diamond-tipped saw.
A few hundred yards away are the remains of a large temple enclosure called the Kalasasaya. In its north-western corner stands the most famous feature of Tiahuanaco, the Gateway of the Sun, which looks like a miniature Arc de Triomphe. The lintel of the gateway has a crack that runs down to the ‘doorway’ in its centre, but before the twentieth century it was more than just a crack: photographs in Professor Arthur Posnansky’s classic work Tiahauanacu: The Cradle of American Man (1915) show it literally torn in two, most probably by some convulsion of the earth.
As I wandered around Tiahuanaco, I was struck by the precision of the workmanship. Massive blocks of stone, many weighing more than 100 tons, were carved with such exactitude that a knife could not be inserted between the blocks. Where blocks had been separated, as in the Puma Punku, it could be seen that they were often joined by metal clamps, obviously to prevent them coming apart in an earthquake. The archaeo-astronomer Professor Neil Steede, who was involved with the same TV programme, examined one of these clamps, roughly 6 inches long and shaped like a capital I, and remarked that the builders must have possessed some kind of portable forge – microscopic examination has shown that the metal was poured into position when hot. No signs of any such portable forge have ever been found, and an open fire would not have been hot enough to melt the metal for these clamps. Also, there are few trees on the Altiplano to provide the fuel.
Shawn Montgomery’s account of the Brown’s Gas flame creating a pool of molten metal within seconds reminded me of the metal clamps of Tiahuanaco. Rand and Shawn had, early in their discussions, wondered whether they had been melted in a ‘portable forge’, as Steede suggested, or by some device more like the ‘blowtorch’ seen on the pilaster at Tula.
The next sequence of the programme took me to Egypt, at the Giza site. Fifty yards from the Menkaura pyramid I was filmed examining a wall of precisely carved blocks and pointing out that in Egypt such blocks have been found to be joined by metal clamps. As Graham Hancock has pointed out, they are also found in Angkor Wat, in Cambodia.
Tiahuanaco has one more feature that raises some of the same questions as Tula: a pyramid known as the Akapana, which was once a vast step pyramid with seven terraces and a flat top, looking rather like some industrial complex or perhaps a modernist building. It had once dominated the temple area, but 90 per cent of its flat facing stones have been removed over the years by builders, so that what remains looks at first glance like a natural hill. Anyone who clambers to the top finds that it contains a kind of lake.
But it was not a hill. Inside, as in the Tollan pyramid, there are tunnels and a chamber of unknown purpose, which a Bolivian archaeologist, Oswaldo Rivera, has described as its ‘King’s Chamber’. Jointed stone channels had carried water, and it had been surrounded by a moat. The large quantities of water that would have fallen on top of the pyramid ran into the central court – what now looks like a lake – then into a drainage system that probably ran around all four sides of the first terrace, to be allowed to emerge into the open, then conducted back inside again, then out, all the way to the moat. The top was covered with green pebbles looking like the water of the ‘lake’. The whole building was a monument to water. We are reminded of Sitchin’s words about Tula, and ‘the remains of the adjoining multichambered and multistoried buildings’ that ‘suggest some industrial processing, and… raise the possibility that at this site, as at Teotihuacan, some kind of purification and refining process had taken place at a very early period’.
As I stood on top of the Akapana pyramid, looking south towards the Quimsachata Mountains, then at the vast plain that extended all around me, I found myself trying to imagine what this place had looked like when Tiahuanaco was at the height of its prosperity. It was difficult to imagine a huge city with a port area and buildings constructed of immense blocks, some weighing nearly 200 tons. How did they get them here? And what was a city doing in the middle of this rather soggy plain? Then what had happened? It seemed that some great catastrophe had turned it into this barren plain. And when had it occurred? According to the museum opposite the Kalasasaya, and to Alan L. Kolata’s book The Tiwanaku17 (the spelling of the city’s name varies), Tiahuanaco rose to power around AD 100, reached its peak around AD 500, then went into steady decline until about AD 1000. What was the tremendous cataclysm that snapped the Gateway of the Sun in two, and hurled the huge stones of the port all over the place? It was obviously more than a local earthquake, but there is no record of such a cataclysm around 500 AD.
Around the turn of the twentieth century Professor Arthur Posnansky, who spent his life studying the ruins, concluded that Tiahuanaco was founded about 15,000 BC. His reasoning was based on two observation points in the enclosure, which marked the summer and winter solstices. At the moment, the two tropics are located 23 degrees, 30 minutes on either side of the equator, but when the Kalasasaya was built, the tropics were slightly closer to the equator — to be exact, at 23 degrees, 8 minutes and 48 seconds. This change in the width of the tropics results from a slight rolling motion of the earth known as the obliquity of the ecliptic, and it enabled Posnansky to calculate when the Kalasasaya was built.
Posnansky’s dating upset scholars, who felt it was thousands of years too early, but between 1927 and 1930 a team of German scientists, led by Dr Hans Ludendorff of Potsdam, checked Posnansky’s results and were inclined to agree with him. The academic furore led them to revise their figure downward, and they ended by suggesting that Tiahuanaco might date from 9,300 BC, but even this struck archaeologists and historians as 9,000 years too early. This view, as we have seen, prevails today.
Yet not entirely. The archaeologist Professor Neil Steede, who studied Tiahuanaco for many years, concluded the sacred city was built about 12,000 years ago.* And, more surprisingly, so does Dr Oswaldo Rivera, the Director of the Bolivian National Institute of Archaeology, who conducted excavations at Tiahuanaco for twenty-one years. In a television programme called The Mysterious Origins of Man,18 made in 1996, Rivera had gone on record as disagreeing with Steede’s estimate. His own view was that the builders of Tiahuanaco had simply made a slight mistake — after all, we are only speaking of about 21 seconds of a degree. Steede disagreed emphatically; he felt that builders as accurate as the founders of Tiahuanaco would not have made even such a minor error.
During the remainder of 1996, Rivera went on to observe the sunsets over Tiahuanaco, which involved the taking of measurements from the other end of the Kalasasaya. His calculations finally convinced him that Steede was right – there was no ‘minor error’. The measurements of the sunsets gave precisely the same reading as the sunrises. Rivera came to agree that the Kalasasaya was built approximately 12,000 years ago, near the time Atlantis fell.
*Using Posnansky’s methodology but armed with better instruments, Steede established a more reliable date.
6
Ancient Voyagers
IN THE EARLY 1930s, the United Fruit Company began clearing the jungles of south-western Costa Rica, in Central America, to make a banana plantation in the area called the Diquis Delta. The workers hacking and burning their way through jungle began to find huge stone hemispheres sticking up out of the earth, and some hard digging revealed that they were spheres, like giant beachballs – except that they were made of granite. The largest was over 9 feet in diameter, the smallest the size of a tennis ball. It seemed that the spheres had once formed part of various religious sites: they had been supported on top of mounds, and were surrounded by stelae and statues. What was so astonishing was the perfect workmanship; many were exact spheres, and their surface was as smooth as paper.
While giant stone balls are certainly an oddity, something about them quickly exhausts one’s curiosity. Some of the wealthier inhabitants of San José and Limon, Costa Rica’s major cities, had them transported on to their front lawns, and learned in the process that the largest weighed 20 tons.
A few archaeologists looked at them, shook their heads, and opined that they probably represented either the sun or the moon, or perhaps both, and turned their attention elsewhere.
About a decade later, an American archaeologist called Samuel K. Lothrop was spending a brief vacation in the Diquis area with his wife when he saw one of the balls on a lawn in Palmar Sur; he was told that there were hundreds of them, and that no one had any idea of what they were. Here was a puzzle worth solving. Since Lothrop happened to have time on his hands – bandits were making it difficult to continue his current task of excavating the pottery of the Chortega – he decided to devote some time to this intriguing problem.
He made little headway, for a smooth stone ball is devoid of clues, but at least he visited the site where some of the balls had been left in place and noted that they often seemed to be found in threes, in the form of a triangle. Others occurred in straight lines consisting of as many as forty-five spheres. But the triangles were oddly irregular, and were often made of balls of differing sizes, which suggested a special purpose in their arrangement, some hidden code that remained impossible to fathom. Lothrop wrote a paper on the stone balls, which was published under the auspices of the Peabody Institute at Harvard, and returned to less impenetrable mysteries. No other archaeologist pursued the subject, for Lothrop seemed to have exhausted it in his brief paper.
Three decades passed, and the stone spheres seemed to have been forgotten. Then, in 1981, Ivar Zapp, a young Professor of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica, thought he saw a new approach to the mystery. His inspiration came from the work of an English scholar, John Michell, whose name had become associated with ‘ley lines’ – long, straight tracks that run like canals across the English countryside. Zapp recalled the long, straight lines of stone spheres in the Diquis Delta, and began to speculate…1