Fingerprints of the Gods
Page 25
such unanimity existed with regard to Teotihuacan. Neither the Street of
the Dead, nor the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, nor the Pyramids of the Sun
and the Moon had ever been definitively dated.23 The majority of scholars
believed that the city had flourished between 100 BC and AD 600, but
others argued strongly that it must have risen to prominence much
earlier, between 1500 and 1000 BC. There were others still who sought,
largely on geological grounds, to push the foundation date back to 4000
BC before the eruption of the nearby volcano Xitli.24
Amid all this uncertainty about the age of Teotihuacan, I had not been
surprised to discover that no one had the faintest idea of the identity of
those who had actually built the largest and most remarkable metropolis
ever to have existed in the pre-Colombian New World.25 All that could be
said for sure was this: when the Aztecs, on their march to imperial power,
first stumbled upon the mysterious city in the twelfth century AD, its
colossal edifices and avenues were already old beyond imagining and so
densely overgrown that they seemed more like natural features than
works of man.26 Attached to them, however, was a thread of local legend,
passed down from generation to generation, which asserted that they had
been built by giants27 and that their purpose had been to transform men
into gods.
21 The Ancient Kingdoms Of Mexico, p. 74; The Traveller’s Key To Ancient Egypt, pp. 11035.
22 See, for example, Ahmed Fakhry, The Pyramids, University of Chicago Press, 1969.
23 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 230-3.
24 Ibid.
25 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 282.
26 Mysteries of ‘the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 11-12.
27 Ibid.
170
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Hints of forgotten wisdom
Leaving the Temple of Quetzalcoatl behind me, I recrossed the Citadel in
a westerly direction.
There was no archaeological evidence that this enormous enclosure had
ever served as a citadel—or, for that matter, that it had any kind of
military or defensive function at all. Like so much else about Teotihuacan
it had clearly been planned with painstaking care, and executed with
enormous effort, but its true purpose remained unidentified by modern
scholarship.28 Even the Aztecs, who had been responsible for naming the
Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon (an attribution which had stuck though
no one had any idea what the original builders had called them) had
failed to invent a name for the Citadel. It had been left to the Spaniards to
label it as they did—an understandable conceit since the 30-acre central
patio of La Ciudadela was surrounded by massively thick embankments
more than 23 feet high and some 1500 feet long on each side.29
My walk had now brought me to the western extreme of the patio. I
climbed a steep set of stairs that led to the top of the embankment and
turned north on to the Street of the Dead. Once again I had to remind
myself that this was almost certainly not what the Teotihuacanos
(whoever they were) had called the immense and impressive avenue. The
Spanish name Calle de los Muertos was of Aztec origin, apparently based
on speculation that the numerous mounds on either side of the Street
were graves (which, as it happened, they were not).30
We have already considered the possibility that the Way of the Dead
may have served as a terrestrial counterpart of the Milky Way. Of interest
in this regard is the work of another American, Alfred E. Schlemmer,
who—like Hugh Harleston Jr.—was an engineer. Schlemmer’s field was
technological forecasting, with specific reference to the prediction of
earthquakes,31 on which he presented a paper at the Eleventh National
Convention of Chemical Engineers (in Mexico City in October 1971).
Schlemmer’s argument was that the Street of the Dead might never
have been a street at all. Instead, it might originally have been laid out as
a row of linked reflecting pools, filled with water which had descended
through a series of locks from the Pyramid of the Moon, at the northern
extreme, to the Citadel in the south.
As I walked steadily northward towards the still-distant Moon Pyramid,
it seemed to me that this theory had several points in its favour. For a
start the ‘Street’ was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls,
at the foot of which the remains of well-made sluices could clearly be
seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would have facilitated a north-south
28 Ibid., p. 213.
29 Ibid.
30 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 72.
31 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 271-2.
171
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
hydraulic flow since the base of the Moon Pyramid stood on ground that
was approximately 100 feet higher than the area in front of the Citadel.
The partitioned sections could easily have been filled with water and
might indeed have served as reflecting pools, creating a spectacle far
more dramatic than those offered by the Taj Mahal or the fabled Shalimar
Gardens. Finally, the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (financed by the
National Science Foundation in Washington DC and led by Professor Rene
Millon of the University of Rochester) had demonstrated conclusively that
the ancient city had possessed ‘many carefully laid-out canals and
systems of branching waterways, artificially dredged into straightened
portions of a river, which formed a network within Teotihuacan and ran
all the way to [Lake Texcoco], now ten miles distant but perhaps closer in
antiquity’.32
There was much argument about what this vast hydraulic system had
been designed to do. Schlemmer’s contention was that the particular
waterway he had identified had been built to serve a pragmatic purpose
as ‘a long-range seismic monitor’—part of ‘an ancient science, no longer
understood’.33 He pointed out that remote earthquakes ‘can cause
standing waves to form on a liquid surface right across the planet’ and
suggested that the carefully graded and spaced reflecting pools of the
Street of the Dead might have been designed ‘to enable Teotihuacanos to
read from the standing waves formed there the location and strength of
earthquakes around the globe, thus allowing them to predict such an
occurrence in their own area’.34
32 Ibid., p. 232.
33 Ibid., p. 272.
34 Ibid.
172
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Reconstruction of Teotihuacan, looking down the Way of the Dead
from behind the Pyramid of the Moon. The Pyramid of the Sun lies to
the left of the Way of the Dead. Visible in the distance beyond it is
the pyramid-temple of Quetzalcoatl inside the large compound of the
citadel.
There was, of course, no proof of Schlemmer’s theory. However, when I
remembered the fixation with earthquakes and floods apparent
everywhere in Mexican mythology, and the equally obsessive concern
with forecasting future events evident in the Maya c
alendar, I felt less
inclined to dismiss the apparently far-fetched conclusions of the
American engineer. If Schlemmer were right, if the ancient Teotihuacanos
had indeed understood the principles of resonant vibration and had put
them into practice in seismic forecasting, the implication was that they
were the possessors of an advanced science. And if people like Hagar and
Harleston were right—if, for example, a scale-model of the solar system
had also been built into the basic geometry of Teotihuacan—this too
suggested that the city was founded by a scientifically evolved civilization
not yet identified.
I continued to walk northwards along the Street of the Dead and turned
east towards the Pyramid of the Sun. Before reaching this great
monument, however, I paused to examine a ruined patio, the principal
feature of which was an ancient ‘temple’ which concealed a perplexing
mystery beneath its rock floor.
173
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Chapter 23
The Sun and the Moon and the Way of the Dead
Some archaeological discoveries are heralded with much fanfare; others,
for various reasons, are not. Among this latter category must be included
the thick and extensive layer of sheet mica found sandwiched between
two of the upper levels of the Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Sun when it
was being probed for restoration in 1906. The lack of interest which
greeted this discovery, and the absence of any follow-up studies to
determine its possible function is quite understandable because the mica,
which had a considerable commercial value, was removed and sold as
soon as it had been excavated. The culprit was apparently Leopoldo
Bartres, who had been commissioned to restore the time-worn pyramid
by the Mexican government.1
There has also been a much more recent discovery of mica at
Teotihuacan (in the ‘Mica Temple’) and this too has passed almost
without notice. Here the reason is harder to explain because there has
been no looting and the mica remains on site.2
One of a group of buildings, the Mica Temple is situated around a patio
about 1000 feet south of the west face of the Pyramid of the Sun. Directly
under a floor paved with heavy rock slabs, archaeologists financed by the
Viking Foundation excavated two massive sheets of mica which had been
carefully and purposively installed at some extremely remote date by a
people who must have been skilled in cutting and handling this material.
The sheets are ninety feet square and form two layers, one laid directly
on top of the other.3
Mica is not a uniform substance but contains trace elements of different
metals depending on the kind of rock formation in which it is found.
Typically these metals include potassium and aluminum and also, in
varying quantities, ferrous and ferric iron, magnesium, lithium,
manganese and titanium. The trace elements in Teotihuacan’s Mica
Temple indicate that the underfloor sheets belong to a type which occurs
only in Brazil, some 2000 miles away.4 Clearly, therefore, the builders of
the Temple must have had a specific need for this particular kind of mica
and were prepared to go to considerable lengths to obtain it, otherwise
they could have used the locally available variety more cheaply and
simply.
Mica does not leap to mind as an obvious general-purpose flooring
1 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 202.
2 Ibid. The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.
3 The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.
4 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8:90, and The Lost Realms, p. 53.
174
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
material. Its use to form layers underneath a floor, and thus completely
out of sight, seems especially bizarre when we remember that no other
ancient structure in the Americas, or anywhere else in the world, has
been found to contain a feature like this.5
It is frustrating that we will never be able to establish the exact
position, let alone the purpose, of the large sheet that Bartres excavated
and removed from the Pyramid of the Sun in 1906. The two intact layers
in the Mica Temple, on the other hand, resting as they do in a place
where they had no decorative function, look as though they were
designed to do a particular job. Let us note in passing that mica
possesses characteristics which suit it especially well for a range of
technological applications. In modern industry, it is used in the
construction of capacitors and is valued as a thermal and electric
insulator. It is also opaque to fast neutrons and can act as a moderator in
nuclear reactions.
Erasing messages from the past
Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan
Having climbed more than 200 feet up a series of flights of stone stairs I
reached the summit and looked towards the zenith. It was midday 19
May, and the sun was directly overhead, as it would be again on 25 July.
On these two dates, and not by accident, the west face of the pyramid
was oriented precisely to the position of the setting sun.6
A more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the
equinoxes, 20 March and 22 September. Then the passage of the sun’s
rays from south to north resulted at noon in the progressive obliteration
of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of
the western façade. The whole process, from complete shadow to
complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds. It had done so without
fail, year-in year-out, ever since the pyramid had been built and would
continue to do so until the giant edifice crumbled into dust.7
What this meant, of course, was that at least one of the many functions
of the pyramid had been to serve as a ‘perennial clock’, precisely
signalling the equinoxes and thus facilitating calendar corrections as and
when necessary for a people apparently obsessed, like the Maya, with the
elapse and measuring of time. Another implication was that the masterbuilders of Teotihuacan must have possessed an enormous body of
astronomic and geodetic data and referred to this data to set the Sun
Pyramid at the precise orientation necessary to achieve the desired
equinoctial effects.
5 The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.
6 Mexico: Rough Guide, p. 217.
7 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 252.
175
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
This was planning and architecture of a high order. It had survived the
passage of the millennia and it had survived the wholesale remodelling of
much of the pyramid’s outer shell conducted in the first decade of the
twentieth century by the self-styled restorer, Leopoldo Bartres. In addition
to plundering precious evidence that might have helped us towards a
better understanding of the purposes for which the enigmatic structure
had been built, this repulsive lackey of Mexico’s corrupt dictator Porfirio
Diaz had removed the outer layer of stone, mortar and plaster to a depth
of more than twenty feet from the entire northern, eastern and southern
faces. The result was catastrophic: the underlying adobe surface began to
dissolve in heavy rains and to exhibit plastic flow which threatened to
destroy the whole edifice. Although the slippage was halted with hasty
remedial measures, nothing could change the fact that the Sun Pyramid
had been deprived of almost all its original surface features.
By modern archaeological standards this was, of course, an
unforgivable act of desecration. Because of it, we will never learn the
significance of the many sculptures, inscriptions, reliefs and artefacts that
had almost certainly been removed with those twenty feet of the outer
shell. Nor was this the only or even the most regrettable consequence of
Bartres’s grotesque vandalism. There was startling evidence which
suggested that the unknown architects of the Pyramid of the Sun might
have intentionally incorporated scientific data into many of the key
dimensions of the great structure. This evidence had been gathered and
extrapolated from the intact west face (which, not accidentally, was also
the face where the intended equinoctial effects could still be seen), but
thanks to Bartres, no similar information was likely to be forthcoming
from the other three faces because of the arbitrary alterations imposed
upon them. Indeed, by drastically distorting the original shape and size of
so much of the pyramid, the Mexican ‘restorer’ had possibly deprived
posterity of some of the most important lessons Teotihuacan had to
teach.
Eternal numbers
The transcendental number known as pi is fundamental to advanced
mathematics. With a value slightly in excess of 3.14 it is the ratio of the
diameter of a circle to its circumference. In other words if the diameter of
a circle is 12 inches, the circumference of that circle will be 12 inches x
3.14 = 37.68 inches. Likewise, since the diameter of a circle is exactly
double the radius, we can use pi to calculate the circumference of any
circle from its radius. In this case, however, the formula is the length of
the radius multiplied by 2pi. As an illustration let us take again a circle of
12 inches diameter. Its radius will be 6 inches and its circumference can
be obtained as follows: 6 inches x 2 x 3.14 = 37.68 inches. Similarly a
circle with a radius of 10 inches will have a circumference of 67.8 inches