PART III PLUMED SERPENT CENTRAL AMERICA

Part III

Plumed Serpent
Central America

Chapter 13 - Blood and Time at the End of the World

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/egipto/fingerprintgods/fingerprintgods03.htm#Chapter 13

Chicken Itza, northern Yucatan, Mexico
Behind me, towering almost 100 feet into the air, was a perfect ziggurat, the Temple of Kukulkan. Its four stairways had 91 steps each. Taken together with the top platform, which counted as a further step, the total was 365. This gave the number of complete days in a solar year.

 In addition, the geometric design and orientation of the ancient structure had been calibrated with Swiss-watch precision to achieve an objective as dramatic as it was esoteric: on the spring and autumn equinoxes, regular as clockwork, triangular patterns of light and shadow combined to create the illusion of a giant serpent undulating on the northern staircase. On each occasion the illusion lasted for 3 hours and 22 minutes exactly.¹

I walked away from the Temple of Kukulkan in an easterly direction. Ahead of me, starkly refuting the oft-repeated fallacy that the peoples of Central America had never succeeded in developing the column as an architectural feature, stood a forest of white stone columns which must at one time have supported a massive roof. The sun was beating down harshly through the translucent blue of a cloudless sky and the cool, deep shadows this area offered were alluring. I passed by and made my way to the foot of the steep steps that led up to the adjacent Temple of the Warriors.

At the top of these steps, becoming fully visible only after I had begun to ascend them, was a giant figure. This was the idol of Chacmool.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/egipto/fingerprintgods/fingerprintgods03.htm#Chapter 13

It half-lay, half-sat in an oddly stiff and expectant posture, bent knees protruding upwards, thick calves drawn back to touch its thighs, ankles tucked in against its buttocks, elbows planted on the ground, hands folded across its belly encircling an empty plate, and its back set at an awkward angle as though it were just about to lever itself upright.



Had it done so, I calculated, it would have stood about eight feet tall. Even reclining, coiled and tightly sprung, it seemed to overflow with a fierce and pitiless energy. Its square features were thin-lipped and implacable, as hard and indifferent as the stone from which they were carved, and its eyes gazed westwards, traditionally the direction of darkness, death and the colour black.2

1 Mexico, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1992, pp. 839.

2 Ronald Wright, Time Among the Maya, Futura Publications, London, 1991, pp. 343.


Rather lugubriously, I continued to climb the steps of the Temple of the Warriors. Weighing on my mind was the unforgettable fact that the ritual of human sacrifice had been routinely practiced here in pre-Colombian times. The empty plate that Chacmool held across his stomach had once served as a receptacle for freshly extracted hearts.

‘If the victim’s heart was to be taken out,’ reported one Spanish observer in the sixteenth century, they conducted him with great display ... and placed him on the sacrificial stone. Four of them took hold of his arms and legs, spreading them out. Then the executioner came, with a flint knife in his hand, and with great skill made an incision between the ribs on the left side, below the nipple; then he plunged in his hand and like a ravenous tiger tore out the living heart, which he laid on the plate 3 ...

3 Friar Diego de Landa, Yucatan before and after the Conquest (trans, with notes by William Gates), Producción Editorial Dante, Merida, Mexico, 1990, p. 71.


What kind of culture could have nourished and celebrated such demonic behaviour? Here, in Chichen Itza, amid ruins dating back more than 1200 years, a hybrid society had formed out of intermingled Maya and Toltec elements. This society was by no means exceptional in its addiction to cruel and barbaric ceremonies. On the contrary, all the great indigenous civilizations known to have flourished in Mexico had indulged in the ritualized slaughter of human beings.

Chichen Itza.




Slaughterhouses

Villahermosa, Tabasco Province
I stood looking at the Altar of Infant Sacrifice. It was the creation of the Olmecs, the so-called ‘mother-culture’ of Central America, and it was more than 3000 years old. A block of solid granite about four feet thick, its sides bore reliefs of four men wearing curious head-dresses. Each man carried a healthy, chubby, struggling infant, whose desperate fear was clearly visible. The back of the altar was undecorated; at the front another figure was portrayed, holding in his arms, as though it were an offering, the slumped body of a dead child.

The Olmecs are the earliest recognized high civilization of Ancient Mexico, and human sacrifice was well established with them. Two and a half thousand years later, at the time of the Spanish conquest, the Aztecs were the last (but by no means the least) of the peoples of this region to continue an extremely old and deeply ingrained tradition.

They did so with fanatical zeal.

It is recorded, for example, that Ahuitzotl, the eighth and most powerful emperor of the Aztec royal dynasty, ‘celebrated the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochitlan by marshalling four lines of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch them. On this occasion as many as 80,000 were slain during a single ceremonial rite.’4

The Aztecs liked to dress up in the flayed skins of sacrificial victims. Bernardino de Sahagun, a Spanish missionary, attended one such ceremony soon after the conquest:

The celebrants flayed and dismembered the captives; they then lubricated their own naked bodies with grease and slipped into the skin ... Trailing blood and grease, the gruesomely clad men ran through the city, thus terrifying those they followed ... The second-day’s rite also included a cannibal feast for each warrior’s family.5

Another mass sacrifice was witnessed by the Spanish chronicler Diego de Duran. In this instance the victims were so numerous that when the streams of blood running down the temple steps ‘reached bottom and cooled they formed fat clots, enough to terrify anyone’.6 All in all, it has been estimated that the number of sacrificial victims in the Aztec empire as a whole had risen to around 250,000 a year by the beginning of the sixteenth century.7

What was this manic destruction of human life for? According to the Aztecs themselves, it was done to delay the coming of the end of the world.8

4 Joyce Milton, Robert A. Orsi and Norman Harrison, The Feathered Serpent and the Cross: The Pre-Colombian God-Kings and the Papal States, Cassell, London, 1980, p. 64.
5 Reported in Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, 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.




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

9 From the Vaticano-Latin Codex 3738, cited in Adela Fernandez, Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, Panorama Editorial, Mexico City, 1992, pp. 21-2.



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 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, MexicoCity, 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.



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 off chance 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 far-off 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

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.

He also bore a striking 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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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



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.



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



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.

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

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.

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 ‘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 their feet, they had long beards and their heads were bare ... Kukulkan instructed the people in the arts of peace, and caused various important edifices to be built ...’14

Meanwhile Juan de Torquemada recorded this very specific pre-conquest tradition concerning the imposing strangers who had entered Mexico with Quetzalcoatl:

They were men of good carriage, well-dressed, in long robes of black linen, open in front, and without capes, cut low at the neck, with short sleeves that did not come to the elbow ... These followers of Quetzalcoatl were men of great knowledge and cunning artists in all kinds of fine work.15

Like some long-lost twin of Viracocha, the white and bearded Andean deity, Quetzalcoatl was depicted as having brought to Mexico all the skills and sciences necessary to create a civilized life, thus ushering in a golden age.16 He was believed, for example, to have introduced the knowledge of writing to Central America, to have invented the calendar, and to have been a master builder who taught the people the secrets of masonry and architecture.

11 Not only obviously related but specifically related. Votan, for example, was often referred to as the grandson of Quetzalcoatl. Itzamana and Kukulkan were sometimes confused by the Indians who transmitted their legends to Spanish chroniclers shortly after the conquest. See Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 100.

12 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 347.

13 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 439.
14 James Bailey, The God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1972, p. 206.
15 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 37-8.
16 According to the sixteenth century chronicler Bernardino de Sahagun: ‘Quetzalcoatl was a great civilizing agent who entered Mexico at the head of a band of strangers. He imported the arts into the country and especially fostered agriculture. In his time maize was so large in the head that a man might not carry more than one stalk at a time and cotton grew in all colours without having to be dyed. He built spacious and elegant houses, and inculcated a type of religion which fostered peace.’

He was the father of mathematics, metallurgy, and astronomy and was said to have ‘measured the earth’. He also founded productive agriculture, and was reported to have discovered and introduced corn—literally the staff of life in these ancient lands. A great doctor and master of medicines, he was the patron of healers and diviners ‘and disclosed to the people the mysteries of the properties of plants’. In addition, he was revered as a lawgiver, as a protector of craftsmen, and as a patron of all the arts.

As might be expected of such a refined and cultured individual he forbade the grisly practice of human sacrifice during the period of his ascendancy in Mexico. After his departure the blood-spattered rituals were reintroduced with a vengeance. Nevertheless, even the Aztecs, the most vehement sacrificers ever to have existed in the long history of Central America, remembered ‘the time of Quetzalcoatl’ with a kind of nostalgia.

‘He was a teacher,’ recalled one legend, ‘who taught that no living thing was to be harmed and that sacrifices were to be made not of human beings but of birds and butterflies.17

17 The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 57.



Cosmic struggle

Why did Quetzalcoatl go away? What went wrong?

Mexican legends provided answers to these questions. They said that the enlightened and benevolent rule of the Plumed Serpent had been brought to an end by Tezcatilpoca, a malevolent god whose name meant ‘Smoking Mirror’ and whose cult demanded human sacrifice. It seemed that a near-cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness had taken place in Ancient Mexico, and that the forces of darkness had triumphed ...

The supposed stage for these events, now known as Tula, was not believed to be particularly old—not much more than 1000 years anyway— but the legends surrounding it linked it to an infinitely more distant epoch. In those times, outside history, it had been known as Tollan. All the traditions agreed that it had been at Tollan that Tezcatilpoca had vanquished Quetzalcoatl and forced him to quit Mexico.

Tula


Fire serpents
Tula - Hidalgo Province

I was sitting on the flat square summit of the unimaginatively named Pyramid B. The late-afternoon sun was beating down out of a clear blue sky, and I was facing south, looking around.

At the base of the pyramid, to the north and east, were murals depicting jaguars and eagles feasting on human hearts. Immediately behind me were ranged four pillars and four fearsome granite idols each nine feet tall. Ahead and, to my left lay the partially unexcavated Pyramid C, a cactus-covered mound about 40 feet high, and farther away were more mounds not yet investigated by archaeologists.



To my right was a ball court. In that long, I-shaped arena, terrible gladitorial games had been staged in ancient times. Teams, or sometimes just two individuals pitted against each other, would compete for possession of a rubber ball; the losers were decapitated.

The idols on the platform behind me had a solemn and intimidating aura. I stood up to look at them more closely. Their sculptor had given them hard, implacable faces, hooked noses and hollow eyes and they seemed without sympathy or emotion. What interested me most, however, was not so much their ferocious appearance as the objects that they clutched in their hands.



Archaeologists admitted that they didn’t really know what these objects were but had tentatively identified them anyway. This identification had stuck and it was now received wisdom that spearthrowers called atl-atls were held in the right hands of the idols and ‘spears or arrows and incense bags’ in the left hands.18 It didn’t seem to matter that the objects did not in any way resemble atl-atls, spears, arrows, or incense bags.

Santha Faiia’s photographs will help the reader to form his or her own impression of these peculiar objects. As I studied the objects themselves I had the distinct sense that they were meant to represent devices which had originally been made out of metal. The right-hand device, which seemed to emerge from a sheath or hand-guard, was lozenge-shaped with a curved lower edge. The left-hand device could have been an instrument or weapon of some kind.

I remembered legends which related that the gods of ancient Mexico had armed themselves with xiuhcoatl, ‘fire serpents’.19 These apparently emitted burning rays capable of piercing and dismembering human bodies.20 Was it ‘fire serpents’ that the Tula idols were holding? What, for that matter, were fire serpents?

Whatever they were, both devices looked like pieces of technology. And both in certain ways resembled the equally mysterious objects in the hands of the idols in the Kalasasaya at Tiahuanaco.



Serpent Sanctuary
Santha and I had come to Tula/Tollan because it had been closely associated both with Quetzalcoatl and with his arch-enemy Tezcatilpoca, the Smoking Mirror.21 Ever-young, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient, Tezcatilpoca was associated in the legends with night, darkness and the sacred jaguar.22



He was ‘invisible and implacable, appearing to men sometimes as a flying shadow, sometimes as a dreadful monster’.23 Often depicted as a glaring skull, he was said to have been the owner of a mysterious object, the Smoking Mirror after which he was named, which he made use of to observe from afar the activities of men and gods. Scholars quite reasonably suppose that it must have been a primitive obsidian scrying stone:

‘Obsidian had an especial sanctity for the Mexicans, as it provided the sacrificial knives employed by the priests ... Bernal Diaz [Spanish chronicler] states that they called this stone “Tezcat”. From it mirrors were also manufactured as divinatory media to be used by wizards.’24

18 Mexico, pp. 194-5.

19 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 185, 188-9.

20 Ibid.
21 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 437.

22 The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, pp. 52-3.

23 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 436.

24 The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, p. 51.

Representing the forces of darkness and rapacious evil, Tezcatilpoca was said in the legends to have been locked in a conflict with Quetzalcoatl that had continued over an immense span of years.25 At certain times one seemed to be gaining the upper hand, at certain times the other. Finally the cosmic struggle came to an end when good was vanquished by evil and Quetzalcoatl driven out from Tollan.26 Thereafter, under the influence of Tezcatilpoca’s nightmarish cult, human sacrifice was reintroduced throughout Central America.

As we have seen, Quetzalcoatl was believed to have fled to the coast and to have been carried away on a raft of serpents. One legend says,

‘He burned his houses, built of silver and shells, buried his treasure, and set sail on the Eastern Sea preceded by his attendants who had been changed into bright birds.’27

This poignant moment of departure was supposedly staged at a place called Coatzecoalcos, meaning ‘Serpent Sanctuary’.28 There, before taking his leave, Quetzalcoatl promised his followers he would return one day to overthrow the cult of Tezcatilpoca and to inaugurate an era when the gods would again ‘accept sacrifices of flowers’ and cease their clamour for human blood.29

25 World Mythology, p. 237.

26 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 437.

27 Ibid.
28 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 139-40.

29 The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, pp. 35, 66.
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CHAPTER 15 MEXICO OF BABEL


We drove south-east from Tula, by-passing Mexico City on an anarchic series of fast freeways that dragged us through the creeping edge of the capital’s eye-watering, lung-searing pollution. Our route then took us up over pine-covered mountains, past the snowy peak of Popocatepetl and thence along tree-lined lanes amid fields and farmsteads.

In the late afternoon we arrived at Cholula, a sleepy town with 11,000 inhabitants and a spacious main square. After turning east through the narrow streets, we crossed a railway line and pulled to a halt in the shadow of tlahchiualtepetl, the ‘man-made mountain’ we had come here to see.

Once sacred to the peaceful cult of Quetzalcoatl, but now surmounted by an ornate Catholic church, this immense edifice was ranked among the most extensive and ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken anywhere in the ancient world. Indeed, with a base area of 45 acres and a height of 210 feet, it was three times more massive than the Great Pyramid of Egypt.1

Though its contours were now blurred by age and its sides overgrown with grass, it was still possible to recognize that it had once been an imposing ziggurat which had risen up towards the heavens in four clean-angled ‘steps’. Measuring almost half a kilometer along each side at its base, it had also succeeded in preserving a dignified but violated beauty.

The past, though often dry and dusty, is rarely dumb. Sometimes it can speak with passion. It seemed to me that it did so here, bearing witness to the physical and psychological degradation visited upon the native peoples of Mexico when the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez almost casually ‘beheaded a culture as a passer-by might sweep off the head of a sunflower’.2



In Cholula, a great centre of pilgrimage with a population of around 100,000 at the time of the conquest, this decapitation of ancient traditions and ways of life required that something particularly humiliating be done to the man-made mountain of Quetzalcoatl. The solution was to smash and desecrate the temple which had once stood on the summit of the ziggurat and replace it with a church.



1 Figures from Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 56.

2 Ibid., p. 12.


Cortez and his men were few, the Cholulans were many. When they marched into town, however, the Spaniards had one major advantage: bearded and pale-skinned, dressed in shining armour, they looked like the fulfillment of a prophecy—had it not always been promised that Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, would return ‘from across the Eastern Sea’ with his band of followers?3

Because of this expectation, the naive and trusting Cholulans permitted the conquistadores to climb the steps of the ziggurat and enter the great courtyard of the temple. There troupes of gaily bedecked dancing girls greeted them, singing and playing on instruments, while stewards moved back and forth with heaped platters of bread and delicate cooked meats.

One of the Spanish chroniclers, an eyewitness to the events that followed, reported that adoring townsfolk of all ranks ‘unarmed, with eager and happy faces, crowded in to hear what the white men would say’. Realizing from this incredible reception that their intentions were not suspected, the Spaniards closed and guarded all the entrances, drew their weapons of steel and murdered their hosts.4



Six thousand died in this horrible massacre5 which matched, in its savagery, the most bloodstained rituals of the Aztecs:

‘Those of Cholula were caught unawares. With neither arrows nor shields did they meet the Spaniards. Just so they were slain without warning. They were killed by pure treachery.’6

3 Ibid., pp. 3-4.
4 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 6.

5 Mexico, p. 224.

6 Contemporary account cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 6.

It was ironic, I thought, that the conquistadores in both Peru and Mexico should have benefited in the same way from local legends that prophesied the return of a pale, bearded god. If that god was indeed a deified human, as seemed likely, he must have been a person of high civilization and exemplary character—or more probably two different people from the same background, one working in Mexico and providing the model for Quetzalcoatl, the other in Peru being the model for Viracocha.



The superficial resemblance that the Spanish bore to those earlier fair-skinned foreigners opened many doors that would otherwise certainly have been closed. Unlike their wise and benevolent predecessors, however, Pizarro in the Andes and Cortez in Central America were ravening wolves. They ate up the lands and the peoples and the cultures they had seized upon. They destroyed almost everything ...



Tears for the past
Their eyes scaled with ignorance, bigotry and greed, the Spanish erased a precious heritage of mankind when they arrived in Mexico. In so doing they deprived the future of any detailed knowledge concerning the brilliant and remarkable civilizations which once flourished in Central America.

What, for example, was the true history of the glowing ‘idol ’ that rested in a sacred sanctuary in the Mixtec capital Achiotlan? We know of this curious object through the writings of a sixteenth-century eyewitness, Father Burgoa:

The material was of marvellous value, for it was an emerald of the size of a thick pepper-pod [capsicum], upon which a small bird was engraved with the greatest skill, and, with the same skill, a small serpent coiled ready to strike. The stone was so transparent that it shone from its interior with the brightness of a candle flame. It was a very old jewel, and there is no tradition extant concerning the origin of its veneration and worship.7

What might we learn if we could examine this ‘very old’ jewel today? And how old was it really? We shall never find out because Fr. Benito, the first missionary of Achiotlan, seized the stone from the Indians:

‘He had it ground up, although a Spaniard offered three thousand ducats for it, stirred the powder in water, poured it upon the earth and trod upon it ...’8

Equally typical of the profligate squandering of the intellectual riches concealed in the Mexican past was the shared fate of two gifts given to Cortez by the Aztec emperor Montezuma. These were circular calendars, as big as cartwheels, one of solid silver, and the other of solid gold. Both were elaborately engraved with beautiful hieroglyphs which may have contained material of great interest. Cortez had them melted down for ingots on the spot.9

More systematically, all over Central America, vast repositories of knowledge accumulated since ancient times were painstakingly gathered, heaped up and burned by zealous friars. In July 1562, for example, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in Yucatan Province) Fr. Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He also destroyed countless ‘idols’ and ‘altars’, all of which he described as ‘works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity ...’10



Elsewhere he elaborated on the same theme:

We found great numbers of books [written in the characters of the Indians] but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which the natives took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.11

Not only the ‘natives’ should have felt this pain but anyone and everyone—then and now—who would like to know the truth about the past.



7 The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, pp. 228-9.

8 Ibid.
9 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 7.
10 Many other ‘men of God’, some even more ruthlessly efficient than Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 9. See also Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 20.

11 Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 104.

Diego de Landa, participated in Spain’s satanic mission to wipe clear the memory banks of Central America. Notable among these was Juan de Zumarraga, Bishop of Mexico, who boasted of having destroyed 20,000 idols and 500 Indian temples. In November 1530 he burned a Christianized Aztec aristocrat at the stake for having allegedly reverted to worship of the ‘rain-god’ and later, in the market-place at Texcoco, built a vast bonfire of astronomical documents, paintings, manuscripts and hieroglyphic texts which the conquistadores had forcibly extracted from the Aztecs during the previous eleven years.12



As this irreplaceable storehouse of knowledge and history went up in flames, a chance to shake off at least some of the collective amnesia that clouds our understanding was lost to mankind for ever. What remains to us of the written records of the ancient peoples of Central America? The answer, thanks to the Spanish, is less than twenty original codices and scrolls.13

We know from hearsay that many of the documents which the friars reduced to ashes contained ‘records of ages past’.14

What did those lost records say? What secrets did they hold?



Gigantic men of deformed stature
Even while the orgy of book-burning was still going on, some Spaniards began to realize that ‘a truly great civilization had once existed in Mexico prior to the Aztecs’.15 Oddly enough, one of the first to act on this realization was Diego de Landa. He appears to have undergone ‘Damascus-road experience’ after staging his auto-da-fé at Mani. In later years, determined to save what he could of the ancient wisdom he had once played such a large part in destroying, he became an assiduous gatherer of the traditions and oral histories of the native peoples of the Yucatan.16

Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan friar, was a chronicler to whom we owe much. A great linguist, he is reported to have ‘sought out the most learned and often the oldest natives, and asked each to paint in his Aztec picture writing as much as he could clearly remember of Aztec history, religion and legend’.17



In this way Sahagun was able to accumulate detailed information on the anthropology, mythology and social history of ancient Mexico, which he later set down in a learned twelve-volume work. This was suppressed by the Spanish authorities. Fortunately one copy has survived, though it is incomplete.

12 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 21.

13 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 34.

14 Ibid.
15 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 23.

16 Yucatan before and after the Conquest.
17 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 24.

Diego de Duran, a conscientious and courageous collector of indigenous traditions, was yet another Franciscan who fought to recover the lost knowledge of the past. He visited Cholula in AD 1585, a time of rapid and catastrophic change. There he interviewed a venerated elder of the town, said to have been more than one hundred years old, who told him this story about the making of the great ziggurat:

In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this place, Cholula, was in obscurity and darkness; all was a plain, without hill or elevation, encircled in every part by water, without tree or created thing. Immediately after the light and the sun arose in the east there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature who possessed the land. Enamoured of the light and beauty of the sun they determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky. Having collected materials for the purpose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen with which they speedily commenced to build the tower ...



And having reared it to the greatest possible altitude, so that it reached the sky, the Lord of the Heavens, enraged, said to the inhabitants of the sky,

‘Have you observed how they of the earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamoured of the light of the sun and his beauty? Come and confound them, because it is not right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should mingle with us.’

Immediately the inhabitants of the sky sallied forth like flashes of lightning; they destroyed the edifice and divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth.18

18 Diego de Duran, ‘Historia antiqua de la Nueve Espana’, (1585), in Ignatius Donelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 200.



It was this story, almost but not quite the biblical account of the Tower of Babel (which was itself a reworking of a far older Mesopotamian tradition), that had brought me to Cholula.

The Central American and Middle Eastern tales were obviously closely related. Indeed, the similarities were unmissable, but there were also differences far too significant to be ignored. Of course, the similarities could be due to unrecorded pre-Colombian contacts between the cultures of the Middle East and the New World, but there was one way to explain the similarities and the differences in a single theory.



Suppose that the two versions of the legend had evolved separately for several thousands of years, but prior to that both had descended from the same remotely ancient ancestor?



Remnants
Here’s what the Book of Genesis says about the ‘tower that reached to heaven’:

Throughout the earth men spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary. Now as they moved eastwards they found a plain in the land of Shinar, where they settled. There they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire.’ For stone they Used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen. ‘Come,’ they said, ‘let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about the entire earth.’

Now Yahewh [the Hebrew God] came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built.

‘So they are all a single people with a single language!’ said Yahweh. ‘This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.’

Yahweh scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth, and they stopped building the tower. It was named Babel, therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. It was from there that Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of the earth.19

The verse which most interested me suggested very clearly that the ancient builders of the Tower of Babel had set out to create a lasting monument to themselves so that their name would not be forgotten— even if their civilization and language were. Was it possible that the same considerations could have applied at Cholula?

Only a handful of monuments in Mexico were thought by archaeologists to be more than 2000 years old. Cholula was definitely one of them. Indeed no one could say for sure in what distant age its ramparts had first begun to be heaped up. For thousands of years before development and extension of the site began in earnest around 300 BC, it looked as though some other, older structure might have been positioned at the spot over which the great ziggurat of Quetzalcoatl now rose.

There was a precedent for this which further strengthened the intriguing possibility that the remnants of a truly ancient civilization might still be lying around in Central America waiting to be recognized. For example, just south of the university campus of Mexico City, off the main road connecting the capital to Cuernavaca, stands a circular step pyramid of great complexity (with four galleries and a central staircase).



It was partially excavated in the 1920s from beneath a mantle of lava. Geologists were called to the site to help date the lava, and carried out a detailed examination. To everyone’s surprise, they concluded that the volcanic eruption which had completely buried three sides of this pyramid (and had then gone on to cover about sixty square miles of the surrounding territory) must have taken place at least seven thousand years ago.20



19 Genesis 11:1-9.
20 Reported in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, p. 199. See also The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 54, and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 207.

This geological evidence seems to have been ignored by historians and archaeologists, who do not believe that any civilization capable of building a pyramid could have existed in Mexico at such an early date. It is worth noting, however, that Byron Cummings, the American archaeologist who originally excavated the site for the National Geographical Society, was convinced by clearly demarcated stratification layers above and below the pyramid (laid down both before and after the volcanic eruption) that it was ‘the oldest temple yet uncovered on the American continent’.



He went further than the geologists and stated categorically that this temple ‘fell into ruins some 8500 years ago’.21



21 Byron S. Cummings, ‘Cuicuilco and the Archaic Culture of Mexico’, University of Arizona Bulletin, volume IV:8, 15 November 1933.



Pyramids upon pyramids
Going inside the Cholula pyramid really did feel like entering a man-made mountain. The tunnels (and there were more than six miles of them) were not old: they had been left behind by the teams of archaeologists who had burrowed here diligently from 1931 until funds ran out in 1966. Somehow, these narrow, low-ceilinged corridors had borrowed an atmosphere of antiquity from the vast structure all around them. Moist and cool, they offered an inviting and secretive darkness.

Following a ribbon of torchlight we walked deeper inside the pyramid. The archaeological excavations had revealed that it was not the product of one dynasty (as was thought to have been the case with the pyramids at Giza in Egypt), but that it had been built up over a very long period of time—two thousand years or so, at a conservative estimate. In other words it was a collective project, created by an inter-generational labour force drawn from the many different cultures, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Cholulan and Aztec, that had passed through Cholula since the dawn of civilization in Mexico.22



22 Mexico, p. 223. See also Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 190.

Though it was not known who had been the first builders here, as far as it had been possible to establish the earliest major edifice on the site consisted of a tall conical pyramid, shaped like an upturned bucket, flattened at the summit where a temple had stood. Much later a second, similar structure was imposed on top of this primordial mound, i.e. a second inverted bucket of clay, and compacted stone was placed directly over the first, raising the temple platform to more than 200 feet above the surrounding plain.



Thereafter, during the next fifteen hundred years or so, an estimated four or five other cultures contributed to the final appearance of the monument. This they did by extending its base in several stages, but never again by increasing its maximum height. In this way, almost as though a master plan were being implemented, the man-made mountain of Cholula gradually attained its characteristic, four-tier ziggurat shape.



Today, its sides at the base are each almost 1500 feet long—about twice the length of the sides of the Great Pyramid at Giza— and its total volume has been estimated at a staggering three million cubic metres.23 This makes it, as one authority succinctly states, ‘the largest building ever erected on earth.’24



23 The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 190.

24 Ibid.

Why?

Why go to all that trouble?

What sort of name for themselves were the peoples of Central America trying to make?

Walking through the network of corridors and passageways, inhaling the cool, loamy air, I was uncomfortably conscious of the great weight and mass of the pyramid pressing down upon me. It was the largest building in the world and it had been placed here in honour of a Central American deity of whom almost nothing was known.

We had the conquistadores and the Catholic Church to thank for leaving us so deeply in the dark about the true story of Quetzalcoatl and his followers. The smashing and desecration of his ancient temple at Cholula, the destruction of idols, altars and calendars, and the great bonfires made out of codices, paintings and hieroglyphic scrolls, had succeeded almost completely in silencing the voices of the past.



But the legends did offer us one graphic and powerful piece of imagery: a memory of the ‘gigantic men of deformed stature’ who were said to have been the original builders.



Back to Contents






Chapter 16 - Serpent Sanctuary


From Cholula we drove east, past the prosperous cities of Puebla, Orizaba and Cordoba, towards Veracruz and the Gulf of Mexico. We crossed the mist-enshrouded peaks of the Sierra Madre Oriental, where the air was thin and cold, and then descended towards sea level on to tropical plains overgrown with lush plantations of palms and bananas. We were heading into the heartlands of Mexico’s oldest and most mysterious civilization: that of the so-called Olmecs, whose name meant ‘rubber people’.

Dating back to the second millennium BC, the Olmecs had ceased to exist fifteen hundred years before the rise of the Aztec empire. The Aztecs, however, had preserved haunting traditions concerning them and were even responsible for naming them after the rubber-producing area of Mexico’s gulf coast where they were believed to have lived.1 This area lies between modern Veracruz in the west and Ciudad del Carmen in the east. In it the Aztecs found a number of ancient ritual objects produced by the Olmecs and for reasons unknown they collected these objects and placed them in positions of importance in their own temples.2



1 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 126.

2 Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, p. 50.

Looking at my map, I could see the blue line of the Coatzecoalcos River running into the Gulf of Mexico more or less at the midpoint of the legendary Olmec homeland. The oil industry proliferates here now, where rubber trees once flourished, transforming a tropical paradise into something resembling the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno. Since the oil boom of 1973 the town of Coatzecoalcos, once easy-going but not very prosperous, had mushroomed into a transport and refining centre with air-conditioned hotels and a population of half a million.

It lay close to the black heart of an industrial wasteland in which virtually everything of archaeological interest that had escaped the depredations of the Spanish at the time of the conquest had been destroyed by the voracious expansion of the oil business. It was therefore no longer possible, on the basis of hard evidence, to confirm or deny the intriguing suggestion that the legends seemed to make: that something of great importance must once have occurred here.

The Olmec sites of Tres Zapotes, San Lorenzo and La Venta along the Gulf of Mexico,

with other Central American archaeological sites.


I remembered that Coatzecoalcos meant ‘Serpent Sanctuary ’. It was here, in remote antiquity, that Quetzalcoatl and his companions were said to have landed when they first reached Mexico, arriving from across the sea in vessels ‘with sides that shone like the scales of serpents’ skins’.3 And it was from here too that Quetzalcoatl was believed to have sailed (on his raft of serpents) when he left Central America. Serpent Sanctuary, moreover, was beginning to look like the name for the Olmec homeland, which had included not only Coatzecoalcos but several other sites in areas less blighted by development.



3 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 139-40.

First at Tres Zapotes, west of Coatzecoalcos, and then at San Lorenzo and La Venta, south and east of it, numerous pieces of characteristically Olmec sculpture had been unearthed. All were monoliths carved out of basalt and similarly durable materials. Some took the form of gigantic heads weighing up to thirty tons. Others were massive stelae engraved with encounter scenes apparently involving two distinct races of mankind, neither of them American-Indian.

Whoever had produced these outstanding works of art had obviously belonged to a refined, well organized, prosperous and technologically advanced civilization. The problem was that absolutely nothing remained, except the works of art, from which anything could be deduced about the character and origins of that civilization. All that seemed clear was that ‘the Olmecs’ (the archaeologists were happy to accept the Aztec designation) had materialized in Central America around 1500 BC with their sophisticated culture fully evolved.


Santiago Tuxtla
We passed the night at the fishing port of Alvarado and continued our journey east the next day. The road we were following wound in and out of fertile hills and valleys, giving us occasional views of the Gulf of Mexico before turning inland. We passed green meadows filled with flame trees, and little villages nestled in grassy hollows. Here and there we saw private gardens where hulking pigs grubbed amongst piles of domestic refuse. Then we crested the brow of a hill and looked out across a giant vista of fields and forests bound only by the morning haze and the faint outlines of distant mountains.

Some miles farther on we dropped into a hollow; at its bottom lay the old colonial town of Santiago Tuxtla. The place was a riot of colour: garish shop-fronts, red-tile roofs, yellow straw hats, coconut palms, banana trees, kids in bright clothes. Several of the shops and cafés were playing music from loudspeakers. In the Zocalo, the main square, the air was thick with humidity and the fluttering wings and songs of bright-eyed tropical birds.



A leafy little park occupied the centre of this square, and in the centre of the park, like some magic talisman, stood an enormous grey boulder, almost ten feet tall, carved in the shape of a helmeted African head. Full-lipped and strong-nosed, its eyes serenely closed and its lower jaw resting squarely on the ground, this head had a sombre and patient gravity.

Here, then, was the first mystery of the Olmecs: a monumental piece of sculpture, more than 2000 years old, which portrayed a subject with unmistakable negroid features. There were, of course, no African blacks in the New World 2000 years ago, nor did any arrive until the slave trade began, well after the conquest. There is, however, firm palaeoanthropological evidence that one of the many different migrations into the Americas during the last Ice Age did consist of peoples of negroid stock. This migration occurred around 15,000 BC.4



4 Ibid., p. 125.

Known as the ‘Cobata’ head after the estate on which it was found, the huge monolith in the Zocalo was the largest of sixteen similar Olmec sculptures so far excavated in Mexico. It was thought to have been carved not long before the time of Christ and weighed more than thirty tons.



Tres Zapotes
From Santiago Tuxtla we drove twenty-five kilometers south-west through wild and lush countryside to Tres Zapotes, a substantial late Olmec centre believed to have flourished between 500 BC and AD 100. Now reduced to a series of mounds scattered across maize fields, the site had been extensively excavated in 1939-40 by the American archaeologist Matthew Stirling.

Historical dogmatists of that period, I remembered, had held tenaciously to the view that the civilization of the Mayas was the oldest in Central America. One could be precise about this, they argued, because the Mayan dot-and-bar calendrical system (which had recently been decoded) made possible accurate dating of huge numbers of ceremonial inscriptions.



The earliest date ever found on a Mayan site corresponded to AD 228 of the Christian calendar.5 It therefore came as quite a jolt to the academic status quo when Stirling unearthed a stela at Tres Zapotes which bore an earlier date. Written in the familiar bar-and-dot calendrical code used by the Maya, it corresponded to 3 September 32 BC.6



5 Mexico, p. 637. See also The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 24.

6 Ibid.

What was shocking about this was that Tres Zapotes was not a Maya site—not in any way at all. It was entirely, exclusively, unambiguously Olmec. This suggested that the Olmecs, not the Maya, must have been the inventors of the calendar, and that the Olmecs, not the Maya, ought to be recognized as ‘the mother culture’ of Central America. Despite determined opposition from gangs of furious Mayanists the truth which Stirling’s spade had unearthed at Tres Zapotes gradually came out.



The Olmecs were much, much older than the Maya. They’d been a smart, civilized, technologically advanced people and they did, indeed, appear to have invented the bar-and-dot system of calendrical notation, with the enigmatic starting date of 13 August 3114 BC, which predicted the end of the world in AD 2012.

Lying close to the calendar stela at Tres Zapotes, Stirling also unearthed a giant head. I sat in front of that head now. Dated to around 100 BC,7 it was approximately six feet high, 18 feet in circumference and weighed over 10 tons. Like its counterpart in Santiago Tuxtla, it was unmistakably the head of an African man wearing a close-fitting helmet with long chin-straps.



The lobes of the ears were pierced by plugs; the pronounced negroid features were furrowed by deep frown lines on either side of the nose, and the entire face was concentrated forwards above thick, down-curving lips. The eyes were open and watchful, almond-shaped and cold. Beneath the curious helmet, the heavy brows appeared beetling and angry.

Stirling was amazed by this discovery and reported,

The head was a head only, carved from a single massive block of basalt, and it rested on a prepared foundation of unworked slabs of stone ... Cleared of the surrounding earth it presented an awe-inspiring spectacle. Despite its great size the workmanship is delicate and sure, the proportions perfect. Unique in character among aboriginal American sculptures, it is remarkable for its realistic treatment. The features are bold and amazingly negroid in character ...8

7 Mexico, p. 638.

8 Matthew W. Stirling, ‘Discovering the New World’s Oldest Dated Work of Man’, National Geographic Magazine, volume 76, August 1939, pp. 183-218 passim

Soon afterwards the American archaeologist made a second unsettling discovery at Tres Zapotes: children’s toys in the form of little wheeled dogs.9 These cute artifacts conflicted head-on with prevailing archaeological opinion, which held that the wheel had remained undiscovered in Central America until the time of the conquest.



The ‘dogmobiles’ proved, at the very least, that the principle of the wheel had been known to the Olmecs, Central America’s earliest civilization. And if a people as resourceful as the Olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel, it seemed highly unlikely that they would have used it just for children’s toys.

9 Matthew W. Stirling, ‘Great Stone Faces of the Mexican Jungle’, National Geographic Magazine, volume 78, September 1940, pp. 314, 310.



Back to Contents






Chapter 17 - The Olmec Enigma


After Tres Zapotes our next stop was San Lorenzo, an Olmec site lying south-west of Coatzecoalcos in the heart of the ‘Serpent Sanctuary’ the legends of Quetzalcoatl made reference to. It was at San Lorenzo that the earliest carbon-dates for an Olmec site (around 1500 BC) had been recorded by archaeologists.1 However, Olmec culture appeared to have been fully evolved by that epoch and there was no evidence that the evolution had taken place in the vicinity of San Lorenzo.2

In this there lay a mystery.

The Olmecs, after all, had built a significant civilization which had carried out prodigious engineering works and had developed the capacity to carve and manipulate vast blocks of stone (several of the huge monolithic heads, weighing twenty tons or more, had been moved as far as 60 miles overland after being quarried in the Tuxtla mountains).3 So where, if not at ancient San Lorenzo, had their technological expertise and sophisticated organization been experimented with, evolved and refined?

Strangely, despite the best efforts of archaeologists, not a single, solitary sign of anything that could be described as the ‘developmental phase’ of Olmec society had been unearthed anywhere in Mexico (or, for that matter, anywhere in the New World). These people, whose characteristic form of artistic expression was the carving of huge negroid heads, appeared to have come from nowhere.4



1 The Prehistory of the Americas, pp. 268-71. See also Jeremy A. Sabloff, The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 35. Breaking the Maya Code, p. 61.

2 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 268.

3 Aztecs: Reign of Blood and Splendour, p. 158.
4 ‘Olmec stone sculpture achieved a high, naturalistic plasticity, yet it has no surviving prototypes, as if this powerful ability to represent both nature and abstract concepts was a native invention of this early civilization.’ The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 15; The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 55: ‘The proto-Olmec phase remains an enigma ... it is not really known at what time, or in what place, Olmec culture took on its very distinctive form.’



San Lorenzo
We reached San Lorenzo late in the afternoon.



Here, at the dawn of history in Central America, the Olmecs had heaped up an artificial mound more than 100 feet high as part of an immense structure some 4000 feet in length and 2000 feet in width. We climbed the dominant mound, now heavily overgrown with thick tropical vegetation, and from the summit we could see for miles across the surrounding countryside. A great many lesser mounds were also visible and around about were several of the deep trenches the archaeologist Michael Coe had dug when he had excavated the site in 1966.

Coe’s team made a number of finds here, which included more than twenty artificial reservoirs, linked by a highly sophisticated network of basalt-lined troughs. Part of this system was built into a ridge; when it was rediscovered water still gushed forth from it during heavy rains, as it had done for more than 3000 years. The main line of the drainage ran from east to west. Into it, linked by joints made to an advanced design, three subsidiary lines were channelled.5 After surveying the site thoroughly, the archaeologists admitted that they could not understand the purpose of this elaborate system of sluices and water-works.6

Nor were they able to come up with an explanation for another enigma. This was the deliberate burial, along specific alignments, of five of the massive pieces of sculpture, showing negroid features, now widely identified as ‘Olmec heads’. These peculiar and apparently ritualistic graves also yielded more than sixty precious objects and artifacts, including beautiful instruments made of jade and exquisitely carved statuettes. Some of the statuettes had been systematically mutilated before burial.

The way the San Lorenzo sculptures had been interred made it extremely difficult to fix their true age, even though fragments of charcoal were found in the same strata as some of the buried objects. Unlike the sculptures, these charcoal pieces could be carbon-dated. They were, and produced readings in the range of 1200 BC.7



5 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 36.

6 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 268.

7 Ibid., pp. 267-8. The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 55.



This did not mean, however, that the sculptures had been carved in 1200 BC. They could have been. But they could have originated in a period hundreds or even thousands of years earlier than that. It was by no means impossible that these great works of art, with their intrinsic beauty and an indefinable numinous power, could have been preserved and venerated by many different cultures before being buried at San Lorenzo.



The charcoal associated with them proved only that the sculptures were at least as old as 1200 BC; it did not set any upper limit on their antiquity.



La Venta
We left San Lorenzo as the sun was going down, heading for the city of Villahermosa, more than 150 kilometers to the east in the province of Tabasco. To get there we rejoined the main road running from Acayucan to Villahermosa and by-passed the port of Coatzecoalcos in a zone of oil refineries, towering pylons and ultra-modern suspension bridges.



The change of pace between the sleepy rural backwater where San Lorenzo was located and the pockmarked industrial landscape around Coatzecoalcos was almost shocking. Moreover, the only reason that the timeworn outlines of the Olmec site could still be seen at San Lorenzo was that oil had not yet been found there.

It had, however, been found at La Venta—to the eternal loss of archaeology ...

We were now passing La Venta.

Due north, off a slip-road from the freeway, this sodium-lit petroleum city glowed in the dark like a vision of nuclear disaster. Since the 1940s it had been extensively ‘developed’ by the oil industry: an airstrip now bisected the site where a most unusual pyramid had once stood, and flaring smokestacks darkened the sky which Olmec star-gazers must once have searched for the rising of the planets.



Lamentably, the bulldozers of the developers had flattened virtually everything of interest before proper excavations could be conducted, with the result that many of the ancient structures had not been explored at all.8 We will never know what they could have said about the people who built and used them.

Matthew Stirling, who excavated Tres Zapotes, carried out the bulk of the archaeological work done at La Venta before progress and oil money erased it. Carbon-dating suggested that the Olmecs had established themselves here between 1500 and 1100 BC and had continued to occupy the site—which consisted of an island lying in marshes to the east of the Tonala river—until about 400 BC.9



Then construction was suddenly abandoned, all existing buildings were ceremonially defaced or demolished, and several huge stone heads and other smaller pieces of sculpture were ritually buried in peculiar graves, just as had happened at San Lorenzo.



The La Venta graves were elaborate and carefully prepared, lined with thousands of tiny blue tiles and filled up with layers of multicoloured clay.10 At one spot some 15,000 cubic feet of earth had been dug out of the ground to make a deep pit; its floor had been carefully covered with serpentine blocks, and all the earth put back. Three mosaic pavements were also found, intentionally buried beneath several alternating layers of clay and adobe.11



8 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 30.

9 Ibid., p. 31.
10 The Prehistory of the Americas, pp. 268-9.

11 Ibid., p. 269.

La Venta’s principal pyramid stood at the southern end of the site. Roughly circular at ground level, it took the form of a fluted cone, the rounded sides consisting of ten vertical ridges with gullies between. The pyramid was 100 feet tall, almost 200 feet in diameter and had an overall mass in the region of 300,000 cubic feet—an impressive monument by any standards.



The remainder of the site stretched for almost half a kilometer along an axis that pointed precisely 8° west of north. Centered on this axis, with every structure in flawless alignment, were several smaller pyramids and plazas, platforms and mounds, covering a total area of more than three square miles.

There was something detached and odd about La Venta, a sense that its original function had not been properly understood. Archaeologists referred to it as a ‘ceremonial centre’, and very probably that is what it was. If one were honest, however, one would admit that it could also have been several other things. The truth is that nothing is known about the social organization, ceremonies and belief systems of the Olmecs.



We do not know what language they spoke, or what traditions they passed to their children. We don’t even know what ethnic group they belonged to. The exceptionally humid conditions of the Gulf of Mexico mean that not a single Olmec skeleton has survived.12 In reality, despite the names we have given them and the views we’ve formed about them, these people are completely obscure to us.



12 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 28.

It is even possible that the enigmatic sculptures ‘they’ left behind, which we presume depicted them, were not ‘their’ work at all, but the work of a far earlier and forgotten people.


Not for the first time I found myself wondering whether some of the great heads other remarkable artifacts attributed to the Olmecs might not have been handed down like heirlooms, perhaps over many millennia, to the cultures which eventually began to build the mounds and pyramids at San Lorenzo and La Venta.

Reconstruction of La Venta.

Note the unusual fluted-cone pyramid that dominates the site.


If so, then who are we speaking of when we use the label ‘Olmec’? The mound-builders? Or the powerful and imposing men with negroid features who provided the models for the monolithic heads?

Fortunately some fifty pieces of ‘Olmec’ monumental sculpture, including three of the giant heads, were rescued from La Venta by Carlos Pellicer Camara, a local poet and historian who intervened forcefully when he discovered that oil-drilling by the PEMEX company jeopardized the ruins. By determined lobbying of the politicians of Tabasco (within which La Venta lies), he arranged to have the significant finds moved to a park on the outskirts of the regional capital Villahermosa.

Taken together these finds constitute a precious and irreplaceable cultural record—or rather a whole library of cultural records—left behind by a vanished civilization.

But nobody knows how to read the language of these records.

Above left: Profile view of the head of the Great Sphinx at Giza, Egypt.

Above right: Profile view of Olmec Head from La Venta, Mexico.

Below left: Front view of the head of the Sphinx.

Below right: Front view of Olmec Head.

Compare also further below, top left: Sphinx-like Olmec sculpture from San Lorenzo, Mexico.

Is it possible that the many similarities between the cultures of pre-Columbian Central America and Ancient Egypt could have stemmed from an as-yet-unidentified ‘third-party’ civilization that influenced both widely separated regions at a remote and early date?

Centre: Double-puma statue at Uxtnal, Mexico.

Bottom: Double-lion symbolism from Ancient Egypt, depicting the Akeru, lion gods of yesterday and today (Akeru was written in hieroglyphs as ).



The religions of both regions share many other common images and ideas. Also noteworthy is the fact that p’achi, the Central American word for ‘human sacrifice’, means, literally ‘to open the mouth’— which calls to mind a strange Ancient Egyptian funerary ritual known as ‘the opening of the mouth’.

Likewise it was believed in both regions that the souls of dead kings were reborn as stars.

Deus ex machina
Villahermosa, Tabasco province

I was looking at an elaborate relief that had been dubbed ‘Man in Serpent’ by the archaeologists who found it at La Venta. According to expert opinion it showed ‘an Olmec, wearing a head-dress and holding an incense bag, enveloped by a feathered serpent’.13



13 The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 37.

The relief was carved into a slab of solid granite measuring about four feet wide by five feet high and showed a man sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him as though he were reaching for pedals with his feet. He held a small, bucket-shaped object in his right hand. With his left he appeared to be raising or lowering a lever. The ‘head-dress’ he wore was an odd and complicated garment. To my eye it seemed more functional than ceremonial, although I could not imagine what its function might have been. On it, or perhaps on a console above it, were two x-shaped crosses.

I turned my attention to the other principal element of the sculpture, the ‘feathered serpent’. On one level it did, indeed, depict exactly that: a plumed or feathered serpent, the age-old symbol of Quetzalcoatl, whom the Olmecs, therefore, must have worshipped (or at the very least recognized). Scholars do not dispute this interpretation.14 It is generally accepted that Quetzalcoatl’s cult was immensely ancient, originating in prehistoric times in Central America and thereafter receiving the devotion of many cultures during the historic period.



14 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 270.

The feathered serpent in this particular sculpture, however, had certain characteristics that set it apart. It seemed to be more than just a religious symbol; indeed, there was something rigid and structured about it that made it look almost like a piece of machinery.



Whispers of ancient secrets
Later that day I took shelter in the giant shadow cast by one of the Olmec heads Carlos Pellicer Camara had rescued from La Venta. It was the head of an old man with a broad flat nose and thick lips. The lips were slightly parted, exposing strong, square teeth.


The expression on the face suggested an ancient, patient wisdom, and the eyes seemed to gaze unafraid into eternity, like those of the Great Sphinx at Giza in lower Egypt.

It would probably be impossible, I thought, for a sculptor to invent all the different combined characteristics of an authentic racial type. The portrayal of an authentic combination of racial characteristics therefore implied strongly that a human model had been used.

I walked around the great head a couple of times. It was 22 feet in circumference, weighed 19.8 tons, stood almost 8 feet high, had been carved out of solid basalt, and displayed clearly ‘an authentic combination of racial characteristics’. Indeed, like the other pieces I had seen at Santiago Tuxtla and at Tres Zapotes, it unmistakably and unambiguously showed a negro.

The reader can form his or her own opinion after examining the relevant photographs in this book. My own view is that the Olmec heads present us with physiologically accurate images of real individuals of negroid stock—charismatic and powerful African men whose presence in Central America 3000 years ago has not yet been explained by scholars. Nor is there any certainty that the heads were actually carved in that epoch. Carbon-dating of fragments of charcoal found in the same pits tells us only the age of the charcoal. Calculating the true antiquity of the heads themselves is a much more complex matter.

It was with such thoughts that I continued my slow walk among the strange and wonderful monuments of La Venta. They whispered of ancient secrets—the secret of the man in the machine ... the secret of the negro heads ... and, last but not least, the secret of a legend brought to life.

For it seemed that flesh might indeed have been put on the mythical bones of Quetzalcoatl when I found that several of the La Venta sculptures contained realistic likenesses not only of negroes but of tall, thin-featured, long-nosed, apparently Caucasian men with straight hair and full beards, wearing flowing robes ...

Chapter 18 - Conspicuous Strangers


Matthew Stirling, the American archaeologist who excavated La Venta in the 1940s, made a number of spectacular discoveries there. The most spectacular of all was the Stele of the Bearded Man.

The plan of the ancient Olmec site, as I have said, lay along an axis pointing 8° west of north. At the southern end of this axis, 100 feet tall, loomed the fluted cone of the great pyramid. Next to it, at ground level, was what looked like a curb about a foot high enclosing a spacious rectangular area one-quarter the size of an average city block. When the archaeologists began to uncover this curb they found, to their surprise, that it consisted of the upper parts of a wall of columns.



Further excavation through the undisturbed layers of stratification that had accumulated revealed that the columns were ten feet tall. There were more than 600 of them and they had been set together so closely that they formed a near-impregnable stockade. Hewn out of solid basalt and transported to La Venta from quarries more than sixty miles distant, the columns weighed approximately two tons each.

Why all this trouble? What had the stockade been built to contain?

Even before excavation began, the tip of a massive chunk of rock had been visible jutting out of the ground in the centre of the enclosed area, about four feet higher than the illusory ‘curb’ and leaning steeply forward. It was covered with carvings. These extended down, out of sight, beneath the layers of soil that filled the ancient stockade to a height of about nine feet.

Stirling and his team worked for two days to free the great rock. When exposed it proved to be an imposing stele fourteen feet high, seven feet wide and almost three feet thick. The carvings showed an encounter between two tall men, both dressed in elaborate robes and wearing elegant shoes with turned-up toes.

Either erosion or deliberate mutilation (quite commonly practiced on Olmec monuments) had resulted in the complete defacement of one of the figures. The other was intact. It so obviously depicted a Caucasian male with a high-bridged nose and a long, flowing beard that the bemused archaeologists promptly christened it ‘Uncle Sam’.1

1 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 144.

I walked slowly around the twenty-ton stele, remembering as I did so that it had lain buried in the earth for more than 3000 years. Only in the brief half century or so since Stirling’s excavations had it seen the light of day again. What would its fate be now? Would it stand here for another thirty centuries as an object of awe and splendour for future generations to gawp at and revere? Or, in such a great expanse of time, was it possible that circumstances might change so much that it would once again be buried and concealed?

Perhaps neither would happen. I remembered the ancient calendrical system of Central America, which the Olmecs had initiated. According to them, and to their more famous successors the Mayas, there just weren’t any great expanses of time left, let alone three millennia. The Fifth Sun was all used up and a tremendous earthquake was building to destroy humanity two days before Christmas in AD 2012.

I turned my attention back to the stele. Two things seemed to be clear: the encounter scene it portrayed must, for some reason, have been of immense importance to the Olmecs, hence the grandeur of the stele itself, and the construction of the remarkable stockade of columns built to contain it. And, as was the case with the negro heads, it was obvious that the face of the bearded Caucasian man could only have been sculpted from a human model. The racial verisimilitude was too good for an artist to have invented it.

The same went for two other Caucasian figures I was able to identify among the surviving monuments from La Venta. One was carved in low relief on a heavy and roughly circular slab of stone about three feet in diameter. Dressed in what looked like tight-fitting leggings, his features were those of an Anglo-Saxon. He had a full pointed beard and wore a curious floppy cap on his head.

In his left hand he extended a flag, or perhaps a weapon of some kind. His right hand, which he held across the middle of his chest, appeared to be empty. Around his slim waist was tied a flamboyant sash. The other Caucasian figure, this time carved on the side of a narrow pillar, was similarly bearded and attired.

Who were these conspicuous strangers? What were they doing in Central America? When did they come? And what relationship did they have with those other strangers who had settled in this steamy rubber jungle—the ones who had provided the models for the great negro heads?

Some radical researchers, who rejected the dogma concerning the isolation of the New World prior to 1492, had proposed what looked like a viable solution to the problem: the bearded, thin-featured individuals could have been Phoenicians from the Mediterranean who had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and across the Atlantic Ocean as early as the second millennium BC. Advocates of this theory went on to suggest that the negroes shown at the same sites were the ‘slaves’ of the Phoenicians, picked up on the coast of West Africa prior to the trans-Atlantic run.2



2 Ibid., p. 141-42.

The more consideration I gave to the strange character of the La Venta sculptures, the more dissatisfied I became with these ideas. Probably the Phoenicians and other Old World peoples had crossed the Atlantic ages before Columbus. There was compelling evidence for that, although it is outside the scope of this book.3 The problem was that the Phoenicians, who had left unmistakable examples of their distinctive handiwork in many parts of the ancient world,4 had not done so at the Olmec sites in Central America.



Neither the negro heads, nor the reliefs portraying bearded Caucasian men showed any signs of anything remotely Phoenician in their style, handiwork or character.5 Indeed, from a stylistic point of view, these powerful works of art seemed to belong to no known culture, tradition or genre. They seemed to be without antecedents either in the New World or in the Old.



3 Fair Gods and Store Faces, passim. See also Cyrus H. Gordon, Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publishers Inc, New York, 1971.
4 See, for example, (a) Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West, Cambridge University Press, 1993; (b) Gerhard Herm, The Phoenicians, BCA, London, 1975; (c) Sabatino Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians, Cardinal, London, 1973.

5 This can be confirmed in any of the works cited in note 4.


They seemed rootless ... and that, of course, was impossible, because all forms of artistic expression have roots somewhere.



Hypothetical third party
It occurred to me that one plausible explanation might lie in a variant of the ‘hypothetical third party’ theory originally put forward by a number of leading Egyptologists to explain one of the great puzzles of Egyptian history and chronology.

The archaeological evidence suggested that rather than developing slowly and painfully, as is normal with human societies, the civilization of Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs, emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight— and with no apparent antecedents whatever.

For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.6

6 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, Penguin Books, London, 1987, p. 192.

What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt’s amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period).7

The majority of Egyptologists will not consider the implications of Egypt’s early sophistication. These implications are startling, according to a number of more daring thinkers. John Anthony West, an expert on the early dynastic period, asks:

How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of ‘development’. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start.

The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a ‘development’, it was a legacy.8

West has been a thorn in the flesh of the Egyptological establishment for many years. But other more mainstream figures have also confessed puzzlement at the suddenness with which Egyptian civilization appeared. Walter Emery, late Edwards Professor of Egyptology at the University of London, summed up the problem:

At a period approximately 3400 years before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the country passed rapidly from a state of neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to one of well-organized monarchy ...

At the same time the art of writing appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts develop to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points to the existence of a luxurious civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time, for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture.9



7 Ibid., p. 38. See also The Egyptian Book of the Dead (trans. E.A. Wallis Budge), British Museum, 1895, Introduction, pp. xii, xiii.

8 John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky, Harper and Row, New York, 1979, p. 13.

9 Archaic Egypt, p. 38. 10 Ibid., pp. 175-91.

One explanation could simply be that Egypt received its sudden and decisive cultural boost from some other known civilization of the ancient world. Sumer, on the Lower Euphrates in Mesopotamia, is the most likely contender. Despite many basic differences, a variety of shared building techniques and architectural styles10 does suggest a link between the two regions. But none of these similarities is strong enough to infer that the connection could have been in any way causal, with one society directly influencing the other.



On the contrary, as Professor Emery writes:

The impression we get is of an indirect connection, and perhaps the existence of a third party, whose influence spread to both the Euphrates and the Nile ... Modern scholars have tended to ignore the possibility of immigration to both regions from some hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area. [However] a third party whose cultural achievements were passed on independently to Egypt and Mesopotamia would best explain the common features and fundamental differences between the two civilizations.11

Among other things, this theory sheds light on the mysterious fact that the Egyptians and Sumerian people of Mesopotamia appear to have worshipped virtually identical lunar deities who were among the oldest in their respective pantheons (Thoth in the case of the Egyptians, Sin in the case of the Sumerians).12



According to the eminent Egyptologist Sir E.A. Wallis Budge,

‘The similarity between the two gods is too close to be accidental ... It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians or the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source.’13

11 Ibid., pp. 31, 177.
12 Ibid., p. 126.
13 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, p. 155.

The question, therefore, is this: what was that ‘common but exceedingly ancient source’, that ‘hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area’, that advanced ‘third party’ to which both Budge and Emery refer? And if it left a legacy of high culture in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, why shouldn’t it have done so in Central America?

It’s not good enough to argue that civilization ‘took off’ much later in Mexico than it had in the Middle East. It is possible that the initial impulse could have been felt at the same time in both places but that the subsequent outcome could have been completely different.

On this scenario, the civilizers would have succeeded brilliantly in Egypt and in Sumer, creating lasting and remarkable cultures there. In Mexico, on the other hand (as also seems to have been the case in Peru), they suffered some serious setback—perhaps getting off to a good start, when the gigantic stone heads and reliefs of bearded men were made, but going rapidly downhill.



The light of civilization would never quite have been lost, but perhaps things didn’t pick up again until around 1500 BC, the so-called ‘Olmec horizon’. By then the great sculptures would have been hoary with age, ancient relics of immense spiritual power, their all-but-forgotten origins wrapped in myths of giants and bearded civilizers.

If so, we may be gazing at faces from a much more remote past than we imagine when we stare into the almond eyes of one of the negro heads or into the angular, chiselled Caucasian features of ‘Uncle Sam’. It is by no means impossible that these great works preserve the images of peoples from a vanished civilization which embraced several different ethnic groups.

That, in a nutshell, is the ‘hypothetical third party’ theory as applied to Central America:

the civilization of Ancient Mexico did not emerge without external influence, and it did not emerge as a result of influence from the Old World

instead certain cultures in the Old World and in the New World may both have received a legacy of influence and ideas from a third party at some exceedingly remote date


Villahermosa to Oaxaca
Before leaving Villahermosa I visited CICOM, the Centre for Investigation of the Cultures of the Olmecs and Maya. I wanted to find out from the scholars there whether there were any other significant Olmec sites in the region. To my surprise, they suggested that I should look farther afield. At Monte Alban, in Oaxaca province hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, archaeologists had apparently unearthed ‘Olmecoid’ artifacts and a number of reliefs thought to represent the Olmecs themselves.

Santha and I had intended to drive straight on from Villahermosa into the Yucatan Peninsula, which lay north-east. The journey to Monte Alban would involve a huge detour, but we decided to make it, in the hope that it might shed further light on the Olmecs. Besides, it promised to be a spectacular drive over immense mountains and into the heart of the hidden valley where the city of Oaxaca lies.

We drove almost due west past the lost site of La Venta, past Coatzecoalcos once again, and on past Sayula and Loma Bonita to the road-junction town of Tuxtepec. In so doing, by degrees we left behind countryside scarred and blackened by the oil industry, crossed long gentle hillsides carpeted in lush green grass, and ran between fields ripe with crops.

At Tuxtepec, where the sierras really began, we turned sharply south following Highway 175 to Oaxaca. On the map it looked barely half the distance that we had driven from Villahermosa. The road, however, proved to be a complicated, nerve-racking, muscle-wrenching, apparently endless zig-zag of hairpin bends—narrow, winding and precipitous— which went up into the clouds like a stairway to heaven.



It took us through many different layers of alpine vegetation, each occupying a specialized climatological niche, until it brought us out above the clouds in a place where familiar plants flourished in giant forms, like John Wyndham’s triffids, creating a surreal and alien landscape. It took twelve hours to drive the 700 kilometers from Villahermosa to Oaxaca.



By the time the journey was over, my hands were blistered from gripping the steering-wheel too tight for too long around too many hairpin bends. My eyes were blurred and I kept having mental retrospectives of the vertiginous chasms we had skirted on Highway 175, in the mountains, where the triffids grew.

The city of Oaxaca is famous for magic mushrooms, marijuana and D.H. Lawrence (who wrote and set part of his novel The Plumed Serpent here in the 1920s). There is still a bohemian feel about the place and until late at night a current of excitement seems to ripple among the crowds filling its bars and cafés, narrow cobbled streets, old buildings and spacious plazas.

We checked into a room overlooking one of the three open courtyards in the Hotel Las Golondrinas. The bed was comfortable. There were starry skies overhead. But, tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep.

What kept me awake was the idea of the civilizers ... the bearded gods and their companions. In Mexico, as in Peru, they seemed to have confronted failure. That was what the legends implied, and not only the legends, as I discovered when we reached Monte Alban the next morning.


Back to Contents





Chapter 19 - Adventures in the Underworld, Journeys to the Stars


The ‘hypothetical third party’ theory explains the similarities and fundamental differences between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia by proposing that both received a common legacy of civilization from the same remote ancestor. No serious suggestions have been made as to where that ancestral civilization might have been located, its nature, or when it flourished. Like a black hole in space, it cannot be seen. Yet its presence can be deduced from its effects on things that can be seen—in this case the civilizations of Sumer and Egypt.

Is it possible that the same mysterious ancestor, the same invisible source of influence, could also have left its mark in Mexico? If so, we would expect to find certain cultural similarities between Mexico’s ancient civilizations and those of Sumer and Egypt. We would also expect to be confronted by immense differences resulting from the long period of divergent evolution which separated all these areas in historical times.



We would, however, expect the differences to be less between Sumer and Egypt, which were in regular contact with each other during the historical period, than between the two Middle Eastern cultures and the cultures of far-off Central America, which enjoyed at most only haphazard, slight and intermittent contacts prior to the ‘discovery ’ of the New World by Columbus in AD 1492.



Eaters of the dead, earth monsters, star kings, dwarves and other relatives
For some curious reason that has not been explained, the Ancient Egyptians had a special liking and reverence for dwarves.1 So, too, did the civilized peoples of ancient Central America, right back to Olmec times.2 In both cases it was believed that dwarves were directly connected to the gods.3 And in both cases dwarves were favoured as dancers and were shown as such in works of art.4

In Egypt’s early dynastic period, more than 4500 years ago, an ‘Ennead’ of nine omnipotent deities was particularly adored by the priesthood at Heliopolis.5 Likewise, in Central America, both the Aztecs and the Mayas believed in an all-powerful system of nine deities.6

1 See, for example, The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 69-70; also Jean-Pierre Hallet, Pygmy Kitabu, BCA, London, 1974, pp. 84-106.

2 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 82.

3 Ibid., The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 69-70, and Pygmy Kitabu, pp. 84-106.

4 Ibid.

5 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 85.
6 The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 148.

The Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the ancient Quiche Maya of Mexico and Guatemala, contains several passages which clearly indicate a belief in ‘stellar rebirth’—the reincarnation of the dead as stars. After they had been killed, for example, the Hero Twins named Hunahpu and Xbalanque,

‘rose up in the midst of the light, and instantly they were lifted into the sky ... Then the arch of heaven and the face of the earth were lighted. And they dwelt in heaven.’7



At the same time ascended the Twins’ 400 companions who had also been killed, ‘and so they again became the companions of Hunahpu and Xbalanque and were changed into stars in the sky.’8

The majority of the traditions of the God-King Quetzalcoatl, as we have seen, focus on his deeds and teachings as a civilizer. His followers in ancient Mexico, however, also believed that his human manifestation had experienced death and that afterwards he was reborn as a star.9

It is therefore curious, at the very least, to discover that in Egypt, in the Pyramid Age, more than 4000 years ago, the state religion revolved around the belief that the deceased pharaoh was reborn as a star.10 Ritual incantations were chanted, the purpose of which was to facilitate the dead monarch’s rapid rebirth in the heavens:

‘Oh king, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion ... you ascend from the east of the sky, being renewed in your due season, and rejuvenated in your due time ...’11

We have encountered the Orion constellation before, on the plains of Nazca, and we shall encounter it again ...

Meanwhile, let us consider the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Parts of its contents are as old as the civilization of Egypt itself and it serves as a sort of Baedeker for the transmigration of the soul. It instructs the deceased on how to overcome the dangers of the afterlife, enables him to assume the form of several mythical creatures, and equips him with the passwords necessary for admission to the various stages, or levels, of the underworld.12



7 Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, (English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the translation by Adrian Recinos), University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 163.

8 Ibid., 164.

9 Ibid., p. 181; The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 147.
10 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, (trans. R. O. Faulkner), Oxford University Press, 1969. Numerous Utterances refer directly to the stellar rebirth of the King, e.g. 248, 264, 265, 268, and 570 (‘I am a star which illumines the sky’), etc.

11 Ibid., Utt. 466, p. 155.
12 The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, (trans. R. O. Faulkner), British Museum Publications, 1989.

Is it a coincidence that the peoples of Ancient Central America preserved a parallel vision of the perils of the afterlife? There it was widely believed that the underworld consisted of nine strata through which the deceased would journey for four years, overcoming obstacles and dangers on the way.13



The strata had self-explanatory names like ‘place where the mountains crash together’, ‘place where the arrows are fired’, ‘mountain of knives’, and so on. In both Ancient Central America and Ancient Egypt, it was believed that the deceased’s voyage through the underworld was made in a boat, accompanied by ‘paddler gods’ who ferried him from stage to stage.14



The tomb of ‘Double Comb’, an eighth-century ruler of the Mayan city of Tikal, was found to contain a representation of this scene.15 Similar images appear throughout the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, notably in the tomb of Thutmosis III, an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh.16



Is it a coincidence that the passengers in the barque of the dead pharaoh, and in the canoe in which Double Comb makes his final journey, include (in both cases) a dog or dog-headed deity, a bird or bird-headed deity, and an ape or ape-headed deity?17

The seventh stratum of the Ancient Mexican underworld was called Teocoyolcualloya: ‘place where beasts devour hearts’.18

Is it a coincidence that one of the stages of the Ancient Egyptian underworld, ‘the Hall of Judgment’, involved an almost identical series of symbols? At this crucial juncture the deceased’s heart was weighed against a feather. If the heart was heavy with sin it would tip the balance. The god Thoth would note the judgment on his palette and the heart would immediately be devoured by a fearsome beast, part crocodile, part hippopotamus, part lion, that was called ‘the Eater of the Dead ’.19



13 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 37.

14 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 128-9.
15 Reproduced in National Geographic Magazine, volume 176, Number 4, Washington DC, October 1989, p. 468: ‘Double Comb is being taken to the underworld in a canoe guided by the “paddler twins”, gods who appear prominently in Maya mythology. Other figures—an iguana, a monkey, a parrot, and a dog—accompany the dead ruler.’ We learn more of the mythological significance of dogs in Part V of this book.
16 Details are reproduced in John Romer, Valley of the Kings, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, London, 1988, p. 167, and in J. A. West, The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, Harrap Columbus, London, 1989, pp. 282-97.
17 In the case of Ancient Egypt the dog represents Upuaut, ‘the Opener of the Ways’, the bird (a hawk) represents Horus, and the ape, Thoth. See The Traveller’s Key To Ancient Egypt, p. 284, and The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, pp. 116-30. For Ancient Central America see note 15.

18 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 40.
19 The Egyptian Book of the Dead (trans. E. A. Wallis Budge), Arkana, London and New York, 1986, p. 21.

Finally, let us turn again to Egypt of the Pyramid Age and the privileged status of the pharaoh, which enabled him to circumvent the trials of the underworld and to be reborn as a star. Ritual incantations were part of the process. Equally important was a mysterious ceremony known as ‘the opening of the mouth’, always conducted after the death of the pharaoh and believed by archaeologists to date back to pre-dynastic times.20



The high priest and four assistants participated, wielding the peshenkhef, a ceremonial cutting instrument. This was used ‘to open the mouth’ of the deceased God-King, an action thought necessary to ensure his resurrection in the heavens. Surviving reliefs and vignettes showing this ceremony leave no doubt that the mummified corpse was struck a hard physical blow with the peshenkhef.21 In addition, evidence has recently emerged which indicates that one of the chambers within the Great Pyramid at Giza may have served as the location for the ceremony.22

All this finds a strange, distorted twin in Mexico. We have seen the prevalence of human sacrifice there in pre-conquest times. Is it coincidental that the sacrificial venue was a pyramid, that the ceremony was conducted by a high priest and four assistants, that a cutting instrument, the sacrificial knife, was used to strike a hard physical blow to the body of the victim, and that the victim’s soul was believed to ascend directly to the heavens, sidestepping the perils of the underworld? 23

As such ‘coincidences’ continue to multiply, it is reasonable to wonder whether there may not be some underlying connection. This is certainly the case when we learn that the general term for ‘sacrifice’ throughout Ancient Central America was p’achi, meaning ‘to open the mouth’.24



20 See, for example, R. T. Rundle-Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson, London, 1991, p. 29.

21 Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 134. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, e. g. Utts. 20, 21.
22 Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery, Wm. Heinemann, London, 1994, pp. 208-10, 270.

23 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, pp. 40, 177.

24 Maya History and Religion, p. 175.

Could it be, therefore, that what confronts us here, in widely separated geographical areas, and at different periods of history, is not just a series of startling coincidences but some faint and garbled common memory originating in the most distant antiquity? It doesn’t seem that the Egyptian ceremony of the opening of the mouth influenced directly the Mexican ceremony of the same name (or vice versa, for that matter).



The fundamental differences between the two cases rule that out. What does seem possible, however, is that their similarities may be the remnants of a shared legacy received from a common ancestor. The peoples of Central America did one thing with that legacy and the Egyptians another, but some common symbolism and nomenclature was retained by both.



This is not the place to expand on the sense of an ancient and elusive connectedness that emerges from the Egyptian and Central American evidence. Before moving on, however, it is worth noting that a similar ‘connectedness’ links the belief systems of pre-Colombian Mexico with those of Sumer in Mesopotamia. Again the evidence is more suggestive of an ancient common ancestor than of any direct influence.

Take the case of Oannes, for example.

‘Oannes’ is the Greek rendering of the Sumerian Uan, the name of the amphibious being, described in Part II, believed to have brought the arts and skills of civilization to Mesopotamia.25 Legends dating back at least 5000 years relate that Uan lived under the sea, emerging from the waters of the Persian Gulf every morning to civilize and tutor mankind.26 Is it a coincidence that uaana, in the Mayan language, means ‘he who has his residence in water’?27

Let us also consider Tiamat, the Sumerian goddess of the oceans and of the forces of primitive chaos, always shown as a ravening monster. In Mesopotamian tradition, Tiamat turned against the other deities and unleashed a holocaust of destruction before she was eventually destroyed by the celestial hero Marduk:

She opened her mouth, Tiamat, to swallow him.
He drove in the evil wind so that she could not close her lips.
The terrible winds filled her belly. Her heart was seized,
She held her mouth wide open,
He let fly an arrow, it pierced her belly,
Her inner parts he clove, he split her heart,
He rendered her powerless and destroyed her life,
He felled her body and stood upright on it.28

How do you follow an act like that?

Marduk could. Contemplating his adversary’s monstrous corpse, ‘he conceived works of art’,29 and a great plan of world creation began to take shape in his mind. His first move was to split Tiamat’s skull and cut her arteries. Then he broke her into two parts ‘like a dried fish’, using one half to roof the heavens and the other to surface the earth. From her breasts he made mountains, from her spittle, clouds, and he directed the rivers Tigris and Euphrates to flow from her eyes.30



25 Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 326; Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, 1992, pp. 163-4.

26 Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 41.

27 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 169; The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 234.

28 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 53-4.

29 Ibid., p. 54.

30 Ibid. See also Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 177.

A strange and violent legend, and a very old one.

The ancient civilizations of Central America had their own version of this story. Here Quetzalcoatl, in his incarnation as the creator deity, took the role of Marduk while the part of Tiamat was played by Cipactli, the ‘Great Earth Monster’.



Quetzalcoatl seized Cipactli’s limbs,

‘as she swam in the primeval waters and wrenched her body in half, one part forming the sky and the other the earth’. From her hair and skin he created grass, flowers and herbs; ‘from her eyes, wells and springs; from her shoulders, mountains’.31

31 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 59; Inga Glendinnen, Aztecs, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 177. See also The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 144.

Are the peculiar parallels between the Sumerian and Mexican myths pure coincidence or could both have been marked by the cultural fingerprints of a lost civilization? If so, the faces of the heroes of that ancestral culture may indeed have been carved in stone and passed down as heirlooms through thousands of years, sometimes in full view, sometimes buried, until they were dug up for the last time by archaeologists in our era and given labels like ‘Olmec Head’ and ‘Uncle Sam’.

The faces of those heroes also appear at Monte Alban, where they seem to tell a sad story.

Monte Alban.




Monte Alban: the downfall of masterful men
A site thought to be about 3000 years old,32 Monte Alban stands on a vast artificially flattened hilltop overlooking Oaxaca. It consists of a huge rectangular area, the Grand Plaza, which is enclosed by groups of pyramids and other buildings laid out in precise geometrical relationships to one another. The overall feel of the place is one of harmony and proportion emerging from a well-ordered and symmetrical plan.



32 Mexico, p. 669.

Following the advice of CICOM, whom I had spoken to before leaving Villahermosa, I made my way first to the extreme south-west corner of the Monte Alban site. There, stacked loosely against the side of a low pyramid, were the objects I had come all this way to see: several dozen engraved stelae depicting negroes and Caucasians ... equal in life ... equal in death.

If a great civilization had indeed been lost to history, and if these sculptures told part of its story, the message conveyed was one of racial equality. No one who has seen the pride, or felt the charisma, of the great negro heads from La Venta could seriously imagine that the original subjects of these magisterial sculptures could have been slaves. Neither did the lean-faced, bearded men look as if they would have bent their knees to anyone. They, too, had an aristocratic demeanour.

At Monte Alban, however, there seemed to be carved in stone a record of the downfall of these masterful men. It did not look as if this could have been the work of the same people who made the La Venta sculptures. The standard of craftsmanship was far too low for that. But what was certain—whoever they were, and however inferior their work— was that these artists had attempted to portray the same negroid subjects and the same goatee-bearded Caucasians as I had seen at La Venta.



There the sculptures had reflected strength, power and vitality. Here at Monte Alban the remarkable strangers were corpses. All were naked, most were castrated, some were curled up in foetal positions as though to avoid showers of blows, others lay sprawled slackly.

Archaeologists said the sculptures showed ‘the corpses of prisoners captured in battle’.33



What prisoners? From where?

The location, after all, was Central America, the New World, thousands of years before Columbus, so wasn’t it odd that these images of battlefield casualties showed not a single native American but only and exclusively Old World racial types?

For some reason, orthodox academics did not find this puzzling, even though, by their reckoning, the carvings were extremely old (dating to somewhere between 1000 and 600 BC 34). As at other sites, this time-frame had been derived from tests on associated organic matter, not on the carvings themselves, which were incised on granite stele and therefore hard to date objectively.



33 The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 53.

34 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 53; Mexico, p. 671.



Legacy
An as yet undeciphered but fully elaborated hieroglyphic script had been found at Monte Alban,35 much of it carved on to the same stele as the crude Caucasian and negro figures.

35 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 53-4; The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 50.

Experts accepted that it was ‘the earliest-known writing in Mexico’.36 It was also clear that the people who had lived here had been accomplished builders and more than usually preoccupied with astronomy. An observatory, consisting of a strange arrowhead-shaped structure, lay at an angle of 45° to the main axis (which was deliberately tilted several degrees from north-south).37 Crawling into this observatory, I found it to be a warren of tiny, narrow tunnels and steep internal stairways, giving sightlines to different regions of the sky.38

The people of Monte Alban, like the people of Tres Zapotes, left definite evidence of their knowledge of mathematics, in the form of bar-and-dot computations.39 They had also used the remarkable calendar,40 introduced by the Olmecs and much associated with the later Maya,41 which predicted the end of the world on 23 December AD 2012.

If the calendar, and the preoccupation with time, had been part of the legacy of an ancient and forgotten civilization, the Maya must be ranked as the most faithful and inspired inheritors of that legacy.

‘Time’ as the archaeologist Eric Thompson put it in 1950, ‘was the supreme mystery of Maya religion, a subject which pervaded Maya thought to an extent without parallel in the history of mankind.’42

As I continued my journey through Central America I felt myself drawn ever more deeply into the labyrinths of that strange and awesome riddle.

36 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 54.

37 Mexico, pp. 669-71.
38 For further details, see The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 17: ‘These buildings probably confirm knowledge of a large body of star lore.’

39 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 53.

40 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 350.

41 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, pp. 44-5.
42 J. Eric Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Carnegie Institution, Washington DC, 1950, p. 155.

Chapter 20 - Children of the First Men


Palenque, Chiapas Province
Evening was settling in. I sat just beneath the north-east corner of the Mayan Temple of the Inscriptions and gazed north over the darkening jungle where the land dropped away towards the flood plain of the Usumacinta.

The Temple consisted of three chambers and rested on top of a nine-stage pyramid almost 100 feet tall. The clean and harmonious lines of this structure gave it a sense of delicacy, but not of weakness. It felt strong, rooted into the earth, enduring—a creature of pure geometry and imagination.

Looking to my right I could see the Palace, a spacious rectangular complex on a pyramidal base, dominated by a narrow, four-storied tower, thought to have been used as an observatory by Maya priests.

Around about me, where bright-feathered parrots and macaws skimmed the treetops, a number of other spectacular buildings lay half swallowed by the encroaching forest. These were the Temple of the Foliated Cross, the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Count, and the Temple of the Lion—all names made up by archaeologists. So much of what the Maya had stood for, cared about, believed in and remembered from earlier times was irretrievably lost. Though we’d long ago learned to read their dates, we were only just beginning to make headway with the deciphering of their intricate hieroglyphs.

I stood and climbed the last few steps into the central chamber of the Temple. Set into the rear wall were two great grey slabs, and inscribed on them, in regimented rows like pieces on a chequerboard, were 620 separate Mayan glyphs. These took the form of faces, monstrous and human, together with a writhing bestiary of mythical creatures.

What was being said here? No one knew for sure because the inscriptions, a mixture of word pictures and phonetic symbols, had not yet been fully decoded. It was evident, however, that a number of the glyphs referred to epochs thousands of years in the past, and spoke of people and gods who had played their parts in prehistoric events.1



1 The Atlas of Mysterious Places (ed. Jennifer Westwood), Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p. 70.



Pacal’s tomb
To the left of the hieroglyphs, let into the huge flagstones of the temple floor, was a steep descending internal stairway. This led to a room buried deep in the bowels of the pyramid, where the tomb of Lord Pacal lay. The stairs, of highly polished limestone blocks, were narrow and surprisingly slippery and moist. Adopting a crabbed, sideways stance, I switched on my torch and stepped gingerly down into the gloom, steadying myself against the southern wall as I did so.

This damp stairway had been a secret place from the date when it was originally sealed, in AD 683, until June 1952 when the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz lifted the flagstones in the temple floor. Although a second such tomb was found at Palenque in 1994,2 Ruz had the honour of being the first man to discover such a feature inside a New World pyramid. The stairway had been intentionally filled with rubble by its builders, and it took four more years before the archaeologists cleared it out completely and reached the bottom.

2 The Times, London, 4 June 1994.

When they had done so they entered a narrow corbel-vaulted chamber. Spread out on the floor in front of them were the mouldering skeletons of five or possibly six young victims of sacrifice. A huge triangular slab of stone was visible at the far end of the chamber. When it was removed, Ruz was confronted by a remarkable tomb.



He described it as,

‘an enormous room that appeared to be graven in ice, a kind of grotto whose walls and roof seemed to have been planed in perfect surfaces, or an abandoned chapel whose cupola was draped with curtains of stalactites, and from whose floor arose thick stalagmites like the dripping of a candle.’3

The room, also roofed with a corbel vault, was 30 feet long and 23 feet high. Around the walls, in stucco relief, could be seen the striding figures of the Lords of the Night—the ‘Ennead’ of nine deities who ruled over the hours of darkness. Centre-stage, and overlooked by these figures, was a huge monolithic sarcophagus lidded with a five-ton slab of richly carved stone. Inside the sarcophagus was a tall skeleton draped with a treasure trove of jade ornaments.

A mosaic death mask of 200 fragments of jade was affixed to the front of the skull. These, supposedly, were the remains of Pacal, a ruler of Palenque in the seventh century AD. The inscriptions stated that this monarch had been eighty years old at the time of his death, but the jade-draped skeleton the archaeologists found in the sarcophagus appeared to belong to a man half that age.4

Having reached the bottom of the stairway, some eighty-five feet below the floor of the temple, I crossed the chamber where the sacrificial victims had lain and gazed directly into Pacal’s tomb. The air was dank, full of mildew and damp-rot, and surprisingly cold. The sarcophagus, set into the floor of the tomb, had a curious shape, flared strikingly at the feet like an Ancient Egyptian mummy case. These were made of wood and were equipped with wide bases since they were frequently stood upright. But Pacal’s coffin was made of solid stone and was uncompromisingly horizontal.



Why, then, had the Mayan artificers gone to so much trouble to widen its base when they must have known that it served no useful purpose? Could they have been slavishly copying a design-feature from some ancient model long after the raison d’être for the design had been forgotten?5 Like the beliefs concerning the perils of the afterlife, might Pacal’s sarcophagus not be an expression of a common legacy linking Ancient Egypt with the ancient cultures of Central America?



3 Quoted in The Atlas of Mysterious Places, pp. 68-9.

4 Ibid. Michael D. Coe, The Maya, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991, pp. 108-9.

5 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 94-5.

Rectangular in shape, the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus was ten inches thick, three feet wide and twelve and a half feet long. It, too, seemed to have been modelled on the same original as the magnificent engraved blocks the Ancient Egyptians had used for this exact purpose.

Indeed, it would not have looked out of place in the Valley of the Kings. But there was one major difference. The scene carved on top of the sarcophagus lid was unlike anything that ever came out of Egypt. Lit in my torch beam, it showed a clean-shaven man dressed in what looked like a tight-fitting body-suit, the sleeves and leggings of which were gathered into elaborate cuffs at the wrists and ankles.

The man lay semi-reclined in a bucket seat which supported his lower back and thighs, the nape of his neck resting comfortably against some kind of headrest, and he was peering forward intently. His hands seemed to be in motion, as though they were operating levers and controls, and his feet were bare, tucked up loosely in front of him.

Was this supposed to be Pacal, the Maya king?

If so, why was he shown operating some kind of machine? The Maya weren’t supposed to have had machines. They weren’t even supposed to have discovered the wheel. Yet with its side panels, rivets, tubes and other gadgets, the structure Pacal reclined in resembled a technological device much more strongly than it did ‘the transition of one man’s living soul to the realms of the dead’,6 as one authority claimed, or the king ‘falling back into the fleshless jaws of the earth monster’,7 as another argued.

I remembered ‘Man in Snake’, the Olmec relief described in Chapter Seventeen. It, too, had looked like a naïve depiction of a piece of technology. Furthermore, ‘Man in Snake’ had come from La Venta, where it had been associated with several bearded figures, apparently Caucasians. Pacal’s tomb was at least a thousand years younger than any of the La Venta treasures.



Nevertheless, a tiny jade statuette was found lying close to the skeleton inside the sarcophagus, and it appeared to be much older than the other grave-goods also placed there. It depicted an elderly Caucasian, dressed in long robes, with a goatee beard.8



6 The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 70.

7 Time Among the Maya, p. 298.

8 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 95-6.





Pyramid of the Magician
Uxmal, Yucatan


On a stormy afternoon, 700 kilometers north of Palenque, I began to climb the steps of yet another pyramid. It was a steep building, oval rather than square in plan, 240 feet long at the base and 120 feet wide. It was, moreover, very high, rising 120 feet above the surrounding plain.

Since time out of mind this edifice, which did look like the castle of a necromancer, had been known as the ‘Pyramid of the Magician’ and also as the ‘House of the Dwarf’. These names were derived from a Maya legend which asserted that a dwarf with supernatural powers had raised the entire building in just one night.9

The steps, as I climbed them, seemed more and more perversely narrow. My instinct was to lean forward, flatten myself against the side of the pyramid, and cling on for dear life. Instead I looked up at the angry, overcast sky above me. Flocks of birds circled, screeching wildly as though seeking refuge from some impending disaster, and the thick mass of low-lying cloud that had blotted out the sun a few hours earlier was now so agitated by high winds that it seemed to boil.

The Pyramid of the Magician was by no means unique in being associated with the supernatural powers of dwarves, whose architectural and masonry skills were widely renowned in Central America.

‘Construction work was easy for them,’ asserted one typical Maya legend, ‘all they had to do was whistle and heavy rocks would move into place.’10

A very similar tradition, as the reader may recall, claimed that the gigantic stone blocks of the mysterious Andean city of Tiahuanaco had been ‘carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet’.11

In both Central America and in the far-off regions of the Andes, therefore, strange sounds had been associated with the miraculous levitation of massive rocks.

What was I to make of this?



Maybe, through some fluke, two almost identical ‘fantasies’ could have been independently invented in both these geographically remote areas. But that didn’t seem very likely. Equally worthy of consideration was the possibility that common recollections of an ancient building technology could have been preserved in stories such as these, a technology capable of lifting huge blocks of stone off the ground with ‘miraculous’ ease.



Could it be relevant that memories of almost identical miracles were preserved in Ancient Egypt? There, in one typical tradition, a magician was said to have raised into the air ‘a huge vault of stone 200 cubits long and 50 cubits broad’?12

9 Mexico: Rough Guide, Harrap-Columbus, London, 1989, p. 354.
10 The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 8. Maya History and Religion, p. 340.

11 See Chapter Ten.
12 E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, The Medici Society Ltd., 1911, volume II, p. 180.

The sides of the stairway I was climbing were richly decorated with what the nineteenth-century American explorer John Lloyd Stephens described as ‘a species of sculptured mosaic’.13 Oddly, although the Pyramid of the Magician had been built long centuries before the Conquest, the symbol most frequently featured in these mosaics was a close approximation of the Christian cross. Indeed there were two distinct kinds of ‘Christian’ crosses: one the wide-pawed croix-patte favoured by the Knights Templar and other crusading orders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the other the x-shaped Saint Andrew’s cross.

After climbing a further shorter flight of steps I reached the temple at the very top of the Magician’s pyramid. It consisted of a single corbel-vaulted chamber from the ceiling of which large numbers of bats hung suspended. Like the birds and the clouds, they were visibly distressed by the sense of a huge storm brewing. In a furry mass they shuffled restlessly upside down, folding and unfolding their small leathery wings.

I took a rest on the high platform that surrounded the chamber. From here, looking down, I could see many more crosses. They were everywhere, literally all over this bizarre and ancient structure. I remembered the Andean city of Tiahuanaco and the crosses that had been carved there, in distant pre-Colombian times, on some of the great blocks of stone lying scattered around the building known as Puma Punku.14 ‘Man in Snake’, the Olmec sculpture from La Venta, had also been engraved with two Saint Andrew’s crosses long before the birth of Christ.

13 John. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1841, vol. II, p. 422.

14 See Chapter Twelve.

And now, here at the Pyramid of the Magician in the Mayan site of Uxmal, I was confronted by crosses yet again.

Bearded men ...
Serpents ...
Crosses ...

How likely was it to be an accident that symbols as distinctive as these should repeat themselves in widely separated cultures and at different periods of history? Why were they so often built into the fabric of sophisticated works of art and architecture?



A science of prophecy
Not for the first time I suspected that I might be looking at signs and icons left behind by some cult or secret society which had sought to keep the light of civilization burning in Central America (and perhaps elsewhere) through long ages of darkness. I thought it notable that the motifs of the bearded man, the Plumed Serpent, and the cross all tended to crop up whenever and wherever there were hints that a technologically advanced and as yet unidentified civilization might once have been in contact with the native cultures.



And there was a sense of great age about this contact, as though it took place at such an early date that it had been almost forgotten. I thought again about the sudden way the Olmecs had emerged, around the middle of the second millennium BC, out of the swirling mists of opaque prehistory. All the archaeological evidence indicated that from the beginning they had venerated huge stone heads and stele showing bearded men.



I found myself increasingly drawn to the possibility that some of those remarkable pieces of sculpture could have been part of a vast inheritance of civilization handed down to the peoples of Central America many thousands of years before the second millennium BC, and thereafter entrusted to the safekeeping of a secret wisdom cult, perhaps the cult of Quetzalcoatl.

Much had been lost. Nevertheless the tribes of this region—in particular the Maya, the builders of Palenque and Uxmal—had preserved something even more mysterious and wonderful than the enigmatic monoliths, something which declared itself even more persistently to be the legacy of an older and a higher civilization.



We see in the next chapter that it was the mystical science of an ancient star-gazing folk, a science of time and measurement and prediction—a science of prophecy even—that the Maya had preserved most perfectly from the past. With it they inherited memories of a terrible, earth-destroying flood and an idiosyncratic legacy of empirical knowledge, knowledge of a high order which they shouldn’t really have possessed, knowledge that we have only reacquired very recently ...



Back to Contents





Chapter 21 - A Computer for Calculating the End of the World


The Maya knew where their advanced learning originated. It was handed down to them, they said, from the First Men, the creatures of Quetzalcoatl, whose names had been Balam-Quitze (Jaguar with the Sweet Smile), Balam-Acab (Jaguar of the Night), Mahucutah (The Distinguished Name) and Iqui-Balam (Jaguar of the Moon).1



According to the Popol Vuh, these forefathers:

were endowed with intelligence; they saw and instantly they could see far; they succeeded in seeing; they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. The things hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move ... Great was their wisdom; their sight reached to the forests, the rocks, the lakes, the seas, the mountains, and the valleys. In truth, they were admirable men ... They were able to know all, and they examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky, and the round face of the earth.2

The achievements of this race aroused the envy of several of the most powerful deities.

‘It is not well that our creatures should know all,’ opined these gods, ‘Must they perchance be the equals of ourselves, their Makers, who can see afar, who know all and see all? ... Must they also be gods?’3

Obviously such a state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. After some deliberation an order was given and appropriate action taken:

Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth ... Then the Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes which clouded their sight as when a mirror is breathed upon. Their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close, only that was clear to them ... In this way the wisdom and all the knowledge of the First Men were destroyed.4

Anyone familiar with the Old Testament will remember that the reason for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden had to do with similar divine concerns. After the First Man had eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

The Lord God said,

‘Behold, the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live for ever, [let us] send him forth from the Garden of Eden ...’5

1 Popol Vuh, p. 167.

2 Ibid., pp. 168-9.
3 Ibid., p. 169.
4 Ibid.
5 Genesis, 4:22-4

The Popol Vuh is accepted by scholars as a great reservoir of uncontaminated, pre-Colombian tradition.6 It is therefore puzzling to find such similarities between these traditions and those recorded in the Genesis story. Moreover, like so many of the other Old World/New World links we have identified, the character of the similarities is not suggestive of any kind of direct influence of one region on the other but of two different interpretations of the same set of events.



Thus, for example:

The biblical Garden of Eden looks like a metaphor for the state of blissful, almost ‘godlike’, knowledge that the ‘First Men’ of the Popol Vuh enjoyed.


The essence of this knowledge was the ability to ‘see all’ and to ‘know all’. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’?


Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to ‘see far’. Thereafter ‘their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close ...’

Both the Popol Vuh and Genesis therefore tell the story of mankind’s fall from grace. In both cases, this state of grace was closely associated with knowledge, and the reader is left in no doubt that the knowledge in question was so remarkable that it conferred godlike powers on those who possessed it.

The Bible, adopting a dark and muttering tone of voice, calls it ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ and has nothing further to add. The Popol Vuh is much more informative. It tells us that the knowledge of the First Men consisted of,

the ability to see ‘things hidden in the distance’, that they were astronomers who ‘examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky’, and that they were geographers who succeeded in measuring ‘the round face of the earth’.7

Geography is about maps. In Part I we saw evidence suggesting that the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization might have mapped the planet with great thoroughness at an early date. Could the Popol Vuh be transmitting some garbled memory of that same civilization when it speaks nostalgically of the First Men and of the miraculous geographical knowledge they possessed?

Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps).

Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying ‘the round face of the earth’ but for their contemplation of ‘the arch of heaven’?8 And is it a coincidence that the outstanding achievement of Mayan society was its observational astronomy, upon which, through the medium of advanced mathematical calculations, was based a clever, complex, sophisticated and very accurate calendar?

6 Popol Vuh, Introduction, p. 16. See also The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, p. 250ff.

7 Popol Vuh, pp. 168-9.

8 Ibid.


Knowledge out of place
In 1954 J. Eric Thompson, a leading authority on the archaeology of Central America, confessed to a deep sense of puzzlement at a number of glaring disparities he had identified between the generally unremarkable achievements of the Mayas, as a whole and the advanced state of their astro-calendrical knowledge,

‘What mental quirks,’ he asked, ‘led the Maya intelligentsia to chart the heavens, yet fail to grasp the principle of the wheel; to visualize eternity, as no other semi-civilized people has ever done, yet ignore the short step from corbelled to true arch; to count in millions, yet never to learn to weigh a sack of corn?’9

9 J. Eric Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, Pimlico, London, 1993, p. 13.



Perhaps the answer to these questions is much simpler than Thompson realized. Perhaps the astronomy, the deep understanding of time, and the long-term mathematical calculations, were not ‘quirks’ at all. Perhaps they were the constituent parts of a coherent but very specific body of knowledge that the Maya had inherited, more or less intact, from an older and wiser civilization.



Such an inheritance would explain the contradictions observed by Thompson, and there is no need for any dispute on the point. We already know that the Maya received their calendar as a legacy from the Olmecs (a thousand years earlier, the Olmecs were using exactly the same system). The real question, should be, where did the Olmecs get it? What kind of level of technological and scientific development was required for a civilization to devise a calendar as good as this?

Take the case of the solar year. In modern Western society we still make use of a solar calendar which was introduced in Europe in 1582 and is based on the best scientific knowledge then available: the famous Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar, which it replaced, computed the period of the earth’s orbit around the sun at 365.25 days.



Pope Gregory XIII’s reform substituted a finer and more accurate calculation: 365.2425 days. Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days. The Gregorian calendar therefore incorporates a very small plus error, just 0.0003 of a day— pretty impressive accuracy for the sixteenth century.

Strangely enough, though its origins are wrapped in the mists of antiquity far deeper than the sixteenth century, the Mayan calendar achieved even greater accuracy. It calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days, a minus error of only 0.0002 of a day.10

Similarly, the Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth. Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days—extremely close to the true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.11 The Mayan priests also had in their possession very accurate tables for the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses and were aware that these could occur only within plus or minus eighteen days of the node (when the moon’s path crosses the apparent path of the sun).12



Finally, the Maya were remarkably accomplished mathematicians. They possessed an advanced technique of metrical calculation by means of a chequerboard device we ourselves have only discovered (or rediscovered?) in the last century.13 They also understood perfectly and used the abstract concept of zero14 and were acquainted with place numerations.

These are esoteric fields. As Thompson observed,

The cipher (nought) and place numerations are so much parts of our cultural heritage and seem such obvious conveniences that it is difficult to comprehend how their invention could have been long delayed. Yet neither ancient Greece with its great mathematicians, nor ancient Rome, had any inkling of either nought or place numeration. To write 1848 in Roman numerals requires eleven letters: MDCCCXLVIII. Yet the Maya had a system of place-value notation very much like our own at a time when the Romans were still using their clumsy method.15

Isn’t it a bit odd that this otherwise unremarkable Central American tribe should, at such an early date, have stumbled upon an innovation which Otto Neugebauer, the historian of science, has described as ‘one of the most fertile inventions of humanity’.16



10 William Gates’s notes (p. 81) to Diego de Landa’s Yucatan before and after the Conquest.
11 This is evident from the Dresden Codex. See, for example, An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs, p. 32.
12 The Maya, p. 176; Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 291; The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 173.

13 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 287.

14 The Maya, p. 173.

15 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, pp. 178-9.

16 Cited in The Maya, p. 173.



Someone else’s science?
Let us now consider the question of Venus, a planet that was of immense symbolic importance to all the ancient peoples of Central America, who identified it strongly with Quetzalcoatl (or Gucumatz or Kukulkan, as the Plumed Serpent was known in the Maya dialects).17



17 World Mythology, p. 241.

Unlike the Ancient Greeks, but like the Ancient Egyptians, the Maya understood that Venus was both ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’.18 They understood other things about it as well. The ‘synodical revolution’ of a planet is the period of time it takes to return to any given point in the sky—as viewed from earth. Venus revolves around the sun every 224.7 days, while the earth follows its own slightly wider orbit. The composite result of these two motions is that Venus rises in exactly the same place in the earth’s sky approximately every 584 days.

Whoever invented the sophisticated calendrical system inherited by the Maya had been aware of this and had found ingenious ways to integrate it with other interlocking cycles. Moreover, it is clear from the mathematics which brought these cycles together that the ancient calendar masters had understood that 584 days was only an approximation and that the movements of Venus are by no means regular.



They had therefore worked out the exact figure established by today’s science for the average synodical revolution of Venus over very long periods of time.19 That figure is 583.92 days and it was knitted into the fabric of the Mayan calendar in numerous intricate and complex ways.20



For example, to reconcile it with the so-called ‘sacred year ’ (the tzolkin of 260 days, which was divided into 13 months of 20 days each) the calendar called for a correction of four days to be made every 61 Venus years. In addition, during every fifth cycle, a correction of eight days was made at the end of the 57th revolution. Once these steps were taken, the tzolkin and the synodical revolution of Venus were intermeshed so tightly that the degree of error to which the equation was subject was staggeringly small—one day in 6000 years.21



And what made this all the more remarkable was that a further series of precisely calculated adjustments kept the Venus cycle and the tzolkin not only in harmony with each other but in exact relationship with the solar year. Again this was achieved in a manner which ensured that the calendar was capable of doing its job, virtually error-free, over vast expanses of time.22

Why did the ‘semi-civilized’ Maya need this kind of high-tech precision? Or did they inherit, in good working order, a calendar engineered to fit the needs of a much earlier and far more advanced civilization?

Consider the crowning jewel of Maya calendrics, the so-called ‘Long Count’. This system of calculating dates also expressed beliefs about the past—notably, the widely held belief that time operated in Great Cycles which witnessed recurrent creations and destructions of the world. According to the Maya, the current Great Cycle began in darkness on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, a date corresponding to 13 August 3114 BC in our own calendar.23

18 The Maya, p. 176.

19 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 170; Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 290.
20 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 170.

21 Ibid., 170-1.
22 Ibid., 169.
23 Breaking The Maya Code, p. 275.

As we have seen, it was also believed that the cycle will come to an end, amid global destruction, on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin: 23 December AD 2012 in our calendar. The function of the Long Count was to record the elapse of time since the beginning of the current Great Cycle, literally to count off, one by one, the 5125 years allotted to our present creation.24

The Long Count is perhaps best envisaged as a sort of celestial adding machine, constantly calculating and recalculating the scale of our growing debt to the universe. Every last penny of that debt is going to be called in when the figure on the meter reads 5125.

So, at any rate, thought the Maya.

Calculations on the Long Count computer were not, of course, done in our numbers. The Maya used their own notation, which they had derived from the Olmecs, who had derived it from ... nobody knows. This notation was a combination of dots (signifying ones or units or multiples of twenty), bars (signifying fives or multiples of five times twenty), and a shell glyph signifying zero.



Spans of time were counted by days (kin), periods of twenty days (uinat), ‘computing years’ of 360 days (tun), periods of 20 tuns (known as katun), and periods of 20 katuns (known as bactun). There were also 8000-tun periods (pictun) and 160,000-tun periods (calabtun) to mop up even larger calculations.25

All this should make clear that although the Maya believed themselves to be living in one Great Cycle that would surely come to a violent end they also knew that time was infinite and that it proceeded with its mysterious revolutions regardless of individual lives or civilizations. As Thompson summed up in his great study on the subject:

In the Maya scheme the road over which time had marched stretched into a past so distant that the mind of man cannot comprehend its remoteness. Yet the Maya 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

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.



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 jungle-dwelling 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 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?



27 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:214.

28 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 168.

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?

Back to Contents or Back to El Tzolkin Maya





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.

Teotihuacan.




The Citadel, the Temple and the Map of Heaven
Teotihuacan, 50 kilometers 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 kilometers. 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 east-west 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


4 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 67.

Another, Professor Gerald Hawkins, had suggested that a ‘Sirius-Pleiades 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 plan 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


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.


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 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 kilometers 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



11 Ibid., pp. 266-9.
12 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 67.



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 star-mapping 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



13 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 221.

14 The Orion Mystery.


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 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



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.

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

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 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 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. 110
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.


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.



28 Ibid., p. 213.
29 Ibid.
30 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 72.

31 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 271-2.

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 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.

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 calendar, 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.

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.



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.

Mica does not leap to mind as an obvious general-purpose flooring 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



5 The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 16.

6 Mexico: Rough Guide, p. 217.

7 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 252.

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 master-builders 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.

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 artifacts 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 (10 inches x 2 x 3.14) and a circle with a radius of 7 inches will have a circumference of 43.96 inches (7 inches x 2 x 3.14).

These formulae using the value of pi for calculating circumference from either diameter or radius apply to all circles, no matter how large or how small, and also, of course, to all spheres and hemispheres. They seem relatively simple—with hindsight. Yet their discovery, which represented a revolutionary breakthrough in mathematics, is thought to have been made late in human history. The orthodox view is that Archimedes in the third century BC was the first man to calculate pi correctly at 3.14.8



Scholars do not accept that any of the mathematicians of the New World ever got anywhere near pi before the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. It is therefore disorienting to discover that the Great Pyramid at Giza (built more than 2000 years before the birth of Archimedes) and the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, which vastly predates the conquest, both incorporate the value of pi. They do so, moreover, in much the same way, and in a manner which leaves no doubt that the ancient builders on both sides of the Atlantic were thoroughly conversant with this transcendental number.

The principal factors involved in the geometry of any pyramid are (1) the height of the summit above the ground, and (2) the perimeter of the monument at ground level. Where the Great Pyramid is concerned, the ratio between the original height (481.3949 feet9) and the perimeter (3023.16 feet10) turns out to be the same as the ratio between the radius and the circumference of a circle, i.e. 2pi.11



Thus, if we take the pyramid’s height and multiply it by 2pi (as we would with a circle’s radius to calculate its circumference) we get an accurate read-out of the monument’s perimeter (481.3949 feet 2 x 3.14 = 3023.16 feet). Alternatively, if we turn the equation around and start with the circumference at ground level, we get an equally accurate read-out of the height of the summit (3023.16 feet divided by 2 divided by 3.14 = 481.3949 feet).

Since it is almost inconceivable that such a precise mathematical correlation could have come about by chance, we are obliged to conclude that the builders of the Great Pyramid were indeed conversant with pi and that they deliberately incorporated its value into the dimensions of their monument.

Now let us consider the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. The angle of its sides is 43.5° 12 (as opposed to 52° in the case of the Great Pyramid13).


The Mexican monument has the gentler slope because the perimeter of its base, at 2932.8 feet,14 is not much smaller than that of its Egyptian counterpart while its summit is considerably lower (approximately 233.5 feet prior to Bartres’s, ‘restoration’15).



8 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9:415.

9 I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin, London, 1949, p. 87.

10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 219.
12 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 55.

13 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 87, 219.

14 The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 74.

15 Mexico, p. 201; The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 156.


The 2pi formula that worked at the Great Pyramid does not work with these measurements. A 4pi formula does. Thus if we take the height of the Pyramid of the Sun (233.5 feet) and multiply it by 4pi we once again obtain a very accurate read-out of the perimeter: 233.5 feet x 4 x 3.14 = 2932.76 feet (a discrepancy of less than half an inch from the true figure of 2932.8 feet).

This, surely, can no more be a coincidence than the pi relationship extrapolated from the dimensions of the Egyptian monument. Moreover, the very fact that both structures incorporate pi relationships (when none of the other pyramids on either side of the Atlantic does) strongly suggests not only the existence of advanced mathematical knowledge in antiquity but some sort of underlying common purpose.

The height of the Pyramid of the Sun x 4pi = the perimeter of its base. The height of the Great Pyramid at Giza x 2pi = the perimeter of its base.

As we have seen the desired height/perimeter ratio of the Great Pyramid (2pi) called for the specification of a tricky and idiosyncratic angle of slope for its sides: 52°. Likewise, the desired height/perimeter ratio of the Pyramid of the Sun (4pi) called for the specification of an equally eccentric angle of slope: 43.5°.



If there had been no ulterior motive, it would surely have been simpler for the Ancient Egyptian and Mexican architects to have opted for 45° (which they could easily have obtained and checked by bisecting a right angle).

What could have been the common purpose that led the pyramid builders on both sides of the Atlantic to such lengths to structure the value of pi so precisely into these two remarkable monuments? Since there seems to have been no direct contact between the civilizations of Mexico and Egypt in the periods when the pyramids were built, is it not reasonable to deduce that both, at some remote date, inherited certain ideas from a common source?

Is it possible that the shared idea expressed in the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of the Sun could have to do with spheres, since these, like the pyramids, are three-dimensional objects (while circles, for example, have only two dimensions)?



The desire to symbolize spheres in three-dimensional monuments with flat surfaces would explain why so much trouble was taken to ensure that both incorporated unmistakable pi relationships. Furthermore it seems likely that the intention of the builders of both of these monuments was not to symbolize spheres in general but to focus attention on one sphere in particular: the planet earth.

It will be a long while before orthodox archaeologists are prepared to accept that some peoples of the ancient world were advanced enough in science to have possessed good information about the shape and size of the earth. However, according to the calculations of Livio Catullo Stecchini, an American professor of the History of Science and an acknowledged expert on ancient measurement, the evidence for the existence of such anomalous knowledge in antiquity is irrefutable.16



Stecchini’s conclusions, which relate mainly to Egypt, are particularly impressive because they are drawn from mathematical and astronomical data which, by common consent, are beyond serious dispute.17



16 The most accessible presentation of Stecchini’s work is in the appendix he wrote for Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 287-382.

17 See The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 95.


A fuller examination of these conclusions, and of the nature of the data on which they rest, is presented in Part VII. At this point, however, a few words from Stecchini may shed further light on the mystery that confronts us:

The basic idea of the Great Pyramid was that it should be a representation of the northern hemisphere of the earth, a hemisphere projected on flat-surfaces as is done in map-making ... The Great Pyramid was a projection on four triangular surfaces. The apex represented the pole and the perimeter represented the equator. This is the reason why the perimeter is in relation 2pi to the height. The Great Pyramid represents the northern hemisphere in a scale of 1:43,200.18 In Part VII we shall see why this scale was chosen.

18 Stecchini, in appendix to Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 378. The perimeter of the Great Pyramid equals exactly one-half minute of arc—see Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 279.




Mathematical city
Rising up ahead of me as I walked towards the northern end of the Street of the Dead, the Pyramid of the Moon, mercifully undamaged by restorers, had kept its original form as a four-stage ziggurat. The Pyramid of the Sun, too, had consisted of four stages but Bartres had whimsically sculpted in a fifth stage between the original third and fourth levels.

There was, however, one original feature of the Pyramid of the Sun that Bartres had been unable to despoil: a subterranean passageway leading from a natural cave under the west face. After its accidental discovery in 1971 this passageway was thoroughly explored. Seven feet high, it was found to run eastwards for more than 300 feet until it reached a point close to the pyramid’s geometrical centre.19



Here it debouched into a second cave, of spacious dimensions, which had been artificially enlarged into a shape very similar to that of a four-leaf clover. The ‘leaves’ were chambers, each about sixty feet in circumference, containing a variety of artefacts such as beautifully engraved slate discs and highly polished mirrors. There was also a complex drainage system of interlocking segments of carved rock pipes.20



19 The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 20.

20 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 335-9. 21 Ibid.


This last feature was particularly puzzling because there was no known source of water within the pyramid.21 The sluices, however, left little doubt that water must have been present in antiquity, most probably in large quantities. This brought to mind the evidence for water having once run in the Street of the Dead, the sluices and partition walls I had seen earlier to the north of the Citadel, and Schlemmer’s theory of reflecting pools and seismic forecasting.


Indeed, the more I thought about it the more it seemed that water had been the dominant motif at Teotihuacan. Though I had hardly registered it that morning, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl had been decorated not only with effigies of the Plumed Serpent but with unmistakable aquatic symbolism, notably an undulating design suggestive of waves and large numbers of beautiful carvings of seashells.



With these images in my mind, I reached the wide plaza at the base of the Pyramid of the Moon and imagined it filled with water, as it might have been, to a depth of about ten feet. It would have looked magnificent: majestic, powerful and serene.

The Akapana Pyramid in far-off Tiahuanaco had also been surrounded by water, which had been the dominant motif there—just as I now found it to be at Teotihuacan.

I began to climb the Pyramid of the Moon. It was smaller than the Pyramid of the Sun, indeed less than half the size, and was estimated to be made up of about one million tons of stone and earth, as against two and a half million tons in the case of the Pyramid of the Sun. The two monuments, in other words, had a combined weight of three and a half million tons. It was thought unlikely that this quantity of material could have been manipulated by fewer than 15,000 men and it was calculated that such a workforce would have taken at least thirty years to complete such an enormous task.22

Sufficient labourers would certainly have been available in the vicinity: the Teotihuacan Mapping Project had demonstrated that the population of the city in its heyday could have been as large as 200,000, making it a bigger metropolis than Imperial Rome of the Caesars. The Project had also established that the main monuments visible today covered just a small part of the overall area of ancient Teotihuacan.



At its peak the city had extended across more than twelve square miles and had incorporated some 50,000 individual dwellings in 2000 apartment compounds, 600 subsidiary pyramids and temples, and 500 ‘factory’ areas specializing in ceramic, figurine, lapidary, shell, basalt, slate and ground-stone work.23



22 The Riddle of the Pyramids, pp. 188-93.
23 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 281. See also The Cities of Ancient Mexico, p. 178 and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 226-36.

At the top level of the Pyramid of the Moon I paused and turned slowly around. Across the valley floor, which sloped gently downhill to the south, the whole of Teotihuacan now stretched before me—a geometrical city, designed and built by unknown architects in the time before history began. In the east, overlooking the arrow-straight Street of the Dead, loomed the Pyramid of the Sun, eternally ‘printing out’ the mathematical message it had been programmed with long ages ago, a message which seemed to direct our attention to the shape of the earth. It almost looked as though the civilization that had built Teotihuacan had made a deliberate choice to encode complex information in enduring monuments and to do it using a mathematical language.

Why a mathematical language?

Perhaps because, no matter what extreme changes and transformations human civilization might go through, the radius of a circle multiplied by 2pi (or half the radius multiplied by 4pi) would always give the correct figure for that circle’s circumference. In other words, a mathematical language could have been chosen for practical reasons: unlike any verbal tongue, such a code could always be deciphered, even by people from unrelated cultures living thousands of years in the future.

Not for the first time I felt myself confronted by the dizzying possibility that an entire episode in the story of mankind might have been forgotten. Indeed it seemed to me then, as I overlooked the mathematical city of the gods from the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, that our species could have been afflicted with some terrible amnesia and that the dark period so blithely and dismissively referred to as ‘prehistory’ might turn out to conceal unimagined truths about our own past.

What is prehistory, after all, if not a time forgotten—a time for which we have no records? What is prehistory if not an epoch of impenetrable obscurity through which our ancestors passed but about which we have no conscious remembrance? It was out of this epoch of obscurity, configured in mathematical code along astronomical and geodetic lines, that Teotihuacan with all its riddles was sent down to us.



And out of that same epoch came the great Olmec sculptures, the inexplicably precise and accurate calendar the Mayans inherited from their predecessors, the inscrutable geoglyphs of Nazca, the mysterious Andean city of Tiahuanaco ... and so many other marvels of which we do not know the provenance.

It is almost as though we have awakened into the daylight of history from a long and troubled sleep, and yet continue to be disturbed by the faint but haunting echoes of our dreams ...



Back to Contents



Back to Teotihuacan








Part IV

The Mystery of the Myths
1. A Species with Amnesia



Chapter 24 - Echoes of Our Dreams


In some of the most powerful and enduring myths that we have inherited from ancient times, our species seems to have retained a confused but resonant memory of a terrifying global catastrophe.

Where do these myths come from?

Why, though they derive from unrelated cultures, are their storylines so similar?

Why are they laden with common symbolism?

Why do they so often share the same stock characters and plots?

If they are indeed memories, why are there no historical records of the planetary disaster they seem to refer to?

Could it be that the myths themselves are historical records?

Could it be that these cunning and immortal stories, composed by anonymous geniuses, were the medium used to record such information and pass it on in the time before history began?


And the ark went upon the face of the waters
There was a king, in ancient Sumer, who sought eternal life. His name was Gilgamesh. We know of his exploits because the myths and traditions of Mesopotamia, inscribed in cuneiform script upon tablets of baked clay, have survived. Many thousands of these tablets, some dating back to the beginning of the third millennium BC, have been excavated from the sands of modern Iraq.



They transmit a unique picture of a vanished culture and remind us that even in those days of lofty antiquity human beings preserved memories of times still more remote—times from which they were separated by the interval of a great and terrible deluge:

I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.1

1 The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Classics, London, 1988, p. 61.


The story that Gilgamesh brought back had been told to him by a certain Utnapishtim, a king who had ruled thousands of years earlier, who had survived the great flood, and who had been rewarded with the gift of immortality because he had preserved the seeds of humanity and of all living things.

It was long, long ago, said Utnapishtim, when the gods dwelt on earth: Anu, lord of the firmament, Enlil, the enforcer of divine decisions, Ishtar, goddess of war and sexual love and Ea, lord of the waters, man’s natural friend and protector.

In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamour. Enlil heard the clamour and he said to the gods in council,

‘The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel.’ So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind.’2

Ea, however, took pity on Utnapishtim. Speaking through the reed wall of the king’s house he told him of the imminent catastrophe and instructed him to build a boat in which he and his family could survive:

Tear down your house and build a boat, abandon possessions and look for life, despise wordly goods and save your soul ... Tear down your house, I say, and build a boat with her dimensions in proportion—her width and length in harmony. Put aboard the seed of all living things, into the boat.3

In the nick of time Utnapishtim built the boat as ordered.

‘I loaded into her all that I had,’ he said, ‘loaded her with the seed of all living things’:



I put on board all my kith and kin, put on board cattle, wild beasts from open country, all kinds of craftsmen ... The time was fulfilled. When the first light of dawn appeared a black cloud came up from the base of the sky; it thundered within where Adad, lord of the storm was riding ... A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight to darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup ...


On the first day the tempest blew swiftly and brought the flood ... No man could see his fellow. Nor could the people be distinguished from the sky. Even the gods were afraid of the flood. They withdrew; they went up to the heaven of Anu and crouched in the outskirts. The gods cowered like curs while Ishtar cried, shrieking aloud, ‘Have I given birth unto these mine own people only to glut with their bodies the sea as though they were fish?’ 4

2 Ibid., p. 108.
3 Ibid., and Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 110.

4 Myths from Mesopotamia, pp. 112-13; Gilgamesh, pp. 109-11; Edmund Sollberger, The Babylonian Legend of the Flood, British Museum Publications, 1984, p. 26.



Meanwhile, continued Utnapishtim:

For six days and nights the wind blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts. When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea grew calm, the flood was stilled. I looked at the face of the world and there was silence. The surface of the sea stretched as flat as a roof-top. All mankind had returned to clay ... I opened a hatch and light fell on my face.



Then I bowed low, I sat down and I wept, the tears streamed down my face, for on every side was the waste of water ... Fourteen leagues distant there appeared a mountain, and there the boat grounded; on the mountain of Nisir the boat held fast, she held fast and did not budge ... When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting place she returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but finding no resting place she returned. I loosed a raven, she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed, and she did not come back.5

Utnapishtim knew that it was now safe to disembark:

I poured out a libation on the mountain top ... I heaped up wood and cane and
cedar and myrtle ... When the gods smelled the sweet savour they gathered like
flies over the sacrifice ...’6

These texts are not by any means the only ones to come down to us from the ancient land of Sumer. In other tablets—some almost 5000 years old, others less than 3000 years old—the ‘Noah figure’ of Utnapishtim is known variously as Zisudra, Xisuthros or Atrahasis. Even so, he is always instantly recognizable as the same patriarchal character, forewarned by the same merciful god, who rides out the same universal flood in the same storm-tossed ark and whose descendants repopulate the world.

There are many obvious resemblances between the Mesopotamian flood myth and the famous biblical story of Noah and the deluge7 (see note). Scholars argue endlessly about the nature of these resemblances. What really matters, however, is that in each sphere of influence the same solemn tradition has been preserved for posterity—a tradition which tells, in graphic language, of a global catastrophe and of the near-total annihilation of mankind.

5 Gilgamesh, p. 111.

6 Ibid.

7 Extracts from the Book of Genesis, Chapters Six, Seven and Eight:

God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart ... And God said, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence ... And behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life from under heaven; and everything that is in the earth shall die.

Saving only Noah and his family (whom he instructed to build a great survival ship 450 feet long x 75 feet wide x 45 feet high), and ordering the Hebrew patriarch to gather together breeding pairs of every living creature so that they too might be saved, the Lord then sent the flood:

In the selfsame day entered Noah and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the wives of his sons with them, into the Ark—they and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went in unto Noah into the Ark, two and two of all flesh wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded, and the Lord shut them in.

And the flood was upon the earth; and the waters increased and bare up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered ... And every man was destroyed, all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

In due course, ‘in the seventh month in the seventeenth day of the month, the Ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month’:

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth.

And he stayed yet another seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off; so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth ... And Noah went forth ... and builded an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled the sweet savour ...


Central America
The identical message was preserved in the Valley of Mexico, far away across the world from Mounts Ararat and Nisir. There, culturally and geographically isolated from Judaeo-Christian influences, long ages before the arrival of the Spaniards, stories were told of a great deluge.



As the reader will recall from Part III, it was believed that this deluge had swept over the entire earth at the end of the Fourth Sun:

‘Destruction came in the form of torrential rain and floods. The mountains disappeared and men were transformed into fish ...’8

According to Aztec mythology only two human beings survived: a man, Coxcoxtli, and his wife, Xochiquetzal, who had been forewarned of the cataclysm by a god. They escaped in a huge boat they had been instructed to build and came to ground on the peak of a tall mountain. There they descended and afterwards had many children who were dumb until the time when a dove on top of a tree gave them the gift of languages. These languages differed so much that the children could not understand one another.9



8 Maya History and Religion, p. 332.
9 Sir J. G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law (Abridged Edition), Macmillan, London, 1923, p. 107.

A related Central American tradition, that of the Mechoacanesecs, is in even more striking conformity with the story as we have it in Genesis and in the Mesopotamian sources. According to this tradition, the god Tezcatlipoca determined to destroy all mankind with a flood, saving only a certain Tezpi who embarked in a spacious vessel with his wife, his children and large numbers of animals and birds, as well as supplies of grains and seeds, the preservation of which were essential to the future subsistence of the human race.



The vessel came to rest on an exposed mountain top after Tezcatilpoca had decreed that the waters of the flood should retire. Wishing to find out whether it was now safe for him to disembark, Tezpi sent out a vulture which, feeding on the carcasses with which the earth was now strewn, did not return. The man then sent out other birds, of which only the hummingbird came back, with a leafy branch in its beak. With this sign that the land had begun to renew itself, Tezpi and his family went forth from their ark, multiplied and repopulated the earth. 10

Memories of a terrible flood resulting from divine displeasure are also preserved in the Popol Vuh. According to this archaic text, the Great God decided to create humanity soon after the beginning of time. It was an experiment and he began it with ‘figures made of wood that looked like men and talked like men’. These creatures fell out of favour because ‘they did not remember their Creator’:

And so a flood was brought about by the Heart of Heaven; a great flood was formed which fell on the heads of the wooden creatures ... A heavy resin fell from the sky ... the face of the earth was darkened and a black rain began to fall by day and by night ... The wooden figures were annihilated, destroyed, broken up and killed.’11

Not everyone perished, however. Like the Aztecs and the Mechoacanesecs, the Maya of the Yucatan and Guatemala believed that a Noah figure and his wife, ‘the Great Father and the Great Mother’, had survived the flood to populate the land anew, thus becoming the ancestors of all subsequent generations of humanity.12



10 Lenormant, writing in Contemporary Review, cited in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, p. 99.
11 Popol Vuh, p. 90.

12 Ibid., p. 93.



South America
Moving to South America, we encounter the Chibcas of central Colombia. According to their myths, they had originally lived as savages, without laws, agriculture or religion. Then one day there appeared among them an old man of a different race. He wore a thick long beard and his name was Bochica. He taught the Chibcas how to build huts and live together in society.

His wife, who was very beautiful and named Chia, appeared after him, but she was wicked and enjoyed thwarting her husband’s altruistic efforts. Since she could not overcome his power directly, she used magical means to cause a great flood in which the majority of the population died. Bochica was very angry and exiled Chia from the earth to the sky, where she became the moon given the task of lighting the nights.



He also caused the waters of the flood to dissipate and brought down the few survivors from the mountains where they had taken refuge. Thereafter he gave them laws, taught them to cultivate the land and instituted the worship of the sun with periodic festivals, sacrifices and pilgrimages. He then divided the power to govern among two chiefs and spent the remainder of his days on earth living in quiet contemplation as an ascetic. When he ascended to heaven he became a god.13

Farther south still, the Canarians, an Indian tribe of Ecuador, relate an ancient story of a flood from which two brothers escaped by going to the top of a high mountain. As the water rose the mountain grew higher, so that the two brothers survived the disaster.14

When they were discovered, the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil venerated a series of civilizing or creator heroes. The first of these heroes was Monan (ancient, old) who was said to have been the creator of mankind but who then destroyed the world with flood and fire ...15

Peru, as we saw in Part II, is particularly rich in flood legends. A typical story tells of an Indian who was warned by a llama of a deluge. Together man and llama fled to a high mountain called Vilca-Coto:

When they reached the top of the mountain they saw that all kinds of birds and animals had already taken refuge there. The sea began to rise, and covered all the plains and mountains except the top of Vilca-Coto; and even there the waves dashed up so high that the animals were forced to crowd into a narrow area ... Five days later the water ebbed, and the sea returned to its bed. But all human beings except one were drowned, and from him are descended all the nations on earth.16

The Araucnaians of pre-Colombian Chile preserved a tradition that there was once a flood which very few Indians escaped. The survivors took refuge on a high mountain called Thegtheg (‘the thundering’ or ‘the glittering’) which had three peaks and the ability to float on water.17

In the far south of the continent a Yamana legend from Tierra del Fuego states:

‘The moon woman caused the flood. This was at the time of the great upheaval ... Moon was filled with hatred towards human beings ... At that time everybody drowned with the exception of those few who were able to escape to the five mountain peaks that the water did not cover.’18

Another Tierra del Fuegan tribe, the Pehuenche, associate the flood with a prolonged period of darkness:

‘The sun and the moon fell from the sky and the world stayed that way, without light, until finally two giant condors carried both the sun and the moon back up to the sky.’19

13 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 440; Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 105.
14 Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 104.

15 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 445.

16 Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 105.

17 Ibid., p. 101.
18 John Bierhorst, The Mythology of South America, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1988, p. 165.

19 Ibid., pp. 165-6.



North America
Meanwhile, at the other end of the Americas, among the Inuit of Alaska, there existed the tradition of a terrible flood, accompanied by an earthquake, which swept so rapidly over the face of the earth that only a few people managed to escape in their canoes or take refuge on the tops of the highest mountains, petrified with terror.20

The Luiseno of lower California had a legend that a flood covered the mountains and destroyed most of mankind. Only a few were saved because they fled to the highest peaks which were spared when all the rest of the world was inundated. The survivors remained there until the flood ended.21



Farther north similar flood myths were recorded amongst the Hurons.22 And a legend of the Montagnais, belonging to the Algonquin family, related how Michabo, or the Great Hare, re-established the world after the flood with the help of a raven, an otter and a muskrat.23

Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, an authoritative work of the nineteenth century which preserved many indigenous traditions that would otherwise have been lost, reports an Iroquois myth that ‘the sea and waters had at one time infringed upon the land, so that all human life was destroyed’.



The Chickasaws asserted that the world had been destroyed by water ‘but that one family was saved and two animals of every kind’. The Sioux also spoke of a time when there was no dry land and when all men disappeared from existence.24



20 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 426.

21 Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 111-12.

22 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 431.
23 Ibid., pp. 428-9; Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 115. In this version the character of Michabo is called Messou.

24 From Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 117.


Water water everywhere
How far and how widely across the myth memories of mankind do the ripples of the great flood spread?

Very widely indeed. More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.25


25 Frederick A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered: A Review of the Evidences of Geology, Archaeology, Ancient Literature and the Bible, Pickering and Inglis Ltd., London, 1970, p. 58. Andree was an eminent German geographer and anthropologist. His monograph on diluvial traditions is described by J. G. Frazer (in Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 46-7) as ‘a model of sound learning and good sense set forth with the utmost clearness and conciseness ...’

For example, early Jesuit scholars who were among the first Europeans to visit China had the opportunity in the Imperial Library to study a vast work, consisting of 4320 volumes, said to have been handed down from ancient times and to contain ‘all knowledge’. This great book included a number of traditions which told of the consequences that followed ‘when mankind rebelled against the high gods and the system of the universe fell into disorder’:

‘The planets altered their courses. The sky sank lower towards the north. The sun, moon and stars changed their motions. The earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upwards with violence and overflowed the earth.’26

In the Malaysian tropical forest the Chewong people believe that every so often their own world, which they call Earth Seven, turns upside down so that everything is flooded and destroyed. However, through the agency of the Creator God Tohan, the flat new surface of what had previously been the underside of Earth Seven is moulded into mountains, valleys and plains. New trees are planted, and new humans born.27

A flood myth of Laos and northern Thailand has it that beings called the Thens lived in the upper kingdom long ages ago, while the masters of the lower world were three great men, Pu Leng Seung, Khun K’an and Khun K’et. One day the Thens announced that before eating any meal people should give them a part of their food as a sign of respect. The people refused and in a rage the Thens created a flood which devastated the whole earth. The three great men built a raft, on top of which they made a small house, and embarked with a number of women and children. In this way they and their descendants survived the deluge.28

In similar fashion the Karens of Burma have traditions of a global deluge from which two brothers were saved on a raft.29 Such a deluge is also part of the mythology of Viet Nam, where a brother and a sister are said to have survived in a great wooden chest which also contained two of every kind of animal.30

Several aboriginal Australian peoples, especially those whose traditional homelands are along the tropical northern coast, ascribe their origins to a great flood which swept away the previous landscape and society. Meanwhile, in the origin myths of a number of other tribes, the cosmic serpent Yurlunggur (associated with the rainbow) is held responsible for the deluge.31


26 Reported in Charles Berlitz, The Lost Ship of Noah, W. H. Allen, London, 1989, p. 126.

27 World Mythology, pp. 26-7.

28 Ibid., p. 305.
29 Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 81.

30 Ibid.
31 World Mythology, p. 280.


There are Japanese traditions according to which the Pacific islands of Oceania were formed after the waters of a great deluge had receded.32 In Oceania itself a myth of the native inhabitants of Hawaii tells how the world was destroyed by a flood and later recreated by a god named Tangaloa. The Samoans believe that there was once an inundation that wiped out almost all mankind. It was survived only by two human beings who put to sea in a boat which eventually came to rest in the Samoan archipelago.33

32 E. Sykes, Dictionary Of Non-Classical Mythology, London, 1961, p. 119.
33 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 460, 466.



Greece, India and Egypt
On the other side of the world, Greek mythology too is haunted by memories of a deluge. Here, however (as in Central America) the inundation is not viewed as an isolated event but as one of a series of destructions and remakings of the world. The Aztecs and the Maya spoke in terms of successive ‘Suns’ or epochs (of which our own was thought to be the Fifth and last).



In similar fashion the oral traditions of Ancient Greece, collected and set down in writing by Hesiod in the eighth century BC, related that prior to the present creation there had been four earlier races of men on earth. Each of these was thought more advanced than the one that followed it. And each, at the appointed hour, had been ‘swallowed up’ in a geological cataclysm.

The first and most ancient creation had been mankind’s ‘golden race’ who had,

‘lived like the gods, free from care, without trouble or woe ... With ageless limbs they revelled at their banquets ... When they died it was as men overcome by sleep.’

With the passing of time, and at the command of Zeus, this golden race eventually ‘sank into the depths of the earth’. It was succeeded by the ‘silver race’ which was supplanted by the ‘bronze race’, which was replaced by the race of ‘heroes’, which was followed by the ‘iron’ race—our own—the fifth and most recent creation.34

It is the fate of the bronze race that is of particular interest to us here. Described in the myths as having ‘the strength of giants, and mighty hands on their mighty limbs’,35 these formidable men were exterminated by Zeus, king of the gods, as a punishment for the misdeeds of Prometheus, the rebellious Titan who had presented humanity with the gift of fire.36 The mechanism the vengeful deity used to sweep the earth clean was an overwhelming flood.



34 C. Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, Thames & Hudson, London, 1974, pp. 226-9.

35 Ibid.
36 World Mythology, pp. 130-1.

In the most widespread version of the story Prometheus impregnated a human female. She bore him a son named Deucalion, who ruled over the country of Phthia, in Thessaly, and took to wife Pyrrha, ‘the red-blonde’, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. When Zeus reached his fateful decision to destroy the bronze race, Deucalion, forewarned by Prometheus, made a wooden box, stored in it ‘all that was necessary’, and climbed into it with Pyrrha.



The king of the gods caused mighty rains to pour from heaven, flooding the greater part of the earth. All mankind perished in this deluge, save a few who had fled to the highest mountains.

‘It also happened at this time that the mountains of Thessaly were split asunder, and the whole country as far as the Isthmus and the Peloponnese became a single sheet of water.’

Deucalion and Pyrrha floated over this sea in their box for nine days and nights, finally landing on Mount Parnassus. There, after the rains had ceased, they disembarked and sacrificed to the gods. In response Zeus sent Hermes to Deucalion with permission to ask for whatever he wished. He wished for human beings. Zeus then bade him take stones and throw them over his shoulder. The stones Deucalion threw became men, and those that Pyrrha threw became women.37

As the Hebrews looked back on Noah, so the Greeks of ancient historical times looked back upon Deucalion—as the ancestor of their nation and as the founder of numerous towns and temples.38

A similar figure was revered in Vedic India more than 3000 years ago. One day (the story goes) when a certain wise man named Manu was making his ablutions, he found in the hollow of his hand a tiny little fish which begged him to allow it to live. Taking pity on it he put it in a jar. The next day, however, it had grown so much bigger that he had to carry it to a lake. Soon the lake was too small.

‘Throw me into the sea,’ said the fish [which was in reality a manifestation of the god Vishnu] ‘and I shall be more comfortable.’

Then he warned Manu of a coming deluge. He sent him a large ship, with orders to load it with two of every living species and the seeds of every plant, and then to go on board himself.’39

Manu had only just carried out these orders when the ocean rose and submerged everything, and nothing was to be seen but Vishnu in his fish form—now a huge, one-horned creature with golden scales. Manu moored his ark to the horn of the fish and Vishnu towed it across the brimming waters until it came to rest on the exposed peak of ‘the Mountain of the North’:40

The fish said, ‘I have saved thee; fasten the vessel to a tree, that the water may not sweep it away while thou art on the mountain; and in proportion as the waters decrease thou shalt descend.’

Manu descended with the waters. The Deluge had carried away all creatures and Manu remained alone.41



37 The Gods of the Greeks, pp. 226-9.

38 World Mythology, pp. 130-1.

39 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 362.
40 Ibid., Satapatha Brahmana, (trans. Max Muller), cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 87.

41 Ibid. See also Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 78-9.


With him, and with the animals and plants he had saved from destruction, began a new age of the world. After a year there emerged from the waters a woman who announced herself as ‘the daughter of Manu’. The couple married and produced children, thus becoming the ancestors of the present race of mankind.42

Last but by no means least, Ancient Egyptian traditions also refer to a great flood. A funerary text discovered in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, for example, tells of the destruction of sinful humanity by a deluge.43 The reasons for this catastrophe are set out in Chapter CLXXV of the Book of the Dead, which attributes the following speech to the Moon God Thoth:

They have fought fights, they have upheld strifes, they have done evil, they have created hostilities, they have made slaughter, they have caused trouble and oppression ... [Therefore] I am going to blot out everything which I have made. This earth shall enter into the watery abyss by means of a raging flood, and will become even as it was in primeval time.44

42 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 7:798. The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, London, 1981, pp. 100-1.

43 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 48.
44 From the Theban Recension of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted in From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 198.





On the trail of a mystery
With the words of Thoth we have come full circle to the Sumerian and biblical floods. ‘The earth was filled with violence’, says Genesis: And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah,

‘The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold I will destroy them with the earth.’45

45 Genesis, 6:11-13.

Like the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Manu, and the flood that destroyed the Aztecs’ ‘Fourth Sun’, the biblical deluge was the end of a world age. A new age succeeded it: our own, populated by the descendants of Noah. From the very beginning, however, it was understood that this age too would in due course come to a catastrophic end. As the old song puts it, ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, the fire next time.’

The Scriptural source for this prophecy of world destruction is to be found in 2 Peter 3:

We must be careful to remember that during the last days there are bound to be people who will be scornful and [who will say], ‘Everything goes on as it has since it began at the creation’.

They are choosing to forget that there were heavens at the beginning, and that the earth was formed by the word of God out of water and between the waters, so that the world of that time was destroyed by being flooded by water.



But by the same word, the present sky and earth are destined for fire, and are only being reserved until Judgment Day so that all sinners may be destroyed ... The Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, and the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up.46

The Bible, therefore, envisages two ages of the world, our own being the second and last. Elsewhere, in other cultures, different numbers of creations and destructions are recorded. In China, for instance, the perished ages are called kis, ten of which are said to have elapsed from the beginning of time until Confucius. At the end of each kis, ‘in a general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring up out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined, and the ancient traces effaced ...’47

Buddhist scriptures speak of ‘Seven Suns’, each brought to an end by water, fire or wind.48 At the end of the Seventh Sun, the current ‘world cycle’, it is expected that the ‘earth will break into flames’.49 Aboriginal traditions of Sarawak and Sabah recall that the sky was once ‘low’ and tell us that ‘six Suns perished ... at present the world is illuminated by the seventh Sun’.50



Similarly, the Sibylline Books speak of nine Suns that are nine ages’ and prophesy two ages yet to come—those of the eighth and the ninth Sun.’51

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Hopi Indians of Arizona (who are distant relatives of the Aztecs52) record three previous Suns, each culminating in a great annihilation followed by the gradual reemergence of mankind. In Aztec cosmology, of course, there were four Suns prior to our own. Such minor differences concerning the precise number of destructions and creations envisaged in this or that mythology should not distract us from the remarkable convergence of ancient traditions evident here.



46 2 Peter 3:3-10.
47 See H. Murray, J. Crawford et al., An Historical and Descriptive Account of China, 2nd edition, 1836, volume I, p. 40. See also G. Schlegel, Uranographie chinoise, 1875, p. 740.
48 Warren, Buddhism in Translations, p. 322.

49 Ibid.
50 Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, p. 178.

51 Worlds in Collision, p. 35.

52 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6:53.


All over the world these traditions appear to commemorate a widespread series of catastrophes. In many cases the character of each successive cataclysm is obscured by the use of poetic language and the piling up of metaphor and symbols. Quite frequently, also, at least two different kinds of disaster may be portrayed as having occurred simultaneously (most frequently floods and earthquakes, but sometimes fire and a terrifying darkness).

All this contributes to the creation of a confused and jumbled picture. The myths of the Hopi, however, stand out for their straightforwardness and simplicity.



What they tell us is this:

The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator’s plans.53

53 World Mythology, p. 26. Details of the Hopi world destruction myths are in Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi, Penguin, London, 1977.



We are on the trail of a mystery here. And while we may never hope to fathom the plans of the Creator we should be able to reach a judgment concerning the riddle of our converging myths of global destruction.

Through these myths the voices of the ancients speak to us directly. What are they trying to say?


Back to Contents




Chapter 25 - The Many Masks of the Apocalypse


Like the Hopi Indians of North America, the Avestic Aryans of pre-Islamic Iran believed that there were three epochs of creation prior to our own. In the first epoch men were pure and sinless, tall and long lived, but at its close the Evil One declared war against Ahura Mazda, the holy god, and a tumultuous cataclysm ensued.



During the second epoch the Evil One was unsuccessful. In the third good and evil were exactly balanced. In the fourth epoch (the present age of the world), evil triumphed at the outset and has maintained its supremacy ever since.1

The end of the fourth epoch is predicted soon, but it is the cataclysm at the end of the first epoch that interests us here. It is not a flood, and yet it converges in so many ways with so many global flood traditions that some connection is strongly suggested.

The Avestic scriptures take us back to a time of paradise on earth, when the remote ancestors of the ancient Iranian people lived in the fabled Airyana Vaejo, the first good and happy creation of Ahura Mazda that flourished in the first age of the world: the mythical birthplace and original home of the Aryan race.

In those days Airyana Vaejo enjoyed a mild and productive climate with seven months of summer and five of winter. Rich in wildlife and in crops, its meadows flowing with streams, this garden of delights was converted into an uninhabitable wasteland of ten months’ winter and only two months summer as a result of the onslaught of Angra Mainyu, the Evil One:

The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created was the Airyana Vaejo ... Then Angra Mainyu, who is full of death, created an opposition to the same, a mighty serpent and snow. Ten months of winter are there now, two months of summer, and these are cold as to the water, cold as to the earth, cold as to the trees ... There all around falls deep snow; that is the direst of plagues ...’2

The reader will agree that a sudden and drastic change in the climate of Airyana Vaejo is indicated. The Avestic scriptures leave us in no doubt about this. Earlier they describe a meeting of the celestial gods called by Ahura Mazda, and tell us that ‘the fair Yima, the good shepherd of high renown in the Airyana Vaejo’, attended this meeting with all his excellent mortals.

1 The Bundahish Chapters I, XXXI, XXXIV, cited in William F. Warren, Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1885, p. 282.
2 Vendidad, Fargard I, cited in Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Tilak Publishers, Poona, 1956, pp. 340-1.

It is at this point that the strange parallels with the traditions of the biblical flood begin to crop up, for Ahura Mazda takes advantage of the meeting to warn Yima of what is about to happen as a result of the powers of the Evil One:

And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima saying:



‘Yima the fair ... Upon the material world a fatal winter is about to descend, that shall bring a vehement, destroying frost. Upon the corporeal world will the evil of winter come, wherefore snow will fall in great abundance. ...

‘And all three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and those that live on the tops of the mountains, and those that live in the depths of the valleys under the shelter of stables.

‘Therefore make thee a var [a hypogeum or underground enclosure] the length of a riding ground to all four corners. Thither bring thou the representatives of every kind of beast, great and small, of the cattle, of the beasts of burden, and of men, of dogs, of birds, and of the red burning fires.3

‘There shalt thou make water flow. Thou shall put birds in the trees along the water’s edge, in verdure which is everlasting. There put specimens of all plants, the loveliest and most fragrant, and of all fruits the most succulent. All these kinds of things and creatures shall not perish as long as they are in the var. But put there no deformed creature, nor impotent, nor mad, neither wicked, nor deceitful, nor rancorous, nor jealous; nor a man with irregular teeth, nor a leper ...’4

Apart from the scale of the enterprise there is only one real difference between Yima’s divinely inspired var and Noah’s divinely inspired ark: the ark is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water; the var is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating ‘winter’ which will destroy every living creature by covering the earth with a freezing blanket of ice and snow.

In the Bundahish, another of the Zoroastrian scriptures (believed to incorporate ancient material from a lost part of the original Avesta), more information is provided on the cataclysm of glaciation that overwhelmed Airyana Vaejo. When Angra Mainyu sent the ‘vehement destroying frost’, he also ‘assaulted and deranged the sky’.5



The Bundahish tells us that this assault enabled the Evil One to master ‘one third of the sky and overspread it with darkness’ as the encroaching ice sheets tightened their grip.6

3 Vendidad, Fargard II, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 300, 353-4.

4 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 320.

5 West, Pahlavi Texts Part I, p. 17, London, 1880.

6 Ibid.; Justi, Der Bundahish, Leipzig, 1868, p. 5.



Indescribable cold, fire, earthquakes and derangement of the skies
The Avestic Aryans of Iran, who are known to have migrated to western Asia from some other, distant homeland,7 are not the only possessors of archaic traditions which echo the basic setting of the great flood in ways unlikely to be coincidental.



Indeed, though these are most commonly associated with the deluge, the familiar themes of the divine warning, and of the salvation of a remnant of mankind from a universal disaster, are also found in many different parts of the world in connection with the sudden onset of glacial conditions.

In South America, for example, Toba Indians of the Gran Chaco region that sprawls across the modern borders of Paraguay, Argentina and Chile, still repeat an ancient myth concerning the advent of what they call ‘the Great Cold’.



Forewarning comes from a semi-divine hero figure named Asin:

Asin told a man to gather as much wood as he could and to cover his hut with a thick layer of thatch, because a time of great cold was coming. As soon as the hut had been prepared Asin and the man shut themselves inside and waited. When the great cold set in, shivering people arrived to beg a firebrand from them. Asin was hard and gave embers only to those who had been his friends.



The people were freezing, and they cried the whole night. At midnight they were all dead, young and old, men and women ... this period of ice and sleet lasted for a long time and all the fires were put out. Frost was as thick as leather.8

As in the Avestic traditions it seems that the great cold was accompanied by great darkness. In the words of one Toba elder, these afflictions were sent ‘because when the earth is full of people it has to change. The population has to be thinned out to save the world ... In the case of the long darkness the sun simply disappeared and the people starved. As they ran out of food, they began eating their children. Eventually they all died ...9

The Mayan Popol Vuh associates the flood, with ‘much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold’.10 It also says that this was a period when ‘it was cloudy and twilight all over the world ... the faces of the sun and the moon were covered.’11



Other Maya sources confirm that these strange and terrible phenomena were experienced by mankind,

‘in the time of the ancients. The earth darkened ... It happened that the sun was still bright and clear. Then, at midday, it got dark ...12 Sunlight did not return till the twenty-sixth year after the flood.’13

7 The Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 390ff.

8 The Mythology of South America, pp. 143-4

9 Ibid., p. 144.
10 Popol Vuh, p. 178.

11 Ibid., p. 93.
12 The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 41.

13 Maya History and Religion, p. 333.

The reader may recall that many deluge and catastrophe myths contain references not only to the onset of a great darkness but to other changes in the appearance of the heavens. In Tierra del Fuego, for instance, it was said that the sun and the moon ‘fell from the sky’14 and in China that ‘the planets altered their courses. The sun, moon and stars changed their motions.’15



The Incas believed that ‘in ancient times the Andes were split apart when the sky made war on the earth.’16 The Tarahumara of northern Mexico have preserved world destruction legends based on a change in the sun’s path.17 An African myth from the lower Congo states that ‘long ago the sun met the moon and threw mud at it, which made it less bright. When this meeting happened there was a great flood ...’18



The Cahto Indians of California say simply that ‘the sky fell’.19 And ancient Graeco-Roman myths tell that the flood of Deucalion was immediately preceded by awesome celestial events.20 These events are graphically symbolized in the story of how Phaeton, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot but was unable to guide it along his father’s course:

Soon the fiery horses felt how their reins were in an unpracticed hand. Rearing and swerving aside, they left their wonted way; then all the earth was amazed to see that the glorious Sun, instead of holding his stately, beneficent course across the sky, seemed to speed crookedly overhead and to rush down in wrath like a meteor.’21

This is not the place to speculate on what may have caused the alarming disturbances in the patterns of the heavens that are linked with cataclysm legends from all over the world. For our purposes at present, it is sufficient to note that such traditions seem to refer to the same ‘derangement of the sky’ that accompanied the fatal winter and spreading ice sheets described in the Iranian Avesta.22



Other linkages occur. Fire, for example, often follows or precedes the flood. In the case of Phaeton’s adventure with the Sun,

‘the grass withered; the crops were scorched; the woods went up in fire and smoke; then beneath them the bare earth cracked and crumbled and the blackened rocks burst asunder under the heat.’23

14 See Chapter Twenty-four.
15 Ibid.
16 National Geographic Magazine, June 1962, p. 87.

17 The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, p. 79.

18 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 481.

19 The Mythology of all Races, Cooper Square Publishers Inc., New York, 1964, volume X, p. 222.
20 See particularly the writings of Hyginus, cited in Paradise Found, p. 195. See also The Gods of the Greeks, p. 195.

21 The Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, p. 15-17.
22 The Iranian Bundahish tells us that the planets ran against the sky and created confusion in the entire cosmos.

23 The Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, p. 17.

Volcanism and earthquakes are also mentioned frequently in association with the flood, particularly in the Americas. The Araucanians of Chile say quite explicitly that ‘the flood was the result of volcanic eruptions accompanied by violent earthquakes.’24 The Mam Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango in the western highlands of Guatemala retain memories of ‘a flood of burning pitch’ which, they say, was one of the instruments of world destruction.25



And in the Gran Chaco of Argentina, the Mataco Indians tell of ‘a black cloud that came from the south at the time of the flood and covered the whole sky. Lightning struck and thunder was heard. Yet the drops that fell were not like rain. They were like fire ...’26



24 Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 101.

25 Maya History and Religion, p. 336.

26 The Mythology of South America, pp. 140-2.



A monster chased the sun
There is one ancient culture that perhaps preserves more vivid memories in its myths than any other; that of the so-called Teutonic tribes of Germany and Scandinavia, a culture best remembered through the songs of the Norse scalds and sages. The stories those songs retell have their roots in a past which may be much older than scholars imagine and which combine familiar images with strange symbolic devices and allegorical language to recall a cataclysm of awesome magnitude:

In a distant forest in the east an aged giantess brought into the world a whole brood of young wolves whose father was Fenrir. One of these monsters chased the sun to take possession of it. The chase was for long in vain, but each season the wolf grew in strength, and at last he reached the sun. Its bright rays were one by one extinguished. It took on a blood red hue, then entirely disappeared.

Thereafter the world was enveloped in hideous winter. Snow-storms descended from all points of the horizon. War broke out all over the earth. Brother slew brother, children no longer respected the ties of blood. It was a time when men were no better than wolves, eager to destroy each other. Soon the world was going to sink into the abyss of nothingness.

Meanwhile the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods had long ago so carefully chained up, broke his bonds at last and escaped. He shook himself and the world trembled. The ash tree Yggdrasil [envisaged as the axis of the earth] was shaken from its roots to its topmost branches. Mountains crumbled or split from top to bottom, and the dwarfs who had their subterranean dwellings in them sought desperately and in vain for entrances so long familiar but now disappeared.

Abandoned by the gods, men were driven from their hearths and the human race was swept from the surface of the earth. The earth itself was beginning to lose its shape. Already the stars were coming adrift from the sky and falling into the gaping void. They were like swallows, weary from too long a voyage, who drop and sink into the waves.

The giant Surt set the entire earth on fire; the universe was no longer more than an immense furnace. Flames spurted from fissures in the rocks; everywhere there was the hissing of steam. All living things, all plant life, were blotted out. Only the naked soil remained, but like the sky itself the earth was no more than cracks and crevasses.

And now all the rivers, all the seas, rose and overflowed. From every side waves lashed against waves. They swelled and boiled slowly over all things. The earth sank beneath the sea ...

Yet not all men perished in the great catastrophe. Enclosed in the wood itself of the ash tree Yggdrasil—which the devouring flames of the universal conflagration had been unable to consume—the ancestors of a future race of men had escaped death. In this asylum they had found that their only nourishment had been the morning dew.

Thus it was that from the wreckage of the ancient world a new world was born. Slowly the earth emerged from the waves. Mountains rose again and from them streamed cataracts of singing waters.27

The new world this Teutonic myth announces is our own. Needless to say, like the Fifth Sun of the Aztecs and the Maya, it was created long ago and is new no longer. Can it be a coincidence that one of the many Central American flood myths about the fourth epoch, 4 Atl (‘water’), does not install the Noah couple in an ark but places them instead in a great tree just like Yggdrasil? ‘4 Atl was ended by floods.



The mountains disappeared ... Two persons survived because they were ordered by one of the gods to bore a hole in the trunk of a very large tree and to crawl inside when the skies fell. The pair entered and survived. Their offspring repopulated the world.’28



27 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 275-7.

28 Maya History and Religion, p. 332.

Isn’t it odd that the same symbolic language keeps cropping up in ancient traditions from so many widely scattered regions of the world?

How can this be explained?

Are we talking about some vast, subconscious wave of intercultural telepathy, or could elements of these remarkable universal myths have been engineered, long ages ago, by clever and purposeful people?

Which of these improbable propositions is the more likely to be true?

Or are there other possible explanations for the enigma of the myths?

We shall return to these questions in due course. Meanwhile, what are we to conclude about the apocalyptic visions of fire and ice, floods, volcanism and earthquakes, which the myths contain? They have about them a haunting and familiar realism. Could this be because they speak to us of a past we suspect to be our own but can neither remember clearly nor forget completely?

Chapter 26 - A Species Born in the Earth’s Long Winter


In all that we call ‘history’—everything we clearly remember about ourselves as a species—humanity has not once come close to total annihilation. In various regions at various times there have been terrible natural disasters. But there has not been a single occasion in the past 5000 years when mankind as a whole can be said to have faced extinction.

Has this always been so? Or is it possible, if we go back far enough, that we might discover an epoch when our ancestors were nearly wiped out? It is just such an epoch that seems to be the focus of the great myths of cataclysm. Scholars normally attribute these myths to the fantasies of ancient poets. But what if the scholars are wrong? What if some terrible series of natural catastrophes did reduce our prehistoric ancestors to a handful of individuals scattered here and there across the face of the earth, far apart, and out of touch with one another?

We are looking for an epoch that will fit the myths as snugly as the slipper on Cinderella’s foot. In this search, however, there is obviously no point in investigating any period prior to the emergence on the planet of recognizably modern human beings. We’re not interested here in Homo habilis or Homo erectus or even Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. We’re interested only in Homo sapiens sapiens, our own species, and we haven’t been around very long.

Students of early Man disagree to some extent over how long we have been around. Some researchers, as we shall see, claim that partial human remains in excess of 100,000 years old may be ‘fully modern’. Others argue for a reduced antiquity in the range of 35-40,000 years, and yet others propose a compromise of 50,000 years. But no one knows for sure.

‘The origin of fully modern humans denoted by the subspecies name Homo sapiens sapiens remains one of the great puzzles of palaeoanthropology,’ admits one authority.1

1 Roger Lewin, Human Evolution, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1984, p. 74.

About three and a half million years of more or less relevant evolution are indicated in the fossil record. For all practical purposes, that record starts with a small, bipedal hominid (nicknamed Lucy) whose remains were discovered in 1974 in the Ethiopian section of East Africa’s Great Rift Valley. With a brain capacity of 400cc (less than a third of the modern average) Lucy definitely wasn’t human.



But she wasn’t an ape either and she had some remarkably ‘human-like’ features, notably her upright gait, and the shape of her pelvis and back teeth. For these and other reasons, her species—classified as Australopithecus afarensis—has been accepted by the majority of palaeoanthropologists as our earliest direct ancestor.2

About two million years ago representatives of Homo habilis, the founder members of the Homo line to which we ourselves belong, began to leave their fossilized skulls and skeletons behind. As time went by this species showed clear signs of evolution towards an ever more ‘gracile’ and refined form, and towards a larger and more versatile brain. Homo erectus, who overlapped with and then succeeded Homo habilis, appeared about 1.6 million years ago with a brain capacity in the region of 900cc (as against 700cc in the case of habilis).3



The million or so years after that, down to about 400,000 years ago, saw no significant evolutionary changes—or none attested to by surviving fossils. Then Homo erectus passed through the gates of extinction into hominid heaven and slowly—very, very slowly—what the palaeoanthropologists call ‘the sapient grade’ began to appear:

Exactly when the transition to a more sapient form began is difficult to establish. Some believe the transition, which involved an increase in brain size and a decrease in the robustness of the skull bones, began as early as 400,000 years ago. Unfortunately, there are simply not enough fossils from this important period to be sure about what was happening.’4

What was definitely not happening 400,000 years ago was the emergence of anything identifiable as our own story-telling, myth-making subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. The consensus is that ‘sapient humans must have evolved from Homo erectus’,5 and it is true that a number of ‘archaic sapient’ populations did come into existence between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago. Unfortunately, the relationship of these transitional species to ourselves is far from clear.



2 Donald C. Johanson and Maitland C. Eddy, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Paladin, London, 1982, in particular, pp. 28, 259-310.

3 Roger Lewin, Human Evolution, pp. 47-49, 53-6; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6:27-8.

4 Human Evolution, p. 76.

5 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 18:831.

6 Human Evolution, p. 76.


As noted, the first contenders for membership of the exclusive club of Homo sapiens sapiens have been dated by some researchers to the latter part of this period. But these remains are all partial and their identification is by no means universally accepted. The oldest, part of a skullcap, is a putative modern human specimen from about 113,000 BC.6 Around this date, too, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis first appears, a quite distinct subspecies which most of us know as ‘Neanderthal Man’.

Tall, heavily muscled, with prominent brow ridges and a protruding face, Neanderthal Man had a bigger average brain size than modern humans (1400cc as against our 1360cc).7 The possession of such a big brain was no doubt an asset to these ‘intelligent, spiritually sensitive, resourceful creatures’8 and the fossil record suggests that they were the dominant species on the planet from about 100,000 years ago until 40,000 years ago.



At some point during this lengthy and poorly understood period, Homo sapiens sapiens established itself, leaving behind fossil remains from about 40,000 years ago that are indisputably those of modern humans, and supplanting the Neanderthals completely by about 35,000 years ago.9

In summary, human beings like ourselves, whom we could pass in the street without blinking an eyelid if they were shaved and dressed in modern clothes, are creatures of the last 115,000 years at the very most—and more probably of only the last 50,000 years. It follows that if the myths of cataclysm we have reviewed do reflect an epoch of geological upheaval experienced by humanity, these upheavals took place within the last 115,000 years, and more probably within the last 50,000 years.



7 Ibid., p. 72.

8 Ibid., p. 73.



Cinderella’s slipper
It is a curious coincidence of geology and palaeoanthropology that the onset and progress of the last Ice Age, and the emergence and proliferation of modern Man, more or less shadow each other. Curious too is the fact that so little is known about either.

In North America the last Ice Age is called the Wisconsin Glaciation (named for rock deposits studied in the state of Wisconsin) and its early phase has been dated by geologists to 115,000 years ago.10 There were various advances and retreats of the ice-cap after that, with the fastest rate of accumulation taking place between 60,000 years ago and 17,000 years ago—a process culminating in the Tazewell Advance, which saw the glaciation reach its maximum extent around 15,000 BC.11 By 13,000 BC, however, millions of square miles of ice had melted, for reasons that have never properly been explained, and by 8000 BC the Wisconsin had withdrawn completely.12

The Ice Age was a global phenomenon, affecting both the northern and the southern hemispheres; similar climatic and geological conditions therefore prevailed in many other parts of the world as well (notably in eastern Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and South America). There was massive glaciation in Europe, where the ice reached outward from Scandinavia and Scotland to cover most of Great Britain, Denmark, Poland, Russia, large parts of Germany, all of Switzerland, and big chunks of Austria, Italy and France.13



(Known technically as the Wurm Glaciation, this European Ice Age started about 70,000 years ago, a little later than its American counterpart, but attained its maximum extent at the same time, 17,000 years ago, and then experienced the same rapid withdrawal, and shared the same terminal date).14

9 Ibid., p. 73, 77.
10 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 12:712.

11 Path of the Pole, p. 146.

12 Ibid., p. 152; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:712.
13 John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, Enslow Publishers, New Jersey, 1979, p. 11.

14 Ibid., p. 120; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:783; Human Evolution, p. 73.

The crucial stages of Ice Age chronology thus appear to be:

1 - around 60,000 years ago, when the Wurm, the Wisconsin and other glaciations were well under way
2 - around 17,000 years ago, when the ice sheets had reached their maximum extent in both the Old World and the New
3 - the 7,000 years of deglaciation that followed

The emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens thus coincided with a lengthy period of geological and climatic turbulence, a period marked, above all else, by ferocious freezing and flooding. The many millennia during which the ice was remorselessly expanding must have been terrifying and awful for our ancestors. But those final 7000 years of deglaciation, particularly the episodes of very rapid and extensive melting, must have been worse.

Let us not jump to conclusions about the state of social, or religious, or scientific, or intellectual development of the human beings who lived through the sustained collapse of that tumultuous epoch. The popular stereotype may be wrong in assuming that they were all primitive cave dwellers. In reality little is known about them and almost the only thing that can be said is that they were men and women exactly like ourselves physiologically and psychologically.

It is possible that they came close to total extinction on several occasions during the upheavals they experienced; it is also possible that the great myths of cataclysm, to which scholars attribute no historical value, may contain accurate records and eyewitness accounts of real events. As we see in the next chapter, if we are looking for an epoch that fits those myths as snugly as the slipper on Cinderella’s foot, it would seem that the last Ice Age is it.



Back to Contents




Chapter 27 - The Face of the Earth was Darkened and a Black Rain Began to Fall

Terrible forces were unleashed on all living creatures during the last Ice Age. We may deduce how these afflicted humanity from the firm evidence of their consequences for other large species. Often this evidence looks puzzling. As Charles Darwin observed after visiting South America:

No one I think can have marvelled more at the extinction of species than I have done. When I found in La Plata [Argentina] the tooth of a horse embedded with the remains of Mastodon, Megatherium, Toxodon, and other extinct monsters, which all co-existed at a very late geological period, I was filled with astonishment; for seeing that the horse, since its introduction by the Spaniards in South America, has run wild over the whole country and has increased its numbers at an unparalleled rate, I asked myself what could have so recently exterminated the former horse under conditions of life apparently so favourable?1

The answer, of course, was the Ice Age. That was what exterminated the former horses of the Americas, and a number of other previously successful mammals. Nor were extinctions limited to the New World. On the contrary, in different parts of the earth (for different reasons and at different times) the long epoch of glaciation witnessed several quite distinct episodes of extinction. In all areas, the vast majority of the many destroyed species were lost in the final seven thousand years from about 15,000 BC down to 8000 BC.2



1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 322.

2 Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 360-1, 394.

At this stage of our investigation is it not necessary to establish the specific nature of the climatic, seismic and geological events linked to the various advances and retreats of the ice sheets which killed off the animals. We might reasonably guess that tidal waves, earthquakes, gigantic windstorms and the sudden onset and remission of glacial conditions played their parts. But more important—whatever the actual agencies involved—is the stark empirical reality that mass extinctions of animals did take place as a result of the turmoil of the last Ice Age.

This turmoil, as Darwin concluded in his Journal, must have shaken ‘the entire framework of the globe’.3 In the New World, for example, more than seventy genera of large mammals became extinct between 15,000 BC and 8000 BC, including all North American members of seven families, and one complete order, the Proboscidea.4



3 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of Countries Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World; entry for 9 January 1834.

4 Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 360-1, 394.

These staggering losses, involving the violent obliteration of more than forty million animals, were not spread out evenly over the whole period; on the contrary, the vast majority of the extinctions occurred in just two thousand years, between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC.5 To put this in perspective, during the previous 300,000 years only about twenty genera had disappeared.6

The same pattern of late and massive extinctions was repeated across Europe and Asia. Even far-off Australia was not exempt, losing perhaps nineteen genera of large vertebrates, not all of them mammals, in a relatively short period of time.7



5 Ibid., pp. 360-1; The Path of the Pole, p. 250.

6 Quaternary Extinctions, p. 360-1.

7 Ibid., p. 358.



Alaska and Siberia: the sudden freeze
The northern regions of Alaska and Siberia appear to have been the worst hit by the murderous upheavals between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. In a great swathe of death around the edge of the Arctic Circle the remains of uncountable numbers of large animals have been found— including many carcasses with the flesh still intact, and astonishing quantities of perfectly preserved mammoth tusks. Indeed, in both regions, mammoth carcasses have been thawed to feed to sled dogs and mammoth steaks have featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks.8



One authority has commented,

‘Hundreds of thousands of individuals must have been frozen immediately after death and remained frozen, otherwise the meat and ivory would have spoiled ... Some powerful general force was certainly at work to bring this catastrophe about.’9

Dr Dale Guthrie of the Institute of Arctic Biology has made an interesting point about the sheer variety of animals that flourished in Alaska before the eleventh millennium BC:

When learning of this exotic mixture of sabre-tooth cats, camels, horses, rhinos, asses, deer with gigantic antlers, lions, ferrets, and saiga, one cannot help wondering about the world in which they lived. This great diversity of species, so different from that encountered today, raises the most obvious question: is it not likely that the rest of the environment was also different?10

8 Donald W. Patten, The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch: A Study in Scientific History, Pacific Meridian Publishing Co., Seattle, 1966, p. 194.

9 The Path of the Pole, p. 258.
10 David M. Hopkins et al., The Palaeoecology of Beringia, Academic Press, New York, 1982, p. 309.



The Alaskan muck in which the remains are embedded is like a fine, dark-grey sand. Frozen solid within this mass, in the words of Professor Hibben of the University of New Mexico:

lie the twisted parts of animals and trees intermingled with lenses of ice and layers of peat and mosses ... Bison, horses, wolves, bears, lions ... Whole herds of animals were apparently killed together, overcome by some common power ... Such piles of bodies of animals or men simply do not occur by any ordinary natural means ...’11

At various levels stone artifacts have been found ‘frozen in situ at great depths, and in association with Ice Age fauna, which confirms that men were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska’.12



Throughout the Alaskan mucks, also there is:

evidence of atmospheric disturbances of unparalleled violence. Mammoth and bison alike were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in Godly rage. In one place we can find the foreleg and shoulder of a mammoth with portions of the flesh and toenails and hair still clinging to the blackened bones. Close by is the neck and skull of a bison with the vertebrae clinging together with tendons and ligaments and the chitinous covering of the horns intact.



There is no mark of knife or cutting instrument [as there would be if human hunters, for example, had been involved]. The animals were simply torn apart and scattered over the landscape like things of straw and string, even though some of them weighed several tons. Mixed with piles of bones are trees, also twisted and torn and piled in tangled groups; and the whole is covered with a fine sifting muck, then frozen solid.13

Much the same picture emerges in Siberia where catastrophic climatic changes and geological upheavals occurred at around the same time. Here the frozen mammoth graveyards, ‘mined’ for their ivory since the Roman era, were still yielding an estimated 20,000 pairs of tusks every decade at the beginning of the twentieth century.14

Once again, some mysterious factor appears to have been at work in bringing about these mass extinctions. With their woolly coats and thick skins, mammoths are generally considered adapted to cold weather, and we are not surprised to come across their remains in Siberia. Harder to explain is the fact that human beings perished alongside them,15 as well as many other animals that in no sense can be described as cold-adapted species:

The northern Siberian plains supported vast numbers of rhinoceroses, antelope, horses, bison, and other herbivorous creatures, while a variety of carnivores, including the sabertooth cat, preyed upon them ... Like the mammoths, these other animals ranged to the extreme north of Siberia, to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and yet further north to the Lyakhov and New Siberian Islands, only a very short distance from the North Pole.16

11 Professor Frank C. Hibben, The Lost Americans, cited in The Path of the Pole, p. 275ff.
12 F. Rainey, ‘Archaeological Investigations in Central Alaska’, American Antiquity, volume V, 1940, page 307.

13 Path of the Pole, p. 275ff.

14 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 107-8.
15 A. P. Okladnikov, ‘Excavations in the North’ in Vestiges of Ancient Cultures, Soviet Union, 1951.

16 The Path of the Pole, p. 255.

Researchers have confirmed that of the thirty-four animal species living in Siberia prior to the catastrophes of the eleventh millennium BC—including Ossip’s mammoth, giant deer, cave hyena and cave lions—no less than twenty-eight were adapted only to temperate conditions.17 In this context, one of the most puzzling aspects of the extinctions, which runs quite contrary to what today’s geographical and climatic conditions lead us to expect, is that the farther north one goes, the more the mammoth and other remains increase in number.18



Indeed some of the New Siberian Islands, well within the Arctic Circle, were described by the explorers who first discovered them as being made up almost entirely of mammoth bones and tusks.19 The only logical conclusion, as the nineteenth-century French zoologist Georges Cuvier put it, is that,

‘this eternal frost did not previously exist in those parts in which the animals were frozen, for they could not have survived in such a temperature. The same instant that these creatures were bereft of life, the country which they inhabited became frozen.’20

There is a great deal of other evidence which suggests that a sudden freeze took place in Siberia during the eleventh millennium BC. In his survey of the New Siberian Islands, the Arctic explorer Baron Eduard von Toll found the remains,

‘of a sabre-tooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been 90 feet tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches ... At the present time the only representative of tree vegetation on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high’.21

Equally indicative of the cataclysmic change that took place at the onset of the great cold in Siberia is the food the extinct animals were eating when they perished:

‘The mammoths died suddenly, in intense cold, and in great numbers. Death came so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is yet undigested ... Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges, and wild beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their mouths and stomachs.’22

Needless to say, such flora does not grow anywhere in Siberia today. Its presence there in the eleventh millennium BC compels us to accept that the region had a pleasant and productive climate—one that was temperate or even warm.23

17 A. P. Okladnikov, Yakutia before its Incorporation into the Russian State, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 1970.

18 The Path of the Pole, p. 250.
19 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 107. Wragnell, the explorer, observed on Bear Island (Medvizhi Ostrova) that the soil consisted of only sand, ice and such a quantity of mammoth bones that they seemed to be the chief substance of the island. On the Siberian mainland he observed that the tundra was dotted with mammoth tusks rather than Arctic shrubbery.

20 Georges Cuvier, Revolutions and Catastrophes in the History of the Earth, 1829.

21 Cited in Path of the Pole, p. 256.
22 Ivan T. Sanderson, ‘Riddle of the Quick-Frozen Giants’, Saturday Evening Post, 16 January 1960, p. 82.

23 Path of the Pole, p. 256.

Why the end of the last Ice Age in other parts of the world should have been the beginning of fatal winter in this former paradise is a question we shall postpone until Part VIII. What is certain, however, is that at some point between 12-13,000 years ago a destroying frost descended with horrifying speed upon Siberia and has never relaxed its grip. In an eerie echo of the Avestic traditions, a land which had previously enjoyed seven months of summer was converted almost overnight into a land of ice and snow with ten months of harsh and frozen winter.24


24 Ibid., p. 256. Winter temperatures fall to 56 degrees below zero.




A thousand Krakatoas, all at once
Many of the myths of cataclysm speak of times of terrible cold, of darkened skies, of black, burning, bituminous rain. For centuries it must have been like that all the way across the arc of death incorporating immense tracts of Siberia, the Yukon and Alaska. Here,

‘Interspersed in the muck depths, and sometimes through the very piles of bones and tusks themselves, are layers of volcanic ash. There is no doubt that coincidental with the [extinctions] there were volcanic eruptions of tremendous proportions.’25

There is a remarkable amount of evidence of excessive volcanism during the decline of the Wisconsin ice cap.26 Far to the south of the frozen Alaskan mucks, thousands of prehistoric animals and plants were mired, all at once, in the famous La Brea tar pits of Los Angeles. Among the creatures unearthed were bison, horses, camels, sloths, mammoths, mastodons and at least seven hundred sabre-toothed tigers.27



A disarticulated human skeleton was also found, completely enveloped in bitumen, mingled with the bones of an extinct species of vulture. In general, the La Brea remains (‘broken, mashed, contorted, and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass’28) speak eloquently of a sudden and dreadful volcanic cataclysm.29

Similar finds of typical late Ice Age birds and mammals have been unearthed from asphalt at two other locations in California (Carpinteria and McKittrick). In the San Pedro Valley, mastodon skeletons were discovered still standing upright, engulfed in great heaps of volcanic ash and sand. Fossils from the glacial Lake Floristan in Colorado, and from Oregon’s John Day Basin, were also excavated from tombs of volcanic ash.30

25 Ibid., p. 277.
26 Ibid., p. 132.
27 R. S. Luss, Fossils, 1931, p. 28.

28 G. M. Price, The New Geology, 1923, p. 579.

29 Ibid.
30 Earth In Upheaval, p. 63

Although the tremendous eruptions that created such mass graves may have been at their most intense during the last days of the Wisconsin, they appear to have been recurrent throughout much of the Ice Age, not only in North America but in Central and South America, in the North Atlantic, in continental Asia, and in Japan.31

It is difficult to imagine what this widespread volcanism might have meant for people living in those strange and terrible times. But those who recall the cauliflower-shaped clouds of dust, smoke and ash ejected into the upper atmosphere by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980 will appreciate that a large number of such explosions (occurring sequentially over a sustained period at different points around the globe) would not only have had devastating local effects but would have caused a severe deterioration in the world’s climate.

Mount Saint Helens spat out an estimated one cubic kilometer of rock and was small-scale by comparison with the typical volcanism of the Ice Age.32 A more representative impression would be the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, which erupted in 1883 with such violence that more than 36,000 people were killed and the explosion was heard 3000 miles away. From the epicenter in the Sunda Strait, tsunamis 100 feet high roared across the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean, carrying steamships miles inland and causing flooding as far away as East Africa and the western coasts of the Americas.



Eighteen cubic kilometers of rock and vast quantities of ash and dust were pumped into the upper atmosphere; skies all over the world were noticeably darker for more than two years and sunsets notably redder. Average global temperatures fell measurably during this period because volcanic dust-particles reflect the sun’s rays back into space.33

During the episodes of intense volcanism which characterized the Ice Age, we must envisage not one but many Krakatoas. The combined effect would at first have been a great intensification of glacial conditions, as the light of the sun was cut by the boiling dust clouds, and as already low temperatures plummeted even further.



Volcanoes also inject enormous volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide is a ‘greenhouse gas’, so it is reasonable to suppose, as the dust began to settle during periods of relative calm, that a degree of global warming would have occurred. A number of authorities attribute the repeated advances and retreats of the great ice sheets to precisely this see-saw interaction between volcanism and climate.34



31 Path of the Pole, p. 133, 176.

32 The Evolving Earth, Guild Publishing, London, 1989, p. 30.

33 Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, p. 64.

34 Path of the Pole, pp. 132-5.


Global flooding
Geologists agree that by 8000 BC the great Wisconsin and Wurm ice-caps had retreated. The Ice Age was over. However, the seven thousand years prior to that date had witnessed climatic and geological turbulence on a scale that was almost unimaginable. Lurching from cataclysm to disaster and from misfortune to calamity, the few scattered tribes of surviving humans must have led lives of constant terror and confusion: there would have been periods of quiescence, when they might have hoped that the worst was over.



While the melting of the giant glaciers continued, however, these episodes of tranquility would have been punctuated again and again by violent floods. Moreover, sections of the earth’s crust hitherto pressed down into the asthenosphere by billions of tons of ice would have been liberated by the thaw and begun to rise again, sometimes rapidly, causing devastating earthquakes and filling the air with terrible noise.

Some times were much worse than others. The bulk of the animal extinctions took place between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC when there were violent and unexplained fluctuations of climate.35



(In the words of geologist John Imbrie, ‘a climatic revolution took place around 11,000 years ago.’36)



There were also greatly increased rates of sedimentation37 and an abrupt temperature increase of 6-10 degrees Centigrade in the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean.38

Another turbulent episode, again accompanied by mass extinctions, took place between 15,000 BC and 13,000 BC. We saw in the previous chapter that the Tazewell Advance brought the ice sheets to their maximum extent around 17,000 years ago and that a dramatic and prolonged thaw then ensued, completely deglaciating millions of square miles of North America and Europe in less than two thousand years.

There were some anomalies: all of western Alaska, the Yukon territory in Canada, and most of Siberia including the New Siberian Islands (now among the coldest parts of the world), remained unglaciated until the Ice Age was near its end. They acquired their present climate only about 12,000 years ago, apparently very abruptly, when the mammoths and other large mammals were frozen in their tracks.39

35 Ibid., p. 137. A major change from glacial to post-glacial conditions occurred about 11,000 years ago. This temperature change was ‘sharp and abrupt’ (Polar Wandering and Continental Drift, Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, Special Publication No. 10, Tulsa, 1953, p. 159). Dramatic climate change around 12,000 years ago is also reported in C.C. Langway and B. Lyle Hansen, The Frozen Future: A Prophetic Report from Antarctica, Quadrangle, New York, 1973, p. 202.



See also Ice Ages, pp. 129, 142; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 357:

‘The last 100,000 years of glacial expansion, as recorded by oxygen-isotope ratios in deep-sea cores from the Atlantic and the Equatorial Pacific, terminated ABRUPTLY around 12,000 years ago. A very rapid ice melt caused a rapid rise in sea level... Detailed land fossils show a major movement of plant and animal species at the time, especially into formerly glaciated terrain. American megafaunal extinctions occurred during a time of rapid climatic change as seen in fossil pollen and small animal records.’

36 Ice Ages, p. 129.

37 Path of the Pole, p. 137.
38 ‘The relative change is shown by the change in the relative abundance of cold and warm water planktonic foraminfera, and the absolute change is given by oxygen isotope ratio determinations on the fauna.’ Polar Wandering, p. 96.
39 The reader may recall that inexplicably warm conditions prevailed in the New Siberian Islands until this time, and it is worth noting that many other islands in the Arctic Ocean were also unaffected for a long while by the widespread glaciations elsewhere (e.g. on Baffin Island the remains of alder and birch trees preserved in peat indicate a relatively warm climate extending at least from 30,000 to 17,000 years ago. It is also certain that large parts of Greenland remained enigmatically ice-free during the Ice Age. Path of the Pole, p. 93, 96.

Elsewhere the picture was different. Most of Europe was buried under ice two miles thick.40 So too was most of North America where the ice-cap had spread from centers near Hudson Bay to enshroud all of eastern Canada, New England and much of the Midwest down to the 37th parallel—well to the south of Cincinnati in the Mississippi Valley and more than halfway to the equator.41

At its peak 17,000 years ago, it is calculated that the total ice volume covering the northern hemisphere was in the region of six million cubic miles, and of course there were extensive glaciations in the southern hemisphere too as we noted. The surplus water flow from which these numerous ice-caps were formed had been provided by the world’s seas and oceans which were then about 400 feet lower than they are today.42

It was at this moment that the pendulum of climate swung violently in the opposite direction. The great meltdown began so suddenly and over such vast areas that it has been described ‘as a sort of miracle’.43 Geologists refer to it as the Bolling phase of warm climate in Europe and as the Brady interstadial in North America.



In both regions:

An ice-cap that may have taken 40,000 years to develop disappeared for the most part, in 2000. It must be obvious that this could not have been the result of gradually acting climatic factors usually called upon to explain ice ages ... The rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some extraordinary factor was affecting the climate.



The dates suggest that this factor first made itself felt about 16,500 years ago, that it had destroyed most, perhaps three-quarters of the glaciers by 2000 years later, and that [the vast bulk of these dramatic developments took place] in a millennium or less.’44

40 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114; Path of the Pole, pp. 47-8.

41 Ice Ages, p. 11. Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117; Path of the Pole, p. 47.

42 Ice Ages, p. 11; Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114.

43 Path of the Pole, p. 150.
44 Path of the Pole, pp. 148-9, 152, 162-3. In North America, where the ice reached its maximum extent between 17,000 and 16,500 years ago, geologists have made the following discoveries: ‘Leaves, needles and fruits’ that flourished around 15,300 years ago in Massachusetts; ‘A bog which developed over glacial material in New Jersey at least 16,280 years ago, immediately after the interruption of the ice advance.’; ‘In Ohio we have a postglacial sample dated about 14,000 years ago. And that was spruce wood, suggesting a forest that must have taken a few thousand years, by conservative estimate, to get established. What, indeed, does this mean? Does it not clearly suggest that the ice cap, estimated to have been at its maximum at least a mile thick in Ohio, disappeared from Delaware County in that state within only a few centuries?’
Likewise, ‘in the Soviet Union, in the Irkutsk area, deglaciation was complete and postglacial life fully established by 14,500 years ago. In Lithuania another bog developed as early as 15,620 years ago. These two dates taken together are rather suggestive. A bog can develop much faster than a forest. First, however, the ice mustdisappear. And let us not forget that there was a great deal of ice.’

Inevitably the first consequence was a precipitous rise in sea levels, perhaps as much as 350 feet.45 Islands and land bridges disappeared and vast sections of low-lying continental coastline were submerged. From time to time great tidal waves rose up to engulf higher land as well. They ebbed away, but in the process left unmistakable traces of their presence.

In the United States, ‘Ice Age marine features are present along the Gulf coast east of the Mississippi River, in some places at altitudes that may exceed 200 feet.’46 In bogs covering glacial deposits in Michigan, skeletons of two whales were discovered. In Georgia marine deposits occur at altitudes of 160 feet, and in northern Florida at altitudes of at least 240 feet. In Texas, well to the south of the farthest extent of the Wisconsin Glaciation, the remains of Ice Age land mammals are found in marine deposits.



Another marine deposit, containing walrus, seals and at least five genera of whales, overlies the seaboard of the north-eastern states and the Arctic coast of Canada. In many areas along the Pacific coast of North America Ice Age marine deposits extend ‘more than 200 miles inland.’47 The bones of a whale have been found north of Lake Ontario, about 440 feet above sea level, a skeleton of another whale in Vermont, more than 500 feet above sea level, and another in the Montreal-Quebec area about 600 feet above sea level.48

Flood myths from all over the world characteristically and recurrently describe scenes when humans and animals flee the rising tides and take refuge on mountain tops. The fossil record confirms that this did indeed happen during the melting of the ice sheets and that the mountains were not always high enough to save the refugees from disaster. For example, fissures in the rocks on the tops of isolated hills in central France are filled with what is known as ‘osseous breccia’, consisting of the splintered bones of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and other animals.



The 1430 feet peak of Mount Genay in Burgundy,

‘is capped by a breccia containing remains of mammoth, reindeer, horse and other animals’.49

Much farther south, so too is the Rock of Gibraltar where,

‘a human molar and some flints worked by Paleolithic man were discovered among the animal bones.’50

45 Ice Ages, p. 11, Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117, Path of the Pole, p. 47.

46 R. F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch, 1947, pp. 294-5.

47 Ibid., p. 362.
48 Earth in Upheaval, p. 43; in general, pp. 42-4.
49 Ibid., p. 47. Joseph Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena Belonging to the Close of the Last Geological Period and on their Bearing upon the Tradition of the Flood, Macmillan, London, 1895, p. 36.

50 On Certain Phenomena, p. 48.

Hippo remains, together with mammoth, rhinoceros, horse, bear, bison, wolf and lion, have been found in England, in the neighbourhood of Plymouth on the Channel.51 The hills around Palermo in Sicily disclosed an ‘extraordinary quantity of bones of hippopotami—in complete hecatombs’.52



On the basis of this and other evidence, Joseph Prestwich, formerly professor of Geology at Oxford University, concluded that Central Europe, England, and the Mediterranean islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily were all completely submerged on several occasions during the rapid melting of the ice sheets:

The animals naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the hills until they found themselves embayed ... They thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into the more accessible caves, until overtaken by the waters and destroyed ... Rocky debris and large blocks from the sides of the hills were hurled down by the currents of water, crushing and smashing the bones ... Certain communities of early man must have suffered in this general catastrophe.53

It is probable that similar flood disasters occurred in China at much the same time. In caves near Peking, bones of mammoths and buffaloes have been found in association with human skeletal remains.54 A number of authorities attribute the violent intermingling of mammoth carcasses with splintered and broken trees in Siberia ‘to a great tidal wave that uprooted forests and buried the tangled carnage in a flood of mud. In the polar region this froze solid and has preserved the evidence in permafrost to the present.’55

All over South America, too, Ice-Age fossils have been unearthed,

‘in which incongruous animal types (carnivores and herbivores) are mixed promiscuously with human bones. No less significant is the association, over truly widespread areas, of fossilized land and sea creatures mingled in no order and yet entombed in the same geological horizon.’56

North America was also badly affected by flooding. As the great Wisconsin ice sheets melted they created huge but temporary lakes which filled up with incredible speed, drowning everything in their paths, then drained away in a few hundred years. Lake Agassiz, for example, the largest glacial lake in the New World, once occupied an area of 110,000 square miles, covering large parts of what are now Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in Canada, and North Dakota and Minnesota in the United States.57



Remarkably, it endured for less than a millennium, indicating a catastrophically sudden episode of melting and flooding followed by a period of quiescence.58

51 Ibid., p. 25-6.
52 Ibid., p. 50.
53 Ibid., p. 51-2.
54 J. S. Lee, The Geology of China, London, 1939, p. 370.

55 Polar Wandering, p. 165.
56 J. B. Delair and E.F. Oppe, ‘The Evidence of Violent Extinction in South America’, in Path of the Pole p. 292.

57 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1:141.

58 Warren Upham, The Glacial Lake Agassiz, 1895, p. 240.



A token of good faith
It was long believed that human beings did not reach the New World until around 11,000 years ago, but recent finds have steadily pushed that horizon back. Stone implements dating to 25,000 BC have been identified by Canadian researchers in the Old Crow Basin in the Yukon Territory of Alaska.59



In South America (as far south as Peru and Tierra del Fuego) human remains and artifacts have been found which have been reliably dated to 12,000 BC—with another group between 19,000 BC and 23,000 BC.60 With this and other evidence taken into account, ‘a very reasonable conclusion on the peopling of the Americas is that it began at least 35,000 years ago, but may well have included waves of immigrants at later dates too.’61


59 Human Evolution, p. 92.

60 Ibid.; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 375.

61 Human Evolution, p. 92.


Those newly arriving Ice Age Americans, trekking in from Siberia across the Bering land bridge, would have faced the most appalling conditions between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago. It was then that the Wisconsin glaciers, all at once, went into their ferocious meltdown, forcing a 350 foot rise in global sea levels amid scenes of unprecedented climatic and geological turmoil.



For seven thousand years of human experience, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and immense floods, interspersed with eerie periods of peace, must have dominated the day-to-day lives of the New World peoples. Perhaps this is why so many of their myths speak with such conviction of fire and floods and times of darkness and of the creation and destruction of Suns.

Moreover, as we have seen, the myths of the New World are not in this respect isolated from those of the Old. All around the globe, a remarkable uniformity reveals itself over issues such as ‘the great flood’ and ‘the great cold’ and ‘the time of the great upheaval’. It is not just that the same experiences are being recounted again and again; that, on its own, would be quite understandable since the Ice Age and its aftereffects were global phenomena.



More curious by far is the way in which the same symbolic motifs keep recurring: the one good man and his family, the warning given by a god, the seeds of all living things saved, the survival ship, the enclosure against the cold, the trunk of a tree in which the pregenitors of future humanity hide themselves, the birds and other creatures released after the flood to find land ... and so on.

Isn’t it also odd that so many of the myths turn out to contain descriptions of figures like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, said to have come in the time of darkness, after the flood, to teach architecture, astronomy, science and the rule of law to the scattered and devastated tribes of survivors.

Who were these civilizing heroes?

Were they figments of the primitive imagination?

Or gods?

Or men?

If they were men, could they have tampered with the myths in some way, turning them into vehicles for transporting knowledge through time?

Such notions seem fanciful. But, as we shall see in Part V, astronomical data of a disturbingly accurate and scientific nature turns up repeatedly in certain myths, as time-worn and as universal in their distribution as those of the great flood.

Where did their scientific content come from?

The Mystery of the Myths
2. The Precessional Code

The Celestial Sphere.


Chapter 28 - The Machinery of Heaven

Although a modern reader does not expect a text on celestial mechanics to read like a lullaby, he insists on his capacity to understand mythical ‘images’ instantly, because he can respect as ‘scientific’ only page-long approximation formulas, and the like.

He does not think of the possibility that equally relevant knowledge might once have been expressed in everyday language. He never suspects such a possibility, although the visible accomplishments of ancient cultures—to mention only the pyramids or metallurgy—should be a cogent reason for concluding that serious and intelligent men were at work behind the stage, men who were bound to have used a technical language ...1

1 - Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 57-8.


The quotation is from the late Giorgio de Santillana, professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the chapters that follow, we shall be learning about his revolutionary investigations into ancient mythology. In brief, however, his proposition is this: long ages ago, serious and intelligent people devised a system for veiling the technical terminology of an advanced astronomical science behind the everyday language of myth.

Is Santillana right?

And if he is right, who were these serious and intelligent people—these astronomers, these ancient scientists—who worked behind the stage of prehistory?

Let us start with some basics.



The wild celestial dance
The earth makes a complete circuit around its own axis once every twenty-four hours and has an equatorial circumference of 24,902.45 miles. It follows, therefore, that a man standing still on the equator is in fact in motion, revolving with the planet at just over 1000 miles per hour.2 Viewed from outer space, looking down on the North Pole, the direction of rotation is anti-clockwise.

While spinning daily on its own axis, the earth also orbits the sun (again in an anti-clockwise direction) on a path which is slightly elliptical rather than completely circular. It pursues this orbit at truly breakneck speed, travelling as far along it in an hour—66,600 miles—as the average motorist will drive in six years. To bring the calculations down in scale, this means that we are hurtling through space much faster than any bullet, at the rate of 18.5 miles every second. In the time that it has taken you to read this paragraph, we have voyaged about 550 miles farther along earth’s path around the sun.3

With a year required to complete a full circuit, the only evidence we have of the tremendous orbital race we are participating in is the slow march of the seasons. And in the operations of the seasons themselves it is possible to see a wondrous and impartial mechanism at work distributing spring, summer, autumn and winter fairly around the globe, across the northern and southern hemispheres, year in and year out, with absolute regularity.

The earth’s axis of rotation is tilted in relation to the plane of its orbit (at about 23.5° to the vertical). This tilt, which causes the seasons, ‘points’ the North Pole, and the entire northern hemisphere away from the sun for six months a year (while the southern hemisphere enjoys its summer) and points the South Pole and the southern hemisphere away from the sun for the remaining six months (while the northern hemisphere enjoys its summer).



The seasons result from the annual variation in the angle at which the sun’s rays reach any particular point on the earth’s surface and from the annual variation in the number of hours of sunlight received there at different times of the year.

The earth’s tilt is referred to in technical language as its ‘obliquity’, and the plane of its orbit, extended outwards to form a great circle in the celestial sphere, is known as the ‘ecliptic’. Astronomers also speak of the ‘celestial equator’, which is an extension of the earth’s equator into the celestial sphere. The celestial equator is today inclined at about 23.5° to the ecliptic, because the earth’s axis is inclined at 23.5° to the vertical.



This angle, termed the ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’, is not fixed and immutable for all time. On the contrary (as we saw in Chapter Eleven in relation to the dating of the Andean city of Tiahuanaco) it is subject to constant, though very slow, oscillations. These occur across a range of slightly less than 3°, rising closest to the vertical at 22.1° and falling farthest away at 24.5°. A full cycle, from 24.5° to 22.1°, and back again to 24.5°, takes approximately 41,000 years to complete.4

So our fragile planet nods and spins while soaring along its orbital path. The orbit takes a year and the spin takes a day and the nod has a cycle of 41,000 years. A wild celestial dance seems to be going on as we skip and skim and dive through eternity, and we feel the tug of contradictory urges: to fall into the sun on the one hand; to make a break for the outer darkness on the other.

2 Figures from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.

3 Ibid.
4 J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, N.J. Shackleton, ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’, Science, volume 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976, p. 1125.



Recondite influences
The sun’s gravitational domain, in the inner circles of which the earth is held captive, is now known to extend more than fifteen trillion miles into space, almost halfway to the nearest star.5 Its pull upon our planet is therefore immense. Also affecting us is the gravity of the other planets with which we share the solar system. Each of these exerts an attraction which tends to draw the earth out of its regular orbit around the sun. The planets are of different sizes, however, and revolve around the sun at different speeds.



The combined gravitational influence they are able to exert thus changes over time in complex but predictable ways, and the orbit changes its shape constantly in response. Since the orbit is an ellipse these changes affect its degree of elongation, known technically as its ‘eccentricity’. This varies from a low value close to zero (when the orbit approaches the form of a perfect circle) to a high value of about six per cent when it is at its most elongated and elliptical.6

There are other forms of planetary influence too. Thus, though no explanation has yet been forthcoming, it is known that shortwave radio frequencies are disturbed when Jupiter, Saturn and Mars line up.7 And in this connection evidence has also emerged,

of a strange and unexpected correlation between the positions of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, in their orbits around the sun, and violent electrical disturbances in the earth’s upper atmosphere. This would seem to indicate that the planets and the sun share in a cosmic-electrical balance mechanism that extends a billion miles from the centre of our solar system. Such an electrical balance is not accounted for in current astrophysical theories.8

5 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, pp. 288-9. Fifteen trillion miles is equivalent to fifteen thousand billion miles.

6 Ice Ages, pp. 80-1.

7 Earth in Upheaval, p. 266.

8 New York Times, 15 April 1951.

The obliquity of the ecliptic varies from 22.1° to 24.5° over a cycle of 41,000 years

Inner planets of the solar system.


The New York Times, from which the above report is taken, does not attempt to clarify matters further. Its writers are probably unaware of just how much they sound like Berosus, the Chaldean historian, astronomer and seer of the third century BC, who made a deep study of the omens he believed would presage the final destruction of the world. He concluded,

‘I Berosus, interpreter of Bellus, affirm that all the earth inherits will be consigned to flame when the five planets assemble in Cancer, so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres.’ 9

A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000 when Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with earth on the other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war.10 Let us also note that modern astrologers who have charted the Mayan date for the end of the Fifth Sun calculate that there will be a most peculiar arrangement of planets at that time, indeed an arrangement so peculiar that,

‘it can only occur once in 45,200 years ... From this extraordinary pattern we might well expect an extraordinary effect.’11

No one in his or her right mind would rush to accept such a proposition. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that multiple influences, many of which we do not fully understand, appear to be at work within our solar system. Among these influences, that of our own satellite, the moon, is particularly strong.



Earthquakes, for example, occur more often when the moon is full or when the earth is between the sun and the moon; when the moon is new or between the sun and the earth; when the moon crosses the meridian of the affected locality; and when the moon is closest to the earth on its orbit.12 Indeed, when the moon reaches this latter point (technically referred to as its ‘perigree’), its gravitational attraction increases by about six per cent. This happens once every twenty-seven and one-third days.



The tidal pull that it exerts on these occasions affects not only the great movements of our oceans but those of the reservoirs of hot magma penned within the earth’s thin crust (which has been described as resembling ‘a paper bag filled with honey or molasses swinging along at a rate of more than 1000 miles an hour in equatorial rotation, and more than 66,000 miles an hour in orbit’ 13).



9 Berossus, Fragments.

10 Skyglobe 3.6.
11 Roberta S. Sklower, ‘Predicting Planetary Positions’, appendix to Frank Waters, Mexico Mystique, Sage Books, Chicago, 1975, p. 285ff.

12 Earth in Upheaval, p. 138.

13 Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 49.



The wobble of a deformed planet
All this circular motion, of course, generates immense centrifugal forces and these, as Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated in the seventeenth century, cause the earth’s ‘paper bag’ to bulge outwards at the equator. The corollary is a flattening at the poles. In consequence, our planet deviates slightly from the form of a perfect sphere and is more accurately described as an ‘oblate spheroid’. Its radius at the equator (3963.374 miles) is about fourteen miles longer than its polar radius (3949.921 miles).14

For billions of years the flattened poles and the bulging equator have been engaged in a covert mathematical interaction with the recondite influence of gravity.

‘Because the Earth is flattened,’ explains one authority, ‘the Moon’s gravity tends to tilt the Earth’s axis so that it becomes perpendicular to the Moon’s orbit, and to a lesser extent the same is true for the Sun.’15

At the same time the equatorial bulge—the extra mass distributed around the equator—acts like the rim of a gyroscope to keep the earth steady on its axis.16



14 Figures from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.

15 Ibid.
16 Path of the Pole, p. 3.

Year in, year out, on a planetary scale, it is this gyroscopic effect that prevents the tug of the sun and the moon from radically altering the earth’s axis of rotation. The pull these two bodies jointly exert is, however, sufficiently strong to force the axis to ‘precess’, which means that it wobbles slowly in a clockwise direction opposite to that of the earth’s spin.

This important motion is our planet’s characteristic signature within the solar system. Anyone who has ever set a top spinning should be able to understand it without much difficulty; a top, after all, is simply another type of gyroscope. In full uninterrupted spin it stands upright. But the moment its axis is deflected from the vertical it begins to exhibit a second behaviour: a slow and obstinate reverse wobble around a great circle. This wobble, which is precession, changes the direction in which the axis points while keeping constant its newly tilted angle.

A second analogy, somewhat different in approach, may help to clarify matters a little further:

Envisage the earth, floating in space, inclined at approximately 23.5° to the vertical and spinning around on its axis once every 24 hours.

Envisage this axis as a massively strong pivot, or axle, passing through the centre of the earth, exiting via the North and South Poles and extending outwards from there in both directions.

Imagine that you are a giant, striding through the solar system, with orders to carry out a specific task.

Imagine approaching the tilted earth (which, because of your great size, now looks no bigger to you than a millwheel).

Imagine reaching out and grasping the two ends of the extended axis.

And imagine yourself slowly beginning to inter-rotate them, pushing one end, pulling the other.

The earth was already spinning when you arrived.

Your orders, therefore, are not to get involved in its axial rotation, but rather to impart to it its other motion: that slow clockwise wobble called precession.

To fulfill this commission you will have to push the northern tip of the extended axis up and around a great circle in the northern celestial hemisphere while at the same time pulling the southern tip around an equally large circle in the southern celestial hemisphere. This will involve a slow swivelling pedalling motion with your hands and shoulders.

Be warned, however. The ‘millwheel’ of the earth is heavier than it looks, so much heavier, in fact, that it’s going to take you 25,776 years 17 to turn the two tips of its axis through one full precessional cycle (at the end of which they will be aiming at the same points in the celestial sphere as when you arrived).

Oh, and by the way, now that you’ve started the job we may as well tell you that you’re never going to be allowed to leave. As soon as one precessional cycle is over another must begin. And another ... and another ... and another ... and so on, endlessly, for ever and ever and ever.

You can think of this, if you like, as one of the basic mechanisms of the solar system, or, if you prefer, as one of the fundamental commandments of the divine will.

17 Jane B. Sellers, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, Penguin, London, 1992, p. 205.

Precession.


In the process, little by little, as you slowly sweep the extended axis around the heavens, its two tips will point to one star after another in the polar latitudes of the southern celestial hemisphere (and sometimes, of course, to empty space), and to one star after another in the polar latitudes of the northern celestial hemisphere. We are talking here, about a kind of musical chairs among the circumpolar stars.



And what keeps everything in motion is the earth’s axial precession—a motion driven by giant gravitational and gyroscopic forces, that is regular, predictable and relatively easy to work out with the aid of modern equipment. Thus, for example, the northern pole star is presently alpha Ursae Minoris (which we know as Polaris). But computer calculations enable us to state with certainty that

in 3000 BC alpha Draconis occupied the pole position

at the time of the Greeks the northern pole star was beta Ursae Minoris

in AD 14,000 it will be Vega 18

18 Skyglobe 3.6.



A great secret of the past
It will not hurt to remind ourselves of some of the fundamental data concerning the movements of the earth and its orientation in space:

It tilts at about 23.5° to the vertical, an angle from which it can vary by as much as 1.5° on either side over periods of 41,000 years.

It completes a full precessional cycle once every 25,776 years.19

It spins on its own axis once every twenty-four hours.

It orbits the sun once every 365 days (actually 365.2422 days).

19 Precise figure from The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 205.

The most important influence on its seasons is the angle at which the rays of the sun strike it at various points on its orbital path.

Equinoxes and solstices.


Let us also note that there are four crucial astronomical moments in the year, marking the official beginning of each of the four seasons. These moments (or cardinal points), which were of immense importance to the ancients, are the winter and the summer solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes.

In the northern hemisphere the winter solstice, the shortest day, falls on 21 December, and the summer solstice, the longest day, on 21 June.

In the southern hemisphere, on the other hand, everything is literally upside down: there winter begins on 21 June and summer on 21 December.

The equinoxes, by contrast, are the two points in the year on which night and day are of equal length all over the planet. Once again, however, as with the solstices, the date that marks the onset of spring in the northern hemisphere (20 March) marks that of autumn in the southern hemisphere, and the date for the onset of autumn in the northern hemisphere (22 September) marks the onset of spring in the southern hemisphere.

Like the subtler variations of the seasons, all this is brought about by the benevolent obliquity of the planet. The northern hemisphere’s summer solstice falls at that point in the orbit when the North Pole is aimed most directly towards the sun; six months later the winter solstice marks that point when the North Pole is aimed most directly away from the sun. And, logically enough, the reason that day and night are of exactly equal length all over the planet on the spring and autumn equinoxes is that these mark the two points when the earth’s axis of rotation lies broadside-on to the sun.

Let us now take a look at a strange and beautiful phenomenon of celestial mechanics.

This phenomenon is known as ‘the precession of the equinoxes’. It has rigid and repetitive mathematical qualities that can be analyzed and predicted precisely. It is, however, extremely difficult to observe, and even harder to measure accurately, without sophisticated instrumentation.

In this, there may lie a clue to one of the great mysteries of the past.


Back to Contents





Chapter 29 - The First Crack in an Ancient Code


The plane of the earth’s orbit, projected outwards to form a great circle in the celestial sphere, is known as the ecliptic. Ringed around the ecliptic, in a starry belt that extends approximately 7° north and south, are the twelve constellations of the zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces.



These constellations are irregular in size, shape and distribution. Nevertheless (and one assumes by chance!) their spacing around the rim of the ecliptic is sufficiently even to bestow a sense of cosmic order upon the diurnal risings and settings of the sun.

To picture what is involved here, do the following:

(1) mark a dot in the centre of a blank sheet of paper;

(2) draw a circle around the dot, about half an inch away from it;

(3) enclose that circle in a second, larger, circle.

The dot represents the sun. The smaller of the two concentric circles represents the earth’s orbit. The larger circle represents the rim of the ecliptic. Around the perimeter of this larger circle, therefore, you should now draw twelve boxes, spacing them evenly, to represent the constellations of the zodiac. Since there are 360° in a circle, each constellation can be considered to occupy a space of 30° along the ecliptic. The dot is the sun.



The inner of the two concentric circles is the earth’s orbit. We know that the earth travels on this orbit in an anti-clockwise direction, from the west towards the east, and that every twenty-four hours it also makes one complete rotation around its own axis (again from the west towards the east).

From these two movements two illusions result:

1 - Each day as the planet turns from west to east, the sun (which is of course a fixed point) appears to ‘move’ across the sky from east to west.

2 - Roughly every thirty days, as the spinning earth journeys along its orbital path around the sun, the sun itself slowly appears to ‘pass’ through one after another of the twelve zodiacal constellations (which are also fixed points), and again it appears to be ‘moving’ in an east-west direction.

On any particular day of the year, in other words, (corresponding on our diagram to any point we care to choose around the inner concentric circle marking the earth’s orbit), it is obvious that the sun will lie between an observer on the earth and one of the twelve zodiacal constellations. On that day what the observer will see, so long as he or she is up and about well before dawn, is the sun rising in the east in the portion of the sky occupied by that particular constellation.

Beneath the clear and unpolluted heavens of the ancient world, it is easy to understand how human beings might have felt reassured by regular celestial motions such as these. It is equally easy to understand why the four cardinal points of the year—the spring and autumn equinoxes, the winter and summer solstices—should everywhere have been accorded immense significance. Even greater significance was accorded to the conjunction of these cardinal points with the zodiacal constellations.



But most significant of all was the constellation in which the sun was observed to rise on the morning of the spring (or vernal) equinox. Because of the earth’s axial precession, the ancients discovered that this constellation was not fixed or permanent for all time but that the honour of ‘housing’ or ‘carrying’ the sun on the day of the vernal equinox circulated—very, very slowly—among all the constellations of the zodiac.

In the words of Giorgio de Santillana:

‘The sun’s position amongst the constellations at the vernal equinox was the pointer that indicated the “hours” of the precessional cycle—very long hours indeed, the equinoctial sun occupying each zodiacal constellation for almost 2200 years.1

The direction of the earth’s slow axial precession is clockwise (i.e., east to west) and thus in opposition to the direction of the planet’s annual path around the sun. In relation to the constellations of the zodiac, lying fixed in space, this causes the point at which the spring equinox occurs ‘to move stubbornly along the ecliptic in the opposite direction to the yearly course Direction in which the vernal point shifts as a result of precession of the sun, that is, against the “right” sequence of the zodiacal signs (Taurus→ Aries→ Pisces→ Aquarius, instead of Aquarius→ Pisces→ Aries→ Taurus).’2

1 - Hamlet ‘s Mill, p. 59.

2 Ibid., p. 58.

During the course of each year the earth’s movement along its orbit causes the stellar background against which the sun is seen to rise to change from month to month: Aquarius→ Pisces→ Aries→ Taurus→ Gemini→ Cancer→ Leo, etc, etc. At present, on the vernal equinox, the sun rises due east between Pisces and Aquarius. The effect of precession is to cause the ‘vernal point’ to be reached fractionally earlier in the orbit each year with the result that it very gradually shifts through all 12 houses of the zodiac, spending 2160 years ‘in’ each sign and making a complete circuit in 25,920 years.



The direction of this ‘processional drift’, in opposition to the annual ‘path of the sun’, is: Leo→ Cancer→ Gemini→ Taurus→ Aries→ Pisces→ Aquarius. To give one example, the ‘Age of Leo’, i.e. the 2160 years during which the sun on the vernal equinox rose against the stellar background of the constellation of Leo, lasted from 10,970 until 8810 BC. We live today in the astrological no man’s land at the end of the ‘Age of Pisces’, on the threshold of the ‘New Age’ of Aquarius. Traditionally these times of transition between one age and the next have been regarded as ill-omened.

That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of ‘precession of the equinoxes’. And that is exactly what is involved in the notion of the ‘dawning of the Age of Aquarius’. The famous line from the musical Hair refers to the fact that every year, for the last 2000 years or so, the sun has risen in Pisces on the vernal equinox. The age of Pisces, however, is now approaching its end and the vernal sun will soon pass out of the sector of the Fish and begin to rise against the new background of Aquarius.

The 25,776-year cycle of precession is the engine that drives this majestic celestial juggernaut along its never-ending tour of the heavens. But the details of exactly how precession moves the equinoctial points from Pisces into Aquarius—and thence onwards around the zodiac—are also worth knowing.

Remember that the equinoxes occur on the only two occasions in the year when the earth’s tilted axis lies broadside-on to the sun. These are when the sun rises due east all over the world and day and night are of equal length. Because the earth’s axis is slowly but surely precessing in a direction opposite to that of its own orbit, the points at which it lies broadside-on to the sun must occur fractionally earlier in the orbit each year.



These annual changes are so small as to be almost imperceptible (a one degree shift along the ecliptic—equivalent to the width of your little finger held up to the horizon—requires approximately seventy-two years to complete). However, as de Santillana points out, such minute changes add up in just under 2200 years to a 30° passage through a complete house of the zodiac, and in just under 26,000 years to a 360° passage through a complete cycle of precession.



When did the ancients first work out precession?
In the answer to this question lies a great secret, and mystery, of the past. Before we try to penetrate the mystery and to learn the secret, we should acquaint ourselves with the ‘official’ line. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is as good a repository as any of conventional historical wisdom, and this is what it tells us about a scholar named Hipparchus, the supposed discoverer of precession:

Hipparchus, also spelled HIPPARCHOS (b. Nicaea, Bithynia; d. after 127 BC, Rhodes), Greek astronomer and mathematician who discovered the precession of the equinoxes ... This notable discovery was the result of painstaking observations, worked upon by an acute mind. Hipparchus observed the positions of the stars, and then compared his results with those of Timocharis of Alexandria about 150 years earlier and with even earlier observations made in Babylonia.



He discovered that the celestial longitudes were different and that this difference was of a magnitude exceeding that attributable to errors of observation. He therefore proposed precession to account for the size of the difference and he gave a value of 45’ or 46’ (seconds of arc) for annual changes. This is very close to the figure of 50.274 seconds of arc accepted today ...’3

3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 5:937-8. See also The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 205, where the precise figure of 50.274 is given.



First, a point of terminology.



Seconds of arc are the smallest subdivisions of a degree of arc. There are 60 of these arc seconds in one arc minute, 60 minutes in one degree, and 360 degrees in the full circle of earth’s path around the sun. An annual change of 50.274 seconds of arc represents a distance somewhat under one-sixtieth of one degree so that it takes roughly 72 years (an entire human lifetime) for the equinoctial sun to migrate just one degree along the ecliptic.



It is because of the observational difficulties entailed in detecting this snails’ pace rate of change that the value worked out by Hipparchus in the second century BC is hailed in the Britannica as a ‘notable discovery’.

Would this discovery seem so notable if it turned out to be a rediscovery?

Would the mathematical and astronomical achievements of the Greeks shine so brightly if we could prove that the difficult challenge of measuring precession had been taken up thousands of years before Hipparchus?

What if this heavenly cycle, almost 26,000 years long, had been made the object of precise scientific investigations long epochs before the supposed dawn of scientific thought?

In seeking answers to such questions there is much that may be relevant which would never be accepted by any court of law as concrete proof. Let us not accept it either. We have seen that Hipparchus proposed a value of 45 or 46 seconds of arc for one year of precessional motion. Let us therefore not attempt to dislodge the Greek astronomer from his pedestal as the discoverer of precession unless we can find a significantly more accurate value recorded in a significantly more ancient source.

Of course, there are many potential sources. At this point, however, in the interests of succinctness, we shall limit our inquiry to universal myths. We have already examined one group of myths in detail (the traditions of flood and cataclysm set out in Part IV) and we have seen that they possess a range of intriguing characteristics:

1 - There is no doubt that they are immensely old. Take the Mesopotamian flood story, versions of which have been found inscribed on tablets from the earliest strata of Sumerian history, around 3000 BC. These tablets, handed down from the dawn of the recorded past, leave no room for doubt that the tradition of a world-destroying flood was ancient even then, and therefore originated long before the dawn.



We cannot say how long. The fact remains that no scholar has ever been able to establish a date for the creation of any myth, let alone for these venerable and widespread traditions. In a very real sense they seem always to have been around—part of the permanent baggage of human culture.

2 - The possibility cannot be ruled out that this aura of vast antiquity is not an illusion. On the contrary, we have seen that many of the great myths of cataclysm seem to contain accurate eye-witness accounts of real conditions experienced by humanity during the last Ice Age. In theory, therefore, these stories could have been constructed at almost the same time as the emergence of our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, perhaps as long as 50,000 years ago.



The geological evidence, however, suggests a more recent provenance, and we have identified the epoch 15,000-8000 BC as the most likely. Only then, in the whole of human experience, were there rapid climatic changes on the convulsive scale the myths so eloquently describe.

3 - The Ice Age and its tumultuous demise were global phenomena. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the cataclysm traditions of many different cultures, widely scattered around the globe, should be characterized by a high degree of uniformity and convergence.

4 - What is surprising, however, is that the myths not only describe shared experiences but that they do so in what appears to be a shared symbolic language. The same ‘literary motifs’ keep cropping up again and again, the same stylistic ‘props’, the same recognizable characters, and the same plots.

According to Professor de Santillana, this type of uniformity suggests a guiding hand at work. In Hamlet’s Mill, a seminal and original thesis on ancient myth written in collaboration with Hertha von Dechend (professor of the History of Science at Frankfurt University) he argues that:

universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something found, say, in China, turns up also in Babylonian astrological texts, then it must be assumed to be relevant if it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more than one instance in diverse places.



But when characters who do not play the lyre but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper turns up both in the German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long before Columbus, and is linked in both places to certain attributes like the colour red, it can hardly be a coincidence ...



Likewise, when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 x 13 reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus’ dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident ...4

4 - Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.5 Ibid.; Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.6 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 65.

Connecting the great universal myths of cataclysm, is it possible that such coincidences that cannot be coincidences, and accidents that cannot be accidents, could denote the global influence of an ancient, though as yet unidentified, guiding hand?

If so, could it be that same hand, during and after the last Ice Age, which drew the series of highly accurate and technically advanced world maps reviewed in Part I?

And might not that same hand have left its ghostly fingerprints on another body of universal myths?

...those concerning the death and resurrection of gods, and great trees around which the earth and heavens turn, and whirlpools, and churns, and drills, and other similar revolving, grinding contrivances?

According to Santillana and von Dechend, all such images refer to celestial events5 and do so, furthermore, in the refined technical language of an archaic but ‘immensely sophisticated’ astronomical and mathematical science:6

‘This language ignores local beliefs and cults. It concentrates on numbers, motions, measures, overall frames, schemas— on the structure of numbers, on geometry.’7

Where could such a language have come from? Hamlet’s Mill is a labyrinth of brilliant but deliberately evasive scholarship, and offers us no straightforward answer to this question. Here and there, however, almost with embarrassment, inconclusive hints are dropped. For example, at one point the authors say that the scientific language or ‘code’ they believe they have identified is of ‘awe-inspiring antiquity’.8 On another occasion they pin down the depth of this antiquity more precisely to a period at least ‘6000 years before Virgil’9—in other words 8000 years ago or more.

What civilization known to history could have developed and made use of a sophisticated technical language more than 8000 years ago?



The honest answer to this question is ‘none’, followed by a frank admission that what is being conjectured is nothing less than a forgotten episode of high technological culture in prehistoric times. Once again, Santillana and von Dechend are elusive when it comes to the crunch, speaking only of the legacy we all owe to,

‘some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization’ that ‘first dared to understand the world as created according to number, measure and weight.’10

The legacy, it is clear, has to do with scientific thinking and complex information of a mathematical nature. Because it is so extremely old, however, the passage of time has dissipated it:

When the Greeks came upon the scene the dust of centuries had already settled upon the remains of this great world-wide archaic construction. Yet something of it survived in traditional rites, in myths and fairy-tales no longer understood ... These are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole.



They make one think of those ‘mist landscapes’ of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the thought of these remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its symbols, since the creating, ordering minds that devised the symbols have vanished forever.’11

What we have here, therefore, are two distinguished professors of the History of Science, from esteemed universities on both sides of the Atlantic, claiming to have discovered the remnants of a coded scientific language many thousands of years older than the oldest human civilizations identified by scholarship. Moreover, though generally cautious, Santillana and von Dechend also claim to have ‘broken part of that code’.12

This is an extraordinary statement for two serious academics to have made.

7 Ibid., p. 345.

8 Ibid., p. 418.

9 Ibid., p. 245.

10 Ibid., p. 132.

11 Ibid., pp. 4-5,348.

12 Ibid., p. 5.

Chapter 30 - The Cosmic Tree and the Mill of the Gods


In their brilliant and far-reaching study Hamlet’s Mill, Professors de Santillana and von Dechend present a formidable array of mythical and iconographic evidence to demonstrate the existence of a curious phenomenon. For some inexplicable reason, and at some unknown date, it seems that certain archaic myths from all over the world were ‘coopted’ (no other word will really do) to serve as vehicles for a body of complex technical data concerning the precession of the equinoxes.



The importance of this astonishing thesis, as one leading authority on ancient measurement has pointed out, is that it has fired the first salvo in what may prove to be ‘a Copernican revolution in current conceptions of the development of human culture.’1

Hamlet’s Mill was published in 1969, more than a quarter of a century ago, so the revolution has been a long time coming. During this period, however, the book has been neither widely distributed among the general public nor widely understood by scholars of the remote past.



This state of affairs has not come about because of any inherent problems or weaknesses in the work. Instead, in the words of Martin Bernal, professor of Government Studies at Cornell University, it has happened because ‘few archaeologists, Egyptologists and ancient historians have the combination of time, effort and skill necessary to take on the very technical arguments of de Santillana.’ 2



1 Livio Catullo Stecchini, ‘Notes on the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid’, in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 381-2.
2 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vintage Books, London, 1991, p. 276.

What those arguments predominantly concern is the recurrent and persistent transmission of a ‘precessional message’ in a wide range of ancient myths. And, strangely enough, many of the key images and symbols that crop up in these myths—notably those that concern a ‘derangement of the heavens’—are also to be found embedded in the ancient traditions of worldwide cataclysm reviewed in Chapters Twenty-four and Twenty-five.

In Norse mythology for example, we saw how the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods had so carefully chained up, broke his bonds at last and escaped:

‘He shook himself and the world trembled. The ash-tree Yggdrasil was shaken from its roots to its topmost branches. Mountains crumbled or split from top to bottom ... The earth began to lose its shape. Already the stars were coming adrift in the sky.’

In the opinion of de Santillana and von Dechend, this myth mixes the familiar theme of catastrophe with the quite separate theme of precession. On the one hand we have an earthly disaster on a scale that seems to dwarf even the flood of Noah. On the other we hear that ominous changes are taking place in the heavens and that the stars, which have come adrift in the sky, are ‘dropping into the void.’ 3

Such celestial imagery, repeated again and again with only relatively minor variations in myths from many different parts of the world, belongs to a category earmarked in Hamlet’s Mill as ‘not mere storytelling of the kind that comes naturally’.4 Moreover the Norse traditions that speak of the monstrous wolf Fenrir, and of the shaking of Yggdrasil, go on to report the final apocalypse in which the forces of Valhalla issue forth on the side of ‘order’ to participate in the terrible last battle of the gods—a battle that will end in apocalyptic destruction:

500 doors and 40 there are I ween, in Valhalla’s walls; 800 fighters through each door fare, When to war with the Wolf they go.5

3 The reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five how Yggdrasil, the world tree itself, was not destroyed and how the progenitors of future humanity managed to shelter within its trunk until a new earth emerged from the ruins of the old. How likely is it to be pure coincidence that exactly the same strategy was adopted by survivors of the universal deluge as described in certain Central American myths? Such links and crossovers in myth between the themes of precession and global catastrophe are extremely common.

4 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.

5 Grimnismol 23, the Poetic Edda, p. 93, cited in Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 199; Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162; Elsa Brita Titchenell, The Masks of Odin, Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, 1988, p. 168.



With a lightness of touch that is almost subliminal, this verse has encouraged us to count Valhalla’s fighters, thus momentarily obliging us to focus our attention on their total number (540 x 800 = 432,000). This total, as we shall see in Chapter Thirty-one is mathematically linked to the phenomenon of precession. It is, unlikely to have found its way into Norse mythology by accident, especially in a context that has previously specified a ‘derangement of the heavens’ severe enough to have caused the stars to come adrift from their stations in the sky.

To understand what is going on here it is essential to grasp the basic imagery of the ancient ‘message’ that Santillana and von Dechend claim to have stumbled upon. This imagery transforms the luminous dome of the celestial sphere into a vast and intricate piece of machinery. And, like a millwheel, like a churn, like a whirlpool, like a quern, this machine turns and turns and turns endlessly (its motions being calibrated all the time by the sun, which rises first in one constellation of the zodiac, then in another, and so on all the year round).

The four key points of the year are the spring and autumn equinoxes and the winter and summer solstices. At each point, naturally, the sun is seen to rise in a different constellation (thus if the sun rises in Pisces at the spring equinox, as it does at present, it must rise in Virgo at the autumn equinox, in Gemini at the winter solstice and in Sagittarius at the summer solstice).



On each of these four occasions for the last 2000 years or so, this is exactly what the sun has been doing. As we have seen, however, precession of the equinoxes means that the vernal point will change in the not so distant future from Pisces to Aquarius. When that happens, the three other constellations marking the three key points will change as well (from Virgo, Gemini and Sagittarius to Leo, Taurus and Scorpius)—almost as though the giant mechanism of heaven has ponderously switched gears ...

Like the axle of a mill, Santillana and von Dechend explain, Yggdrasil ‘represents the world axis’ in the archaic scientific language they have identified: an axis which extends outwards (for a viewer in the northern hemisphere) to the North Pole of the celestial sphere:

This instinctively suggests a straight, upright post ... but that would be an oversimplification. In the mythical context it is best not to think of the axis in analytical terms, one line at a time, but to consider it, and the frame to which it is connected, as a whole:... As radius automatically calls circle to mind so axis should invoke the two determining great circles on the surface of the sphere, the equinoctial and solstitial colures.6

These colures are the imaginary hoops, intersecting at the celestial North Pole, which connect the two equinoctial points on the earth’s path around the sun (i.e. where it stands on 20 March and 22 September) and the two solstitial points (where it stands on 21 June and 21 December). The implication, is that:

‘The rotation of the polar axis must not be disjointed from the great circles that shift along with it in heaven. The framework is thought of as all one with the axis.’7

6 - Hamlet’s Mill, p. 232-3.

7 Ibid., p. 231.

Santillana and von Dechend are certain that what confronts us here is not a belief but an allegory. They insist that the notion of a spherical frame composed of two intersecting hoops suspended from an axis is not under any circumstances to be understood as the way in which ancient science envisaged the cosmos. Instead it is to be seen as a ‘thought tool’ designed to focus the minds of people bright enough to crack the code upon the hard-to-detect astronomical fact of precession of the equinoxes.

It is a thought tool that keeps on cropping up, in numerous disguises, all over the myths of the ancient world.




At the mill with slaves
One example, from Central America (which also provides a further illustration of the curious symbolic ‘cross-overs’ between myths of precession and myths of catastrophe), was summarized by Diego De Landa in the sixteenth century:

Among the multitude of gods worshipped by these people [the Maya] were four whom they called by the name Bacab. These were, they say, four brothers placed by God when he created the world at its four corners to sustain the heavens lest they fall. They also say that these Bacabs escaped when the world was destroyed by a deluge.8

It is the opinion of Santillana and von Dechend that the Mayan astronomer-priests did not subscribe for a moment to the simple-minded notion that the earth was flat with four corners. Instead, they say, the image of the four Bacabs is used as a technical allegory intended to shed light on the phenomenon of precession of the equinoxes.



The Bacabs stand, in short, for the system of coordinates of an astrological age. They represent the equinoctial and solstitial colures, binding together the four constellations in which the sun continues to rise at the spring and autumn equinoxes and at the winter and summer solstices for epochs of just under 2200 years.

Of course it is understood that when the gears of heaven change, the old age comes crashing down and a new age is born. All this, so far, is routine precessional imagery. What stands out, however, is the explicit linkage to an earthly disaster—in this case a flood—which the Bacabs survive. It may also be relevant that relief carvings at Chichen Itza unmistakably represent the Bacabs as being bearded and of European appearance.9

Be that as it may, the Bacab image (linked to a number of badly misunderstood references to ‘the four corners of heaven’, ‘the quadrangular earth’, and so on) is only one among many that seem to have been designed to serve as thought tools for precession. Archetypal among these is, of course, the ‘Mill’ of Santillana’s title—Hamlet’s Mill.

It turns out that the Shakespearean character, ‘whom the poet made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual’, conceals a past as a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by longstanding myth.10 In all his many incarnations, this Hamlet remains strangely himself.



The original Amlodhi (or sometimes Amleth) as his name was in Icelandic legend,

‘shows the same characteristics of melancholy and high intellect. He, too, is a son dedicated to avenge his father, a speaker of cryptic but inescapable truths, an elusive carrier of Fate who must yield once his mission is accomplished ...’11

8 Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 82.
9 See, for example, The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 64. It may also be relevant that other versions of ‘the Bacabs’ myth tell us that ‘their slightest movement produces an earth tremor or even an earthquake’ (Maya History and Religion, p. 346).

10 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.

11 Ibid.

In the crude and vivid imagery of the Norse, Amlodhi was identified with the ownership of a fabled mill, or quern, which, in its time, ground out gold and peace and plenty. In many of the traditions, two giant maidens (Fenja and Menja) were indentured to turn this great contraption, which could not be budged by any human strength. Something went wrong, and the two giantesses were forced to work day and night with no rest:

Forth to the mill bench they were brought, To set the grey stone in motion; He gave them no rest nor peace, Attentive to the creak of the mill.

Their song was a howl, shattering silence; ‘Lower the bin and lighten the stones!’ Yet he would have them grind more.12

Rebellious and angry, Fenja and Menja waited until everyone was asleep and then began to turn the mill in a mad whirl until its great props, though cased in iron, burst asunder.13 Immediately afterwards, in a confusing episode, the mill was stolen by a sea king named Mysinger and loaded aboard his ship together with the giantesses.



Mysinger ordered the pair to grind again, but this time they ground out salt. At midnight they asked him whether he was not weary of salt; he bade them grind longer. They had ground but a little longer when down sank the ship:

The huge props flew off the bin,
The iron rivets burst,

The shaft tree shivered,

The bin shot down.14

When it reached the bottom of the sea, the mill continued to turn, but it ground out rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom.15 Such images, Santillana and von Dechend assert, signify precession of the equinoxes.16 The axis and ‘iron props’ of the mill stand for: a system of coordinates in the celestial sphere and represent the frame of a world age.



Actually the frame defines a world age. Because the polar axis and the colures form an invisible whole, the entire frame is thrown out of kilter if one part is moved. When that happens a new Pole star with appropriate colures of its own must replace the obsolete apparatus.17

12 Grottasongr, ‘The Song of the Mill’, in The Masks of Odin, p. 198.

13 Ibid., p. 201.
14 Grottasongr, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 89-90.

15 Ibid., p. 2.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 232.



Furthermore, the engulfing whirlpool:

belongs to the stock-in-trade of ancient fable. It appears in the Odyssey as Charybdis in the Straits of Messina, and again in other cultures in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It is found there, too, curiously enough, with an overhanging fig-tree to whose boughs the hero can cling as the ship goes down, whether it be Satyavrata in India or Kae in Tonga ... The persistence of detail rules out free invention. Such stories have belonged to the cosmographical literature since antiquity.18

The appearance of the whirlpool in Homer’s Odyssey (which is a compilation of Greek myths more than 3000 years old), should not surprise us, because the great Mill of Icelandic legend appears there also (and does so, moreover, in familiar circumstances). It is the last night before the decisive confrontation.



Odysseus, bent on revenge, has landed in Ithaca and is hiding under the magic spell of the goddess Athena, which protects him from recognition. Odysseus prays to Zeus to send him an encouraging sign before the great ordeal:

Straightaway Zeus thundered from shining Olympus ... and goodly Odysseus was glad. Moreover, a woman, a grinder at the mill, uttered a voice of omen from within the house hard by, where stood the mills of the shepherd of the people. At these handmills twelve women in all plied their task, making meal of barley and of wheat the marrow of men.



Now all the others were asleep, for they had ground out their task of grain, but this one alone rested not yet, being the weakest of all. She now stayed her quern and spake the word ... ‘May the [enemies of Odysseus] on this day, for the last time make their sweet feasting in his halls. They that have loosened my knees with cruel toil to grind their barley meal, may they now sup their last!’19

Santillana and von Dechend argue that it is no accident that the allegory of the ‘orb of heaven that turns around like a millstone and ever does something bad’ 20 also makes an appearance in the biblical tradition of Samson, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’.21



His merciless captors unbind him so that he can ‘make sport’ for them in their temple; instead, with his last strength, he takes hold of the middle pillars of that great structure and brings the whole edifice crashing down, killing everybody.22 Like Fenja and Menja, he gets his revenge.


18 Ibid., p. 204.
19 Odyssey (Rouse translation), 20:103-19.

20 Trimalcho in Petronius, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 137.

21 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1:41. 22 Judges, 16:25-30.
23 In Japanese myth the Samson character is named Susanowo. See Post Wheeler, The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese, New York, 1952, p. 44ff.

The theme resurfaces in Japan,23 in Central America,24 among the Maoris of New Zealand,25 and in the myths of Finland. There the Hamlet/Samson figure is known as Kullervo and the mill has a peculiar name: the Sampo. Like Fenja and Menja’s mill it is ultimately stolen and loaded on board a ship. And like their mill, it ends up being broken in pieces.26

It turns out that the word ‘Sampo’ has its origins in the Sanskrit skambha, meaning ‘pillar or pole’.27 And in the Atharvaveda, one of the most ancient pieces of north Indian literature, we find an entire hymn dedicated to the Skambha:

In whom earth, atmosphere, in whom sky is set, where fire, moon, sun, wind stand fixed ... The Skambha sustains both heaven and earth; the Skambha sustains the wide atmosphere; the Skambha sustains the six wide directions; into the Skambha entered all existence.

Whitney, the translator (Atharvaveda 10:7) comments in some perplexity:

‘Skambha, lit, prop, support, pillar, strangely used in this hymn as frame of the universe’.28

Yet with an awareness of the complex of ideas linking cosmic mills, and whirlpools and world trees and so on, the archaic Vedic usage should not seem so strange.



What is being signaled here, as in all the other allegories, is the frame of a world age—that same heavenly mechanism that turns for more than 2000 years with the sun rising always in the same four cardinal points and then slowly shifts those celestial coordinates to four new constellations for the next couple of thousand years.



24 In slightly distorted form in the Popol Vuh’s account of the Twins and their 400 companions (see Chapter Nineteen). Zipcana, son of Vucub-Caquix sees the 400 youths dragging a huge log they want as a ridgepole for their house. Zipcana carries the tree without effort to the spot where a hole has been dug for the post to support the ridgepole. The youths try to kill Zipcana by crushing him in the hole, but he escapes and brings down the house on their heads, killing them all. Popol Vuh, pp. 99-101.

25 In Maori traditions the Samson character is known as Whakatu. See Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology, London, 1956 (1st ed. 1858), p. 97ff.

26 Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 104-8.

27 Ibid., p. 111.

28 Ibid., 233.

This is why the mill always breaks, why the huge props always fly off the bin in one way or another, why the iron rivets burst, why the shaft-tree shivers. Precession of the equinoxes merits such imagery because, at widely separated intervals of time it does indeed change, or break, the stabilizing coordinates of the entire celestial sphere.



Openers of the way
What is remarkable about all this is the way that the mill (which continues to serve as an allegory for cosmic processes) stubbornly keeps on resurfacing, all over the world, even where the context has been jumbled or lost. Indeed, in Santillana and von Dechend’s argument, it doesn’t really matter if the context is lost.

‘The particular merit of mythical terminology,’ they say, ‘is that it can be used as a vehicle for handing down solid knowledge independently from the degree of insight of the people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc.’ 29

29 Ibid., 312.

What matters, in other words, is that certain central imagery should survive and continue to be passed on in retellings, however far these may drift from the original storyline.

An example of such drift (coupled with the retention of essential imagery and information) is found among the Cherokees, whose name for the Milky Way (our own galaxy) is ‘Where the Dog Ran’. In ancient times, according to Cherokee tradition, the ‘people in the South had a corn mill’, from which meal was stolen again and again. In due course the owners discovered the thief, a dog, who,

‘ran off howling to his home in the North, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day ... “Where the Dog Ran”.’ 30

In Central America, one of the many myths concerning Quetzalcoatl depicts him playing a key role in the regeneration of mankind after the all-destroying flood that ended the Fourth Sun. Together with his dog-headed companion Xolotl, he descends into the underworld to retrieve the skeletons of the people killed by the deluge.



This he succeeds in doing, after tricking Miclantechuhtli, the god of death, and the bones are brought to a place called Tamoanchan. There, like corn, they are milled into a fine meal on a grindstone. Upon this ground meal the gods then release blood, thus creating the flesh of the current age of men.31

Santillana and von Dechend do not think that the presence of a canine character in both the above variants of the myth of the cosmic mill is likely to be accidental. They point out that Kullervo, the Finnish Hamlet, is also accompanied by ‘the black dog Musti’.32 Likewise, after his return to his estates in Ithaca, Odysseus is first recognized by his faithful dog,33 and as anyone who has been to Sunday school will remember, Samson is associated with foxes (300 of them to be precise34), which are members of the dog family.



In the Danish version of the Amleth/Hamlet saga, ‘Amleth went on and a wolf crossed his path amid the thicket.’35 Last but not least an alternative recension of the Kullervo story from Finland has the hero (rather weirdly) being ‘sent to Esthonia to bark under the fence; he barked one year ...’36



30 James Mooney, ‘Myths of the Cherokee’, Washington, 1900, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 249, 389; Jean Guard Monroe and Ray A. Williamson, They Dance in the Sky: Native American Star Myths, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1987, pp. 117-18.

31 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 70.

32 Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 33.

33 Homer, The Odyssey, Book 17.

34 Judges, 15:4.

35 Saxo Grammaticus, in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 13.

36 Ibid., p. 31.

Santillana and von Dechend are confident that all this ‘doggishness’ is purposive: another piece of the ancient code, as yet unbroken, persistently tapping out its message from place to place. They list these and many other canine symbols among a series of ‘morphological markers’ which they have identified as likely to suggest the presence, in ancient myths, of scientific information concerning precession of the equinoxes.37



These markers may have had meanings of their own or been intended simply to alert the target audience that a piece of hard data was coming up in the story being told. Beguilingly, sometimes they may also have been designed to serve as ‘openers of the way’—conduits to enable initiates to follow the trail of scientific information from one myth to another.

Thus, even though none of the familiar mills and whirlpools is in sight, we should perhaps sit up and pay attention when we learn that Orion, the great hunter of Greek myth, was the owner of a dog. When Orion tried to ravish the virgin goddess Artemis she produced a scorpion from the earth which killed him and the dog. Orion was transported to the skies where he became the constellation that bears his name today; his dog was transformed into Sirius, the Dog Star.38

Precisely the same identification of Sirius was made by the ancient Egyptians,39 who linked the Orion constellation specifically to their god Osiris.40 It is in Ancient Egypt too that the character of the faithful celestial dog achieves its fullest and most explicit mythical elaboration in the form of Upuaut, a jackal-headed deity whose name means ‘Opener of the Ways’.41 If we follow this way opener to Egypt, turn our eyes to the constellation of Orion, and enter the potent myth of Osiris, we find ourselves enveloped in a net of familiar symbols.

The reader will recall that the myth presents Osiris as the victim of a plot. The conspirators initially dispose of him by sealing him in a box and casting him adrift on the waters of the Nile. In this respect does he not resemble Utnapishtim, and Noah and Coxcoxtli and all the other deluge heroes in their arks (or boxes, or chests) riding out the waters of the flood?

Another familiar element is the classic precessional image of the world-tree and/or roof-pillar (in this case combined). The myth tells us how Osiris, still sealed inside his coffer, is carried out into the sea and washed up at Byblos. The waves lay him to rest among the branches of a tamarisk tree, which rapidly grows to a magnificent size, enclosing the coffer within its trunk.42


37 Ibid., pp. 7, 31.
38 World Mythology, p. 139. It should also be noted that, like Samson, Orion was blind— the only blind figure in constellation mythology. See Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 177-8.

39 Mercer, The Religion of Ancient Egypt, London, 1946, pp. 25, 112.
40 Ibid. Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 39: ‘the ancient Egyptians are known to have identified Orion with Osiris’.
41 Also rendered Wapwewet and Ap-uaut. See, for example, E. A. Wallis Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, Methuen and Co., London, 1904, vol. II, pp. 366-7.

42 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. L.

The king of the country, who much admires the tamarisk tree, cuts it down and fashions the part which contains Osiris into a roof pillar for his palace. Later Isis, the wife of Osiris, removes her husband’s body from the pillar and takes it back to Egypt to undergo rebirth.43

The Osiris myth also includes certain key numbers. Whether by accident or by design, these numbers give access to a ‘science’ of precession, as we shall see in the next chapter.

43 Ibid. Though a mill, as such, is nowhere to be seen, many Ancient Egyptian reliefs depict two of the principal characters in the Osiris myth (Horus and Seth) jointly operating a giant drill, again a classic symbol of precession. Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162: ‘This feature is continuously mislabelled the “uniting of the two countries” whether Horus and Seth serve the churn or, as is more often the case, the so-called Nile Gods.’


Back to Contents





Chapter 31 - The Osiris Numbers


Archaeo-astronomer Jane B. Sellers, who studied Egyptology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, spends her winters in Portland, Maine, and summers at Ripley Neck, a nineteenth-century enclave ‘downcast’ on Maine’s rocky coast.

‘There,’ she says, ‘the night skies can be as clear as the desert, and no one minds if you read the Pyramid Texts out loud to the seagulls ...1

One of the few serious scholars to have tested the theory advanced by Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, Sellers has been hailed for having drawn attention to the need to use astronomy, and more particularly precession, for the proper study of ancient Egypt and its religion.2 In her words:

‘Archaeologists by and large lack an understanding of precession, and this affects their conclusions concerning ancient myths, ancient gods and ancient temple alignments ... For astronomers precession is a well-established fact; those working in the field of ancient man have a responsibility to attain an understanding of it.’3

It is Sellers’s contention, eloquently expressed in her recent book, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, that the Osiris myth may have been deliberately encoded with a group of key numbers that are ‘excess baggage’ as far as the narrative is concerned but that offer an eternal calculus by which surprisingly exact values can be derived for the following:

1 - The time required for the earth’s slow precessional wobble to cause the position of sunrise on the vernal equinox to complete a shift of one degree along the ecliptic (in relation to the stellar background);

2 -The time required for the sun to pass through one full zodiacal segment of thirty degrees;

3 -The time required for the sun to pass through two full zodiacal segments (totalling sixty degrees);
4 -The time required to bring about the ‘Great Return’4, i.e., for the sun to shift three hundred and sixty degrees along the ecliptic, thus fulfilling one complete precessional cycle or ‘Great Year’.

1 The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, author biography.

2 For example by Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery, pp. 144-5.

3 The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 174.
4 This phrase was coined by Jane Sellers, whom also detected the precessional calculations embedded in the Osiris myth.




Computing the Great Return
The precessional numbers highlighted by Sellers in the Osiris myth are 360, 72, 30 and 12. Most of them are found in a section of the myth which provides us with biographical details of the various characters. These have been conveniently summarized by E. A. Wallis Budge, formerly keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum:

The goddess Nut, wife of the sun god Ra, was beloved by the god Geb. When Ra discovered the intrigue he cursed his wife and declared that she should not be delivered of a child in any month of any year. Then the god Thoth, who also loved Nut, played at tables with the moon and won from her five whole days. These he joined to the 360 days of which the year then consisted [emphasis added]. On the first of these five days Osiris was brought forth; and at the moment of his birth a voice was heard to proclaim that the lord of creation was born.5

Elsewhere the myth informs us that the 300-day year consists of ‘12 months of 30 days each’.6 And in general, as Sellers observes, ‘phrases are used which prompt simple mental calculations and an attention to numbers’.7



5 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, page XLIX.

6 Cited in The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 204.

7 Ibid.

Thus far we have been provided with three of Sellers’s precessional numbers: 360, 12 and 30. The fourth number, which occurs later in the text, is by far the most important. As we saw in Chapter Nine, the evil deity known as Set led a group of conspirators in a plot to kill Osiris. The number of these conspirators was 72.

With this last number in hand, suggests Sellers, we are now in a position to boot-up and set running an ancient computer programme:

12 = the number of constellations in the zodiac

30 = the number of degrees allocated along the ecliptic to each zodiacal constellation

72 = the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a precessional shift of one degree along the ecliptic

360 = the total number of degrees in the ecliptic

72 x 30 = 2160 (the number of years required for the sun to complete a passage of 30 degrees along the ecliptic, i.e., to pass entirely through any one of the 12 zodiacal constellations)

2160 x 12 (or 360 x 72) = 25,920 (the number of years in one complete precessional cycle or ‘Great Year’, and thus the total number of years required to bring about the ‘Great Return’)

Other figures and combinations of figures also emerge, for example:

36, the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a precessional shift of half a degree along the ecliptic

4320, the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a precessional shift of 60 degrees (i.e., two zodiacal constellations)

These, Sellers believes, constitute the basic ingredients of a precessional code which appears again and again, with eerie persistence, in ancient myths and sacred architecture. In common with much esoteric numerology, it is a code in which it is permissible to shift decimal points to left or right at will and to make use of almost any conceivable combinations, permutations, multiplications, divisions and fractions of the essential numbers (all of which relate precisely to the rate of precession of the equinoxes).

The pre-eminent number in the code is 72. To this is frequently added 36, making 108, and it is permissible to multiply 108 by 100 to get 10,800 or to divide it by 2 to get 54, which may then be multiplied by 10 and expressed as 540 (or as 54,000. or as 540,000, or as 5,400,000, and so on).



Also highly significant is 2160 (the number of years required for the equinoctial point to transit one zodiacal constellation), which is sometimes multiplied by 10 and by factors often (to give 216,000, 2,160,000, and so on) and sometimes by 2 to give 4320, or 43,200, or 432,000, or 4,320,000, ad infinitum.



Better than Hipparchus
If Sellers is correct in her hypothesis that the calculus needed to produce these numbers was deliberately encoded into the Osiris myth to convey precessional information to initiates, we are confronted by an intriguing anomaly. If they are indeed about precession, the numbers are out of place in time. The science they contain is too advanced for them to have been calculated by any known civilization of antiquity.

Let us not forget that they occur in a myth which is present at the very dawn of writing in Egypt (indeed elements of the Osiris story are to be found in the Pyramid Texts dating back to around 2450 BC, in a context which suggests that they were exceedingly old even then8). Hipparchus, the so-called discoverer of precession lived in the second century BC. He proposed a value of 45 or 46 seconds of arc for one year of precessional motion.

8 Ibid., pp. 125-6ff; see also The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

These figures yield a one-degree shift along the ecliptic in 80 years (at 45 arc seconds per annum), and in 78.26 years (at 46 arc seconds per annum). The true figure, as calculated by twentieth century science, is 71.6 years.9 If Sellers’s theory is correct, therefore, the ‘Osiris numbers’, which give a value of 72 years, are significantly more accurate than those of Hipparchus.



Indeed, within the obvious confines imposed by narrative structure, it is difficult to see how the number 72 could have been improved upon, even if the more precise figure had been known to the ancient myth-makers. One can hardly insert 71.6 conspirators into a story, but 72 will fit comfortably.

Working from this rounded-up figure, the Osiris myth is capable of yielding a value of 2160 years for a precessional shift through one complete house of the zodiac. The correct figure, according to today’s calculations, is 2148 years.10 The Hipparchus figures are 2400 years and 2347.8 years respectively. Finally, Osiris enables us to calculate 25,920 as the number of years required for the fulfillment of a complete precessional cycle through 12 houses of the zodiac. Hipparchus gives us either 28,800 or 28,173.6 years.



The correct figure, by today’s estimates, is 25,776 years.11 The Hipparchus calculations for the Great Return are therefore around 3000 years out of kilter. The Osiris calculations miss the true figure by only 144 years, and may well do so because the narrative context forced a rounding-up of the base number from the correct value of 71.6 to a more workable figure of 72.



9 Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 205.

10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.

All this, however, assumes that Sellers is right to suppose that the numbers 360, 72, 30 and 12 did not find their way into the Osiris myth by chance but were placed there deliberately by people who understood— and had accurately measured—precession.

Is Sellers right?



Times of decay
The Osiris myth is not the only one to incorporate the calculus for precession. The relevant numbers keep surfacing in various forms, multiples and combinations, all over the ancient world.

An example was given in Chapter Thirty-three—the Norse myth of the 432,000 fighters who sallied forth from Valhalla to do battle with ‘the Wolf’. A glance back at that myth shows that it contains several permutations of ‘precessional numbers’.

Likewise, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-four, ancient Chinese traditions referring to a universal cataclysm were said to have been written down in a great text consisting of precisely 4320 volumes.

Thousands of miles away, is it a coincidence that the Babylonian historian Berossus (third century BC) ascribed a total reign of 432,000 years to the mythical kings who ruled the land of Sumer before the flood? And is it likewise a coincidence that this same Berossus ascribed 2,160,000 years to the period ‘between creation and universal catastrophe’?12

Do the myths of ancient Amerindian peoples like the Maya also contain or enable us to compute numbers such as 72, 2160, 4320, etc. We shall probably never know, thanks to the conquistadores and zealous friars who destroyed the traditional heritage of Central America and left us so little to work with. What we can say, however, is that the relevant numbers do turn up, in relative profusion, in the Mayan Long Count calendar.



Details of that calendar were given in Chapter Twenty-one. The numerals necessary for calculating precession are found there in these formulae:

1 Katun = 7200 days

1 Tun = 360 days

2 Tuns = 720 days

5 Baktuns = 720,000 days

5 Katuns = 36,000 days

6 Katuns = 43,200 days

6 Tuns = 2160 days

15 Katuns = 2,160,000 days 13

Nor does it seem that Sellers’s ‘code’ is confined to mythology. In the jungles of Kampuchea the temple complex of Angkor looks as though it could have been purpose-built as a precessional metaphor. It has, for example, five gates to each of which leads a road bridging the crocodile-infested moat that surrounds the whole site. Each of these roads is bordered by a row of gigantic stone figures, 108 per avenue, 54 on each side (540 statues in all) and each row carries a huge Naga serpent.



Furthermore, as Santillana and von Dechend point out in Hamlet’s Mill, the figures do not ‘carry’ the serpent but are shown to ‘pull’ it, which indicates that these 540 statues are ‘churning the Milky Ocean’. The whole of Angkor ‘thus turns out to be a colossal model set up with true Hindu fantasy and incongruousness’ to express the idea of precession.14

12 Ibid., p. 196.
13 Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, p. 143.

14 Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 162-3; see also Atlas of Mysterious Places, pp. 168-70.
The same may be true of Java’s famous temple of Borobudur, with its 72 bell-shaped stupas, and perhaps also of the megaliths of Baalbeck in the Lebanon—which are thought to be the world’s biggest blocks of cut stone. Long predating Roman and Greek structures on the site, the three that make up the so-called ‘Trilithion’ are as tall as five-storey buildings and weigh over 600 tons each.



A fourth megalith is almost 80 feet in length and weighs 1100 tons. Amazingly these giant blocks were cut, perfectly-shaped and somehow transported to Baalbeck from a quarry several miles away. In addition they were skillfully incorporated, at a considerable height above ground-level into the retaining walls of a magnificent temple. This temple was surrounded by 54 columns of immense size and height.15

15 See, for example, Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients, Time-Life Books, 1990, p. 65.

In the subcontinent of India (where the Orion constellation is known as Kal-Purush, meaning Time-Man16), we find that Sellers’s Osiris numbers are transmitted through a wide range of media in ways increasingly difficult to ascribe to chance. There are, for instance, 10,800 bricks in the Agnicayana, the Indian fire altar. There are 10,800 stanzas in the Rigveda, the most ancient of the Vedic texts and a rich repository of Indian mythology.



Each stanza is made up of 40 syllables with the result that the entire composition consists of 432,000 syllables ... no more, and no less.17 And in Rigveda 1:164 (a typical stanza) we read of ‘the 12 spoked wheel in which 720 sons of Agni are established’.18

In the Hebrew Cabala there are 72 angels through whom the Sephiroth (divine powers) may be approached, or invoked, by those who know their names and numbers.19 Rosicrucian tradition speaks of cycles of 108 years (72 plus 36) according to which the secret brotherhood makes its influence felt.20



Similarly the number 72 and its permutations and subdivisions are of great significance to the Chinese secret societies known as Triads. An ancient ritual requires that each candidate for initiation pay a fee including ‘360 cash for “making clothes”, 108 cash “for the purse”, 72 cash for instruction, and 36 cash for decapitating the “traitorous subject”.’21



The ‘cash’ (the old universal brass coin of China with a square hole in the centre) is of course no longer in circulation but the numbers passed down in the ritual since times immemorial have survived. Thus in modern Singapore, candidates for Triad membership pay an entrance fee which is calculated according to their financial circumstances but which must always consist of multiples of $1.80, $3.60, $7.20, $10.80 (and thus, $18, $36, $72, $108.00, or $360, $720, $1,080, and so on.22



16 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists, George G. Harrap and Company, London, 1913, p. 384.

17 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162.

18 Rig Veda, 1:164, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 168.
19 Frances A. Yates, Girodano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 93.

20 Personal communication from AMORC, San Jose, California, November 1994.
21 Leon Comber, The Traditional Mysteries of the Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, Eastern Universities Press, Singapore, 1961, p. 52.

22 Ibid., p. 53.
23 Gustav Schlegel, The Hung League, Tynron Press, Scotland, 1991 (first published 1866), Introduction, p. XXXVII.

Of all the secret societies, the most mysterious and archaic by far is undoubtedly the Hung League, which scholars believe to be ‘the depository of the old religion of the Chinese’.23 In one Hung initiation ritual the neophyte is put through a question and answer session that goes:

Q. What did you see on your walk?
A. I saw two pots with red bamboo.

Q. Do you know how many plants there were?
A. In one pot were 36 and in the other 72 plants, together 108.

Q. Did you take home some of them for your use?
A. Yes, I took home 108 plants ...

Q. How can you prove that?
A. I can prove it by a verse.

Q. How does this verse run?
A. The red bamboo from Canton is rare in the world. In the groves are 36 and 72. Who in the world knows the meaning of this? When we have set to work we will know the secret.

The atmosphere of intrigue that such passages generate is accentuated by the reticent behaviour of the Hung League itself, an organization resembling the medieval European Order of the Knights Templar (and the higher degrees of modern Freemasonry) in many ways that are beyond the remit of this book to describe.24 It is intriguing, too, that the Chinese character Hung, composed of water and many, signifies inundation, i.e. the Flood.

Finally, returning to India, let us note the content of the sacred scriptures known as the Puranas. These speak of four ‘ages of the earth’, called Yugas, which together are said to extend to 12,000 ‘divine years’. The respective durations of these epochs, in ‘divine years’, are,

Krita Yuga = 4800

Treta Yuga = 3600

Davpara Yuga = 2400

Kali Yuga = 1200 25

The Puranas also tell us that ‘one year of the mortals is equal to one day of the gods’.26 Furthermore, and exactly as in the Osiris myth, we discover that the number of days in the years of both gods and mortals has been artificially set at 360, so one year of the gods is equivalent to 360 mortal years.27


24 For fuller details see The Hung League and J. S. M. Ward, The Hung Society, Baskerville Press, London, 1925 (in three volumes).
25 W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology: Vedic and Puranic, Heritage Publishers, New Delhi, 1991, p. 353.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.


The Kali Yuga, therefore, at 1200 years of the gods, turns out to have a duration of 432,000 mortal years.28 One Mahayuga, or Great Age (made up of the 12,000 divine years contained in the four lesser Yugas) is equivalent to 4,320,000 years of mortals. A thousand such Mahayugas (which constitute a Kalpa, or Day of Brahma) extend over 4,320,000,000 ordinary years,29 again supplying the digits for basic precessional calculations.



Separately there are Manvantaras (periods of Manu) of which we are told in the scriptures that ‘about 71 systems of four Yugas elapse during each Manvantara.’30 The reader will recall that one degree of precessional motion along the ecliptic requires 71.6 years to complete, a number that can be rounded down to ‘about 71’ in India just as easily as it was rounded up to 72 in Ancient Egypt.

The Kali Yuga, with a duration of 432,000 mortal years, is, by the way, our own. ‘In the Kali Age,’ the scriptures say, ‘shall decay flourish, until the human race approaches annihilation.’31


29 Ibid., pp. 353-4.

30 Ibid., p. 354.

31 Ibid., p. 247.



Dogs, uncles and revenge
It was a dog that brought us to these decaying times.

We came here by way of Sirius, the Dog Star, who stands at the heel of the giant constellation of Orion where it towers in the sky above Egypt. In that land, as we have seen, Orion is Osiris, the god of death and resurrection, whose numbers—perhaps by chance—are 12, 30, 72, and 360. But can chance account for the fact that these and other prime integers of precession keep cropping up in supposedly unrelated mythologies from all over the world, and in such stolid but enduring vehicles as calendar systems and works of architecture?

Santillana and von Dechend, Jane Sellers and a growing body of other scholars rule out chance, arguing that the persistence of detail is indicative of a guiding hand.

If they are wrong, we need to find some other explanation for how such specific and inter-related numbers (the only obvious function of which is to calculate precession) could by accident have got themselves so widely imprinted on human culture.

But suppose they are not wrong? Suppose that a guiding hand really was at work behind the scenes?

Sometimes, when you slip into Santillana’s and von Dechend’s world of myth and mystery, you can almost feel the influence of that hand ... Take the business of the dog ... or jackal, or wolf, or fox. The subtle way this shadowy canine slinks from myth to myth is peculiar—stimulating, then baffling you, always luring you onwards.

Indeed, it was this lure we followed from the Mill of Amlodhi to the myth of Osiris in Egypt. Along the way, according to the design of the ancient sages (if Sellers, Santillana and von Dechend are right) we were first encouraged to build a clear mental picture of the celestial sphere. Second, we were provided with a mechanistic model so that we could visualize the great changes precession of the equinoxes periodically effects in all the coordinates of the sphere. Finally, after allowing the dog Sirius to open the way for us, we were given the figures to calculate precession more or less exactly.

Nor is Sirius, in his eternal station at Orion’s heel, the only doggish character around Osiris. We saw in Chapter Eleven how Isis (who was both the wife and sister of Osiris32) searched for her dead husband’s body after he had been murdered by Set (who, incidentally, was also her brother, and the brother of Osiris). In this search, according to ancient tradition, she was assisted by dogs (jackals in some versions).33



Likewise, mythological and religious texts from all periods of Egyptian history assert that the jackal-god Anubis ministered to the spirit of Osiris after his death and acted as his guide through the underworld.34 (Surviving vignettes depict Anubis as virtually identical in appearance to Upuaut, the Opener of the Ways.)

Last but not least, Osiris himself was believed to have taken the form of a wolf when he returned from the underworld to assist his son Horus in the final battle against Set.35

Investigating this kind of material, one sometimes has the spooky sense of being manipulated by an ancient intelligence which has found a way to reach out to us across vast epochs of time, and for some reason has set us a puzzle to solve in the language of myth.

If it were just dogs that kept cropping up again and again, it would be easy to brush off such weird intuitions. The dog phenomenon seems more likely to be coincidence than anything else. But it isn’t just dogs.

The ways between the two very different myths of Osiris and Amlodhi’s Mill (which nonetheless both seem to contain accurate scientific data about precession of the equinoxes) are kept open by another strange common factor. Family relationships are involved. Amlodhi/Amleth/Hamlet is always a son who revenges the murder of his father by entrapping and killing the murderer. The murderer, furthermore, is always the father’s own brother, i.e., Hamlet’s uncle.36

This is precisely the scenario of the Osiris myth. Osiris and Seth are brothers.37 Seth murders Osiris. Horus, the son of Osiris, then takes revenge upon his uncle.38

32 For details of these complicated family relationships, see Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLVIIIff.

33 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 366.

34 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 71.

35 Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 367.

36 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.

37 Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLIX-LI.

38 Ibid.


Another twist is that the Hamlet character often has some sort of incestuous relationship with his sister.39 In the case of Kullervo, the Finnish Hamlet, there is a poignant scene in which the hero, returning home after a long absence, meets a maiden in the woods, gathering berries. They lie together. Only later do they discover that they are brother and sister. The maiden drowns herself at once. Later, with ‘the black dog Musti’ padding along at his heels, Kullervo wanders into the forest and throws himself upon his sword.40



39 Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 32-4.

40 Ibid., p. 33.

There are no suicides in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, but there is the incest of Osiris and his sister Isis. Out of their union is born Horus the avenger.

So once again it seems reasonable to ask:

What is going on?

Why are there all these apparent links and connections?

Why do we have these ‘strings’ of myths, ostensibly about different subjects, all of which prove capable in their own ways of shedding light on the phenomenon of precession of the equinoxes?

And why do all these myths have dogs running through them, and characters who seem unusually inclined to incest, fratricide and revenge?

It surely drives skepticism beyond its limits to suggest that so many identical literary devices could keep on turning up purely by chance in so many different contexts.

If not by chance, however, then,

Who exactly was responsible for creating this intricate and clever connecting pattern?

Who were the authors and designers of the puzzle and what motives might they have had?


Scientists with something to say
Whoever it was, they must have been smart—smart enough to have observed the infinitesimal creep of precessional motion along the ecliptic and to have calculated its rate at a value uncannily close to that obtained by today’s advanced technology.

It therefore follows that we are talking about highly civilized people. Indeed, we are talking about people who deserve to be called scientists. They must, moreover, have lived in extremely remote antiquity because we can be certain that the creation and dissemination of the common heritage of precessional myths on both sides of the Atlantic did not take place in historic times. On the contrary the evidence suggests that all these myths were ‘tottering with age’ when what we call history began about 5000 years ago.41



41 Ibid., p. 119.

The great strength of the ancient stories was this: as well as being for ever available for use and adaptation free of copyright, like intellectual chameleons, subtle and ambiguous, they had the capacity to change their colour according to their surroundings. At different times, in different continents, the ancient tales could be retold in a variety of ways, but would always retain their essential symbolism and always continue to transmit the coded precessional data they had been programmed with at the outset.

But to what end?

As we see in the next chapter, the long slow cycles of precession are not limited in their consequences to a changing view of the sky. This celestial phenomenon, born of the earth’s axial wobble, has direct effects on the earth itself. In fact, it appears to be one of the principal correlates of the sudden onset of ice ages and their equally sudden and catastrophic decay.


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Chapter 32 - Speaking to the Unborn


It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC.



The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers.

Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.1 Indeed the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been ‘written’ by the same ‘author’.

Could that author have had anything to do with the wondrous deity, or superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to the shocked and demoralized survivors?

White and bearded, Osiris is the Egyptian manifestation of this universal figure, and it may not be an accident that one of the first acts he is remembered for in myth is the abolition of cannibalism among the primitive inhabitants of the Nile Valley.2



Viracocha, in South America, was said to have begun his civilizing mission immediately after a great flood; Quetzalcoatl, the discoverer of maize, brought the benefits of crops, mathematics, astronomy and a refined culture to Mexico after the Fourth Sun had been overwhelmed by a destroying deluge.

1 See Chapter Twenty-four for details of flood myths. The same kind of convergence among supposedly unconnected myths also occurs with regard to precession of the equinoxes. The mills, the characters who work and own and eventually break them, the brothers and nephews and uncles, the theme of revenge, the theme of incest, the dogs that flit silently from story to story, and the exact numbers needed to calculate precessional motion—all crop up everywhere, from culture to culture and from age to age, propagating themselves effortlessly along the jet-stream of time.
2 Diodorus Siculus, Book I, 14:1-15, translated by C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1989, pp. 47-9.

Could these strange myths contain a record of encounters between scattered palaeolithic tribes which survived the last Ice Age and an as yet unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?

And could the myths be attempts to communicate?


A message in the bottle of time
‘Of all the other stupendous inventions,’ Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3



3 Galileo, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 10.

If the ‘precessional message’ identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn’t just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn’t that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.

Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It must be obvious that in such circumstances a written legacy to the future would be of no value at all, because nobody would be able to make sense of it.

What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them—and the city of Teotihuacán may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.

Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall see).

Another ‘constant’ in our solar system is the language of time: the great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost imperceptible reverse motion that the sun appears to make along the ecliptic against the background of the fixed stars (one degree in 71.6 years, 30 degrees in 2148 years, and so on).

The sense that a correlation exists is strengthened by something else. It is neither as firm nor as definite as the number of syllables in the Rigveda; nevertheless, it feels relevant. Through powerful stylistic links and shared symbolism, myths to do with global cataclysms and with precession of the equinoxes quite frequently intermesh.



A detailed interconnectedness exists between these two categories of tradition, both of which additionally bear what appear to be the recognizable fingerprints of a conscious design. Quite naturally, therefore, one is prompted to discover whether there might not be an important connection between precession of the equinoxes and global catastrophes.



Mill of pain
Although several different mechanisms of an astronomical and geological nature seem to be involved, and although not all of these are fully understood, the fact is that the cycle of precession does correlate very strongly with the onset and demise of ice ages.

Several trigger factors must coincide, which is why not every shift from one astronomical age to another is implicated. Nevertheless, it is accepted that precession does have an impact on both glaciation and deglaciation, at widely separated intervals. The knowledge that it does so has only been established by our own science since the late 1970s.4 Yet the evidence of the myths suggests that the same level of knowledge might have been possessed by an as yet unidentified civilization in the depths of the last Ice Age.



The clear suggestion we may be meant to grasp is that the terrible cataclysms of flood and fire and ice which the myths describe were in some way causally connected to the ponderous movements of the celestial coordinates through the great cycle of the zodiac. In the words of Santillana and von Dechend,

‘It was not a foreign idea to the ancients that the mills of the gods grind slowly and that the result is usually pain.’5

4 Ice Ages; John Imbrie et al., ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’ in Science, volume 194, No. 4270, 10 December 1976.

5 - Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 138-9.

Three principal factors, all of which we have met before, are now known to be deeply implicated in the onset and the retreat of ice ages (together, of course, with the diverse cataclysms that ensue from sudden freezes and thaws). These factors all have to do with variations in the earth’s orbital geometry.



They are:

1 - The obliquity of the ecliptic (i.e., the angle of tilt of the planet’s axis of rotation, which is also the angle between the celestial equator and the ecliptic). This, as we have seen, varies over immensely long periods of time between 22.1 degrees (the closest point that the axis reaches to vertical) and 24.5 degrees (the furthest it falls away from the vertical)

2 - The eccentricity of the orbit (i.e., whether the earth’s elliptical path around the sun is more or less elongated in any given epoch)

3 - Axial precession, which causes the four cardinal points on the earth’s orbit (the two equinoxes and the winter and summer solstices) to creep backwards very, very slowly around the orbital path

We are dipping our toes into the waters of a technical and specialized scientific discipline here—one largely outside the scope of this book. Readers seeking detailed information are referred to the multidisciplinary work of the US National Science Foundation’s CLIMAP Project, and to a keynote paper by Professors J. D. Hays and John Imbrie entitled ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’ (see Note 4).

Briefly, what Hays, Imbrie and others have proved is that the onset of ice ages can be predicted when the following evil and inauspicious conjunctions of celestial cycles occur:

(a) maximum eccentricity, which takes the earth millions of miles further away from the sun at ‘aphelion’ (the extremity of its orbit) than is normal

(b) minimum obliquity, which means that the earth’s axis, and consequently the North and South poles, stand much closer to the vertical than is normal

(c) precession of the equinoxes which, as the great cycle continues, eventually causes winter in one hemisphere or the other to set in when the earth is at ‘perihelion’ (its closest point to the sun); this in turn means that summer occurs at aphelion and is thus relatively cold, so that ice laid down in winter fails to melt during the following summer and a remorseless buildup of glacial conditions occurs 6

6 ‘Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’.



Levered by the changing geometry of the orbit, ‘global insolation’—the differing amounts and intensity of sunlight received at various latitudes in any given epoch—can thus be an important trigger factor for ice ages.

Is it possible that the ancient myth-makers were trying to warn us of great danger when they so intricately linked the pain of global cataclysms to the slow grinding of the mill of heaven?

This is a question we will return to in due course, but meanwhile it is enough to observe that by identifying the significant effects of orbital geometry on the planet’s climate and wellbeing, and by combining this information with precise measurements of the rate of precessional motion, the unknown scientists of an unrecognized civilization seem to have found a way to catch our attention, to bridge the chasm of the ages, and to communicate with us directly.

Whether or not we listen to what they have to say is, of course, entirely up to us.