Chapter 22
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
Tcotihuacan.
The Citadel, the Temple and the Map of Heaven
Teotihuacan, 50 kilometres north-east of Mexico City
I stood in the airy enclosure of the Citadel and looked north across the morning haze towards the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Set amid grey-green scrub country, and ringed by distant mountains, these two great monuments played their parts in a symphony of ruins strung out along the axis of the so-called ‘Street of the Dead’. The Citadel lay at the approximate mid point of this wide avenue which ran perfectly straight for more than four kilometres. The Pyramid of the Moon was at its northern extreme, the Pyramid of the Sun offset somewhat to its east.
In the context of such a geometric site, an exact north-south or 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 Another, Professor Gerald Hawkins, had suggested that a ‘Sirius–Pleides axis’ could also have played a part.5 And Stansbury Hagar (secretary of the Department of Ethnology at the Brooklyn Institute of the Arts and Sciences), had suggested that the street might represent the Milky Way.6
Indeed Hagar went further than this, seeing the portrayal of specific planets and stars in many of the pyramids, mounds and other structures that hovered like fixed satellites around the axis of the Street of the Dead. His complete thesis was that Teotihuacan had been designed as a kind of ‘map of heaven’: ‘It reproduced on earth a supposed celestial 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 imediately in front of it to the west. Excavation of that mound had revealed the elegant six-stage pyramid that now confronted me. It stood 72 feet high and its base covered an area of 82,000 square feet.
Still bearing traces of the original multicoloured paints which had coated it in antiquity, the exposed Temple was a beautiful and strange sight. The predominant sculptural motif was a series of huge serpent heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the facing blocks and lining the sides of the massive central stairway. The elongated jaws of these oddly humanoid reptiles were heavily endowed with fangs, and the upper lips with a sort of handlebar moustache. Each serpent’s thick neck was ringed by an elaborate plume of feathers – the unmistakable symbol of Quetzalcoatl.10
What Harleston’s investigations had shown was that a complex mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal structures lined up along the Street of the Dead (and indeed beyond it). This relationship suggested something extraordinary, namely that Teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale-model of the solar system. At any rate, if the centre line of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the sun, markers laid out northwards from it along the axis of the Street of the Dead seemed to indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (represented by the so-called ‘Sun’ Pyramid), Uranus (by the ‘Moon’ Pyramid), and Neptune and Pluto by as yet unexcavated mounds some kilometres farther north.11
If these correlations were more than coincidental, then, at the very least, they indicated the presence at Teotihuacan of an advanced observational astronomy, one not surpassed by modern science until a relatively late date. Uranus remained unknown to our own astronomers until 1787, Neptune until 1846 and Pluto until 1930. Even the most conservative estimate of Teotihuacan’s antiquity, by contrast, suggested that the principal ingredients of the site-plan (including the Citadel, the Street of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon) must date back at least to the time of Christ.12 No known civilization of that epoch, either in the Old World or in the New, is supposed to have had any knowledge at all of the outer planets – let alone to have possessed accurate information concerning their orbital distances from each other and from the sun.
Egypt and Mexico – more coincidences?
After completing his studies of the pyramids and avenues of Teotihuacan, Stansbury Hagar concluded: ‘We have not yet realized either the importance or the refinement, or the widespread distribution throughout ancient America, of the astronomical cult of which the celestial plan was a feature, and of which Teotihuacan was one of the principal centres.’13
But was this just an astronomical ‘cult’? Or was it something approximating more closely to what we might call a science? And whether cult or science, was it realistic to suppose that it had enjoyed ‘widespread distribution’ only in the Americas when there was so much evidence linking it to other parts of the ancient world?
For example, archaeo-astronomers making use of the latest 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 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
The notion of pyramids as devices designed (presumably in some metaphysical sense) ‘to turn men into gods’ was, it seemed to me, too idiosyncratic and peculiar to have been arrived at independently in both Ancient Egypt and Mexico. So, too, was the idea of using the layout of sacred sites to incorporate a celestial plan.
Moreover, there were other strange similarities that deserved to be considered.
Just as at Giza, three principal pyramids had been built at Teotihuacan: the Pyramid/Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. Just as at Giza, the site plan was not symmetrical, as one might have expected, but involved two structures in direct alignment with each other while the third appeared to have been deliberately offset to one side. Finally, at Giza, the summits of the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre were level, even though the former was a taller building than the latter. Likewise, at Teotihuacan, the 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 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.
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 36-acre central patio of La Ciudadela was surrounded by massively thick embankments more than 23 feet high and some 1500 feet long on each side.29
My walk had now brought me to the western extreme of the patio. I climbed a steep set of stairs that led to the top of the embankment and turned north on to the Street of the Dead. Once again I had to remind myself that this was almost certainly not what the Teotihuacanos (whoever they were) had called the immense and impressive avenue. The Spanish name Calle de los Muertos was of Aztec origin, apparently based on speculation that the numerous mounds on either side of the Street were graves (which, as it happened, they were not).30
We have already considered the possibility that the Way of the Dead may have served as a terrestrial counterpart of the Milky Way. Of interest in this regard is the work of another American, Alfred E. Schlemmer, who – like Hugh Harleston Jr – was an engineer. Schlemmer’s field was technological forecasting, with specific reference to the prediction of earthquakes,31 on which he presented a paper at the Eleventh National Convention of Chemical Engineers (in Mexico City in October 1971).
Schlemmer’s argument was that the Street of the Dead might never have been a street at all. Instead, it might originally have been laid out as a row of linked reflecting pools, filled with water which had descended through a series of locks from the Pyramid of the Moon, at the northern extreme, to the Citadel in the south.
As I walked steadily northward towards the still-distant Moon Pyramid, it seemed to me that this theory had several points in its favour. For a start the ‘Street’ was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls, at the foot of which the remains of well-made sluices could clearly be seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would have facilitated a north-south 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
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.