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.
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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 ninestage 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.
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Palenque.
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
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.
1 The Atlas of Mysterious Places (ed. Jennifer Westwood), Guild Publishing, London,
1987, p. 70.
2 The Times, London, 4 June 1994.
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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?
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.
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.
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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 semireclined 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
Pyramid of the Magician
Uxmal, Yucatan
On a stormy afternoon, 700 kilometres 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
6 The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 70.
7 Time Among the Maya, p. 298.
8 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 95-6.
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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.
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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 corbelvaulted 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. And now, here at the Pyramid of the Magician in the Mayan site of
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.
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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