Page 107 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

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.
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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
offchance 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. I felt disinclined to ignore the
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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. He also bore a striking
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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.
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 286.
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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.

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