Page 110 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

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 judgement 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. The legends added that he had promised solemnly
8
that he would return one day —a clear echo of Viracocha it would be
9
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
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

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.
New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1989, pp. 437, 439.
8
9 Ibid., p. 437.
10 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 62.

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