Page 116 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 15

Mexican 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. Though its contours were now blurred by age and its
1
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 kilometre 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’. In Cholula, a great centre of pilgrimage with a population of
2
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.
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

1 Figures from Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 56.
2 Ibid., p. 12.

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