Page 117 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, would return ‘from across the Eastern
Sea’ with his band of followers?
3
Because of this expectation, the naive and trusting Cholulans permitted
the conquistadores to climb the steps of the ziggurat and enter the great
courtyard of the temple. There troupes of gaily bedecked dancing girls
greeted them, singing and playing on instruments, while stewards moved
back and forth with heaped platters of bread and delicate cooked meats.
One of the Spanish chroniclers, an eyewitness to the events that
followed, reported that adoring townsfolk of all ranks ‘unarmed, with
eager and happy faces, crowded in to hear what the white men would
say’. Realizing from this incredible reception that their intentions were
not suspected, the Spaniards closed and guarded all the entrances, drew
their weapons of steel and murdered their hosts. Six thousand died in
4
this horrible massacre which matched, in its savagery, the most
5
bloodstained rituals of the Aztecs: ‘Those of Cholula were caught
unawares. With neither arrows nor shields did they meet the Spaniards.
Just so they were slain without warning. They were killed by pure
treachery.’
6
It was ironic, I thought, that the conquistadores in both Peru and
Mexico should have benefited in the same way from local legends that
prophesied the return of a pale, bearded god. If that god was indeed a
deified human, as seemed likely, he must have been a person of high
civilization and exemplary character—or more probably two different
people from the same background, one working in Mexico and providing
the model for Quetzalcoatl, the other in Peru being the model for
Viracocha. The superficial resemblance that the Spanish bore to those
earlier fair-skinned foreigners opened many doors that would otherwise
certainly have been closed. Unlike their wise and benevolent
predecessors, however, Pizarro in the Andes and Cortez in Central
America were ravening wolves. They ate up the lands and the peoples and
the cultures they had seized upon. They destroyed almost everything ...

Tears for the past

Their eyes scaled with ignorance, bigotry and greed, the Spanish erased a
precious heritage of mankind when they arrived in Mexico. In so doing
they deprived the future of any detailed knowledge concerning the
brilliant and remarkable civilizations which once flourished in Central
America.
What, for example, was the true history of the glowing ‘idol’ that rested

3 Ibid., pp. 3-4.
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 6.
4
5 Mexico, p. 224.
6 Contemporary account cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 6.

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