Page 118 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

in a sacred sanctuary in the Mixtec capital Achiotlan? We know of this
curious object through the writings of a sixteenth-century eyewitness,
Father Burgoa:

The material was of marvellous value, for it was an emerald of the size of a thick
pepper-pod [capsicum], upon which a small bird was engraved with the greatest
skill, and, with the same skill, a small serpent coiled ready to strike. The stone was
so transparent that it shone from its interior with the brightness of a candle flame.
It was a very old jewel, and there is no tradition extant concerning the origin of its
veneration and worship.
7
What might we learn if we could examine this ‘very old’ jewel today? And
how old was it really? We shall never find out because Fr. Benito, the first
missionary of Achiotlan, seized the stone from the Indians: ‘He had it
ground up, although a Spaniard offered three thousand ducats for it,
stirred the powder in water, poured it upon the earth and trod upon it ...’
8
Equally typical of the profligate squandering of the intellectual riches
concealed in the Mexican past was the shared fate of two gifts given to
Cortez by the Aztec emperor Montezuma. These were circular calendars,
as big as cartwheels, one of solid silver, and the other of solid gold. Both
were elaborately engraved with beautiful hieroglyphs which may have
contained material of great interest. Cortez had them melted down for
ingots on the spot.
9
More systematically, all over Central America, vast repositories of
knowledge accumulated since ancient times were painstakingly gathered,
heaped up and burned by zealous friars. In July 1562, for example, in the
main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in Yucatan Province)
Fr. Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings
and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He also destroyed
countless ‘idols’ and ‘altars’, all of which he described as ‘works of the
devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them
from accepting Christianity ...’ Elsewhere he elaborated on the same
10
theme:
We found great numbers of books [written in the characters of the Indians] but as
they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned
them all, which the natives took most grievously, and which gave them great
pain.
11
Not only the ‘natives’ should have felt this pain but anyone and
everyone—then and now—who would like to know the truth about the
past.
Many other ‘men of God’, some even more ruthlessly efficient than

7 The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico, pp. 228-9.
8 Ibid.
9 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 7.
Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 9. See also Mysteries of the Mexican
10
Pyramids, p. 20.
11 Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 104.

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