Page 119 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Diego de Landa, participated in Spain’s satanic mission to wipe clear the
memory banks of Central America. Notable among these was Juan de
Zumarraga, Bishop of Mexico, who boasted of having destroyed 20,000
idols and 500 Indian temples. In November 1530 he burned a
Christianized Aztec aristocrat at the stake for having allegedly reverted to
worship of the ‘rain-god’ and later, in the market-place at Texcoco, built a
vast bonfire of astronomical documents, paintings, manuscripts and
hieroglyphic texts which the conquistadores had forcibly extracted from
the Aztecs during the previous eleven years. As this irreplaceable
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storehouse of knowledge and history went up in flames, a chance to
shake off at least some of the collective amnesia that clouds our
understanding was lost to mankind for ever.
What remains to us of the written records of the ancient peoples of
Central America? The answer, thanks to the Spanish, is less than twenty
original codices and scrolls.
13
We know from hearsay that many of the documents which the friars
reduced to ashes contained ‘records of ages past’.
14
What did those lost records say? what secrets did they hold?

Gigantic men of deformed stature

Even while the orgy of book-burning was still going on, some Spaniards
began to realize that ‘a truly great civilization had once existed in Mexico
prior to the Aztecs’. Oddly enough, one of the first to act on this
15
realization was Diego de Landa. He appears to have undergone
‘Damascus-road experience’ after staging his auto-da-fé at Mani. In later
years, determined to save what he could of the ancient wisdom he had
once played such a large part in destroying, he became an assiduous
gatherer of the traditions and oral histories of the native peoples of the
Yucatan.
16
Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan friar, was a chronicler to whom we
owe much. A great linguist, he is reported to have ‘sought out the most
learned and often the oldest natives, and asked each to paint in his Aztec
picture writing as much as he could clearly remember of Aztec history,
religion and legend’. In this way Sahagun was able to accumulate
17
detailed information on the anthropology, mythology and social history
of ancient Mexico, which he later set down in a learned twelve-volume
work. This was suppressed by the Spanish authorities. Fortunately one
copy has survived, though it is incomplete.

12 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 21.
13 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 34.
14 Ibid.
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 23.
15
16 Yucatan before and after the Conquest.
17 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 24.

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