Page 158 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Uxmal.

The sides of the stairway I was climbing were richly decorated with what
the nineteenth-century American explorer John Lloyd Stephens described
as ‘a species of sculptured mosaic’. Oddly, although the Pyramid of the
13
Magician had been built long centuries before the Conquest, the symbol
most frequently featured in these mosaics was a close approximation of
the Christian cross. Indeed there were two distinct kinds of ‘Christian’
crosses: one the wide-pawed croix-patte favoured by the Knights Templar
and other crusading orders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the
other the x-shaped Saint Andrew’s cross.
After climbing a further shorter flight of steps I reached the temple at
the very top of the Magician’s pyramid. It consisted of a single corbel-
vaulted chamber from the ceiling of which large numbers of bats hung
suspended. Like the birds and the clouds, they were visibly distressed by
the sense of a huge storm brewing. In a furry mass they shuffled
restlessly upside down, folding and unfolding their small leathery wings.
I took a rest on the high platform that surrounded the chamber. From
here, looking down, I could see many more crosses. They were
everywhere, literally all over this bizarre and ancient structure. I
remembered the Andean city of Tiahuanaco and the crosses that had
been carved there, in distant pre-Colombian times, on some of the great
blocks of stone lying scattered around the building known as Puma
Punku. ‘Man in Snake’, the Olmec sculpture from La Venta, had also
14
been engraved with two Saint Andrew’s crosses long before the birth of
Christ. And now, here at the Pyramid of the Magician in the Mayan site of

John. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan,
13
Harper and Brothers, New York, 1841, vol. II, p. 422.
14 See Chapter Twelve.

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