Page 159 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Uxmal, I was confronted by crosses yet again.
Bearded men ...
Serpents ...
Crosses ...
How likely was it to be an accident that symbols as distinctive as these
should repeat themselves in widely separated cultures and at different
periods of history? Why were they so often built into the fabric of
sophisticated works of art and architecture?

A science of prophecy

Not for the first time I suspected that I might be looking at signs and
icons left behind by some cult or secret society which had sought to keep
the light of civilization burning in Central America (and perhaps
elsewhere) through long ages of darkness. I thought it notable that the
motifs of the bearded man, the Plumed Serpent, and the cross all tended
to crop up whenever and wherever there were hints that a technologically
advanced and as yet unidentified civilization might once have been in
contact with the native cultures. And there was a sense of great age
about this contact, as though it took place at such an early date that it
had been almost forgotten. I thought again about the sudden way the
Olmecs had emerged, around the middle of the second millennium BC,
out of the swirling mists of opaque prehistory. All the archaeological
evidence indicated that from the beginning they had venerated huge
stone heads and stele showing bearded men. I found myself increasingly
drawn to the possibility that some of those remarkable pieces of
sculpture could have been part of a vast inheritance of civilization handed
down to the peoples of Central America many thousands of years before
the second millennium BC, and thereafter entrusted to the safekeeping of
a secret wisdom cult, perhaps the cult of Quetzalcoatl.
Much had been lost. Nevertheless the tribes of this region—in particular
the Maya, the builders of Palenque and Uxmal—had preserved something
even more mysterious and wonderful than the enigmatic monoliths,
something which declared itself even more persistently to be the legacy
of an older and a higher civilization. We see in the next chapter that it
was the mystical science of an ancient star-gazing folk, a science of time
and measurement and prediction—a science of prophecy even—that the
Maya had preserved most perfectly from the past. With it they inherited
memories of a terrible, earth-destroying flood and an idiosyncratic legacy
of empirical knowledge, knowledge of a high order which they shouldn’t
really have possessed, knowledge that we have only reacquired very
recently ...

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