Page 169 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

that a ‘Sirius-Pleides axis’ could also have played a part. And Stansbury
5
Hagar (secretary of the Department of Ethnology at the Brooklyn Institute
of the Arts and Sciences), had suggested that the street might represent
the Milky Way.
6
Indeed Hagar went further than this, seeing the portrayal of specific
planets and stars in many of the pyramids, mounds and other structures
that hovered like fixed satellites around the axis of the Street of the
Dead. His complete thesis was that Teotihuacan had been designed as a
kind of ‘map of heaven’: ‘It reproduced on earth a supposed celestial plan
of the sky-world where dwelt the deities and spirits of the dead.’
7
During the 1960s and 1970s Hagar’s intuitions were tested in the field
by Hugh Harleston Jr., an American engineer resident in Mexico, who
carried out a comprehensive mathematical survey at Teotihuacan.
Harleston reported his findings in October 1974 at the International
Congress of Americanists. His paper, which was full of daring and
8
innovative ideas, contained some particularly curious information about
the Citadel and about the Temple of Quetzalcoatl located at the eastern
extreme of this great square compound.
The Temple was regarded by scholars as one of the best-preserved
archaeological monuments in Central America. This was because the
9
original, prehistoric structure had been partially buried beneath another
much later mound immediately in front of it to the west. Excavation of
that mound had revealed the elegant six-stage pyramid that now
confronted me. It stood 72 feet high and its base covered an area of
82,000 square feet.
Still bearing traces of the original multicoloured paints which had
coated it in antiquity, the exposed Temple was a beautiful and strange
sight. The predominant sculptural motif was a series of huge serpent
heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the facing blocks and lining
the sides of the massive central stairway. The elongated jaws of these
oddly humanoid reptiles were heavily endowed with fangs, and the upper
lips with a sort of handlebar moustache. Each serpent’s thick neck was
ringed by an elaborate plume of feathers—the unmistakable symbol of
Quetzalcoatl.
10
What Harleston’s investigations had shown was that a complex
mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal
structures lined up along the Street of the Dead (and indeed beyond it).
This relationship suggested something extraordinary, namely that
Teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale-

5 Beyond Stonehenge, pp. 187-8.
6 Cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 220-1.
7 Ibid.
8 Hugh Harleston Jr., ‘A Mathematical Analysis of Teotihuacan’, XLI International
Congress of Americanists, 3 October 1974.
9 Richard Bloomgarden, The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, Editur S. A. Mexico, 1993, p. 14.
10 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 215.

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