Page 171 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

feature—the river Nile—which was exactly where it should be had it been
designed to represent the Milky Way.
15
The incorporation of a ‘celestial plan’ into key sites in Egypt and Mexico
did not by any means exclude religious functions. On the contrary,
whatever else they may have been intended for it is certain that the
monuments of Teotihuacan, like those of the Giza plateau, played
important religious roles in the lives of the communities they served.
Thus Central American traditions collected in the sixteenth century by
Father Bernardino de Sahagun gave eloquent expression to a widespread
belief that Teotihuacan had fulfilled at least one specific and important
religious function in ancient times. According to these legends the City of
the Gods was so known because ‘the Lords therein buried, after their
deaths, did not perish but turned into gods ...’ In other words, it was
16
‘the place where men became gods’. It was additionally known as ‘the
17
place of those who had the road of the gods’, and ‘the place where gods
18
were made’.
19
Was it a coincidence, I wondered, that this seemed to have been the
religious purpose of the three pyramids at Giza? The archaic hieroglyphs
of the Pyramid Texts, the oldest coherent body of writing in the world,
left little room for doubt that the ultimate objective of the rituals carried
out within those colossal structures was to bring about the deceased
pharaoh’s transfiguration—to ‘throw open the doors of the firmament
and to make a road’ so that he might ‘ascend into the company of the
gods’.
20
The notion of pyramids as devices designed (presumably in some
metaphysical sense) ‘to turn men into gods’ was, it seemed to me, too
idiosyncratic and peculiar to have been arrived at independently in both
Ancient Egypt and Mexico. So, too, was the idea of using the layout of
sacred sites to incorporate a celestial plan.
Moreover, there were other strange similarities that deserved to be
considered.
Just as at Giza, three principal pyramids had been built at Teotihuacan:
the Pyramid/Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Pyramid of the Sun and the
Pyramid of the Moon. Just as at Giza, the site plan was not symmetrical,
as one might have expected, but involved two structures in direct
alignment with each other while the third appeared to have been
deliberately offset to one side. Finally, at Giza, the summits of the Great
Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre were level, even though the former
was a taller building than the latter. Likewise, at Teotihuacan, the

15 Ibid.
16 Bernardino de Sahagun, cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 23.
17 Mexico: Rough Guide, p. 216.
The Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 158.
18
19 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.
20 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Utt. 667A, p. 281.

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