Page 182 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock
P. 182
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Great Pyramid represents the northern hemisphere in a scale of 1:43,200.
18
In Part VII we shall see why this scale was chosen.
Mathematical city
Rising up ahead of me as I walked towards the northern end of the Street
of the Dead, the Pyramid of the Moon, mercifully undamaged by
restorers, had kept its original form as a four-stage ziggurat. The Pyramid
of the Sun, too, had consisted of four stages but Bartres had whimsically
sculpted in a fifth stage between the original third and fourth levels.
There was, however, one original feature of the Pyramid of the Sun that
Bartres had been unable to despoil: a subterranean passageway leading
from a natural cave under the west face. After its accidental discovery in
1971 this passageway was thoroughly explored. Seven feet high, it was
found to run eastwards for more than 300 feet until it reached a point
close to the pyramid’s geometrical centre. Here it debouched into a
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second cave, of spacious dimensions, which had been artificially enlarged
into a shape very similar to that of a four-leaf clover. The ‘leaves’ were
chambers, each about sixty feet in circumference, containing a variety of
artefacts such as beautifully engraved slate discs and highly polished
mirrors. There was also a complex drainage system of interlocking
segments of carved rock pipes.
20
This last feature was particularly puzzling because there was no known
source of water within the pyramid. The sluices, however, left little
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doubt that water must have been present in antiquity, most probably in
large quantities. This brought to mind the evidence for water having once
run in the Street of the Dead, the sluices and partition walls I had seen
earlier to the north of the Citadel, and Schlemmer’s theory of reflecting
pools and seismic forecasting.
Indeed, the more I thought about it the more it seemed that water had
been the dominant motif at Teotihuacan. Though I had hardly registered
it that morning, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl had been decorated not only
with effigies of the Plumed Serpent but with unmistakable aquatic
symbolism, notably an undulating design suggestive of waves and large
numbers of beautiful carvings of seashells. With these images in my
mind, I reached the wide plaza at the base of the Pyramid of the Moon
and imagined it filled with water, as it might have been, to a depth of
about ten feet. It would have looked magnificent: majestic, powerful and
18 Stecchini, in appendix to Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 378. The perimeter of the
Great Pyramid equals exactly one-half minute of arc—see Mysteries of the Mexican
Pyramids, p. 279.
The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, p. 20.
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20 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 335-9.
21 Ibid.
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