Page 90 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

two invisible dimensions—a door between nowhere and nothing. The
stonework was of exceptionally high quality and authorities agreed that it
was ‘one of the archaeological wonders of the Americas’. Its most
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enigmatic feature was the so-called ‘calendar frieze’ carved into its
eastern façade along the top of the portal.
At its centre, in an elevated position, this frieze was dominated by what
scholars took to be another representation of Viracocha, but this time in
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his more terrifying aspect as the god-king who could call down fire from
heaven. His gentle, fatherly side was still expressed: tears of compassion
were running down his cheeks. But his face was set stern and hard, his
tiara was regal and imposing, and in either hand he grasped a
thunderbolt. In the interpretation given by Joseph Campbell, one of the
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twentieth century’s best-known students of myth, ‘The meaning is that
the grace that pours into the universe through the sun door is the same
as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and is itself indestructible ...’
18
I turned my head to right and left, slowly studying the remainder of the
frieze. It was a beautifully balanced piece of sculpture with three rows of
eight figures, twenty-four in all, lined up on either side of the elevated
central image. Many attempts, none of them particularly convincing, have
been made to explain the assumed calendrical function of these figures.
19
All that could really be said for sure was that they had a peculiar,
bloodless, cartoon-like quality, and that there was something coldly
mathematical, almost machinelike, about the way they seemed to march
in regimented lines towards Viracocha. Some apparently wore bird masks,
others had sharply pointed noses, and each had in his hand an
implement of the type the high god was himself carrying.
The base of the frieze was filled with a design known as the
‘Meander’—a geometrical series of step-pyramid forms set in a
continuous line, and arranged alternately upside down and right side up,
which was also thought to have had a calendrical function. On the third
column from the right-hand side (and, more faintly, on the third column
from the left-hand side too) I could make out a clear carving of an
elephant’s head, ears, tusks and trunk. This was unexpected since there
are no elephants anywhere in the New World. There had been, however,
in prehistoric times, as I was able to confirm much later. Particularly
numerous in the southern Andes, until their sudden extinction around
10,000 BC, had been the members of a species called Cuvieronius, an
20

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Paladin Books, London, 1988,
p. 145.
18 Ibid., p. 146.
19 The calendrical function of the Gateway of the Sun is fully described and analysed by
Posnansky in Tiahuanacu: The Cradle of American Man, volumes I-IV.
20 Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, Paul S. Martin, Richard G. Klein, eds.
The University of Arizona Press, 1984, p. 85.

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