From Atlantis to the Sphinx (18 page)

Why did the Spanish succeed with such relative ease? Because the Aztecs mistook them for descendants of the god Quetzalcoatl, a cross between a snake and a bird known as ‘the plumed serpent’. (Elsewhere in South America he is known as Viracocha, Votan, Kukulkan and Kon-Tiki.) The legend states that Quetzalcoatl, a tall, bearded, white man, came from somewhere in the south, soon after some catastrophe that had obscured the sun for a long time; Quetzalcoatl brought back the sun, and he also brought the arts of civilisation. (We are naturally inclined to wonder: was the arrival of Quetzalcoatl connected with the obscuring of the sun? Could he have been fleeing from the catastrophe that caused it?) After an attempt to kill him by treachery, the ‘god’ returned to the sea, promising one day to return. By coincidence, Cortés had landed close to the spot where Quetzalcoatl was expected, which is why the superstitious Montezuma allowed Cortés to take him prisoner.

One reason why the Spaniards felt no compunction at slaughtering the Aztecs was that they were appalled at their tradition of human sacrifice. The Aztec priest would carefully slice an incision in the ribs with a flint knife, while several men held the victim down on the altar by his (or her) arms and legs, and then plunged in his hand and tore out the beating heart. When—as in many cases—the victim was a baby, it was unnecessary to hold it down. Such victims were often despatched by the dozen, and even—when prisoners were taken—by the hundreds or thousands. The Spaniards saw this, rightly, as a custom of appalling barbarity. What they did not know is that it dated back thousands of years, and that it was designed to prevent the gods from bringing about the end of the world in some violent catastrophe, as they had done in the remote past.

In 1697, when an Italian traveller named Giovanni Careri visited Mexico, he found a country exploited by greedy Spanish merchants and fanatical and ignorant priests who were busily destroying signs of the old civilisation. ‘We found a great number of books,’ says one chronicler, ‘but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil, we burned them.’ But in Mexico City Careri met a priest who was an exception: Don Carlos de Siguenza, scientist and historian, who could speak the language of the Indians and read their hieroglyphs. From ancient manuscripts, Siguenza had concluded that the Aztecs had founded the city of Tenochtitlan—and the Aztec empire—in 1325. Before them there was a race called the Toltecs, and before them, the Olmecs, who lived in the tropical lowlands, and who, according to legend, had come over the sea from the east—Siguenza believed from Atlantis.

From Siguenza, Careri learned that the Indian civilisation also had its great pyramids, including one at Cholula that was three times as massive as the Great Pyramid at Giza (which Careri had visited on his way to South America). On Siguenza’s recommendation, Careri went to the town of San Juan Teotihuacan, and was impressed by the magnificent Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun, even though both were partly buried in earth. What puzzled him was how the Indians had succeeded in transporting enormous blocks from distant quarries; no one was able to tell him. Neither could anyone suggest how the Aztecs had carved great stone idols without metal chisels, or how they had raised them to the summit of pyramids.

When, in 1719, Careri published the story of his round-the-world voyage in nine volumes, he was greeted with incredulity and hostility; his critics spread the story that he had never left Naples. One of the main reasons for this hostility was Careri’s descriptions of the civilisation of the Aztecs; Europeans simply refused to believe that savages could have created a culture that ranked with those of ancient Egypt and Greece.

Many distinguished travellers visited Mexico and described its ruins—including the great Alexander von Humboldt—but somehow their descriptions failed to make an impact outside academic circles. It would not be until the mid-nineteenth century that a wider audience would become aware of the legacy of South America. In 1841, a three-volume work called
Incidents of Travel in Central America
became an unexpected bestseller, and brought its author—a young New York lawyer named John Lloyd Stephens—overnight celebrity in Europe as well as America. Stephens had already explored the archaeology of the Old World, in Egypt, Greece and Turkey. And when he came across a report by a Mexican colonel of huge pyramids buried in the jungles of Yucatan—on the Gulf of Mexico—he succeeded in using his political connections to get himself appointed to the post of chargé d’affaires in Central America. He took with him an artist named Frederick Catherwood.

Landing at Belize, Stephens and Catherwood made their way inland along the Honduras-Guatemala border. It proved to be more dangerous and uncomfortable than travelling in the Middle East. The country was in the grip of a civil war, and they spent one night under arrest while drunken soldiers fired off rifles into the air. After that they plunged into deep forest where the trees met overhead, and the stifling air was full of mosquitoes. They breathed in the stench of vegetable decay, and the horses often sank up to their bellies in the swamp. Stephens had almost lost faith when one day they came upon a wall of stone blocks, with a flight of steps leading up to a terrace. Their Indian guide attacked the lianas with his machete, and tore them away to reveal a kind of statue like an immense totem pole, standing more than twice the height of a man. A blank face with closed eyes looked down on them; the decorations were so rich and finely carved that it might have been some statue of the Buddha from India. There could be no doubt whatsoever that this was the product of a highly sophisticated civilisation. Within the next few days, Stephens realised that he was on the edge of a magnificent city, almost totally buried in the jungle. It was called Copan, and it contained the remains of huge step pyramids—not unlike the one at Saqqara—that were part of a temple complex.

The owner of the site, an Indian called Don José Maria, at first showed signs of irritation at the intruding foreigners, but quickly became amenable when they offered to buy the jungle city for a vast sum that exceeded all his expectations. In fact, their offer—$50—convinced him that they were fools, but he accepted without revealing his bafflement that they should want to purchase such a worthless piece of property. Stephens threw a party and offered everyone—including the women—cigars.

Stephens’s
Travels in Central America
was the first that the civilised world had heard of an ancient people called the Maya, who preceded (and overlapped with) the Toltecs, and who had built Copan around AD 500; their cities had once spread from Chichen Itzá—in Yucatan—to Copan, from Tikal in Guatemala to Palanque in Chiapas. Their temples were as magnificent as those of Babylon, their cities as sophisticated as eighteenth-century Paris or Vienna, their calendar as complex and precise as that of ancient Egypt.

Yet the Mayas also represented a great mystery. There is evidence that, around AD 600, they decided to abandon their cities; their method, apparently, was to move to a new location in the jungle, where they would build another city. The first attempt at an explanation was that they were driven out by enemies. But as knowledge of their society increased, it became clear that they had no enemies; in their own territory they were supreme. Some natural catastrophe—like earthquake or floods—also had to be ruled out, since there was no sign of any kind of destruction. And if the explanation was some kind of plague, the graveyards would have been full, and this was not true either.

The likeliest theory is the one put forward by the American archaeologist Sylvanus Griswold Morley, who believed that Maya origins went back as far as 2500 BC. Morley noted that the Mayan cities suggested a rigid hierarchical structure, with the temples and the palaces of the nobility in the centre, and the huts of the peasants scattered around the edges. The Mayas had no ‘middle class’, only peasants and aristocrats—the latter including the priests. The task of the peasants was to support the upper classes with their labour—particularly the growing of maize. But their agricultural methods were primitive—dropping seed into a hole made with a stick. They seemed to know nothing about allowing certain fields to ‘rest’ and grow fallow. So the soil surrounding the cities gradually became infertile, requiring a move to another site. Moreover, because the social structure was so rigid, the ruling class received no new blood. So as the farming land lost its strength, and the peasant population increased, and the rulers became increasingly decadent, the society went into a slow collapse—and a once-great people drifted into primitivism, confirming Hapgood’s suspicion that history can go backwards.

Stephens’s book inspired a French
abbé
named Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg to follow in his footsteps across Mexico. In Guatemala he found the sacred book of the Quiché Indians, the
Popol Vuh
, which he translated into French and published in 1864. In the same year he brought out a translation of the
Account of Yucatan
by Bishop Diego de Landa, a work of immense value by one of the original Spanish ‘conquistadors’, which had been languishing in the Madrid archives. His four-volume
History of the Civilisation of Mexico and Central America
was immediately recognised as the most important work so far on the subject. But one of his most interesting discoveries was a Mayan religious book known as the
Troano Codex
(which later, when a second part was found, became the
Codex Tro-Cortesianus
), owned by a descendant of Cortés, for it was in this book that Brasseur found mentions of some great catastrophe that had convulsed Central America in the remote past—Brasseur declared that the year could be identified as 9937 BC—and destroyed much of its civilisation. Brasseur had met natives who still had an oral tradition about the destruction of a great continent in the Atlantic ocean, and had no doubt, like the
Codex
, they were referring to the destruction of Atlantis. He went on to speculate that it was from Atlantis that the civilisations of Egypt and of South America originated. This seemed to be confirmed by an account of a great cataclysm described in the writings of the Nahuatl tribe, whose language Brasseur had learned directly from a descendant of Montezuma. He suggested that Quetzalcoatl, the white god who came from the sea, was an inhabitant of the lost Atlantis.

In the College of San Gregorio, in Mexico City, Brasseur discovered a manuscript in Nahuatl (which he called the
Chimalpopoca Codex
), in which he learned that the immense upheaval had occurred around 10,500 BC, but that it was not one catastrophe, as described by Plato, but a series of at least four, each of which was caused by a temporary shifting of the earth’s axis.

Such unscholarly notions could hardly be excused, even in one whose knowledge of the culture of Central America was greater than that of most of the professors, and in his later years Brasseur came in for more than his share of derision. Yet many of his theories would later be supported by Hapgood’s ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’ (while Graham Hancock cites
Nature
to the effect that the last reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles occurred 12,400 years ago—in other words, about 10,400 BC). Brasseur believed that there was an ancient seafaring civilisation long before the first cities appeared in the Middle East, and that its sailors carried its culture throughout the world. He also believed that their religion involved a cult of the dog star Sirius—thus anticipating the discoveries made by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen among the Dogon in the 1930s.

Between 1864 and 1867, the history of Mexico took a turn in the direction of comic opera when the French government, under Napoleon III, sent a military expedition led by Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, to bring an end to the civil war by claiming the throne. A gentle liberal, Maximilian encouraged the arts, subsidised investigation of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, and did his best to cope with the total corruption that was part of the Mexican way of life. Betrayed by Napoleon III, who decided to withdraw his army, Maximilian was captured by the rebel General Porfirio Diaz and shot by a firing squad. His empress Carlota went insane and remained so for the remainder of her long life (she died in 1927). But Maximilian left a rich legacy for historians when he purchased from a collector named José Maria Andrade a library of five thousand books on Mayan culture, which were sent to Europe.

Among Europeans to flee Mexico when Maximilian was executed was a young Frenchman named Desiré Charnay, who had been the first to photograph the ruins with a camera obscura. It was while his assistants were setting up the camera that Charnay prodded idly in the soil with his dagger, and unearthed pottery and bones, a find that was to inspire a lifelong passion for excavation. He would return to Mexico in 1880, searching for Tollan, the legendary capital of the Toltecs. Convinced that it lay beneath the Indian village of Tula, fifty miles north of Mexico City, Charnay began to dig there, and soon came upon six-foot-long blocks of basalt, which he took to be the feet of huge statues intended to support a large building. He called these statues ‘Atlanteans’—from which it may be deduced that, like so many Central American archaeologists, he had come to believe that the civilisations of South America originated in Atlantis. This was enough to make the academic world regard him with deep suspicion.

Charnay went on to study the ruins of another Maya city, Palenque in Chiapas, discovered in 1773 by Friar Ramón de Ordonez, who had then gone on to write a book in which he declared that the ‘Great City of the Serpents’ had been founded by a white man called Votan who had come from somewhere over the Atlantic in the remote past. Ordonez claimed to have seen a book written (in Quiché) by Votan—and burned by the Bishop of Chiapas in 1691—in which Votan identified himself as a citizen of ‘Valim Chivim’, which Ordonez believed to be Tripoli in ancient Phoenicia.

In the steaming heat of the ‘City of the Serpents’, Charnay had to content himself with taking papier-maché casts of the friezes, which were already being destroyed by the vegetation. In the Yucatan city of Chichen Itzá, built by the Mayas as they abandoned cities they had built in Guatemala—and here Charnay was confirmed in his belief that Mayan civilisation had the same roots as that of Egypt, India and even China and Thailand—the step pyramids reminded him of Angkor Wat. But Charnay was inclined to believe that the Toltecs originated in Asia. Later, in one of the least-explored of Mayan ruins at Yaxchilan (which Charnay renamed after his patron Lorillard), he was deeply impressed by a relief showing a man kneeling before a god, and apparently passing a long rope through a hole in his tongue—reminding Charnay that the worshippers of the Hindu goddess Shiva also pay homage by drawing a rope through their pierced tongues.