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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

that a ‘Sirius-Pleides axis’ could also have played a part. 5 And Stansbury<br />

Hagar (secretary of the Department of Ethnology at the Brooklyn Institute<br />

of the Arts and Sciences), had suggested that the street might represent<br />

the Milky Way. 6<br />

Indeed Hagar went further than this, seeing the portrayal of specific<br />

planets and stars in many of the pyramids, mounds and other structures<br />

that hovered like fixed satellites around the axis of the Street of the<br />

Dead. His complete thesis was that Teotihuacan had been designed as a<br />

kind of ‘map of heaven’: ‘It reproduced on earth a supposed celestial plan<br />

of the sky-world where dwelt the deities and spirits of the dead.’ 7<br />

During the 1960s and 1970s Hagar’s intuitions were tested in the field<br />

by Hugh Harleston Jr., an American engineer resident in Mexico, who<br />

carried out a comprehensive mathematical survey at Teotihuacan.<br />

Harleston reported his findings in October 1974 at the International<br />

Congress of Americanists. 8 His paper, which was full of daring and<br />

innovative ideas, contained some particularly curious information about<br />

the Citadel and about the Temple of Quetzalcoatl located at the eastern<br />

extreme of this great square compound.<br />

The Temple was regarded by scholars as one of the best-preserved<br />

archaeological monuments in Central America. 9 This was because the<br />

original, prehistoric structure had been partially buried beneath another<br />

much later mound immediately in front of it to the west. Excavation of<br />

that mound had revealed the elegant six-stage pyramid that now<br />

confronted me. It stood 72 feet high and its base covered an area of<br />

82,000 square feet.<br />

Still bearing traces of the original multicoloured paints which had<br />

coated it in antiquity, the exposed Temple was a beautiful and strange<br />

sight. The predominant sculptural motif was a series of huge serpent<br />

heads protruding three-dimensionally out of the facing blocks and lining<br />

the sides of the massive central stairway. The elongated jaws of these<br />

oddly humanoid reptiles were heavily endowed with fangs, and the upper<br />

lips with a sort of handlebar moustache. Each serpent’s thick neck was<br />

ringed by an elaborate plume of feathers—the unmistakable symbol of<br />

Quetzalcoatl. 10<br />

What Harleston’s investigations had shown was that a complex<br />

mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal<br />

structures lined up along the Street of the Dead (and indeed beyond it).<br />

This relationship suggested something extraordinary, namely that<br />

Teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale-<br />

5<br />

Beyond Stonehenge, pp. 187-8.<br />

6<br />

Cited in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 220-1.<br />

7<br />

Ibid.<br />

8<br />

Hugh Harleston Jr., ‘A Mathematical Analysis of Teotihuacan’, XLI International<br />

Congress of Americanists, 3 October 1974.<br />

9<br />

Richard Bloomgarden, The Pyramids of Teotihuacan, Editur S. A. Mexico, 1993, p. 14.<br />

10<br />

Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 215.<br />

167

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