2. More Connections: Giants, the Red-Paint People, and the Astronomical West
Egyptian,
Irish-Celtic, and Gallic-Celtic legends refer to an enigmatic “Land
of the West” which may well refer to the two American continents.
The various Celtic and Germanic traditions also refer - as we saw
in chapter three - to races of warlike giants, and even the
Cherokee nation of North America refers to the Tsunilkalu, a “slant-eyed” race of giants” from a
land in the west, and classical Greek references exist quoting
Gallic stories about a “Hyperborean” land in the west which was
invaded by warring giants from the Western Ocean.507
Another peculiar
connection exists between the “New” world and the “Old” world of
ancient Egypt: the “Red Paint People.” The Mayan god Pacal was
depicted as a white man of - for then - large stature, “whose teeth
were discovered to be painted bright red.”508 It is this
same figure of Pacal on his famous “sarcophagus” in Palenque, that
many revisionists of the “ancient astronauts” school, beginning
with Erich von Däniken in his famous Chariots
of the Gods, take to be a stylized portrayal of an astronaut
in a space capsule.
Lord Pacal of Palenque
While many
revisionists see in Pacal’s sarcophagus a corroboration of their
“ancient astronauts” theory and are quick to dismiss its
mythological connections, there really is no reason to oppose the
mythological elements of the sarcophagus lid from what are also
very suggestive elements of stylized technology and
transportation.
Why this is so may be
seen from the fact that, as author and alternative researcher David
Hatcher Childress observes, the “sacred bird, sun and moon motifs”
that appear to the left of the picture “signify the upper world,
while the monster below signifies the under world. The ancient
Chinese had the exact same belief in three interlocking
worlds.”509 Indeed, the theme
of the three interlocking worlds is a common one in most
mythological traditions.
But Pacal, as was
seen, is an example of the “Red Paint People,” and it is this
connection which, with its own network of concepts, traces to
Egypt, and to the possibility that, in Pacal’s case, the “ancient
astronaut” and the “mythological” elements need not necessarily be
opposed, but rather, aid in each other’s complete understanding. As
Rux observes,
The Red Paint People were written of around the turn of the (last) century by such notable scholars as Lewis Spence in The History of Atlantis, and then appear to have been ignored until such anthropologists as Richard Cavendish and Franklin and Mary Folsom brought them up again.... Also known as the “Maritime Archaic” culture circa 5,500-2,000 BC, they were a comparatively tall white race (five-foot eight or taller) who...got their nickname from their practice of sprinkling red ochre paint (common to Egypt...) over their dead.510
Even more strange is
the fact that this “Red Paint People’s” skull measurements and
medical defects appear the closest to the Irish, and that their
remains have been found over a wide range from Canada, in Labrador
and Newfoundland, to Norway, Finland, central Siberia, Mesoamerica,
and that their bodies are always buried facing west.511
But why red paint?
Why that color in particular? The color itself reveals some
interesting associations, again, from legends spanning the globe
and seemingly unrelated cultures. The Hopi Indians of North
America, for example,
Have “hundreds of tales” about a mysterious Red City of the South from which the kachinas came, where the highest learning and moral instruction were taught in structures specifically designated as pyramids. This may or may not have been the once-red Mayan city of Tikal.512
However, notes Rux,
the Hopi nation is not “the only tribe with legends telling of
a lost red land.”513
The “Weeping God” on the Gateway to the Sun at Tiahuanaco514 is said to cry for “the sunken Red Land.” L. Taylor Hansen, in The Ancient Atlantic, quotes a Sioux chief as saying, “...this is the land of our beginning, where we went from the old Red Land before it sank, because this land is as old as the dragon land of the fire god” The Apache myth is the same: “Long before the Deluge, we used to live in the land of red fire, in a city whose entrance was hard to find... the mountains were the highest in the world in those days, and deep down in them was the abode of the fire-god...It was through his rage that our old land was destroyed: the god left his underground cave, rose up through the mountain and poured fire and death on the terrified people.”515
As Rux rightly
observes, the last reference could indicate a massive volcanic
eruption. But the problem is the lack of agreement between this
legend and others; they are simply not agreed in its
particulars.516 Notes Rux, the
Awawak Indians likewise have a similar legend about their fire-god,
suggestively named “Aimon,” destroying the world by burning and
submerging it.517 The name “Aimon”
might refer, as Rux observes, to Amon-Ra, the Egyptian fire and sun
god.
And with Ra one has
yet another intriguing connection in the catalogue of associations
with the color red within mythology, for red is “the color worn in
battle by both the Valkyries and Sekhmet, who the ‘Father of
Terror,’ Ra, sent with his eye to burn the human race.”518 And more
importantly, Sekhmet wore red because “it was the color of her
homeland.”519 So here is another
curious reference, this time from Egyptian, and not native American
Indian, sources associating red with a lost land. Note, too, that
Ra is “the Father of Terror,” a designation that would associate
him with the Sphinx at Giza, which in the Arabic tradition is known
as Abu-Hol, the Father of Terrors. As
we shall see later on in this chapter, there are yet more
references associating Ra with the chimerical figure of a
sphinx.