The Lost City of the Monkey God – myth or reality? From 1927 to 2017, the changing narratives of the experts, explorers and enterprising book writers [2]

The Lost City of the Monkey God – myth or reality? From 1927 to 2017, the changing narratives of the experts, explorers and enterprising book writers [2]

Charles Lindbergh reportedly claimed that he saw the expansive white remains of an ‘amazing ancient metropolis’ when he flew over the region in 1927: Wild animals routinely wandered through their camp, clearly never having encountered humans before. Even without excavation, the scientists found 52 artefacts sticking out from the ground with many more clearly lying in the earth and vegetation beneath[1]. They included stone ceremonial seats and finely carved vessels decorated with snakes, vultures and zoomorphic / animal-like figures[2]. The most arresting find was a viciously fanged stone head, part-man and part-beast.  Fisher believes it to be not a ‘were-wolf’ but a spirit-like ‘were-jaguar’— the giant cat still prowls the jungles — representing a priest in a transformed state. The ancient culture that created the city, say the scientists, is so little known that it doesn’t even have a proper name — although Morde called its people the Chorotegans. He was just one of many men to search for the ruins after the aviator Charles Lindbergh reportedly claimed that he saw the expansive white remains of an ‘amazing ancient metropolis’ when he flew over the region in 1927. In the Thirties, George Heye, the multi-millionaire founder of New York’s Museum of the American Indian, paid for two expeditions to find it led by a pith-helmeted Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society named Capt R. Stuart Murray. He found nothing except dark rumours that the natives were ‘devil worshippers’ who spoke of a lost ‘City of the Monkey God’. And there was another myth — that the Monkey God had produced offspring, a half-man and half-simian race dubbed the ‘hairy people’. Thus, for some reasons, the US-experts have been adding myth over myth creating a new myth.

It was Yucatan structures, he photographed.

Of course, he photographed mounds like this also.

The huge mound, the place of sacrifice: Locals believed apes from the jungle had long ago stolen virgins from their villages to produce the mongrel offspring; they also insisted the ruins were cursed[3]. Theodore Morde was the leader of Heye’s third expedition and, as he explained later, after months of starvation, sickness and exhaustion, they were about to give up when he saw something from the top of a small cliff[4]. It was the stone ruins of a walled ‘great city . . . that at its height must have held many thousands of inhabitants’, he wrote. The jungle-choked city walls originally would have risen, he estimated, to 30ft and on almost everything he found, said Morde, was carved the likeness of a monkey. While they were there, he said, real spider monkeys peered curiously at the expedition’s team from the trees above. Although the vegetation was too thick to see much, local guides showed him a huge mound they said lay at the centre of the city. Buried deep within was an enormous temple with a vast staircase leading to a ‘high stone dais on which was the statue of the Monkey God himself’. This, they claimed, had been ‘the place of sacrifice’.

Monkeys sacrificed to Monkey God: As to what had been sacrificed, Morde and ethnologists he consulted were convinced the people had practised a barbaric tradition that was later adopted by the warlike Aztecs to the north in Mexico. Every year, a physically perfect young man, usually a priest, would be selected to be the Monkey God for that year. He would be worshipped, pampered and given the most beautiful girls. But after 12 months, he would be ritually slaughtered at the top of the pyramid temple, his heart torn out and his body thrown down the steps where it would be cut into pieces. Priests would distribute it among the worshippers who would each take a small piece home to eat. One night Morde watched a group of natives perform a morbid ritual dance in which each of them brandished a spear on which were impaled three spider monkeys. The monkeys were roasted over a fire in such a way that their limbs contracted and writhed in the flames as if still alive, and the whole tribe settled down later to eat them. Officiating was the local head medicine man or shaman — the Dama Suk-ya Tara. This type of narratives have been added to show that the natives were cannibals, thus, they were barbarians, uncivilized and idolaters.

Monkey sacrifice, curse affecting the explorers: Naked except for a loincloth and his body painted with white chalk, the priest made a blood-curdling spectacle with a necklace laced with the minute skulls of unborn monkeys, yellow human teeth and the poison sacks of lethal jungle snakes. To his fingertips, he had fixed the fangs of huge alligators. At one point he brandished a long arrow on which was impaled a large spider monkey. At another, he stuck a hollow bamboo rod into the eye socket of each roasted monkey, ritually sucking out their brain fluid. Was this monstrous man the spiritual successor to the chief priest of the Monkey God? The natives said the ceremony was a dance of revenge for the theft by monkeys of their virgins all those years ago. Morde spent just two days at the ruins because the monsoon season started suddenly, forcing him to leave the place before conducting any excavations which might have enabled him to prove his theories[5]. Only now, with this new expedition, does it look like his discovery may finally be verified. And if The White City really is cursed, as the natives had warned Morde, he may have belatedly paid the price. He committed suicide in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained[6]. Note, how his death is mentioned differently – first, they informed died in a car crash, died under suspicious circumstances, then, committed suicide!

The shama priest – Dama Suk-ya Tara, who sacrificed monkeys……

He fried the monkeys in fire…….

British SAS (Special air service), reportedly discovered remains of a city in the Mosquitia region (2015): The Honduran-American expedition, aided by former members of the British SAS, reported that they had discovered the extensive remains of a city in the Mosquitia region, some 32,000 square miles of virgin rainforest in eastern Honduras which is largely only accessible by air. Alongside artefacts such as the stone “were-jaguar” – a half-human, half-feline representation of a transformed shaman – was a cache of sculptures which had laid untouched since the city was abandoned around 1,000 years ago. The tops of 52 artworks were found protruding from the jungle floor, prompting expedition members to calculate that many more lie below along with stone ceremonial seats and elaborately carved vessels decorated with snakes and vultures. The artefacts were located at the base of an earthen pyramid which was mapped by the team along with a network of plazas, mounds and earthworks. The National Geographic Society, which accompanied the expedition and today revealed its findings, said: “This vanished culture has been scarcely studied and it remains virtually unknown. Archaeologists don’t even have a name for it.” Thus, after 1997, another expedition was reported in 2015, after 8 years.

Was it a pre-Columbian civilization?: The scientists, who have documented their findings but had to leave the priceless artefacts in situ, believe their discoveries in a hidden valley in the swampy jungle of Mosquitia suggest not only a lost city but potentially an entire pre-Columbian civilisation whose settlements are scattered throughout the surrounding mountains. According to one estimate, the artefacts date back to between the tenth and 14th centuries. But the vanishingly rare revelation of a lost world brought with it a warning that it may not remain so for long. Deforestation for cattle farming has brought modernity to within 12 miles of the discovery site and Honduran archaeologists are worried the site is at risk of being overrun by the illegal ranching operators. The Europeans and Americans did not want it to be known or called as “Indian or Hindu related” issue or civilization. Definitely, the books like “Hindu America” were not taken seriously by them, though, the books of Charles Berlitz, Eric Von Daniken, Desmond Drake and others are liked. These books give credit to Indian civilization for its highest civilized status.

Archaeologists condemn National Geographic over claims of Honduran ‘lost cities: More than two dozen archaeologists and anthropologists have written an open letter of protest against the “sensationalisation” of their fields, with one accusing National Geographic of reverting to “a colonialist discourse” in announcing researchers had found two city-like sites in the deep jungles of Honduras[7]. They also say National Geographic has ignored decades of research that suggests Honduras was home to a vibrant chain of kingless societies, which merged qualities of the Maya to the north with other people’s less stratified, more equal cultures[8]. The scholars criticise National Geographic and the media for what they describe as the aggrandisement of a single expedition at the expense of years of research by scientists and decades of support from indigenous people of the dense rainforests in Honduras’ Mosquitia region. John Hoopes, a signatory and professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, said that National Geographic had shown “a disrespect for indigenous knowledge”. The expedition was co-coordinated by two American film-makers, National Geographic and Honduras’ national institute of anthropology. “Any words like ‘lost’ or ‘civilization’ should set off alarm bells,” said Rosemary Joyce, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and also a signatory, for the same reasons that the word “discover” is no longer acceptable to discuss Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. “It’s a colonialist discourse which disrespects them,” Hoopes said. However, they did not want to mention about the earlier visitors, settlers or others of the region. That is, one has to forget the past.

‘Colonialist discourse’ v ‘political correctness’: Joyce, Hoopes and others also noted that, like the Maya, the descendants of ancient Central Americans survive in sizable numbers today, even if researchers do not know who exactly they are and must still piece together what life was like a millennium ago. Chris Fisher, the lead American archaeologist on the expedition, expressed bafflement at the sudden backlash, largely because “the stakes are so low”. “We never said it’s Ciudad Blanca or the city of the lost monkey god,” Fisher said, referring to two legendary, likely non-existent sites. “The articles aren’t scientific papers though, and we don’t deny that local people might have knowledge of these sites. But the area was unoccupied and relatively undisturbed after all these centuries.” National Geographic defended its coverage in a statement, saying in part that “it does not give credence to [the] ‘fantastic’ statements” of the eccentric journalist Theodore Morde, who claimed to have discovered a city in the Honduras jungle around 1940. Cornell’s Dr John Henderson, who neither signed the letter nor took part in the expedition, said the charge of colonialist rhetoric “strikes me as political correctness”. “The most offensive part is that there’s an awful lot that’s known that National Geographic left out,” he said. The area is so rich with sites, Henderson said, that “you’re going to point your Lidar” – the infrared surveying device that the expedition used via plane to find the site – “at almost any valley and you’re going to find something like what these guys find.” “But what they’ve done is modest in comparison with what Chris Begley has done there for all these years,” he said, bringing up the Transylvania University anthropologist hailed by his peers for his 24 years of work in this part of Honduras.

© K. V. Ramakrishna Rao

22-05-2020

[1] National Geographic, Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest, BY Douglas Preston, Published March 2, 2015.

[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-honduras-lost-city-monkey-god-maya-ancient-archaeology/

[3] CBS NEWS, Curse of the “Lost City of the Monkey God”?, January 8, 2017, 10:02 AM,

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/curse-of-the-lost-city-of-the-monkey-god/

[5] The Daily Mail, Cannibals. Human sacrifice. Have explorers finally found the fabled lost City of the Monkey God?, By Tom Leonard, FOR THE DAILY MAIL, PUBLISHED: 01:31 BST, 6 March 2015 | UPDATED: 19:53 BST, 6 March 2015.

[6]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982044/Have-explorers-finally-fabled-lost-City-Monkey-God.html

[7] The Guardian, Archaeologists condemn National Geographic over claims of Honduran ‘lost cities’, Alan Yuhas, @alanyuhasPublished on Wed 11 Mar 2015 18.22 GMT

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/11/honduras-lost-cities-open-letter-national-geographic-report