article_snippet: may have been offerings to the Monkey God.
article_snippet: But the Honduran monkey the Monkey God is more menacing .
article_snippet: the Honduran monkey showed ruins that stretched for more than a mile along a river through the valley.
article_snippet: the giant cat still prowls the jungles — representing a priest in a transformed state.
article_snippet: And there was another myth — that the Monkey God had produced offspring, a half-man and half-simian race dubbed the ‘hairy people’.
article_snippet: Locals believed apes from the jungle had long ago stolen virgins from Locals villages to produce the mongrel offspring; Locals also insisted the ruins were cursed.
article_snippet: The jungle-choked city walls originally would have risen, Theodore Morde estimated, to 30ft and on almost everything Theodore Morde found, said Theodore Morde, was carved the likeness of a monkey.
article_snippet: 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’.
article_snippet: Locals believed apes from the jungle had stolen virgins from virgins villages to produce mongrel offspring .
article_snippet: Every year, a physically perfect young man, usually a priest, would be selected to be the Monkey God for that year.
article_snippet: the Monkey God would be worshipped, pampered and given the most beautiful girls.
article_snippet: But after 12 months, the Monkey God would be ritually slaughtered at the top of the pyramid temple, the Monkey God heart torn out and the Monkey God body thrown down the steps where his body would be cut into pieces.
article_snippet: Was this monstrous man the spiritual successor to the chief priest of the Monkey God?
article_snippet: the natives said the ceremony was a dance of revenge for the theft by monkeys of the natives virgins all those years ago.