The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude [1]
Tuesday, 21 February, 2012:
Today I found an old book in the library, in the de-accessioned pile. It cost me two dollars to buy it (Hardback Non-fiction – if it had been Fiction, it would only have been a dollar). The title was Breaking the Maya Code, by Michael Coe.
But why on earth were they throwing it out?
It’s true that this was a copy of the first, 1992, edition, and since then – I checked – Coe has gone on to publish a number of revisions of his book (just as he did with his 1966 text The Maya, now in its eighth edition). So perhaps they thought it was too out of date to be useful.
What I suspect, though, is that they read those words ‘the Maya Code’ as something analogous to the Da Vinci Code – as a reference to the (alleged) Mayan Prediction of the end of days in December 2012.
If so, they were sorely mistaken. Far from an Occultist text full of babble about the Apocalypse, Coe’s is a profoundly scholarly work, which tells the tale of one of the great decipherments in history.
The name of Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, the Russian genius whose phonological and comparative methodology finally led to success in this two-hundred-year-old quest, should undoubtedly go down in history along with Jean-François Champollion, Michael Ventris, and other heroes of the intellect.
The fact that we can now actually read these texts from a far-off civilisation, mute for centuries, thanks solely to such feats of ingenuity is one of the few proofs I know that the cosmos is not entirely arbitrary.
Just as the patterns of Nature become clear over time when examined by the dispassionate intellect, so advances can be made in our knowledge, the stones can be made to speak.
(Funnily enough, when I tried to find the book again to verify these references, it had disappeared into the jungle of my too well-stocked shelves. Perhaps because its work was done; perhaps because paying too much attention to the glyphs themselves might become, in its turn, a distraction from the main event: the culmination of this present cycle of ours.)
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Monday, 8 October, 2012:
This is a map of the tunnels of the Lizard People under Los Angeles.
That may sound a bit unlikely. I’m sure you’ve all heard about the tunnels under North Head, full of old wartime ammunition dumps (as well as the two first Boeings ever built), but the idea of ‘lizard people’ probably strikes you as coming straight out of Science Fiction.
There really was a cover story about them in the Los Angeles Times for January 29, 1934, though. A mining engineer claimed to have discovered traces of them with a ‘radio X-ray’ device he’d built to detect ‘minerals and tunnels below the surface of the ground.’
Further details came from a Hopi Indian chief in Arizona, who told him that the tunnels were the remains of one of three lost cities built after ‘the ‘great catastrophe’ which occurred about 5000 years ago’:
This legendary catastrophe was in the form of a huge tongue of fire, which ‘came out of the Southwest, destroying all in it’s [sic.] path ... the path being several hundred miles wide.’ The city underground was dug as a means of escaping future fires. [2]Interestingly, the engineer, G. Warren Shufelt, disappeared shortly after this article appeared, and has never been heard from since.
1934 AD[the year the article appeared]
– ‘5000 years’[the approximate time elapsed since the fiery ‘catastrophe’]
3066 BC
It seems a bit more than a coincidence that this date is within less than fifty years (48, to be precise) of 3114 BC, the (alleged) date of commencement of the fourth creation in the Mayan count.
If we measure back from 2012, we can see just exactly how far Shufelt’s discovery was ahead of its time: 78 years, to be precise. Perhaps that’s why he had to disappear: if people had known that another catastrophe was coming, they might have panicked and run amok (as they did a few years later, after Orson Welles’ infamous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in 1938, on the brink of the Second World War).
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Wednesday, 23 December, 2012:
Michael Coe ends Breaking the Maya Code as follows:
The Maya wise men all across Yucatán predict that the world will end in the year 2000 y pico – ‘and a little.’ How many years will that ‘a little’ be? The Great Cycle of the Maya calendar which began in darkness on 13 August 3114 BC will come to an end after almost five millennia on 23 December AD 2012, when many of you who read this will still be alive. … And what is to happen? A Katun prophecy in the Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimín reads:It’s pretty clear from this that the catastrophe will take the form of a flood.Ca hualahom caanThen the sky is divided
Can nocpahi petenThen the land is raised
Ca ix hopp iAnd then there begins
U hum ox lahun ti kuThe Book of the 13 Gods.
Ca uch iThen occurs
No hai cabilThe great flooding of the Earth
Ca lik iThen arises
Noh Itzam Cab AinThe great Itzam Cab Ain.
Tz’ocebal u thanThe ending of the word,
U uutz’ katunThe fold of the Katun:
Lai hun yeciilThat is a flood
Bin tz’oce(ce)balWhich will be the ending of
u than katunthe word of the Katun. [3]
And so it has.
Is it any accident that even the most conservative predictions have the sea-levels rising between 56 and 200 cm (22 or 79 in) during the 21st century? Whereas the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, could contribute 4 to 6 m (13 to 20 ft) or more to present levels.
Try to imagine what that means the next time you go to the beach. First add seven feet, the height of the tallest man, to the high tide levels you see marked on the sand. What would be left of the coastal community behind you? Then expand it to twenty feet. What would remain of the surrounding towns and suburbs?
The end is near, make no mistake about it. As with the lost land bridges between the straits of Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, the waters will flow in gradually, but the result will be a new sea: a new Mediterranean, a new Black Sea. We may not see it yet but it is coming. Our futile attempts to hold it off were always that: futile.
Better, instead, to beat the bounds of the new dispensation: learn to read the signs of the coming age in a hundred everyday things.
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Sunday, 6 January, 2013:
I was struck today, while reading L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, by the following passage. Tip, the young boy who will be transformed into a girl (‘Ozma’) at the end of the story, explains how you can always know exactly where you are in Oz:
… in the Emerald City everything is green that is purple here. And in the Country of the Munchkins, over at the East, everything is blue; and in the South country of the Quadlings everything is red; and in the West country of the Winkies, where the Tin Woodman rules, everything is yellow. [4]There’s even a map included in the endpapers to illustrate the idea.
The Maya, too, saw each of the four directions as governed by a particular colour. Admittedly they were slightly different from L. Frank Baum’s, but the basic concept was the same:
WHITE for the North – of ice and snow; RED for the East – where the sun comes up; BLACK for the wild oceans to the West; YELLOW for the deserts of the South, with BLUEGREEN at the Centre – for the lands of men.
Michael Coe’s book The Maya, which I took this picture from, goes on to explain some of the principles behind their multiplicity of gods:
Exceedingly little is known about the Maya pantheon. That their Olympus was peopled with a bewildering number of gods can be seen in the eighteenth-century manuscript, ‘Ritual of the Bakabs,’ in which 166 deities are mentioned by name, or in the pre-Conquest codices where more than thirty can be distinguished. … First, in the case of certain gods, each was not only one but four individuals, separately assigned to the color-directions. Secondly, a number seem to have had a counterpart of the opposite sex as consort, a reflection of the Mesoamerican principle of dualism, the unity of opposite principles. Thirdly, some seem to have had young and old aspects, or (especially in Classic times) fleshed and fleshless guises. Fourthly, there was no clear dividing line between humans and animals, or even between species of animals, so that many supernaturals combine these elements in fantastic ways. And lastly, every astronomical god has an Underworld avatar, as he died and passed beneath the earth to reappear once more in the eastern sky. [my emphases] [5]Young and old, male and female, fleshed and fleshless – it’s like that thought experiment of placing grains of wheat on a chessboard. One grain goes on the first square, two on the second, four on the third … before you reach the sixty-fourth square, the grains of wheat you need will outnumber all the atoms in the universe.
Or all the words, the names, in every human language?
For Tip to become Ozma, the sexes, like the sky, must reverse. Are there other lessons concealed in Baum’s books, frivolous though they appear on the surface?
Is there something encoded there about self-sacrifice, like the ‘spotless virgin’ in the Mayan hunting song?
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Wednesday, 6 February, 2013:
I’ve had this little paperback for years: La literatura de los Mayas: Mayan Literature. There’s a companion volume of Aztec Literature. They’re both in Spanish, published in the 1960s.
I was looking through it the other day when I came across this poem. It was collected from among the Lacandon Maya tribesmen by a couple called Phillip and Mary Baer, and published by them in the Academic Journal Tlalocan in 1948:
Lacandon-Maya Poem
Every time I lift my foot
every time I lift my hand
I shift my tail
I hear your voice from far away
I’m searching for a fallen tree
tired now
I’ll fall asleep on the fallen tree
My skin
My ears
my hands
my feet
are scratched
– Demetrio Sodi M., La literatura de los Mayas (1964) [6]
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Wednesday, 13 February, 2013:
I was walking along Jervois Road, away from Ponsonby – Pon-snobby, they call it – when I happened to glance in the window of an art gallery.
There were five pink shelves there, each with ceramic books, pyramids, and candlesticks balanced on top of it. The artist seemed to have taken all the things she’d read and turned them into pottery statues of themselves: there were titles like ‘Monster und Menschen in der Maya Kunst’ and ‘Lord Smoking Squirrel’s Cacao Cup.’
I’ve made a little sketch-plan of the layout.
- One of the candlesticks had Adam and Eve reaching up into a tree for the forbidden fruit, with the serpent hovering above them.
- Another one had a lot of leaves attached to its branches, each one with the word ‘leaf’ written upon it.
- There were a couple of strange melty-looking books with candle sticks growing out of them.
- Most striking of all, there were stacks of clay books in the form of Mayan pyramids.
I could hear some of what they were talking about, though:
– It’s a terrible film [someone was saying].
– Terrible? What do you mean? It’s fantastic! Priestesses in flowing white robes – Sean Connery in leather – Civilisation vs. Barbarism … and then there’s that bit where he’s in the library, looking at the books, and the penny finally drops: ZARDOZ, their god, is really the WiZARD of OZ … so then he goes mad and starts tearing the whole place up …
– But it’s so cheesey …
‘I’ve seen it myself!’ I wanted to shout at that point. On late night television, years ago. Every time there was an ad break you’d see that motif of the great floating face turning to show the priestesses inside. But I didn’t dare. They all looked too cool.
I could see that she knew, though. I guess that must have been the artist herself. She knew about Oz, about the Mayans, the whole kit and caboodle. She wasn’t putting down the movie Zardoz, or laughing in other people’s faces … I wish I could have talked to her about it, but I wasn’t ready. Not just then, anyway.
And I would have especially liked to take some pictures of her beautiful works on my phone, but I know that gallery people don’t let you do that – I’ve been warned about that before.
What I felt, though, looking in on her show, was a fierce pleasure in finding this proof that I wasn’t the only one who knew – that others were already at work, outlining the new order, laying out a new heaven and a new earth where male can be female, up can be down, the serpent a hero and the pyramid a book.
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Wednesday, 13 February, 2013:
Tzotzil-Maya Prayer
Green fire
aërial fog
be epilepsy
yellow fire
be epilepsy
north wind
be epilepsy
narcolepsy
white mist
be epilepsy
I repel it
repel it nine times
I expel it
expel it nine times
pacify it
pacify it nine times
Lord
in an hour
half an hour
fly away
into the fog
fly away
as a butterfly
Slow your big pulse
slow your small pulse
both of them
within the hour
half an hour
So be it
Lord
send it away
over thirteen mountains
over thirteen hills
stop at thirteen rows of rocks
stop at thirteen rows of trees
– Demetrio Sodi M., La literatura de los Mayas (1964) [7]
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Tuesday, 12 March, 2013:
There’s an ad today on the University of Auckland website:
Could that actually be true? Did the world come to an end on 21st December 2012, the end of the 13th b’ak’tun in the Mayan Long Count. Professor Arias claims that ‘this change does not predict the end of time but promotes continuity at a time of crisis.’ But what does that mean?Oxlajuj B’aqtun:
not the end but a new beginning for Maya,
Indigenous Peoples and the Earth
On 21 December, 2012, Maya communities across the Americas celebrated the end of the Fourth Era and welcomed the Oxlajuj B’aqtun, the Fifth Mayan Era. The Maya Calendar is the oldest extant calendar on the planet, with a 5,200 year cycle of remarkable accuracy and complexity. However, across the planet, from the US to Russia, citizens panicked at the idea that the world would end ‘as predicted by Maya astronomers’. This was a Western invention; this change does not predict the end of time but promotes continuity at a time of crisis. In his talk, Professor Arias will explain the workings of the Maya Calendar, the celebrations last December, and the way indigenous peoples throughout the Americas understand this momentous event as a starting point to reconfigure an ethical beginning for their own people, to promote an indigenous worldview on Earth, to advance decolonial processes, strengthen indigenous cultures, and protect Mother Nature in significant ways. [8]
People still seem to be walking around, conducting their business – loving, dying, praying, giving birth – just as they have been since August 11, 3114 BC, when the present era began.
A few points to remember:
- All this has happened before: three times, in fact. However, according to the Popol Vuh, the Holy Book of the Quiché Maya, ours, the fourth creation, is the first wherein the gods have succeeded in keeping humans and animals alive for any length of time.
- Secondly, note the close coincidence of that date with Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC, Bishop Ussher’s 17th century calculation for the exact Date of Creation, still to be found in many old Bibles – admittedly there’s a difference of 890 years, but that’s surely a permissible deviation, given the tentative nature of the evidence.
- After all, John Lightfoot, Ussher’s predecessor, calculated the beginning of things at 3929 BC; the Talmudic scholar Yose ben Halafta at 3761 BC; the Venerable Bede at 3952 BC; the French scholar Joseph Scaliger at 3949 BC; the Cosmologist Johannes Kepler at 3992 BC; and Sir Isaac Newton at c. 4000 BC. All within cooee of the Mayan figure.
It reminds me a bit of Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, after the epidemic of insomnia that afflicted the early settlers:
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS. In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting. [9]‘Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.’
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Tuesday, 19 March, 2013:
– You can see that paint is going to peel off in a couple of years. I know they used to market that stuff as permanent-coat, one size fits all, but that’s not really practical in a climate like this.
– We did tell her at the time. She wouldn’t listen, though.
– So she was a bit of a gardener, was she?
– Back in the day, yes. Not after the cataracts got really bad. And she found that walking down to the shops was getting harder and harder.
– A bit like my Dad.
He pauses, groping instinctively for a rollie from his front pocket, then remembers he’d agreed to give up a couple of years ago now. The reflex still won’t quite quit.
– I ran into my brother in town one day. I mentioned that I’d been summoned upcountry for yet another deathbed scene. ‘So the old man’s still dying,’ he said. And that was right. It must have been a good fifteen years of phone-calls to come up and see him for the last time. And then one day it actually happened.
– Not my Gran. She was pretty cogent right up to the end. She checked herself into a rest-home, got rid of all her stuff, piece by piece. I’ve still got a few of her books lying round.
The two men look down at the inlet below, framed by dark-green trees.
– I guess she knew all along what ‘permanent’ means …
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Saturday, 23 March, 2013:
Yucatán-Maya Hunting Song
Hunter from the mountains
hunt
at the edge of the grove
once
twice
dance
three times
Lift your face
look carefully
make no mistake
about your prize
Have you sharpened your arrows?
Have you strung your bow?
Have you stroked your shaft
with catzim resin?
Have you greased your arms
your feetyour knees
your calvesyour ribs
your waistyour chest
with buck-deer fat?
Lap three times
the coloured stone
where the spotless virgin
youth
is tied
Firstrun
second
take your bow
nock your arrow
against his chest
shoot him
– not so hard as that! –
let him suffer
as God wills
Lap again
the blue-green stone
shoot him again
but don’t stop dancing
that’s how we measure
warriors
men pleasing
in the eyes of God
The sun breaks through
the eastern trees
the archer starts to sing
his song
learning to be
a warrior
learning to run and dance
and kill
– Demetrio Sodi M., La literatura de los Mayas (1964) [10]
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Sunday, 14 April, 2013:
‘Dear me!’ said Jack. ‘I’m getting confused with all this history. Who is the Scarecrow?’– L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) [11]
‘Citizens of the sweet hereafter.’
That’s what the girl says at the end of one of my favourite films, The Sweet Hereafter, made in Canada in 1997.
She’s sitting by a ferris wheel, I think, or some kind of fairground ride.
The film is about a small town where a school bus goes off the road and gets trapped under the ice of a frozen lake, so most of the children in the community are drowned. For the rest of them, the survivors, it’s as if time has stopped. All they can think about is what they’ve lost.
In another way, though, nothing can touch them now: the worst has already happened, and anything they can think of doing seems futile in advance.
The girl, played by Sarah Polley, has been disabled by the crash, and has to get around in a wheelchair. It’s as if she’s re-enacting the fate of that one child left behind by the Pied Piper in Robert Browning’s poem.
She’s a singer, too – at one point she sings a song with the repeated refrain, ‘Courage!’
She needs quite a lot of courage herself, because – on top of everything else – she’s being sexually abused by her father.
It’s hard to explain why that film had such a strong effect on me when I first saw it. I know it sounds pretty dark.
Now, though, when I think of us, picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off after the End of Days, I think of that girl, that town of people caught in the sweet hereafter, where all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and – new Adams, new Eves – we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see.
Notes:
[1] Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. 1st ed. 1967. Trans. Gregory Rabassa, 1970 (London: Picador, 1980), 9.
[2] ‘Ancient ‘Lizard People’ Underground In LA?’ Reptoid.com.
[3] Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1982), 275-76.
[4] L. Frank Baum, Journeys through Oz: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz & The Marvelous Land of Oz. 1st eds 1900 & 1904. Illustrations by W. W. Denslow & John R. Neill (Leicester: Galley Press, 1982), 35.
[5] Michael Coe, The Maya. 1st ed. 1966. (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2011), 223-24.
[6] ‘Lacandon-Maya Poem’ (trans. 6-23/3/13). Demetrio Sodi M., La literatura de los Mayas. 1st ed. 1964. El Legado de la América Indígena (México: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, S. A., 1974), 81.
[7] ‘Tzotzil-Maya Prayer’ (trans. 6-23/3/13). Demetrio Sodi M., La literatura de los Mayas, 89.
[8] University of Auckland website (12/3/13).
[9] García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 46.
[10] ‘Yucatán-Maya Hunting Song’ (trans. 6-23/3/13). Demetrio Sodi M., La literatura de los Mayas, 34-35.
[11] Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz, 35.
Alex Wild & Brett Cross, ed.: brief 53 (2015)[6/2-27/4/2013]
[3728 words]
[Published in brief 53 (2015): 80-97;
‘Lacandon-Maya Poem,’ ‘Tzotzil-Maya Prayer,’ and ‘Yucatán-Maya Hunting Song’ were published in brief 49 (2013): 60-65;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 35-52.]
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