Light that came from beside the sea

December 16, 2003 at 10:58 pm (Uncategorized)

Now, I know if I say Palenque, at least a few of you are going to groan and think I’m dragging in Erich Von Daniken. A few more of you are going to realize that it’s far more likely that I’m going to use Jacques Vallee’s far superior Passport to Magonia instead (and really, not only is Von Daniken’s work almost entirely garbage, but the few tidbits in it that are worth anything are seemingly cribbed from superior works like Vallee’s…if it were up to me, Von Daniken would be paying Vallee royalties) and beyond that, I’d hope a few of you would realize that I’m probably not going to retread the old alien astronaut path others have travelled so well before me.

Still, Palenque is a fascinating subject.

The team was investigating the impressive Palenque monuments, located in the state of Chiapas, on the site of a well-known Mayan city that scientists were busy restoring and mapping in systematic fashion. Yucatan is a region of constant humidity and high temperature, and the tropical vegetation had caused considerable damage to the temples and pyramids erected by the Mayas, whose civilization was marked by the genius of its architects and is thought to have declined in the first centuries of our era, disappearing almost completely about the ninth century – that is, at the time of the Charlemagne Empire in Europe.
Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia

The roots of Mayan civilization may lie in the prior civilization of the Olmecs, which was flowering on the Gulf costal plain of Veracruz and Tabasco by about 1200 BC. A more immediate antecedent is the Izapan culture, which ran along the western and southern edges of the Mayan world and reached inside that world at the highland site of Kaminaljuyu, on the west side of what is now Quatemala City. Beginning in the first century BC, Izapan stone monuments display an iconography and writing system similar to the ones that emerge later in the sites archaeologists designate as properly Mayan. This emergence took place during the period they call the Early Classic (AD 300-600) and it was centered in the lowland rain forest that separates the mountain pine forest of Chiapas and Guatemala from the low and thorny scrub forest of northern Yucatan.
Dennis Tedlock, Introduction to the Popul Vuh

To be honest, the Palenque ruins are interesting for far more than one sarcophagus lid that looks funny. They’re very impressive remains of high Maya culture. They prove that when Europe was having a hard time building huts out of thatch, the Americas had a civilization that could work in stone to amazing effect. The squabbling barbarians who destroyed the western Roman Empire couldn’t match the Maya…Rome itself would have been hard pressed to create more elaborate architectural displays. (And it wasn’t the Maya alone building such fantastic structures…Macchu Piccu dates to about 800 AD) Deriving from societies like the Olmec, which dated back to 800 BC at the most conservative estimate (1200 is more likely) the Maya achieved a sophisticated society with detailed knowledge of the stars and how they could be used to mark time as well as their already admitted architectural gifts. And Palenque is a great example of these abilities manifested in tangible form. The Pyramid of the Inscriptions in Palenque is where the tomb of Pacal exists, and where the aforementioned sarcophagus lid can be found. Pacal supposedly died in 683 AD, and became something of a semi-mythological figure…according to Kay Almere Read and Jason J. Gonzalez’s Mesoamerican Mythology, Pacal was ‘an important ancestor with close connections to the cosmos. Lord Pacal’s sarcophagus lid portrays him beginning his journey through the afterlife, entering the underworld Xibalba like a setting sun.’ It’s an established fact that Pacal was remembered as much for his long rulership and his program of monumental construction…in his way, he was a Mayan Ramses II, erecting structures all over Palenque. (It might be better to compare him to Gilgamesh, who was more identifiable with a city.)

However, I won’t bullshit around here. The sarcophagus lid does look a lot like Pacal’s reclining in some sort of capsule. It’s even more notable if you turn the thing on its side…it almost looks like Pacal’s riding on some sort of rocket sled. That doesn’t mean that Pacal took off in a spaceship or anything, and I’m not saying that he did, I’m merely pointing out that the idea that he’s descending into Xibalba like the setting sun in that image is no more plausible than the idea that he’s ascending somewhere. You could read it either way. It has been pointed out as well that Pacal, or whoever was found in that sarcophagus, was one hell of a specimen for the time period: at six feet tall he was close to eight inches taller than the average Mayan then or now. That makes him a rival for the Carolingian kings in size, and one wonders what kind of conversations these near contemporaries could have had. If nothing else, they might have had some interesting talks about where to buy clothes.

Not only was Pacal of heroic stature, his supposed descent into Xibalba (if that’s what the sarcophagus lid depicts) mirrors the descent or the Hero Twins (who were, in their turn, sons of 1-Hunter who also descended into the lands of the dead alongside his brother, 7-Hunter) into Xibalba to play ball with the lords of the dead. Once there, they passed various tests (smoking a cigar all night without burning it via lighting it with a firefly, offering the blades that dwell in the Razor House animal meat to devour so as to not become food for them, sealing the drafts of the Cold House, tossing bones to the Jaguars of Jaguar House, enduring the heat of the Fire House, and restoring Hunahpu’s head after he lost it in the Bat House and was forced to use a pumpkin for a head)…of course, Pacal was not considered to have sacrificed himself only to return from the dead and trap the lords 1-Death and 7-Death in a magical dance. And also, Pacal was not considered to have ascended into heaven as either the sun or the moon…say, wait a minute. Interesting that the supposed ‘descent’ of the Hero Twins into Xibalba ends with them ascending into heaven, now isn’t it? If this reminds you of the cult of Orpheus in Greece, or of Osiris in Egypt…well, of course, the idea of a divinity who descends into the otherworld, has great magical powers and who dies and is reborn is hardly unique to Mayan and other Mesoamerican mythologies…nor is the cross unique to Central and South America, either.

As in the oldest temples and catacombs of Egypt, so this type likewise abounds in the ruined cities of Mexico and Central America, graven as well upon the most ancient cyclopean and polygonal walls as upon the more modern and perfect examples of masonry; and is displayed in an equally conspicuous manner upon the breasts of innumerable bronze statuettes which have been recently disinterred from the cemetery of Juigalpa (of unknown antiquity) in Nicaragua.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis – The Antediluvian World

The late Dr. Augustus le Plongeon and his wife spent many years in trying to prove that a certain Queen Moo of Yucatan founded a colony in Egypt; but as they professed to be able to read heiroglyphs that no one else could decipher, and many of which were not heiroglyphs at all but ornamental designs, and as they placed side by side and compared with the Egyptian alphabet a “Mayan” alphabet which certainly never originated anywhere but in their own ingenuity, we cannot have much faith in their conclusions.
Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism

Yeah, Moo was probably as fictional as Ah Pook the Destroyer. Nevertheless, Spence spent much of his life trying to prove that Atlantis was real and existed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (even if he did dismiss a lot of Donnelly’s similar conclusions as being insufficiently rigorous) and so he had a bit of an axe to grin on the subject of Central and South American civilization and its possible contact with Europe and Africa. Most people who approach the issue take either the Donnelly/Spence tack that there was once an Atlantean civilization that contacted and possibly even was the progenitor for both American and Eurasian/African cultures, or that explorers from Europe or Africa (sometimes relatively latecoming explorers, like the Phoenician mariners written about in Herodotus who circumvented Africa for the Pharoah of Egypt, or the Irish Monks of St. Brendan’s time, or the Vikings of Leif Erikson’s) made contact with America. Similarly, there are those who argue that Chinese fleets reached America and that America was a mythical land to the east spoken of in Chinese reports of the time. Some argue for Sanskrit writings in ancient sites that may have meant that mariners from India were visiting the Americas before Columbus came west in search of India. And of course, there are always though who take the Graham Hancock position (similar to that in Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) that the myth of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan is a legacy from an older civilization that once girdled the world. However, none of them ever seem willing to take up Plongeon’s idea that civilization in fact developed in Central America before spilling out onto the world, and this seems to me to be a shame.

Well, except for T.E.D. Klein in Children of the Kingdom, I suppose. But that was supposedly as fictional as Ah Pook and Queen Moo, more’s the pity. However, being as how I have no thesis to prove and am liberated from the twin curses of plausibility and probability, what say we take a look at what couldn’t possibly be the case? For starters, I’m going to reject the alien half of the alien astronaut theory right out of the gate. Why should the peoples of ancient America be assumed to need alien help to have developed their culture any more than, say, the people of ancient Europe? But it does occur to me, looking upon the Palenque sarcophagus lid, that Pacal does appear to be seated in a vessel of some sort, a sweeping, growing thing built like a throne, built like a cross…but if there was any such technology in ancient America, wouldn’t we have found evidence of it?

Not if they grew it.

And here is the beginning of the conception of humans, and of the search for the ingredients of the human body. So they spoke, the Bearer, Begetter, the Makers, Modelers named Sovereign Plumed Serpent: “The dawn has approached, preparations have been made, and morning has come for the provider, nurturer, born in the light, begotten in the light. Morning has come for humankind, for the people of the face of the earth,” they said. It all came together as they went on thinking in the darkness, in the night, as they searched and they sifted, they thought and they wondered. And here their thoughts came out in clear light. They sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon and stars were to appear above the Makers and Modelers. Split Place, Bitter Water Place is the name: the yellow corn, white corn came from there…and these were the ingredients for the flesh of the human work, the human design, and the water was for the blood. It became human blood, and corn was also used by the Bearer, Begetter.
Dennis Tedlock, trans., Popol Vuh

Biotechnology. The mastery of flesh from synthetics created from plant matter. Agriculture yoked with genetics, the production of perfectly disposable, perfectly self-renewing technology. When something breaks down, you use it for compost for the new batch of devices growing in one of the swamps they cleared. For that matter, it brings to mind the theory of Terence McKenna that mushrooms growing in cow dung helped accelerate human mental evolution…those of us who’ve read Burroughs know of his trips south seeking yage and of McKenna’s own experiences among the ayahuasqueros of South America. (An interesting aside to McKenna’s theory: it was recently reported that researchers in Italy have found evidence that cocaine and ecstasy affect DNA, causing mutations. Now, if this holds true for mushrooms and yage, well…) Did the ancient pre-Olmec peoples of the Yucatan use powerful drugs synthesized from the various plants they cultivated and perhaps even created to alter their consciousness, perhaps even their own genetic codes? Did they consider man to have been created from plants because they used plants to help develop their brains, to become more human? Did they grow their cities while developing their mental abilities, perhaps even entering into a psychic symbiosis with their plant creations…consider the image of the Palenque sarcophagus. Was Pacal reclining in tendrils of animate symbiotic plants that allowed him to range his mind, his very being out into Xibalba, the world beyond this one?

One of the reasons that the spiritual world impinges upon us is that it knows something that most of us don’t. It knows that each of us was originally a resident of a spiritual world. Eons ago, for some reason that few people know, we left the spiritual world to incarnate our ‘spirit’ into physical bodies in a physical world dominated by pleasure and pain. Some occultists think this represents the ‘fall’ of the angels, but I think not. ‘New Agers’ feel that we are to develop ourselves sufficiently that we can free ourselves from the physical trap we have been caught in.
Gregory L. Little, People of the Web

That supposedly ‘new age’ idea is as old as Manicheanism and Orphism, but we’ll forgive Greg for that. For now, let’s just consider the possibility that what Pacal knew, his cosmic connection was that he realized that this world is Xibalba. This is the underworld that we live in, this is the realm fallen from heaven into. The spirit descended into bodies of matter, lived its life amidst pleasure and pain and learned the secrets of the Sovereign Plumed Serpents, the power of the plant over the flesh, the chemicals that could grant the mind ascension again, allow it to escape what Little calls the physical trap. From inside his organic cage, his own private tree of knowledge, Pakal ascended into the cosmos and became a god to the people of Palenque, much as Kukulcan had earlier. Is it possible that Pakal himself was Kukulcan? Looking upon the Palenque sarcophagus lid, we see two angry faces hanging from the top of the tree-like structure, each to the side of the strange plumed head at the top of it. Are they Hunahpu and Xbalanque, having cheated death and risen into the stars, showing Pakal how to seize the secrets of the Sovereign Plumed Serpents that created man out of the plants?

With the ability to free the mind of the body…call it apotheosis, astral projection, ascending the tree of life from Malkuth to Kether again, walking Yggdrasil and learning the secrets of the runes while seeing the nine worlds, or even defeating the lords of the underworld and reassembling the father as first to be worshipped…perhaps the people of Mesoamerica didn’t need to go anywhere to influence the developing cultures of the rest of the world. Maybe they didn’t need to build anything. With powers over life and death, over the growth and development of crops and other plants, perhaps even to awaken the hidden powers of the mind itself, they could well have been Shamans, and theirs a Shamanic empire.

She must have grown into this role, I thought as I drank. It was warm and salty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old, old thing…When I regained consciousness I appeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave of brightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high. Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realized that my wave was speeding toward a rocky coastline. Everything disappeared in the roaring chaos of informational wave meeting virtual land. More lost time and then an impression of being a shipwrecked sailor washed onto a tropical shore. I feel that I am pressing my face into the hot sand of a tropical beach. I feel lucky to be alive. I am lucky to be alive? Or is it that I am alive to be lucky? I break up laughing. At this point the old woman begins to sing. Hers is no ordinary song, but an icaro, a magical curing song that in our intoxicated and ecstatic state seems more like a tropical reef fish or an animated silk scarf of many colors than a vocal performance. The song is a visible manifestation of power, enfolding us and making us secure.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

the Maker, Modeler,
named Bearer, Begetter,
Hunahpu Possum, Hunahpu Coyote,
Great White Peccary, Coati,
Sovereign Plumed Serpent,
Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea,
plate shaper, bowl shaper, as they are called,
also named, also described as
the midwife, matchmaker
named Xpiyacoc, Xmucane,
twice a midwife, twice a matchmaker
Dennis Tedlock, trans., Popol Vuh

Imagine the mounds of Cahokia, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Ziggarauts of Sumeria, the monumental architecture of Chavin de Hunantar and Mycenae and the Minoans, all inspired by astral astronauts voyaging out from the feverishly living jungles of southern America and attempting to explain the path to and from infinity, creating solar cults wherever they went, pyramids and temples raised high to the sun. The myths of heroes who descend and return from the land of the dead, dying and reborn gods of vegetation…Adonis, Dionysos, Balder, even Christ himself a transformed, carried forward reinterpretation of the lore of the ancient pre-Olmec societies that lived in ancient America, and made of agriculture a religion and a science. Perhaps they themselves were the original Atlanteans or perhaps the Atlantis myth was created to attempt to explain why the visitors stopped visiting. One imagines Nazca as an attempt to call them back, perhaps, to gain the attention of Kukulcan and the Hero Twins, who had abandoned this fleshly existence to perhaps settle in the stars above us, to colonize the Pleiades and Sirius and the other stars that were so sacred a mystery to the Quiche and other Maya peoples. Indeed, once free of their bodies and in the firmament of heaven, it’s possible to imagine that time and space themselves had no meaning to these travelers…perhaps they even reached back to the beginning, and descended again to start the cycle of creation over, as they had before? The Feathered Serpent who came from the East may well have been the Sovereign Plumed Serpent who started all of creation in the first place…the keeper of the reincarnation house mat may well have started as Pakal, and moved further and further back, becoming the father of Hunaphu and Xbalanque, then further back to Kukulcan, and further back to Sovereign Plumed Serpent himself…and also sideways through time and space to the rest of the world, to be the serpent who bears knowledge from a tree. Perhaps Pakal bore his culture back to the very Izapan who inspired it in the first place. Perhaps he walked the Yucatan of the future and saw the city he built covered in vines, and thought it fitting that plants should destroy what plants helped create. Perhaps he imparted his stolen knowledge of the agricultural transformative to the very tribes he learned it from, walking the jungles of the Yucatan before his birth as a shade, a mind detached from the body by the power of his biological computer, his plant-based throne, his chemically enhanced brain.

Perhaps, too, their expertise with the very stuff of growth, of biological matter, is remembered dimly in the stories of gods whose flesh changes shape at their whim, who can be the bull or the wolf or the bird, a long-distant memory of their gift with the shaping and growing of their technology. Or perhaps they actually learned to treat their own flesh as a canvas, as an object…would those who viewed their minds as caged in flesh hesitate to change their cages to suit them, or to create images that they were whatever they chose? After all, shapeshifter legends extend from the Jaguar-idols of ancient America to the wolf-shifting Neurians of Herodotus to the tiger-men of Indonesia to the fox-spirit Kitsune of Japan.

Perhaps he sacrificed himself and was reborn, as the Hero Twins did, as Dionysos burst forth from his father’s thigh, as Taliesin found himself a bubble in beer, as Odin hung from the tree for nine days and saw the nine worlds, as Osiris rose green like fertile soil after a flood. Perhaps it was in the Americas that these ideas took hold, and were spread by the sheer power of the chemically augmented brain. Perhaps there were in fact ancient astronauts in Palenque…astronauts who needed no ships, who could reach the stars themselves, who could even slip loose from time and travel back to their own beginnings and discover themselves waiting for them. The primordial ones. The Elohim, the Ennead of Heliopolis, the Anunaki, the council of Atlantean kings…the Maker, Modeler named Bearer, Begetter, Hunahpu Possum, Hunaphu Coyote, Great White Peccary, Coati, Sovereign Plumed Serpent.

Perhaps, too, they watch us still, or more accurately, they watch us throughout our history at once, for time is nothing to them. After all, South America is a hotspot of UFO activity…perhaps the lights in the sky are the star-travellers returned from their long sojurns in the night, to see what we’ve become, what we’ve done with the green, pleasant world they left us so long ago. Perhaps they aren’t very pleased, or perhaps all things are the same to them who know the beginning and the end of the story, who see the whole wheel of time clicking through the ages of man, and know we have to be what we are if we are to become what we will. I suppose, if McKenna was right, we’ll find out in 2012…one can only hope that Ah Pook is fictional, and not an example of Burroughs’ gaining true enlightenment from the ayacusha…then again, who is to say that old Bill didn’t manage to free himself from this cage of fleshly existence and take his place next to Pakal amidst the starry sky? Ah Pook may have had the last laugh after all.