“Mi corazón en amarte eternamente se ocupe
Y mi lengua en alabarte Madre mía de Guadalupe.”
(“My heart wants to love you eternally
And my tongue to praise you, my Mother Guadalupe.”)
What seemed obvious to James and me on the matchbox at arm’s length or the beach towel at a glance was that the image of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was in the shape of a yoni, complete with wavy lips and clitoral head! What persistence the archetype of the Divine Feminine has!
The iconic yoni of Guadalupe is not so surprising when you consider that she arose from an indigenous Earth Mother, Tonantzin, who dwelled in an Aztec kosmology that started with Om… Ometeotl, that is. Ometeotl was the nondifferentiated Creative Force, which manifested then as male and female (Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl), whose making love – having sex! – begat all that exists.
This is the mythological ground upon which stands the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The Power of Myth
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world
the master calls a butterfly.
~ Richard Bach
I could appreciate the Mesoamerican mythic vision: that life is not a bunch of things but a dramatic procession of spirit flowing into – and out of – manifestation. Creation was not a one-time event; it was a continuous process. Life – Death – Rebirth... on and on in endless cycles. According to Mesoamerican mythology, there were four ages preceding ours, each of which met its end, only to be followed by the subsequent age.
After the first four suns, destruction was total when the skies collapsed onto the Earth. This was the state of affairs when the gods came together at Teotihuacán to initiate the Fifth Sun, our current age. Creation – Existence – Destruction – the Void – Creation... the great ages cycled through. Not only did their calendars precisely record “historical” dates, they also precisely predicted them. For our age was supposed to end, too, according to their timekeeping, on December 21st, 2012.
I had been to Teotihuacán a couple times – “the Place where the Gods Touch the Earth” – to behold the massive architecture and feel the grandeur of the place. The ancient city of broad step pyramids and wide avenues sits just northeast of Mexico City in a semi-arid valley. At one time, it was home to 100,000-200,000 people. The Pyramid of Quetzalcóatl, with its seven levels, demonstrates Earth-commensurate measurements, while the main thoroughfare, The Way of the Dead, is like a scale model of the solar system (including Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto!). The length of the Sun Pyramid of Teotihuacán is exactly the same as that of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. Coincidence? Could there have been contact between ancient Egypt and ancient Mexico? Or did the same “gods” build them both? My mind envisioned fleeing Atlanteans or colonizing Anunnaki from Sumer arriving here.
Mathematical relationships are built into the structures and layout of the city, including Pythagorean right angles, π (pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle), φ (the phi ratio, the Golden Mean), and φ2 . Peter Tompkins, in Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, writes that Teotihuacán displays “an ideal architectural design that would incorporate major universal constants, geodetic, atomic, astrophysical, and other cosmic information in the minimum number of structures, all of which had to conform to right-angle Cartesian coordinates on an optimum scale model of the Earth.”124 Like Hawai’i, it sits at 19.5o latitude. Whoever built Teotihuacán (over 10,000 years ago, it is claimed, by interpreters of Edgar Cayce, the famous American psychic, or in 1500 BCE, 200 BCE, or 150 CE, according to archaeologists) had sophisticated mathematical knowledge.
The Aztec Empire, on the rise in the 15th century, came late onto the scene, but we know more about them because they are whom the Spaniards found in power when they arrived. Though the Culhua-Méxica people, as they called themselves, carried forward Teotihuacán’s high standards of architecture, science, city planning, and arts, their regard for women and other “low-ranking” people wallowed in the depths of unenlightenment – a dominator culture shored up by the warrior/mythic mindset. The Aztecs, with their bloody rituals and culture of violence, had conquered most of central México, so when the Spaniards wanted to take control of the empire, they found willing allies among other subjugated tribes. What good luck for the Spanish conquerors Cortés (in México) and Pizarro (in Perú) that the empires they sought to crush were already suffering severe structural cracks.
It also helped that Culhua-Méxica mythology, corroborated by the calendar, had foretold the arrival of a god: Quetzalcóatl, the great plumed serpent deity. The pre-eminent creator god who brought science, corn and agriculture, the calendar, arts and crafts to the people, had departed, vowing to return. He was born in the year 1 Reed, and his second coming would be in the year 1 Reed of a subsequent cycle. So when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés landed on the eastern shore in the year 1 Reed (1519), all according to prophecy, naturally the Aztec emperor Moctezuma opened the gates of his empire to him. Myth turned history. By the time Moctezuma realized Cortés was an imposter, it was too late.
Still, presuming his priests kept him up on the prophecies, he must have had his doubts all along. According to the prophetic calendar, a series of thirteen heavens and nine hells, each lasting 52 years, began in 843 CE. The earlier heaven cycles coincided with the Classic Maya period, when the Mayan civilization reached its heights. The thirteenth heaven cycle ended in 1519, precisely on the day that Cortés landed. Then began the nine hells, during which the great native Mesoamerican cultures were torn apart through enslavement, disease, slaughter, and subjugation. The ninth hell ended on August 16, 1987, a day many of us celebrated as the Harmonic Convergence. At sunrise that morning, I had stood on a hill above San Miguel de Allende, my home in north-central México, welcoming the dawning of a new age.
Whenever the end of our age happens, it certainly feels like the world is already in a monumental transition. How are our myth keepers preparing us? From pulpits, our priests warn of Armageddon, a final battle between the forces of good and evil, which luckily will be escaped by the “chosen ones” who will ascend into another dimension, Heaven. In our cinemas, modern-day myth tellers show us, in technicolor and emotional detail, the destruction of our world through a series of possible calamities: a comet/asteroid strike (Armageddon, Deep Impact); solar flare (Knowing); climate change (The Day after Tomorrow); earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis (Doomsday Prophecy, 2012); epidemics (The Andromeda Strain, Outbreak, Rise of the Planet of the Apes); nuclear holocaust (Fail-Safe, The Day After, and the Terminator and Matrix movies); and ET invasion (War of the Worlds, Independence Day), to cite but a few disaster movies.
Will any of the above myths turn history? Conceivably, because we equate “myth” with “untruth,” we dismiss these Hollywood stories and escape into denial, distraction, or numbing out, despite the gathering signs that many of the above catastrophes could actually happen. At the least, the films are invitations for us to confront Death, the mythic “The End” to our collective story – an appropriate contemplation for us living in the time of the Sixth Great Extinction.
What if we took back the power of myth? What if each of us reinvented the myth of this time of transition? What timeline on our cyclical calendar do we want to co-create? For the ancient Mayans, the Ahau Kines were rulers connected to the sun and the galactic center who channeled cosmic energy into their kingdom. Now, it seemed to me, we could be modern Ahau Kines who manifested a new world through our visioning.
Into the Dark Rift
We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.
~ Joseph Campbell
One morning James and I drove our rental car under brilliant blue sky and white puffy clouds away from the coast. Into the forested interior we went, to visit the ruins of Cobá. Once a large city of some 50,000 inhabitants, Cobá
today reveals a well-organized system of raised and paved sacbeob (sacbé = white road), pyramids, platforms, ball courts, stelae, and temples. Exploring the white limestone ruins, we found a quiet spot to set an altar and perform ceremony. We placed our offerings on my mesa cloth – coca leaves, tobacco, cornmeal – and poured the waters from the Rio Grande (New Mexico) and Sacsayhuamán (Péru) to carry our visions of peace and justice for the Americas. We thanked the Land of the Maya for receiving us.
I wanted to climb the Nohoch Mul Pyramid – at 12 stories, the tallest pyramid on the Yucatán Peninsula. The steep climb requires steady muscles and able legs, so James waited under shade trees and then met me as I reached the bottom steps, where we sat down to rest. We were both sweating.
Handing me a bottle of water, he said, “Why didn’t you hold onto the chain that runs down the center of the staircase, like everybody else? You could have fallen.”
I took a swig and explained, “Well, it just seems to me that the steps are so narrow and steep so that you don’t walk straight up or down. They make you walk sideways, so you zigzag your way up and down... moving like a snake.”
“A pretty slow snake,” James commented, squeezing my arm affectionately.
“Yeah, well, imagine a whole line of priests walking first to the right, then left, then back right again. They would be like a snake crawling up the pyramid, which is pretty cool, considering they worshipped a snake god.”
“You mean the feathered snake?” James asked.
“Quetzalcóatl, the plumed serpent, exactly,” I replied. “He was called Kukulcán by the Mayans. The snake part of him was of the earth, the feathered part was of the sky. I like to think that they were depicting kundalini energy, which can unify from the Underworld through the Earth to the Heavens, like what we can do with our chakras.”
“Like what we can do when we make love,” James laughed. He leaned over to kiss me. Our lips tasted salty with sweat.
I resumed our conversation. “You know, I remember reading that on the pyramids, they acted out the choice between the forces of death and life. Tezcatlipoca was the Lord of the Shadows who had a magic ‘smoking mirror’ that could see into the souls of people. He could see their motives. He was God of Death, and a trickster, and usually depicted with jaguars.”
“Quetzalcóatl, on the other hand, was benevolent and taught humanity all the arts of civilization. He wanted people to rise above their baser drives.”
“So Quetzalcóatl met up on the pyramid with Texasi—” James ventured.
“Tezcatlipoca,” I pronounced the name for him. “Yeah, OK, what happened was there was a person who climbed halfway up the pyramid. The priests portraying Tezcalipoca would be at the top of the pyramid and try to force the person down with whatever evil temptations or threats they could hurl at him. But at the base of the pyramid the priests of Quetzalcóatl tried to raise the guy higher, calling out virtuous actions. Maybe it was like a kind of courtroom where people’s actions led them up or down for all to see.”
“Can you imagine Bush and Cheney on the pyramid?” James asked. “Though actually, they’d probably be the priests on the top ripping out people’s hearts. They like blood.”
“Well, like I’ve said before, the whole idea of blood sacrifice happens when societies are in decline. It happened to the Maya, it happened to the Aztecs, and it’s happening to us. Isn’t war a mass bloodletting?”
“It’s the Dominator Culture doing itself in,” James stated with finality. “It’s such a damn mess to watch.”
James and I continued our wanderings through the jungle and ruins of Cobá until the heat had worn us out. Seeking a shady place for our picnic, we spread a sarong at the shores of Laguna Cobá, and pulled out our sandwiches. A flock of herons flapped above us.
“Ya know, I feel like taking a swim,” I said, eyeing the cool water.
“I don’t think so, honey!” admonished James. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
I looked to where he was pointing. The sign read ¡PELIGRO! COCODRILO (Danger! Crocodile). “OK, you convinced me... I’d really rather swim in the ocean anyway,” I said, carefully eyeing our surroundings, especially the tall reeds at water’s edge.
“Quetzalcóatl, or Kukulcán, was a very interesting mythological character,” I said, taking a drink of my canned mango juice. “He brought so much good to humanity. Some stories say he was a ruler, born here; others say that this fair-skinned, bearded man arrived here from the east, in a boat that moved without paddles.”
“Where did he arrive from?” James asked.
“Well, Edgar Cayce did say that before Atlantis was destroyed, that boatloads of Atlanteans left, heading for Egypt, southern Europe, South America and Yucatán. If the man they called Quetzalcóatl was an Atlantean, think of how much he must have known, especially if he was a scientist! Or... he could’ve been one of the Sumerian Anunnaki gods, who supposedly traveled to other lands.
“Jose Argüelles has a whole ‘nother take on it. He says that Quetzalcóatl, as well as a lot of Mayans, were from...” I pointed to the sky.
“Yeah, they were ET’s,” James finished the thought.
“Well, yes, or that they were from another dimension... or maybe that can be the same thing,” I answered.
“Question is: why would they come here?” James wondered. “Maybe they found early humans and wanted to enslave them.”
I said, “Or maybe they were benevolent beings who wanted to help along the evolution of Earth. Or both: some benevolent, some predatory. Argüelles says that the prophecy predicts that Quetzalcóatl will return...”
James extrapolated, “Like the second coming of Christ and his Kingdom of Heaven?”
“And the second coming of Merlin and King Arthur, with their Avalon, and all the other avatars who said they’d come back to walk us into the Golden Age,” I went on.
“So, we’re talking about now, aren’t we?” James said, chewing his sandwich thoughtfully.
“Yep! And that’s why the Mayans were obsessed with stargazing and keeping time. They had such advanced mathematics, astronomy, geometry, and multiple calendars so they could map our trip through the galaxy. They realized our solar system passed through high- and low-density fields and different beams of energy, and that we entered the last one in 3113 BCE...”
“That’s about when Marija Gimbutas said the Indo-European invasions were happening in Europe and Asia, isn’t it? When the goddess-worshipping cultures were being overrun, and the Patriarchy was being established?”
“Hey, you’re right, James,” I nodded. “The Dominator System started gaining ground, maybe because it was reinforced by certain cosmic influences... A Mayan calendar astrologer once told me that the First Sun, or Age, was feminine; then the Second Sun was masculine; the Third Sun was feminine; and the Fourth Sun is masculine, which correlates with the dominator era. Anyway, our trip through the galaxy has its bumps in the road – its ups and downs, so to speak – and the Mayans mapped them. That’s how they could predict the hell cycles and golden ages. We’re in a Great Cycle of about 5,125 years, which will end in...”
“2012!” James exclaimed. “When Kali cleans house. You know, I’ve read that even scientists acknowledge that we will be lined up with the galactic equator around 2012.”
“That must be why the sun is going wild, with its sunspot activity and solar flares. Father Sun is probably already feeling it! When we line up with the center of the Milky Way – it’s a dark spot in the sky, the Dark Rift – the Mayans called it Xibalba Be... It all makes sense,” I mused aloud.
“What do you mean?” James asked. “What’s Xibalba?”
“Xibalba is the Underworld in Mayan mythology...” My mind tumbled into the mythical meanings of the Underworld – the place of death and rebirth, of transformation, of the void.
“Becca, I love how you are a veritable vault of information!”
James said, eyeing me affectionately.
“Well, what do you think I’ve been doing all week lying in the hammock? Haven’t you noticed I carry my books into the hammock with me?” I chided him.
“Ya know, your smarts are the sexiest thing about you!” James squeezed my hand. “There’s no one else I’d rather go through 2012 with!”
“Even if it’s a trip through the Underworld?” I asked.
“Yup. It’s all a magical mystery tour! Remember Joseph Campbell’s advice? ‘Follow Your Bliss!’ Well, we’ve lived our lives that way. I feel content. Let the world end tomorrow, or in 2012, or 2025! I am ready to leave this hell cycle behind,” James said. “But Becca, this new age we’re coming into – the Fifth Sun – you never said what it’s supposed to be. Back to feminine?”
“No, actually, that astrologer told me it’s going to be masculine and feminine – the two of them, in balance,” I responded.
James broke into a smile and lifted his hand in a high five. “Well, then, Venus and Her Lover is right on time!” he declared. The two of us smacked our palms together victoriously.
Archetypes through the Apocalypse
Back at our beach cabaña, we enjoyed our last days swimming in the warm Caribbean, eating mangos, and swinging in the hammocks under the palms. Our final night we got all our packing done by the time our eco-hotel shut off the electricity at 11:00, and climbed into our swinging bed. I liked the idea of our cabaña, built in the typical Yucatecan style: the walls were of rounded sticks bound together in the shape of an oval, and the roof was of palm thatch. No windows, one door. As I lay in the bed I could hear scratching above my head: rats scurried across the wooden rafters. Like I said, I liked the idea of our cabaña, but the reality of it was a bit rustic for me.
Parting the mosquito net, I stepped out of bed, setting it to swinging.
“Where are you going?” James mumbled sleepily.
Venus and Her Lover Page 23