It should be emphasized here that in much of the early Dreamspell literature, the terminology labeled it “the Maya calendar.” The primary result of my efforts has been to initiate a careful distinction in the group’s literature, an acknowledgment that there is indeed an authentic day-count still followed by the Maya. In Argüelles’s recent biography, the discussion of Dreamspell very carefully avoids calling it “the Maya calendar,” whereas in earlier literature a conceptual conflation between the two existed. I count this a victory for accuracy and clarity, in retrospect, but it came only after a drastic step was taken, because for many years this truth was resisted.
In late 1995 I was encouraged by my friend Mark Valladares to write a piece in a different voice, one that might get through to the followers of Dreamspell. Instead of trying to engage Socratic dialogue based on facts, as I’d been doing for years, I took on a high-toned science-fiction voice and laid out the dire energetic consequences of having a new system conflict with the ancient, traditional one. It’s ironic that truth must sometimes be wrapped in allegorical satire. But it seemed to work. In late 1995 I posted “The Key to the Dreamspell Agenda” piece on my website, and although it ruffled some feathers it became the seed through which the Dreamspell camp began acknowledging that a True Count existed and the Dreamspell system was a different kind of bird.
The spin doctors stepped in pretty quickly, of course, and the Dreamspell count was soon identified as the preferable “Wizard Count” or “Galactic Count.” So another creative level of apologetics has allowed the system to continue with only a minor deference to the facts of the matter. Although its acknowledgment of the True Count was progress, the Dreamspell movement tended to see its own perspective as a higher “galactic” calendar or a “new dispensation” that could replace the older traditional day-count. The idea of new things replacing old things is a common theme in the trendy marketplace of New Age capitalism, where “traditional” ideas are old and must be disposed of. Since all this went down, I’ve observed my work to clarify the fundamental problems with the Dreamspell system slip into public consensus. At the time, few others had noticed the issues, or dared or cared to make the corrections, but now my observations are adopted by a new generation of writers, without much awareness of how long it took to crack open the web of misconceptions.
In 1999, I shared a conference venue with José called the Fourth International Mayan Dreamtime Festival, set in the beautiful town of Glastonbury, England. After the conference we had a chance to talk. Glastonbury is part of a sacred landscape. Visionaries and mystics have long perceived a zodiac that runs around Glastonbury for miles, and the twelve constellations are represented by tors (hills), waterways, wells, and other features. A dinner for the speakers was organized by our hosts, Mikhail and Alloa, and it happened to take place at a country home in Baltonsbury. As our group of speakers drove through the countryside, sharing Maya chocolate, the mood was light, and we laughed when someone mentioned that Baltonsbury was right between Sagittarius and Scorpio on the Glastonbury zodiac—right in the Galactic Center.
After dinner José spoke at length about a wide range of unrelated things, including his readings of the Koran, and it was a bit difficult for anyone to interject comments or questions. José was well aware of my criticisms of his Dreamspell system because we had exchanged e-mails, once, in 1996. I finally managed to bring up the issue of the day-count discrepancy, and his response was that it didn’t really matter, both the Quiché calendar and his calendar worked in the same way. This was, of course, simply not true, as the day skipping on February 29 was a major stumbling block to continuity between the counts, and was just one of the many problems that set it apart from the authentic day-count. There was nowhere for a cordial conversation to go. Nervous laughter rippled among the guests, more chocolate was passed around, and I realized that my work on that front was done.
The writing was on the wall for the Argüellian Mothership: Dreamspell was a grab bag of contradictory mystifications, and the calendar Argüelles promoted was at odds with the surviving, traditional, authentic day-count in the highlands of Guatemala. Nevertheless, the system still has currency and is followed by many, which is the prerogative of free will. Some Dreamspell enthusiasts in England have adopted a rather complex two-part system in which the Dreamspell count and the traditional count are both factored into readings and birthday tabulations. My primary goal was to defend and emphasize the existence of the True Count so that people would at least know they had a choice. And that is, in the end, what has occurred, more or less.
An unfortunate side effect of Argüelles’s decision to create his own day-count system manifested in his relationship with Hunbatz Men. In 1990 Bear & Company published Hunbatz Men’s book Secrets of Mayan Science and Religion. Men’s book was interesting in some respects, although his claim that a tribe in India, the Naga Mayas, were cousins to the Maya was a bit hard to swallow. Hunbatz came to the attention of Bear through Argüelles, who hosted a visit by Hunbatz to Boulder, Colorado, in 1985.
A collaboration between Hunbatz and Argüelles is apparent, especially in one important respect—the correlation they used. Both acknowledged 2012 as a significant reference point, but the question of what day it was in the Maya calendar defaulted to Argüelles, as the tzolkin calendar had stopped being followed in the Yucatán. Hunbatz had no tzolkin tradition to draw from. This kind of thing would be a bit of a sticky problem for any Maya shaman. The tradition had been lost in his homeland, so he had to rely on the authority of an outsider, a teacher at an American university believed to be accurately informed on the matter. Unfortunately, the information transmitted from Argüelles to Hunbatz was tainted by the questionable model that Argüelles himself had devised.
Hunbatz didn’t mention a correlation in his 1990 book, but by 1992 a Maya enthusiast, writer, and tour leader named Aluna Joy Yaxkin started publishing Maya calendars in the magazine Sedona. This was a monthly feature that continued up through 1995, when Hunbatz led many thousands of people in solar initiations at Chichén Itzá and the cenote at nearby Dzibilchaltún—sacred ceremonies and initiations that were similar in nature to the Harmonic Convergence events. I had noticed that Aluna Joy’s calendar charts followed the Argüelles day-count, yet she stated the system was taught to her by Hunbatz (she partnered with Hunbatz for tours in the early 1990s). The day-count she used thus seemed to have the stamp of approval from a real Maya elder. I immediately suspected what had happened, and I was able to confirm the underlying hidden story with the help of my friend Jim Reed.
Jim Reed, the charismatic “Mayaman” who leads tours to Maya temples and caves, served as president of the Institute of Maya Studies in Miami, and he continues to edit their informative newsletter. He hosted Hunbatz Men at events in Florida in the mid-1990s, and told me of Hunbatz’s collaboration with Argüelles in Boulder in 1985. I came to understand the difficult work that Hunbatz has been engaged with in Mexico, where the Maya people are forbidden from doing rituals within the archaeological sites. Treading a thin legal line and often hassled by government officials, Hunbatz has performed rituals at places like Dzibilchaltún, where the rising equinox sun shines through the windows in the Temple of the Seven Dolls to illuminate the sacred walkway and visitors can swim in a sacred cenote. Hunbatz has performed annual initiations in the sacred waters of the cenote, and on the March equinox in 1995 hundreds of people were initiated by Hunbatz into the ancient solar religion.21
Aluna Joy Yaxkin was instrumental in Hunbatz’s well-attended solar initiations of 1995. By 1998 the day-count discrepancy had become a question that Hunbatz wanted to resolve, and he invited me to speak at a Maya Calendar congress he organized in Mérida. Jim Reed led a group that I joined in Champotón, and together we visited Aké, Edzna, and other sites before joining Hunbatz in Mérida. Our groups planned to journey together, after the conference, to Dzibilchaltún and Chichén Itzá. On the conference day in Mérida, Jim encouraged me to emphasize the correct day-count and m
ake no mistake about it. But there were a few other speakers, and I was on last.
The loquacious speaker before me, part of Hunbatz’s group, ended up talking far beyond his allotted time, and I had to quickly adapt my slides for a quick forty-five-minute presentation. This presenter didn’t seem to care or be aware of the duration of his time slot, and he finally had to be interrupted as he had gone on for more than two hours. I then was able to briefly share my reconstruction of the Maya’s awareness of the sun’s alignment with the Pleiades over the Pyramid of Kukulcan. I also emphasized that, historically, the tzolkin was lost in Yucatán but survived in the Guatemalan highlands. March 19, 1998 (the day of the conference), was equal to the day 8 Muluc. (I’ll always remember this because an amazing artist, Furie, gifted me with a glass pendant that day, engraved with the Muluc day-sign.)
The situation of the correct day-count continued, nevertheless, to be unclear among Maya day-keepers, and Hunbatz had been following the Argüelles count. Some writers liked to say that 8 Batz (8 Monkey, the initiation day for day-keepers) was the Maya New Year, which was confusing because New Year’s Day wasn’t technically connected to 8 Batz. Also, the Long Count calendar and 2012 were a lost tradition, and information on it in the literature was unclear. Some terminology and definitions needed to be worked out. Consequently, Hunbatz, as a representative of the Yucatec Maya, invited a contingency of Guatemalan calendar priests to attend the Calendar Congress in Mérida in 1999. The results were mixed, as the Guatemalan day keepers did not seem to get any stage time at the conference. Hunbatz concluded by stating that they were all in agreement, which was clearly not the case. Hunbatz continues to lead a renewed calendar tradition in the Yucatán, driven by solar initiations at the Maya sites.
* * *
In the 1970s Argüelles lived in Boulder, Colorado, and he was involved in the founding of Naropa College in 1974. He was a devoted student of Trungpa Rinpoche, who was known for a spiritual teaching style called Crazy Wisdom. This school of thought, and its leader, became famous for techniques that disrupted the rational mind. The methods were unorthodox and, in retrospect, highly questionable. Some of its “graduates” have claimed that it left them in states of severe confusion. Author Sam Keen had this to say about the proliferation of Wisdom teachers:
One of the things I frankly don’t like about your magazine [What Is Enlightenment?] is the holding up of these people who are supposedly “in the absolute” and totally liberated. I don’t know whether you remember, but for many years I was the person at Psychology Today who interviewed all these gurus. And so I’ve had a good bit of experience with a fair number of them—Chögyam Trungpa, Oscar Ichazo, Muktananda and others. And if these are all examples of people who are totally liberated, I say give me slavery because they were people with enormous illusions and who were cultivating enormous illusions in their followers. By and large almost all of them were totally unclear about three important things: sex, money and power. And they could play like they were liberated as long as they had a whole cult of disciples who did everything for them except wipe their asses—and probably that, too. And most of them were on enormous power trips. So I think the idea of total liberation is sort of like the idea of perfection. It’s an idea that is more crippling than helpful.22
Students of Trungpa Rinpoche in the early days of Naropa had to contend with contradictory statements and behavior offered by their teacher, dealing with jealousy issues by partner swapping, and similar practices characterized as “crazy.” Unfortunately, the progenitor of Crazy Wisdom teachings in the West succumbed, at the age of forty-seven, to alcoholism and heart failure after moving from Boulder to Nova Scotia. Those are the facts of the matter, and I’m not intending to pass judgment on what may have been important spiritual teachings for Westerners of the boomer generation to experience.
Argüelles, in his biography, discussed the extreme yet often endearing nature of Trungpa’s character, and remembers that he benefited from learning presence of mind by practicing dharma art projects, with Trungpa’s guidance, in the late 1970s.23 In my opinion, a devaluing of facts and rational assessment might have been instilled in Argüelles at this time, and Argüelles’s own predilection for creative process and model-making took precedence. The irrational teaching methods of the Crazy Wisdom school may in some way underlie the unorthodox presentation of Dreamspell, which is, as I discussed, irrational and internally inconsistent. In this light I offer my own conclusion that Dreamspell is best understood as a test for seekers who need to strengthen the muscle of discernment and “discriminating wisdom.” It’s a Way Station on the spiritual path, designed to snare seekers who need to develop discernment and rational discrimination before moving on to transrational processing. Here we encounter the idea of a progression of spiritual and cognitive development, from prerational to rational to transrational, which is an important framework for understanding the larger implications of 2012.
INTREPID INVESTIGATORS: HANCOCK, COTTERELL, AND GILBERT
In 1995, while I was finding evidence to support my thesis on the 2012 galactic alignment, two popular books on the Maya calendar appeared in the marketplace. One might suspect that this was triggered by breakthroughs occurring in academia with Linda Schele’s book Maya Cosmos (1993, coauthored with David Freidel and Joy Parker), but neither book mentioned Schele’s work.
Fingerprints of the Gods, by Graham Hancock, dealt tangentially with the Maya calendar while taking a global approach to reviving the old Atlantis hypothesis. To be sure, Hancock had new findings and theories to report, and that he paid special attention to the precession of the equinoxes is important. The Mayan Prophecies, on the other hand, was written largely by a hired coauthor who had very little research into the Maya traditions under his belt. We should treat both books separately, as they are very different.
Graham Hancock had achieved some fame with his well-researched book on the Ark of the Covenant The Sign and the Seal (1992). He pretty much defined the genre of globe-trotting sleuth scholarship. His provocatively titled book Fingerprints of the Gods explored the premise that an unrecognized earlier civilization had existed before the widely accepted date for the advent of civilization—around 4000 BC. It’s the old Atlantis idea that preoccupied Charnay and Le Plongeon, but today we can draw on the work of, for example, Marija Gimbutas, which shows conclusively that prior to the advent of patriarchal monotheism a cultural phenomenon bearing all the marks of civilization existed in Neolithic Europe. This Magdalenian phase began roughly 17,000 years ago. Likewise, compelling structures that seem to be megalithic sites recently found off the coasts of Japan and India imply high culture around 15,000 BC. Hancock rallied his own insights while summarizing the progressive research of others to present a compelling case that something wasn’t being acknowledged by conventional historians and other status quo gatekeepers.
His chapter on the Maya presented a standard summary and didn’t delve into the recent breakthroughs of Schele and others. Also, the galactic alignment concept remained unrecognized. He did discuss the 13-Baktun cycle end date, but following Coe’s preference reported it as occurring on December 23, 2012. One of Hancock’s beliefs is that the Maya’s calendar wisdom must have been handed down from a previous high civilization, and this was a reiteration of his main thesis, that of an earlier source-civilization that existed before the currently accepted dawn of human civilization some 6,000 years ago in the Middle East. This view doesn’t jibe too well with what we know about the independent development of civilization in Mesoamerica.
The situation that Hancock presupposes, however, of transoceanic contact between the Maya and Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, is complicated and needs to be examined carefully. In my view, the native genius of the ancient Maya was more than enough to create the Long Count and formulate profound astronomical insights. It’s extremely unlikely that the specific details of these traditions were passed down from an ancient ur-culture. The Long Count and the 260-day tzolkin are unique cultural and
scientific achievements that have no parallel in other parts of the world, past or present. However, more generally we may observe that the nondual orientation of Maya cosmovision, perceiving all domains of nature as being inextricably interwoven, belongs to an archaic kind of consciousness that has been increasingly eclipsed by modernity and scientific rationalism. So in this light certain elements of Maya civilization may resemble those found in Egypt not because of physical contact and transmission but because both cultures drew from the same type of philosophical and cosmological outlook. More to the point, both looked to the heavens for a celestial prototype, and this idea was explored in Hancock’s subsequent volume, Heaven’s Mirror (1997), a beautiful book containing many photographs by his wife Santhia.
Hancock went on to explore sunken ruins off the coasts of India, Japan, and elsewhere, finding more evidence to help identify a prehistoric civilization, and published Underworld in 2004. His next book, Supernatural, was an unexpected turn for those who were followers of Hancock’s work. In it, he explored the visions induced by the South American jungle vine, ayahuasca, relating observations garnered from his own experiences taking the hallucinogenic brew. This latest offering exemplifies his continuing effort to challenge establishment limits and push back the fringes of knowledge.
The 2012 Story Page 12