What the Pyramid of Kukulkan had to tell me
What the Pyramid of Kukulkan had to tell me
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Back to the snow from tropical Honduras I wonder how people ever came to move to these northern parts, but maybe this too is part of the Cosmic Plan encoded in the calendrical system of the Maya. I feel grateful to Hunbatz and his Mayan associates for having shared their spiritual knowledge and for the privilege to have been able to visit the land of the Maya again. Yet, it was only as I came back to my particular part of the global Creation field that the experiences in the Land of the Maya and Chichen-Itza in particular turned into a deeper realization. I feel that what today attracts the interest of many in the Mayan calendar is the impending advent of the ending date of the so called Long Count, December 21, 2012 (although as I have argued previously in the Mayan Messenger this might need a slight adjustment) and many people ask what is behind this date. Was the ancient Mayan chronology just a whim or does it reflect a way of viewing reality that we so far have been unable to understand? Are we indeed approaching a sort of completion of this Creation and if so how? The key to finding an answer to this question I believe lies in an empirical study of history, a study of history where above all we ask the question: "When did this or that happen?" In what pictun, baktun, katun, etc did this or that happen and how does it relate to events and thoughts people had in previous baktuns, katuns etc?" Maybe there was a reason that the ahauob of the ancient Maya would always emphasize not only what they did, but maybe even more importantly when they did something. Whether they decided to engage in a war or get married it always played a predominant role when they did it. After all, the only reason that we experience synchronicities, meaningful coincidences, in our lives is that these occur at certain specific time - otherwise we would not call them syn-chron-icities. Thus, it seems we are able to experience meaning and purpose because of exactly when things happen, and this would hardly be so unless everything was governed by a Cosmic Plan developing according to a very exact time schedule. This time schedule is provided by the Mayan calendar. If in recent years there has been somewhat of a heated discussion about which is the right calendar to use it is because this is an issue that can hardly be avoided. Today we need to make choices as to exactly what we are to synchronize with and this is likely to lead us in different directions depending on the calendar we are using and how we understand this. This is why it may pay to make the effort to seek to understand the underlying basis of the various Mayan calendars that are proposed and make an informed choice. What many people probably find intriguing about the calendrical systems of the Maya such as the tzolkin (260 days) and the tun (360 days, which is the basis of the Long Count) is that these periods of time have no astronomical or physical basis. And I feel it is exactly that attracts people to the calendars of the Maya, and the sense that maybe here a higher truth may be revealed about our existence. After all, if we were only interested in a calendar of the solar, agricultural 365-day year, the month or the earth's precession the best to do is probably to ask today's astronomers whose accuracy is widely superior to that of any ancient people. However, as is the case today, people are increasingly becoming interested in the non-physical aspects of reality and therefore they sense intuitively that the calendrical system of the Maya may have something unique to contribute, something that goes beyond the vision of today's astronomers. Personally, I am convinced that the calendars of the Maya reflect the movements of the divine rather than of the physical, that they the evolution of human consciousness in accordance with a divine plan, rather than astronomical movements of material bodies, and this is why they may be useful where the other calendars are not. Yet, the way we have been trained through our education to look at human history it is not always easy to see how the divine plan plays out in accordance with the Mayan calendar. In our schools we have basically been taught that where and how things happen is important, while it is considered relatively irrelevant exactly when things happen in the chaos of events that has shaped human history. But as the ancient Mayan kings seem to be wanting to tell us it is not irrelevant when things happen. Such an emphasis on when things have happened, however, creates the need for a great reorganization of our understanding of human history, and also biological evolution for that matter, and I believe such a reorganization can only be made in the light of the calendrical system of the Maya and in the light of their basic cosmology of Nine Underworlds and Thirteen Heavens reflected in so many of the pyramids they built. What, then, is the Long Count with its Thirteen baktuns all about? In the ancient inscriptions at Palenque and Quirigua the beginning of this chronology, which again, was not based on the physical year but on the tun, marked the event when the "First Father raised the Heaven" and I believe it represents the beginning of the creation of another Underworld, the sixth to be exact, through a sequence of Thirteen Heavens. In my forthcoming book The Theory of Everything I detail the differences between the various baktuns of the Long Count in a global perspective and describe how various phenomena evolve in synchrony as a result of the effects of these Heavens (that should not be mistaken for physical, astronomical phenomena but rather understood as divine creation fields) throughout human history. I also show that these Heavens are identical with what the Jews, Christians and Muslims have called the Seven Days and Six Nights of God's Creation, and also are important among Buddhists and Hindus. The Hindus refer to Creation as the "108 transformations of Shiva" which becomes understandable if the Creation of each of the 9 Underworlds is effected by Thirteen Heavens undergoing 12 transformations between themselves (9 x 12 = 108). The Creation stories of all the Major religions of the world then present a numerically consistent picture, which, however, can only be understood in light of the calendrical system of the Maya, the most refined of all non-astronomical calendar systems of this planet. For some time now I have been asking the question: "What did the ancient Mesoamericans know about the differences between the various baktuns of the Long Count?" All I have been able to find has been the Aztec names of the various deities governing the days of the cycle of thirteen numbers then seen as a microcosmic representation of the Thirteen Heavens. Although this is very helpful it has seemed to me that the basic difference between the Seven baktuns of light and the Six baktuns of darkness (this does not always mean "good" and "bad" - we all need nights for sleeping, dreaming, healing and preparation for the new day to come!) could not have passed by unnoticed by such an ingenious people as the Maya, who, what is more, was preoccupied by this type of questions. From the Classical Maya I have however found nothing and, of course, their inscriptions may not always have been designed to answer questions of people from the late 20th century. I had visited Chichen-Itza twice before, but not at a Spring Equinox, and although I had heard about the phenomenon of the coiling serpent I had never quite understood what it would look like. Clearly it could only be experienced. It was not visible at the time the group visited the site, but I feel the wonderful ceremony Hunbatz led at Ake helped alert me even further to the significance of the Cosmic Serpent and ponder the mystery of the Feathered Serpent, a myth, cult or religion which was predominant all over Mesoamerica in ancient times and was embraced by millions of people. Clearly, the Cosmic Serpent of Creation, but how and why? It was first initiated in Teotihuacan at the beginning of baktun 8, synchronistically with Christianity in the Old World, and then spread especially during baktun 10,. We can see ample evidence of this in Chichen-Itza which began to be built a few years into this baktun (its oldest date is from AD 842). What was this worship of the Serpent all about? In ancient Mesoamerica the importance of the Serpent as a symbol can in the Christian religion probably only be compared to the role the Cross. What is amazing then is that the temporal evolution of the spread of the two symbols parallel each other. One can not help to ask if they are both reflections of the same phenomena, the same light which manifests differently in different parts of the world or is seen through different glasses. Obviously, if the Thirteen Heavens of the Maya are identical with the Seven Days and Six Nights of God's Creation, then baktuns 8, 10 and 12 would be periods of light, Days, in the particular Underworld created in accordance with the Long Count, and this means that Chichen-Itza was built in a period of light. Indeed, much archaeological evidence seems to indicate that, in contrast to the Classical Mayan sites in Chiapas and Guatemala of baktun 9, the focus in Chichen-Itza was no longer on shaman-kings who were seen as personifications of the divine - much like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the early Chinese Emperors - but on a higher, immaterial life-giving cosmic principle - the Feathered Serpent. In the new light, and the resulting change in consciousness, the worship shifted from the kings to a symbol of the process of Divine Creation - the Feathered Serpent. What speaks for such an interpretation? The Feathered Serpent itself descending the Pyramid of Kukulkan at Spring Equinox! As I came home to Sweden and looked at Hunbatz video it dawned on me: The Serpent descending the staircase is made up of Seven triangles of light and Six triangles of darkness. The Feathered Serpent was how the Maya of Chichen-Itza the wave-like process of the evolution of the consciousness of this planet. The coiling movement of the Serpent was a way of expressing how history evolves according to a sequence of Seven Days with Six intermediate Nights. Maybe Chichen-Itza, which was itself a product of a Day, baktun 10. is in fact the only place among the Maya where this can be seen. A long quest had been completed and I felt the Pyramid of Kukulkan had finally spoken to me.
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