Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials (18 page)

3.6. Transporting the Ark of the Covenant (an illustration from an old bible). Author's own image.

Shortly after the construction of the Ark was completed, God warned his servant Moses that he must ensure that Aaron follow explicit instructions "or he will die" (Leviticus 16:2). Later the Ark of the Covenant was involved in a number of catastrophes. The Philistines captured the Ark (first book of Samuel, Chapter 4 ff.) and all the gawkers who got anywhere near the uncanny object died of diseases that today would probably be described as radiation sickness. The nails on their hands and feet fell off, as did their hair, their skin was covered in "boils," and "the men who did not die were smitten with tumors and the cry of the city went up to heaven" (I Samuel 5:12).8 The bible even tells us about a fatal accident suffered by a priest who forgot to follow the strict safety guidelines: "...when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out toward the ark of God and took hold of it.... And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and he died there by the ark of God" (II Samuel 6:6 ff.).

Poor old Uzzah! And he was one of the priests! So what did he do that was so wrong? And what kind of god smites one of his subjects for a moment of carelessness? The Bible provides an answer: "And the whole of mount Sinai was clad in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke climbed up like the smoke from a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly" (Exodus 19:18).

This same God demanded sacrifices from the Israelites (gold, silver, precious stones) and iterated to his servant Moses that he should make it tell the Israelites in no uncertain terms: "You have seen that I have talked with you from heaven" (Exodus 20:22).

(You can find out more about what happened to the Ark of the Covenant and where the remains of this technical device can be found today in one of my earlier books, Signs of the Gods.)

Parts of the Old Testament (Bible), the Vedas (India), the pyramid texts (Egypt), the Apocrypha (such as the Book of Enoch), and Popol Vuh make more sense when viewed from a contemporary standpoint, and they complement each other in many areas. But when it comes to the Mayan Popol Vuh it becomes incredibly complicated. There are good reasons for this. The book was translated (into German, my native language) by a certain Dr. Wolfgang Cordan, who was fluent in a number of Mayan dialects. He called the text the Book of the Council.10 That was 50 years ago. Cordan's translation was in a flowing style of speech, easily readable by anyone who chose to. The following generation of Maya experts did not accept Cordan's work and drew up a new translation, this time word for word.11 To understand this version, you need to have lived with the K'iche' Maya for some time because there is simply endless room for interpretation. What did they really mean? How can we understand this text? Well, for a start, we have to bear in mind that there is no such thing as an "original" text of Popol Vuh. All of the translations are based on a single version that admittedly existed in the K'iche' language but wasn't actually written down until the 18th century by a Christian cleric, Father Francisco Ximenez. To represent the K'iche' sounds in a way that his contemporaries could read them, the priest used the Latin alphabet. He had to render K'iche' words, which may be pronounced in a drawn-out, sing-song manner, phonetically using Latin letters. Easier said than done. Here are a few extracts from the literal translation:"

"Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, they who have borne children... luminous they are in the water.... "

"The face of the Earth was not far for him. Nor wasXibalba (hell, the underworld) far for him. In an instant, he could return to the sky with Huracan.... "

"Then they arose as the central lights. They arose straight into the sky.... Thus was the womb of the sky illuminated over the face of the Earth, for they came to dwell in the sky.... The four hundred boys who had died at the hands of Zipacna also rose up to become their companions. They became a constellation of the sky. "

"...the miraculous power and the spirit essence... Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent. Thus their countenances appeared like people. People they came to be. They were able to speak and converse. They were able to look and listen... straightaway their vision came to them.... "

And so on!

It's pretty hard to translate this mush into comprehensible English. If I were to try, I would end up with a version that had little to do with the original. But I can say this much: just like in the Bible, Popol Vuh tells of a confusion of languages. The people could no longer understand each other because of a "stone that changed their speech when they came from Tulan." We read about "valuable metals" that are to be given to certain gods (but also men). There are descriptions of "black people and white people," of boys that were sacrificed, of a mountain called "Hacavitz" where the people multiplied, and so on, and so on. It's a thoroughly mixed bag that arose from the impotence of language.

The vocabulary of the early chroniclers was limited. Many of the terms they used derived from their daily lives and regular natural events: Tribe and family, animals and plants, early devices and simple weapons all had names. There were words for sun, water, day and night, sunrise and sunset, lightning, thunder, birth, illness, and death. But any time something happened that could not be directly described with this sparse collection of words, then it was time to paraphrase and describe so that the available words could be made to evoke the event in the mind's eye.

However, language-words arranged one after another-cannot always express the meaning that is intended. Gestures are just as much a part of our communication process as pictures are or music is. At an auction, when someone raises a hand with five fingers, he is signaling to his partner in the first row that he wants to raise his bid by 50,000 dollars. Not a sound needs to be uttered. We cannot know which gestures the old story-tellers of the K'iche' Maya used to tell their tales. A laugh, a whine, a grimace, and a stamped foot may all have been used to change the sense of the actual series of words used. I remember once meeting a senn (a mountain herder) in an Alpine hut. He told me a tale of dwarves that, so he claimed, still lived right there in the region. When the words failed him, he gesticulated meaningfully. I could understand him. Without words.

This nonlinguistic component of communication-gestures, intonation, music, sadness, anger, happiness, or facial expressions-cannot be expressed by the simple spoken word. Spoken language is the poor relation of thought. It lumbers along after the event and has to invent new terms-words-for things that have already happened. Language is not a dogma of eternal values; it is a constantly evolving organism. Depending on the state of development of the user, language is never completely free of values; it is constantly adapting to the zeitgeist. Now, myths belong to the barely researched epochs of our past history. So, bearing that in mind, how many times may these first-used words have changed their meaning since then? Not only that, all those who recorded the myths in the first place filled their words with other semantic meaning. Back in the early days of language-let's not forget!-there simply were no words for the impossible. Of course, a Stone Age man would have no words to describe a helicopter, headlamps, pistols, an aircraft or a space shuttle, a protective space suit, or an ear-splitting UFO, but he knew words like fire, lightning, earth-shaking, noise, and heat. And then he was forced to use these to describe the impossible event he was experiencing. This is how, in Central America, the myth of the feathered serpent arose-something that was well-known in Egypt, too, by the way. For instance, in the grave of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings you can see many depictions of snakes with wings.

Winged snakes in ancient Egyptian tombs. Images courtesy of Tatjana Ingold, Solothurn, Switzerland.

3.9. Another ancient Egyptian winged snake. Author's own image.

Thousands of years later, in our Age of Reason, the serious and rational world of science does not want to accept that Stone Age man could realistically have had any meetings with a high-tech civilization, and that he could have seen any helicopter-like flying machine or met with beings that they, in their ignorance, named gods. When even the original texts are utterly confusing-because of the incomprehensible terms and missing gestures-then the translations are bound to end up as some kind of religious-psychological mishmash. The methodologies simply do not allow any other possibilities. Total chaos!

tang Over the Earth

Then there is the well-known myth of Etana, once part of the clay-tablet library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (685-circa 627 Bc). Found during excavations in Niniveh, the tablets are now kept in the British Museum in London. The origin of the story is unknown, although parts of it are present in the older Gilgamesh epic. The story tells how Etana is carried high up into the sky by an eagle. The magnificent bird repeatedly asks him to look down:

...After flying on high for some time, the eagle addresses Etana:

Look, my friend, how the Earth appears, look at the sea at the side of the world mountain.

And the Earth appeared as a mountain, the sea as a pool....

After flying on even higher, the eagle addresses Etana:

Look, my friend, how the Earth appears. And the Earth appeared as a plantation of trees....

My friend, look down and see how the Earth appears. And the Earth appeared as a garden, and the wide sea no bigger than a bucket.

And he carried him yet higher still and said: My friend, look down and see how the Earth disappears.

I looked down and saw how the Earth had disappeared and my eyes could not even pick out the wide sea.

My friend, I cannot go any further towards heaven. Stop now that I might return to the Earth .... 11

"The Eagle has landed" was the message sent back to Houston by the crew of Apollo 11, as they became the first men to set foot on the Moon. The eagle has landed. Even if the word heaven is used in the Etana epos, it is clear that what is being referred to here is space travel. After all, the eagle carries his burden up into the stratosphere ("the wide sea [was] no bigger than a bucket") and up over the Earth ("I looked down and saw how the Earth had disappeared.... "). And now we bundle it all up in our convoluted religious-psychological contemporary thinking because things that don't fit in simply cannot be.