The mayan civilization

Lost Civilizations (@lostcivilizations)

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lostworlds

 · 1 year ago

Index

• Brief history of Central and South America
• Cortez
• The myth of Quetzalcoatl
• Tiahuanaco
• Palenque
• The Popul Vuh

When Columbus, on 12 October 1492, landed on the islet he christened San Salvador, he was convinced that he had reached the fabulous Cipango or Cathay, i.e. Japan or China, but only starting from 1511 did the new arrivals begin to have contact with the resident Aztecs until in February 1519 the fleet of Cortes with 508 soldiers, a friar, 110 sailors, 16 horses, 10 cannons, 4 falconets, 13 muskets, 32 crossbows and muskets on board, dropped anchor on the Yucatan coast. Thus began the epic of the conquistadors, gold diggers on behalf of the sovereigns of Spain.

Soon the conquistadors saw the human sacrifices that the Aztecs offered to their gods, and under this pretext, that of Christianization, an inexorable destruction of that dying civilization began. The Aztecs were subjugated and soon disappeared from the historical scene.

In the reality the Aztecs were the latest arrivals, in chronological order (1168 AD), warriors of a now decadent and barbarised civilization due to not having been able or knowing how to get out of the Stone Age.

When Cortes arrived, the Mayans had already abandoned the big cities for centuries, which had all by now been covered by the forest, and the Aztecs had perhaps rediscovered and inhabited some of them, giving Cortés the impression of being faced with an "Aztec Empire".

Spain, on the other hand, was unable to take advantage of the river of gold and silver coming from the new colonies, for example by favoring the birth of artisan or commercial activities among the subjects in the motherland, preferring instead to buy only finished products from France and England.

The conquistadors, who had classified the first Indians they came into contact with in the Greater Antilles as sub-human, naked and without culture, unworthy even of receiving Christian baptism (therefore only good as slaves), were amazed to find huge continental cities inhabited by tens of thousands of people, the Aztecs, who however did not know the wheel or metals, and who had erected temples on top of large truncated pyramids which recalled the Egyptian ones. In reality the pyramids were often composed of three, four or more steps with the walls in high and narrow steps. In these pyramids human sacrifices were made and ritual cannibalism was practiced. That barbarian people, in the eyes of another barbarian people, deserved to be destroyed, and after the destruction, nothing more was heard of them for centuries.

But starting from the 19^th century, with the advancement in knowledge, favored by the industrial revolution and organized research, the interest in those ancient peoples increased more and more, also following the discoveries of important archaeological sites, such as large cities with temples and huge pyramids, and with the discovery of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan "Bible", and of sculptures and paintings that posed new enigmas on the history of man, enigmas so far unsolved such as those connected to the Egyptian pyramids, dating back to the dawn of humanity, which they amaze modern men with their grandeur.

Brief history of Central and South America

According to official science there has been no real civilization in Central America before 900 B.C. At that time the Olmecs built the temples that have come down to us whose courtyards, decorated with stone mosaics, built jade jewels and used a symbolic writing that we are only beginning to understand today. In the 1^st century B.C. another civilization built a large city in central Mexico, Teothihuacan ("Place where the gods were created"), ruled by priest-kings. By the 4^th century A.D., these people had also founded other cities up to 1000 kilometers away in Guatemala. The Olmecs, meanwhile, moving south and under the influence of the Indians of the forests of Chiapas and Peten gave shape to what would later be the Maya civilization.

Even having erected colossal buildings, the Mayans never knew how to build a real bow, and, like all American Indians, never discovered the use of the wheel, either for transportation or for making pottery.

By the 10^th century A.D., soil erosion or the advance of the Toltecs ("master builders") had driven the population out of the cities, cities which were quickly swallowed up by the jungle.

Where did the Toltecs come from? Tradition makes them come from Guatemala, led by the legendary Quetzalcoatl, who founded the capital Tula, which was destroyed by civil war in 950 A.D.

Around 1168 A.D. a small group of Indians adopted the civilization of the Toltecs and founded an empire of 5 million inhabitants. These Indians, called Aztecs ("people of the herons") belonged to the Nahua tribe; their name probably derives from the fact that their warriors wore two heron feathers in their hair.

According to their legend, before founding their civilization the Aztecs lived on an island in the middle of a lake until in 1168 A.D. Their god Huitzilopochtli ("hummingbird on the left") appeared to them, ordering them to leave that place and wander search for a certain sign: when they found it, they would become a great people.

Thus began the odyssey of the Aztecs, who wandered from place to place, stopping there for a few years to grow corn; they were enslaved by the king of Colhuacan ("twisted mountain") but managed to escape to Lake Mexico. Here they saw a rock where a cactus was growing on which stood an eagle holding a snake in its talons: this was the sign, and in that place they built the city of Tenochtitlan ("rock of the cactus").

By 1440, under the leadership of Itzcoatzin ("serpent prince of sharp stones"), the Aztecs were masters of the valley, and by 1502 they had conquered almost all of the fertile southern part of Mexico.

But in 1519 Cortès invades Mexico and the Aztecs head towards rapid destruction. As we know, the Aztecs did not know oxen or horses and traders brought their goods to the city by armies of bearers who carried loads of 30 kilos on their shoulders. In every city there was a market where elastic rubber, mole, cocoa, beans, and even eagle feathers filled with gold dust were traded. Nearly a million people lived in Tenochtitlan; the city was built around the two large pyramidal temples, more than 30 meters high, where human sacrifices took place.

Official science easily interpreted the message of the temples: the Egyptian pyramids were tombs of ancient pharaohs and were built by them (it is not known how) to impress posterity, while the Mayan and Aztec pyramids were "palaces of power", the sign of the power of the clergy, a power expressed with human sacrifices and with specially created mythology, as happens in all the dominant institutionalized religions.

But with the intensification of the studies on the archaeological sites, with the discovery of particular astronomical alignments adopted in the construction of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, and with the partial understanding of the Mayan glyphs in the very rare documents found (codexes scattered in the museums of the world, full of precise astronomical dates and related myths), new hypotheses and new theories had to be formulated.

The predecessors of the Aztecs, the Maya, were said to be formidable astronomers, and to be governed by literally two calendars, the 365-day "civil" one and the 260-day "religious" one, with 52-year "centuries" beginning both in the year 3373 B.C. and end on December 22, 2012. The religious calendar would have been an "invention" of the priestly caste to cloak the cult of idols in mystery and further fill their social class with power.

But at the end of the 20^th century it was discovered that the 260-day calendar corresponds to the period of the hypothetical planet (Tiamat...) that would be obtained by reuniting the asteroid fragments found in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter.

The mysteries therefore multiply, instead of dissipating.

Cortez

At this point, to understand who the Aztecs were, it is interesting to read the "official" reports from Cortés to Charles V on the

"inhabitants of that land... are of medium height, with well-proportioned bodies, but their habits vary from one province to another, some pierce their ears to insert large and little value objects, others pierce the skin of the nose up to the mouth to insert stone wheels, sometimes very large, which look like mirrors. Still others pierce their lips, in the lower part, up to the teeth, and apply discs of stone or gold, so heavy that the lips hang deformed.

Often you meet scary cross-eyed men. It is customary to put a little pitch between the eyes of children to make them cross-eyed because this was considered very seductive, or to wrap their heads tightly with boards, to make them grow up with their heads stretched, a distinctive sign of high rank.

The clothes they wear resemble stoles of different colors; the men hide their shame and wear very light cloaks, painted like the "alquizales" of the Moors. The women and the common people wear colorful cloaks that start from the waist and reach the ground, and others that cover the breasts while the rest of the body remains uncovered. Rich women wear large, very fine cotton shirts, as if made on a spool. Their nourishment consists of corn and cuye..."

And speaking of the houses

"There are large well-arranged villages in this country. The houses, where there is stone, are built with lime and sand, and the rooms are small and low in Moorish style. Where there is no stone, they build them with clay covered with lime. The roofs are made of palm trees and straw..."

Regarding the cult, Cortés mentions the mosques (this is how he called the Mayan temples!), the oratories, the squares for the (cruel) ball game.

"...They keep there their idols, the ones they adore, some of earth, others of stone or wood... The houses and mosques in which they keep their gods are the best built that can be seen in every village and they are adorned with feathers and very well worked fabrics...

Every day, before starting to work, they burn incense in the mosques, sometimes they even sacrifice themselves by cutting off their tongues, ears, or cutting their bodies with a knife.

The blood that flows from the wounds they offer to idols, sprinkling it on their masks, or throwing it towards the sky, and performing all sorts of ceremonies; some of these cannot begin if these sacrifices have not been made first.

Moreover, they have another custom, horrible and abominable and worthy of being punished: every time they want to ask their idols for something, they take little girls or small boys, but sometimes also adult women and men and, in front of to those idols, they open their chests to extract their hearts and entrails which they then burn by offering the smoke as a sacrifice..."

Or the more detailed description by Diego De Landa, a notable following Cortés: he first made them drink enough balche to leave them completely stunned. Very often they were slaves - and the community had listed themselves to buy them - or prisoners of war, or even, if there were no slaves or prisoners, local children and young people.

The officiants and their live offerings climbed to the top of the pyramid via impossibly narrow steps, and four chaci laid the victim flat on its back, placing it in an arch on the convex stone of sacrifice. Shortly before she had been stripped naked and painted blue, the sacrificial color, and had been combed in a particular way.

The four chaci held her tightly by the ends of her outstretched limbs; themselves, like the tortured and the sacrificial stone, had been tinted blue. Clouds of smoke issued from the censers, enveloping the scene, while a priest, armed with an aspersorium made of coils of rattlesnakes, sprinkled the mead of the gods, the place and the victim in particular, with balca.

With a flint or obsidian dagger, known as "the hand of god", the priest Nacom struck a blow at the left base of the rib cage, immediately ripped out the heart and presented it to the high priest who, in turn, extended it beyond above his head in the direction of the west, where the sun dies every evening.

The body of the sacrificed was thrown down the steps, where other priests skinned and decapitated him.

Then came the turn of the other victims, if any, as they continued to beat the great vertical drums, drowning out the din of the conches, trumpets, shrill voices and the shells of tortoises beaten with the branches of the deer's antlers.

At the foot of the pyramid, identified with their role, the dancers hidden under their large masks identified themselves with the gods, or with celestial monsters. The priests who embodied Venus then approached the idol, each with a vessel containing a human heart. In the midst of a thick copal cloud, the high priest took those bloody entrails one by one and passed them on the surface of the stele, staining it with blood.

Before retiring, offerings, food, jewels and quetzal feathers were placed around the idol.

It reached the point that the officiants and the faithful let themselves go to sacrifices themselves, offering their blood, which they obtained by injuring themselves in various ways, by means of thorns, flint splinters, a sting that they stuck in the tongue, in the earlobes, nasal septum, cheeks, limbs and even the penis.

Sometimes a string trimmed with many moose thorns was passed through the tongue (as we can see in certain reliefs at Yaxchilan). Once the piercing was done, the blood was left to drip onto sheets of bark paper, arranged in a basket which was later offered to the gods.

It also happened that a chilam, after undressing, covered himself with the skin of the victim, to perform a particular dance.

The body of the tortured, if he had been a man of merit and courage, could be divided and eaten. The body was given first to the leaders, the head, hands and feet went to the priests and their assistants while the warrior who had taken him prisoner received the jawbones which he passed on his arms like bracelets, and which he displayed proudly.

About a century later, in 1618, some religious who had come to try to convert the Itzà found in one of the twelve temples of their city, Tayasal, a clay idol reproducing a crouched horse struggling to get up. It was the memory of Morzillo, the horse of Cortés, deified with the name of Tzimin Chac.

The people just described by the living words of Cortés, warrior-peasants dedicated to human sacrifices to keep a complicated pantheon of divinities in order, who even deified the wounded horse of the conquistador, would be, according to the knowledge (or ignorance) of the twentieth century, also the people builder of fantastic cities, of imposing pyramids, of an extraordinary calendar that competes with our most advanced and precise astronomical measurements, and inventor even of a refined twentieth-century mathematics that made use of the zero millennia before it was "invented" by the Arabs!

This type of knowledge contrasts with the cannibalistic rituals of that people (it is difficult to imagine the priest with a pierced nose, with the stone or gold disc hanging from the cut lips which reveal the teeth encrusted with jade, fearfully cross-eyed, who after having ripped open the chest of a human being sits down to make astronomical calculations patiently looking at the stars through the pyramids: these types of studies require very different contexts...), lacking even the invention of the wheel and others tools commonly used for the development of civilizations, such as systems for weighing goods (all Mayan pictorial representations, which survived the destruction of the conquistadors, show men carrying their goods on the shoulders and no wheeled carts), or money , the function of which was performed by cocoa beans or jade flakes.

This is precisely one of the mysteries of ancient civilizations, which joins the mystery of the Egyptian pyramids.

Probably, it wasn't the Egyptians we know who built the pyramids or the Sphinx, just as it wasn't the Mayans who discovered the calendar or the cycles of Venus or the heliacal rising of Sirius, but previous civilizations (perhaps even pre-glacial) lost from human memory, or super-human intelligences from other planets who taught (or imposed) the construction of those architectures to the primitives.

These considerations save us, for the moment, from answering on the technology used to build the pyramids.

In the light of new knowledge, both hypotheses (pre-glacial civilizations, and therefore the catastrophes that put an end to civilizations, and those of extraterrestrial visitors who instead "help" the development of civilizations) are equally likely to be true.

All this civilization, without a technical-cultural substratum that justifies its existence, or vice versa, would be like saying that prehistoric man, after discovering that wood floats, is able to (empirically) build boats, and become a navigator despite not having the slightest inkling of Archimede's law on the buoyancy of fluids; in the case of the Maya it would even be like saying that they had discovered this law, but from it they had not learned to build ships! And what about the animal figures in the Nazca plain visible only from above?

From radar surveys in the Central American forests where those civilizations once flourished, hundreds of kilometers of stone-paved roads have been discovered (in addition to the aforementioned stylized figures of animals), in the middle of the dense forest, leveled at the time by huge stone rollers today abandoned in the countryside, roads that connected all the most important Mayan cities and yet these Aztecs or Mayans or Olmecs or Toltecs did not know the use of the wheel: no evidence of a wheeled cart has come down to us, nor did it exist at the time of Cortes.

Yet some very ancient sculptures on blocks of stone in Copàn show, very clearly, gears equipped with spokes, hub and fork, which in terms of shape and consistency could be said to be made of metal!

And their calendar, wasn't it a wheel within a wheel?

The myth of Quetzalcoatl

In Toltec mythology, Quetzalcoatl (the "Feathered Serpent") was a white bearded god.

According to the myth he came from the East and for a long time he educated men. He taught them the secrets of cultivation, was a great legislator, and provided the tools for the advancement of knowledge, reigning wisely for a long time. His goodness went so far as to invite his subjects to feed on the fruits of the earth while sparing the lives of animals.

The Toltecs, according to their tradition, would have descended from the North, guided by a god, Mixcoatl, whose translation is "Serpent of the Clouds". The religious motif of the flying serpent is, from the Toltecs onwards, a constant element of the cults of the Mesoamerican peoples.

Quetzalcoatl was the son of Mixcoatl and the earth goddess Chipalman, which means "Lying Shield".

The contrast between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, both handed down as historical figures, not myths, so it had to be real. It is not difficult to imagine how this Quetzalcoatl, also remembered for his ugliness and white skin, could have been an extraterrestrial.

His antagonist, Tezcatlipoca ("Smoking Mirror") was the god of war and therefore represented the reference of the very powerful caste of warriors, devoted to combat and the sacrifice of prisoners. The conflict between the two saw the defeat of Quetzalcoatl, who fled from the city of Tula where he resided and went as far as the coast.

Here, according to one version of the myth, he set himself on fire to redeem his behavior. His heart thus became the luminous planet Venus, the "Morning Star", with which Quetzalcoatl has ever since been identified.

According to another version of the legend, instead of sacrificing himself, he sailed east across the ocean aboard a raft of sea serpents and promised to return one day to repossess his land. The Spaniards took advantage of this myth, as we know. Perhaps, his "alien" origin did not allow him to interfere profoundly in the freedom of choice of men.

This would be the profound meaning of the episode of the mirror shown to Quetzalcoatl by the noble warriors, in which he recognizes his own ugliness and convinces himself to exile. If we consider his birthplace, he was the son of the goddess Chipalman ("Lying Shield"), i.e. came out of a UFO, and it is established that disc-shaped UFOs spring from cigar-shaped objects ("Serpent of Clouds"), i.e. the father Mixcoatl.

In the version where one sets himself on fire, the entrance of the deity can be seen in a luminous object taking off towards the sky, while in the version of the raft (of snakes) it could be interpreted in the same way since "ocean" and "night sky" were used as synonyms by the Toltecs. An ancient Aztec poem sings: "The columns of serpents still rise there".

Quetzacoatl is not, however, the only white-skinned deity. The Incas worshiped a white, bearded god named Kon Tiki Illac Viracocha (Kon Tiki means "Son of the Sun", Illac means "Lightning" and Viracocha "Foam of the Sea"), the Maya remembered Kukulkan or Kukumatz ("The Heart of the Sea "), the Aztecs remembered it as Nacxitl and the Muisca of Colombia as Bochica ("White Luminous Cloak").

Although the Aztecs weren't great farmers, their cultivation techniques were quite advanced, so much so that they developed what are now called hydroponic cultivation systems. They were also able to obtain already colored cotton, based on a process successfully developed by our biotechnology only today.

These considerations support the hypothesis of visits by extraterrestrial beings who would have "donated" this knowledge, now forgotten and mythologised, or of a previous human civilization now disappeared without leaving any trace. It was thought that homo sapiens had existed for at least a million years, but that civilization, our civilization, had developed only in the last ten thousand years, starting from the end of a glacial period that lasted millennia during which many animal species extinct, from Siberian mammoths to saber-toothed tigers, from furry rhinoceroses to toothless giants, and many others, while man managed to survive "by living in trees and in caves and dressing in animal skins"... All for its first nine hundred and ninety thousand years, while instead in the last ten thousand, indeed five thousand years it discovered metals, built the pyramids, invented writing, and in "just" 500 years it invented gunpowder, the computer and went to the moon! Doesn't that seem counterintuitive?

Is it possible that he lived on trees and in caves for a million years without dying out from the glaciations and other catastrophes that cyclically strike the earth? It is no longer likely that other evolved human civilizations existed even before the last ice age, or inundation or deluge, as all myths and legends state, flood or glaciation which destroyed its traces and whose end is the beginning of our present civilization? Couldn't the Egyptian pyramids be the trace of these preglacial or prediluvian civilizations? And what was their function? But above all, what is the message contained in these ancient monuments?

Tiahuanaco

Among the most interesting Mayan archaeological sites is Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, 15 km from Titicaca, located at 3800 meters above sea level. Officially, archaeologists consider its period of development and splendor to be between 500 and 1500 A.D., the civilization of the Incas.

But they are unable to explain the Apkana, a large stone platform (200 meters long and 15 high) composed of enormous slabs of andesite, a very hard stone, each weighing over 100 tons transported from distant quarries.

Near the Apkana stands the Kalasasaya, a temple composed of a rectangular enclosure inside which there are two large statues now called "El Fraile" which Graham Hancock in his book "Footprints of the Gods" states to be fish-tailed men, similar to the Sumerian Oannes, the Japanese Kappas and the Nommo of the Dogon, who in the ancient local tradition were called "Chullua" or "Umantua", the Gods of Lake Titicaca.

A local legend tells that the monuments of Tihauanaco were erected by a civilization of giants. Another legend mentions the giants, but as slaves, subjugated by a race of "celestial gods".

But despite frontier studies, no one has been able to establish when the first settlements of Tihauanaco took place. However, some clues emerge from the morphology of the territory.

It seems that, originally, the city was conceived as a port city on Lake Titicaca and that in an unspecified moment it was suddenly raised up to 3800 meters in height. At 3500 meters, in fact, the Andean chain is crossed by a white line over 500 km long of calcified sediments of marine plants, indicating an ancient level of Lake Titicaca. Another yellowish-white line formed by saline sediments was "only" uncovered over 10,000 years ago. However, it is oblique with respect to the current body of water of the lake; this would confirm the uplift of a large portion of land, or a cataclysm.

The animal figures carved on the Porta del Sole belong to a proboscidean, the Cuverionius and to the Toxodont, a semi-aquatic mammal both extinct over 12,000 years ago. They are also present on pottery, along with other animals that disappeared before the flourishing of civilization.

So was Tihuanaco built over 10,000 years ago? Maybe the Atlantean civilization or the giants are not just a myth? Because only a contemporary civilization at the time of extinct mammals could have depicted them on its monuments.

Pedro Pizarro, cousin of the conquistador says about some inhabitants of Lake Titicaca:

"Noble women are pleasant to look at. The hair of women and men is like ripe ears and some individuals have lighter skin than the Spaniards... The Indians claim that they are descendants of the gods."

The descendants of Atlantis?

Off the coast of Bimini, in Florida, the remains of ancient roads or cyclopean walls have been discovered emerging from the mud that covers them more than 40 meters deep in the ocean. Are the traces of the Atlantean civilization we are looking for?

Furthermore, it is hard to believe that terrestrial men could lift and transport those colossal stones in remote times. And in case they used machines, where are these machines now? Would it then be the testimony of the extra-planetary industry of beings who came to Earth with unknown secrets? Or could it be assumed that an extinct race of giants built the imposing buildings, as hypothesized for other megalithic monuments scattered around the globe? And indeed the remains of bones belonging to a gigantic race were found in China, while in Agadir some Cyclopean tools would have been found and dated to over 30,000 years ago. If they were the ones who erected the megalithic buildings, where did they come from? Were they terrestrial - our ancestors - or extraterrestrial?

The Astronaut of Palenque:

Another interesting discovery took place in Mexico, in 1952, in Palenque, inside a pyramid known as "The Temple of the Inscriptions". A monolithic slab covered the sarcophagus containing the remains of a man whose face was covered by a jade mask, whose characteristics differed from the average and from the customs of the population, with his 173 centimeters in height (20 cm more than the average) and for the "normal" shape of the skull instead of being "elongated" as was appropriate for the nobles of that people.

Monarch Pacal, the man under the jade mask, appeared to have been a robust man, in his 40s or 50s. His teeth, though painted red, were normal, and were neither pointed nor ornamented, which was unusual for a high-ranking adult Maya.

But the most surprising thing is the high relief sculpture that adorned the tombstone, known today as the "Astronaut of Palenque". Much has been written about the Maya, but for the most part the treatises have had a "technical" character, i.e. aimed at other archaeologists or specialists, or a "journalist" one where the "truth" is sacrificed to bring out the conventional, suggestive or mystical aspects, as the first description of the aforementioned slab encountered by the Author in the course of his studies:

"The general design"

continues Gallekamp

"recalled the one found by Stephen and Catherwood in the nearby Temple of the Leafy Cross. The cross-shaped figures, a favorite theme of the sculptors of Palenque, were probably symbols of the cultivation of maize, the propitious giver of life to the Mayas, and therefore held in great veneration".

As a specific interpretation of the finely chiselled motifs, Gallekamp concluded that they would symbolize

"man's yearning for the life to come. It cannot be certain whether the figure represents mortal man in general, or a special individual for whom the monument was erected. He is condemned by fate to be swallowed up by the earth on which he rests, and in the hope of eternal life he looks fervently at that cross, which is the symbol of corn, and therefore of life itself..."

Much more interesting is the following interpretation:

"levers or knobs forming part of the vehicle structure while a kind of inhaler enters the nostrils. Air intakes can be identified in front of the vehicle, from which the atmospheric flight can be deduced. Finally, the hair of the enigmatic character leaning upwards suggests some mysterious form of anti-gravity, but this cannot yet be said as twentieth-century man has not reached this point and anti-gravity cannot exist recognized in atmospheric flying vehicles"

Are we getting closer to the truth? And what about the Mayan jewels that look remarkably like modern jet aircraft (see photo)?

THE POPOL VUH AND THE CHILAM BALAM

When archaeologists of the future find what in the 20^th century were called CD-ROMs, they won't be able to understand what they are about until they also find a computer (or its equivalent) capable of reading its contents.

Perhaps the same is true with the Mayan calendar.

The grandeur of the Mayan pyramids, the precision of their calendar immediately tell us that we are dealing with a highly evolved people or system (not the Mayans of human sacrifices, but those beings who built the pyramids and developed the calendars), and the message they wanted to convey to us must have been of great importance, so great as to reach the monumental works such as the pyramids to make it reach us through the centuries.

But what is the message contained in the pyramids and Mayan calendars?And what does the 260-day religious calendar mean? Is there any relation to the period of the shattered planet in the asteroid belt? Perhaps the builders of the pyramids were castaways from that planet doomed to destruction and who for some time adopted both calendars, before dying out completely or leaving for worlds more favorable to them? And what is supposed to happen on December 22, 2012, the day on which the cycle of the Mayan calendar ends? the end of the "fifth sun"?

In these ancient religious texts, the Mayas have handed down their myths on the creation of man, and on the Gods who in ancient times descended from heaven and lived on earth and created men, as all the myths and religions of the past also affirm. And they have also handed down to us confused news of great catastrophes that have almost erased humanity and have cyclically pushed it back to the stone age; in this perspective we can also interpret the Hebrew Bible, the Indian Vedas and the Popol Vuh of the Maya Quiché.

Popol Vuh

In the Popol Vuh, at the beginning of the primitive chaos, only the sky and the water emerged, in which

"There were no men, no animals, no birds, no fish, no crayfish, no wood, no stones, no valleys, no plants, nor woods; there was only the sky. The appearance of the earth was not yet shown."

The creator gods, Gukumatz and Hurakan made it appear by immediately covering it with forests, grasslands and rivers and with a multitude of animals. But since these animals were incapable of paying homage to the gods, they were destined to serve as food and therefore to be killed and devoured. The gods then modeled clay creatures who turned out to be devoid of intelligence and feelings, without substance or shape and therefore also unable to speak and to honor them.

Disappointed, the gods destroyed them by dissolving them in water.

After consulting with some mythical hunters and enchanters, the gods then sculpted wooden beings who spoke, ate and procreated but whose face, being made of wood, had neither life nor expression; their hands and feet were devoid of fingers, and their flesh was yellow, bloodless. Their intelligence was mediocre, and being devoid of feeling they ignored their creators altogether. The latter, disappointed again, drowned them under deluges of water which darkened the earth's crust like a thick resin. From the dog to the jaguar, all the animals turned against those sad puppets and even the domestic utensils, pots and gourds included, with the sieves and the cauldrons, turned against them and reduced them to dust or forced them to flee to the tallest trees, who began to quiver to try to make them fall.

Then the gods took another initiative: they kneaded corn flour, a yellow and white species that they had found by chance in the heart of a mountain, helped by the fox, the coyote, the crow and the parrot. They modeled the first four men, but endowed them with too perfect senses that allowed them to see to infinity and with a thought that was able to grasp and embrace everything.

Worried that they had created geniuses too similar to themselves, the gods blew on their faces and immediately their gaze became veiled, their vision reduced, and

"they saw only what was close and only what was clear to their eyes !"

The gods gave them wives whom they found with joy when they awoke. By now dawn was turning the sky purple and the morning star heralded the sun.

The last sentence suggests the creation of subjects or slaves...

"These are the names of the first men who were built, created: the first man was Balamquitze, the second Balamcab, the third Mahucutah, the fourth finally Iquibalam, these are therefore the names of our first ancestors. Only being built, only creature were they called: they have no mother, they have no father, only noble we may call them. No women bore them, nor were they begotten as sons by the Master Builder and the Master Creator, by the Mother and the Begetter of Children. But it was a miracle that they were built, that they were created, a spell performed by the Builder and by the Begetter of Children, by the Mighty and by Kukumatz..."

This introduction of the Popol Vuh states, as does the Bible, that man was "constructed", a "spell" by the gods, like Adam who was built from the mud, and Eve from a rib of Adam, i.e. the creative act of the gods seems to have been a form, indeed a long and complex process of genetic manipulation.

"They looked and immediately they saw in the distance; they came to see, to know everything that exists in the world. Looking, they instantly saw everything around, and all around they saw the dome of the sky and within the earth. All things far away and hidden they saw without having to move. In fact they saw the whole world, and they saw it from the place where they were."

Here, however, the author sees an analogy with the mythical Garden of Eden. It even seems that in addition to the various food delights in the garden there were also computers and television!

"The heart of heaven threw a veil over their eyes. And they became clouded, like a breath resting on a mirror. Their gaze became clouded: from that instant, they could only see what was near, only what which was clear. Thus were the wisdom and knowledge of the four men of the origin and the beginning destroyed. Thus were our ancestors, our fathers fashioned. From the heart of heaven, from the heart of the earth."

This seems to be an analogy with the tower of Babel, but the author also sees an analogy with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Indeed, even the fact of the expulsion can be seen as an authentic disaster for mankind, the memory of a catastrophe, much older than the catastrophe of the flood, but which still lives on in myth.

The alternatives are as follows:

• The cataclysms were limited phenomena that occurred several times. The survivors migrated to all continents, bringing knowledge and chronicles with them.
• The catastrophes had global dimensions and were experienced and suffered by many peoples at the same time, which over time added different variants.

Both hypotheses are acceptable, and both include the presence of the gods, who return after the catastrophe.

I believes that these catastrophic phenomena were not due to divine actions.

The gods were living beings of "superior" races and civilizations, but who did not have the interest or the power to destroy the planets (or to avoid their destruction). Otherwise they would not have taken the trouble to warn Noah and his analogues of impending danger...

Chilam Balam:

"This is the history of the world, as it was written in ancient times, for the time has not yet elapsed to write these books... so that the Mayan people may learn how they were brought about in this country... It happened in the Katun 11 Ahau, when Ah Mucencab (the descending god) appeared. It was then that fire came down from the sky, then the rope fell, and then the rocks and trees..."

Ah Mucencab, the descending god, successively destroys the insignia of the dominion of the 13 deities of the maya (mystery) universe. At the end of the first era, the sky falls on the earth and burns it.

"The second sun was established. Four jaguar was the sign of the day. Its name is jaguar sun. In it it happened that the sky fell, that the sun did not follow its course. Now it was noon, suddenly it was night!"

It must have been much more than a normal solar eclipse, because these phenomena were well known to them, just think of the Dresden code which contains entire tables of eclipses with very precise dates. Furthermore, the Chimalpopoca codex mentions the presence of giants in the epoch of the second sun. Prehistoric giants appear in many myths, and scientists seem to have found huge footprints in sedimentary rock…

Third sun

"His name is sun of the rain of fire. In this era it happened that it rained fire, and the inhabitants burned. And with it rained stony sands. The old people narrate that at that time the stony sand that we see now was scattered, and boiled the andesite lavas and the various reddish rocks were deposited."

These descriptions cannot be referred only to local phenomena given the recurrence of catastrophic events which led to darkness and fiery rains in all the myths of the world, therefore not local phenomena such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, but cosmic events such as explosion of an entire planet in our solar system, where the catastrophe would take on a worldwide dimension; the sun would be eclipsed for months or years, huge burning embers would fall on the earth depositing reddish rocks in an unimaginable spectacle... Perhaps it was Tiamat, the small planet shattered between Mars and Jupiter?

Fourth sun

"And so they perished: they were inundated with the rain of fire... It rained fire for a single day"

and

"And so they perished: they were submerged in water, they turned into fish. The sky fell, in one day they perished..."

The end of the fourth sun should correspond to the great flood. These verses indicate that the end of the age occurred either through a rain of fire or through a flood; everything, then, would have happened "in a single day", i.e. in a very short time, and this could explain the frozen Siberian mammoths with the grass still fresh in their stomachs, the scientific proof of rapid and sudden freezing. The rain of fire supports the hypothesis of an asteroid falling into the ocean, which would then explain the flood. And the verses of the rain of fire reveal that the point of fall of the asteroid could be located in the Gulf of Mexico, while in all other places in the world there was only "flooding"...

But let's go back to Chilam Balam.

The Chilam Balam narrates that men could not bear the blaze of the new sun: the heat was intolerable, and "today" - that is, at the time of writing the chronicle - only a pale reflection of that primordial sun shone in the sky.

Analogies can be noted with the myth of the universal flood; since the filter of the "waters above" mentioned in the Bible in Genesis was missing, the sun must have appeared much hotter than before...

The cycle of the fourth sun therefore ended in a flood or deluge that wiped out almost all the humanity, at the end of which the ancestors of the Aztecs, similarly to the Jews, lit a fire:

"The gods, those who clothe stars in the realms of stars, look and say: oh gods! Who kindles fires there? Who fills the sky with smoke? Then came down from heaven He, to whose we are subjects, Tezcatlipoca."

Tezcatlipoca is the god who had defeated and forced Quetzacoatl to flee. After the flood the mighty god descended from heaven again!

The delicious scent of the fire of the holocaust tickled the nostrils of the Mayan deities exactly like those of the gods of the epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king of protohistory, in 2600 B.C. in southern Babylonia. The epic poem that bears his name, found during excavations in the ancient city of Nineveh, narrates that his ancestor Ut-Napishtim survived the global flood by taking refuge on an island across the sea.

He too, after the catastrophe, lit a fire of cedar and myrtle:

"The gods smelled the perfume which went up to their nostrils. Like flies the gods gathered over the victim".

Notice:

"over the victim".