Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date by John Major Jenkins, Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna (Foreword by)

From the Publisher

While researching the 2012 end-date of the Maya Calendar, John Major Jenkins decoded the Maya's galactic cosmology. The Maya discovered that the periodic alignment of the Sun with the center of the Milky Way galaxy is the formative influence on human evolution. These alignments also define a series of World Ages. The fourth age ends on December 21, 2012, when an epoch chapter in human history will come to an end. Maya Cosmogenisis 2012 reveals the Maya's insight into the cyclic nature of time, and prepares us for oue own cosmogenesis--the birth of a new world.

John Major Jenkins is a leading independent researcher on ancient Mesoamerican cosmology. He has authored five books on the Maya, and has given a presentation to the prestigious Institute of Maya Studies in Miami. In March of 1998, he was invited by the Indigenous Council of the Americas to speak at their conference in Merida, Mexico.

Library Journal

These two works press beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship to explore the alternative world view offered by Maya culture. Brennan, an artist and longtime student of prehistoric rock inspirations throughout North America and Mexico, examines the hand signs shown in Maya glyphs and art work in search of an interpretation of the Maya system of writing, which has long interested interested and puzzled scholars He contends that the Maya used a sophisticated gesture language similar to that of the Plains Indian groups of North America. Many useful illustrations and compelling examples support Brennan's theory. While the conclusions drawn are equal parts scholarship and hypothesis, this thorough and detailed study of the relationships among writing, art, symbolism, and meaning fascinates. The Maya Long Count calendar, a complex system for measuring time, was developed around 2000 years ago, possibly at the pre-Maya site of Izapa in southern Mexico. Jenkins, an independent researcher, presents a wealth of information about Maya astronomy, mythology, and caledrics in support of his analysis of the Long Count calendar end-date, scheduled to occur on December 21, 2012. Providing evidence that the end-date corresponds with a rare alignment of our solar system, Jenkins contends that the Maya were aware of this celestial event and believed that it portended a dramatic rebirth for humanity. Good illustrations, maps, and an extensive bibliography complement this detailed work. Ultimately, however, Jenkins' well-researched and interesting interpretation remains speculative. [For more on Maya culture, see Linda Schele and Jorge P rez de Lara's Hidden Faces of the Maya, reviewed on p. 87.--Ed.]--Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westeville, P.L.

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Chapter One

A TIMELINE OF MESOAMERICAN CULTURE

Before we delve into the Maya period, we need to journey back in time, to the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. This journey will take us from the humble beginnings of hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic to the complex high civilization of the Maya—and beyond. Eight thousand years ago, the embers of New World civilization began stirring in Middle America. Nomadic tribes wandered the wide valleys of what is now Central Mexico, hunting bison and other free-roaming game. At night, these people tracked the movements of the planets and stars, as their ancestors had for thousands of years before them. They gave the sun and the moon names. In fact, they recognized these celestial giants as deities, capable of nurturing and guiding life, but also capable of terrible acts of cruelty and destruction. The sun provided life-giving warmth, but also could be brutally hot. The planets, too, were observed as celestial wanderers, gods and goddesses sometimes involved in human affairs, and their motions were carefully charted. The Milky Way stretched overhead, spanning the horizons, and the river of white light that flowed from its womb embraced Earth with nurturance attributable only to the Great Mother of Creation. Even at this early phase in the development of Mesoamerican culture, the night sky loomed as a cosmic backdrop on which the concerns and questions of humanity were projected.

    As long as six thousand years ago, villages began to form as maize was domesticated, through selective breeding, from a wild grain. This great accomplishment ofthe early Mesoamericans testifies to their innate genius and persistence. The achievement of coaxing juicy maize kernels out of teosinte, a skinny wild grain, required hundreds, if not thousands, of years of ongoing effort—a goal-focused continuity of effort over many generations. It seems reasonable for us to entertain the possibility that early skywatchers possessed a similar capacity for persistence and continuous effort. They could have relayed an accurate accounting of star positions and constellation lore from the earliest times. The ancient Mesoamerican astronomers even may have noticed the slow shifting of the stars, the precession of the equinoxes, at a very early date. The minds of the early Mesoamerican people were sharp, complex, and endlessly curious. Their vigilant attention to life, to evolving food sources, and to the stars imbued them with a sense of connection to both Earth and sky.

    For the Maya, maize has an ancient mythological association with the origin of human beings. They believe to this day that the flesh of the first human beings was made from white maize and yellow maize. Today, maize cannot reseed itself without the help of human beings. A deep truth about humanity's relationship to Divinity is hidden within this fact: The Maize Deity—the source of life—needs human beings to further the ongoing process of life on Earth. The Maize Deity and human beings are cocreators. Thus, in a very real sense, the birth of New World civilization can be traced to the domestication of maize. From a mythological viewpoint, the domestication of maize suggests that early cultures in the New World had entered into a pact with the Maize Deity, a contract that would carry them to the lofty heights of a sophisticated and complex civilization. The Flute Song of the Hopi suggests what this contract might have been about:

We we lo lo, We we lo lo
Ah yum tu wa, Na sa vu eh
Sa qua ma na, Ku yea va
Nah tuk se na

There at the center of the universe
Blue Corn Girl came up
Growing and maturing
Beautifully

    This song recalls what seems to be a universally held indigenous idea that culture is like a beautiful child, growing outward from the center of the universe, maturing in time. This image also serves as a key to understanding a basic insight into human nature and time: Our spiritual natures unfold, in time, like flowers. That ancient people understood this profound truth gives us pause, and makes us wonder what else they knew. We know that some five thousand years ago the early corn-farming villages of Mesoamerica were well-organized and planned. They contained ceremonial centers, religious cults, sacred rulers, and burial mounds. Even the earliest phases of cultural development in Mesoamerica reveal a sophisticated and profound level of social ease, scientific capacity, and artistic sensitivity.

THE PRE-CLASSIC PERIOD

    A very early culture in Central Mexico centers on the archaeological site of Cuicuilco. In typical fashion, archaeologists have identified layers of pyramids here, but they are unclear how far back this center can be dated. An earspool with a calendar glyph on it, unearthed at Cuicuilco, was dated to 679 B.C. Laurette Séjourné, in her book Burning Water, considers Cuicuilco the precursor to Teotihuacan, the great Toltec metropolis that arose in the first century A.D. However, Cuicuilco, which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, may have been founded as much as four thousand years ago.

    The Olmecs were the first widespread and organized culture in Mexico. Dubbed the Mesoamerican "mother culture" by Mexican artist and scholar Miguel Covarrubias, Olmec civilization took root in the Gulf Coast swamps around 1800 B.C. Its origin is somewhat obscure. Some scholars believe that an earlier precedent for the Olmec can be found in Guerrero state, south of Mexico City. But Olmec sites have been found along the Pacific coasts of Guatemala and El Salvador, suggesting a vigorous and expansive empire during the second millennium B.C. Amazingly, scholars even have argued, rather convincingly, that the Olmec had trade links with the Chavín culture in South America.

    The first great Olmec city was San Lorenzo, which was fully formed by 1200 B.C. This site is in the Olmec heartland, a swampy and inhospitable region along the Mexican Gulf Coast stretching from southern Veracruz east to Campeche. Colossal stone heads were found here, some of them weighing forty tons, in addition to over two hundred ceremonial mounds. Strangely, San Lorenzo was suddenly destroyed by human hands around 900 B.C.

    La Venta is another important early Olmec site in this region. A cone-shaped pyramid almost a hundred feet high occupies the central precinct of the city, which was built on a small island surrounded by swamps. This pyramid is thought to be Mesoamerica's first large pyramid, built around 1200 B.C., although the structures at Cuicuilco in Central Mexico may be older. La Venta was a thriving ceremonial and market center, and even at this early period in Mesoamerican culture, there is evidence at La Venta of a sophisticated astronomical knowledge. Archaeoastronomical investigation has shown that the pyramid at La Venta was intentionally aligned toward the polar area of the sky and to specific stars in the Big Dipper. The level of precision in these alignments is quite impressive. However, the effects of precession inevitably caused these alignments to "go out of sync," and the Olmec astronomers and temple-builders responded by periodically reorienting the pyramid. Their solution, however, was bound to be temporary, for precession would once again cause a misalignment between the stars and the pyramid. Nevertheless, the realignments of La Venta's pyramid provide persuasive evidence that Olmec astronomers were aware of precession.

    As mentioned in the Introduction, precession is caused by the wobbling of Earth's axis and results in a shifting of the rise times of stars. Many Maya specialists believe that early Mesoamerican cultures such as the Olmec were not sophisticated enough to notice precession, because it is a very slow phenomenon. However, precession causes the rising time of a prominent star such as Spica to shift about 1° in seventy-two years. One degree actually spans a fairly large amount of space—consider that the full moon covers one-half of a degree. In the course of only 150 years—a period of time spanning only two or three lifetimes—Spica would shift very noticeably by the distance of about four full moons! If the Olmec skywatchers and others were indeed passing astronomical information down from one generation to another, they could very well, and fairly easily, have tracked precession. And tracking the rising time of a single, bright star is only one method early skywatchers may have used to discover precession. At the latitude of La Venta, the polar area of the sky (specifically, the North Celestial Pole) is very close to the horizon. Precession affects the rising position of circumpolar stars, and, given La Venta's precise orientation to the circumpolar stars in the Big Dipper, Olmec astronomers easily could have tracked precession-caused changes in the rising position of those stars. The pyramid realignments at La Venta make sense only if we allow that the Olmec were keenly interested in calibrating precession.

    But why should the Ancients' understanding of precession be so important to us? This is a complicated question, and it will be answered in detail as the book progresses. Briefly, my research shows that precession was of immense interest to early Mesoamerican astronomers because it changed their relationship to the heavens, exerting dramatic effects on evolving humanity. The Maya were interested in the big picture, and, as sophisticated cosmologists, they endeavored to formulate a holistic model of time, evolution, and human nature. As often stated in the literature, the Maya were obsessed with time. Precession, a cycle of almost 26,000 years, was the largest astronomical time cycle that the Maya encountered. It thus represented to them the most profound of mysteries, and their cosmological sights were fixed on figuring out what precession meant for human beings. The Maya recognized that one heavenly object, the Galactic Center, was a key reference point for precessional change. In other words, we might say that precession shifts our "angular" orientation to the Galactic Center, and, as I will show, the Maya believed this to change—indeed, to intensify—evolutionary potential on Earth.

    Ultimately, the discovery of precession gave rise to a Maya doctrine of World Ages—the Popol Vuh Creation myth—in which Earth and humanity experience cycles of destruction and re-creation over long periods of time. Anticipating realizations that our own science has yet to make, the Maya understood that precession represents a 26,000-year cycle of biological unfolding—a type of spiritual gestation and birth—that Earth and its consciousness-endowed lifeforms undergo. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us return to La Venta and the early skywatchers, for they have more to teach us.

    I believe that the evidence at La Venta for the discovery of precession represents a watershed event in the development of Mesoamerican cosmology. But how was this discovery incorporated into Olmec symbology? We can look to the many artifacts excavated at La Venta to get a sense of the Olmecs' mythological and cosmological preoccupations. The jaguar was the primary animal totem of the Olmec. The mouth of the jaguar represented the portal to the Underworld, as did terrestrial caves, where the Olmec priests engaged in shamanistic rituals. Toads, serpents, and birds also were important features of the Olmecs' shamanistic pantheon. Toads were the source of a vision-producing drug and also were the earthly animal totem of the Great Mother Goddess. Attuned to the rhythms of the Earth Mother, toads croak wildly before it rains, announcing the Earth Mother's water blessing. Snakes were symbols of rebirth and immortality, because they shed their skin every year yet do not die. In addition, the snake was also a symbol of the Milky Way.

    Many Olmec artifacts depict human heads with a small V-shaped cleft in their foreheads. This "cleft-head" motif is very revealing of Olmec ideas about life, birth, and death.

    Sacred maize plants are often shown sprouting from these clefts, suggesting they represent a type of divine birthplace. The cleft head, as a divine birthplace, was believed to symbolize the portal between worlds—the doorway between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead, an entrance to the Underworld. The mouth of the jaguar and the cleft head both symbolize a portal to another realm that is also a birthplace. Here we begin to see how different mythological symbols can represent the same underlying concept. When it comes to astronomical concepts, we will find that many mythological symbols may refer to the same astronomical object. For example, Mesoamerican thinkers mythologized the Milky Way as a snake, a road, a river, a toad, and a Cosmic Mother. As we will see later, the cleft-head motif is an Olmec symbol that represents a very important "cleft-like" feature of the Milky Way—a "birthplace doorway" that the December solstice sun will enter on the 2012 end-date.

    At La Venta, as at later Mesoamerican cities, mythology and astronomy were closely related to ideas of political rulership. The emphasis on the relationship between the city's central ceremonial precinct and the ruling king-shaman indicates the presence of sacred kingship at La Venta, an institution central to later Maya society. The king was typically associated with the highest deity, sometimes the sun, but, more importantly, he was associated with the center and origin of the world. This association might take the form of the king's throne being located in—that is, aligned with—the "cosmic center." The Sacred Tree or World Axis was visualized extending down to Earth from this cosmic center. As the polar orientation of La Venta's pyramid suggests, the Olmec probably thought of the polar region as the cosmic center and source. This is not surprising, because the entire sky appears to revolve around the North Celestial Pole. In addition, the Neolithic ancestors of the Olmec who migrated into the New World from the far north of Asia worshiped the Pole Star as the highest deity. This notion survives today in Asia. The symbology and orientation of the sacred ruler's central palace within the Forbidden City (Beijing, China) reflect an ancient interest in identifying the shaman-ruler with the Pole Star.

    In Mesoamerican symbology, in addition to being associated with the cosmic center, the king-shaman was also associated with caves. At Chalcatzingo, a late Olmec site dated to 600 B.C., Monument 1 portrays the sacred ruler, a king-shaman, sitting in a cave.

    Shamanic rites, which were central to Mesoamerican religion, were performed in caves by calendar priests and probably even by sacred rulers themselves. You may recall that Maya kings, as shamans, were responsible for mediating knowledge and power flowing between Earth and the invisible, otherworldly domains. The Mesoamerican king-shaman had a foot in both worlds, and is thus depicted enthroned in the cosmic cave, the "portal" between worlds. The cave thus symbolizes the divine throne, a nexus between worlds. In later Maya hieroglyphic writing, caves were indicated by a "cleft-in-hill" glyph, a symbol corresponding to the Olmec cleft-head motif.

    As mentioned, the mouth of the jaguar also represented an entrance to the Underworld. In addition, temple doorways, cenotes (sinkholes where water collects), and a woman's birth canal were all symbolic portals to the Underworld—the realm of the ancestors.

    Significantly, the Maya of today equate the terrestrial symbols of the Underworld portal with a specific place in the sky. The modern Quiché Maya identify the Great Cleft or "dark-rift" in the Milky Way, which looks like a black road running down its middle, as the "Road to the Underworld." It runs from the stars of Sagittarius northward along the Milky Way, beyond the Aquila constellation. The Quiché term for this dark-rift in the Milky Way is xibalba be (xibalba = underworld; be = road). They also call it the Black Road. Though it may seem unusual to locate the Road to the Underworld in the sky, the Maya believe that every night the Underworld rotates above the Earth and becomes the night sky. As such, the dark-rift is the lowest point of the Underworld, but is also the highest point of the night sky. As we will see, recognition of this astronomical feature is critical to understanding the true meaning of the Maya end-date in A.D. 2012.

    As the first millennium B.C. drew to a close, both the New World and the Old World were in transition, with conflicting mythologies and political ideologies battling for supremacy. In the Old World, a new paradigm, Christianity, emerged. In the New World, between 400 B.C. and 100 B.C., a great shift occurred in the flow of Mesoamerican civilization. The Olmecs had faded. A cultural style that would come to define the Maya, clearly different from the earlier Olmec tradition, began to emerge. The Pacific coastal regions of Chiapas and Guatemala saw a brief but important upsurge in cultural activity, which centered upon the site of Izapa. Izapa exerted enormous influence for at least three hundred years (250 B.C. to A.D. 50), and it was there that the Long Count calendar, with its intriguing 2012 end-date, was invented.

    Over eighty standing carved monuments (stela, pronounced "stee-lah"), altars, and thrones depict scenes from the Maya Creation myth, the Popol Vuh, otherwise known as the Hero Twin myth. Dated to the first century B.C., these Izapan monuments are the first representations of the Hero Twin saga to appear in Mesoamerican art. Scholars recognize Izapa as an important archaeological site for what it reveals of Mesoamerica's cultural and political changes, but I came to realize that the knowledge encoded on Izapa's monuments was more astronomical than anthropological. I first noticed that the entire site-plan of Izapa was aligned to the December solstice horizon, suggesting that many of Izapa's monuments may portray astronomical events occurring in that direction. Izapa's ballcourt is aligned to the December solstice horizon, and may have represented the Milky Way. Several monuments depict the rebirth of the First Father solar deity, called One Hunahpu in the Popol Vuh. Putting the pieces together, I began to suspect that Izapa's monuments offered a mythic narrative, carved in stone, describing the astronomical alignment charted by the Long Count calendar.

    Another major factor in understanding the role of Izapan culture in the development of sophisticated cosmological ideas involves the discovery nearby of many "mushroom stones" (ritual stone effigies of hallucinogenic mushrooms), dated to the era of Izapa's beginnings. The entire Chiapas-Guatemalan Pacific coastal region, with Izapa at the center, apparently was the site of a lengthy experiment in ritualistic and/or scientific use of hallucinogenic mushrooms around 300 B.C. They are evidence that the innovative ideas pioneered at Izapa were informed by the use of psychoactive drugs. As we shall` see, an advanced cosmological knowledge emerged at Izapa, suggesting that the Izapans were not just ahead of their own time, they were even ahead of ours.

THE CLASSIC PERIOD

    The Classic period (200 A.D. — 900 A.D) refers specifically to the Maya realm. However, the Teotihuacan-Toltec tradition of Central Mexico (100 A.D. — 750 A.D.) closely paralleled the ascendancy of Maya civilization. These two traditions nurtured trade and political alliances. Although the Toltecs and Maya spoke different languages, they shared many basic beliefs about time, nature, and cosmology. The Maya occupied eastern Mesoamerica and the Toltecs lived some eight hundred kilometers directly to the west, in Central Mexico. As we will see, variations in calendrical tradition between these two realms defined a fundamental underlying difference in their respective conceptualization of World Ages.

    Maya civilization has been thoroughly discussed in many popular books. Recent work by archaeologists shows that very early Proto-Classic Maya sites emerged in the lowlands of the Petén (in northern Guatemala) around 100 B.C. Cerros is one of them, thought to be a place where the institution of sacred kingship became standardized. The great Maya cities of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Yaxchilan followed closely. Palenque, a little further to the west, contains astounding carvings and hieroglyphic texts, and today is a beautiful place to visit. In the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., Palenque was ruled by Pacal the Great and his son Chan Bahlum. Many of the sanctuaries and buildings found today at Palenque were dedicated by these rulers. Interestingly, Palenque was ruled by Pacal's mother for a time in the early seventh century, before he effectively took the throne. Among the Classic Maya cities of Chiapas and Petén, a unique form of warfare emerged. Scholars call it Tlaloc-Venus warfare, or "Star Wars," because raiding campaigns were timed by the movements of Venus.

    The great southern city of the Maya was Copán, which is in present-day Honduras. William Fash is directing the archaeological project for the Peabody Museum at Copán, and many interesting new discoveries have come to light in recent years. Within the main temple Fash found a sequence of earlier pyramids, built by successive rulers of Copán between A.D. 430 and A.D. 800. Fash's team painstakingly reconstructed Copán's ornately sculpted buildings, revealing some of the esoteric facets of Copán's worldview. A dance platform and surrounding buildings depict episodes from the Popol Vuh story of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the heroic twin sons of the First Father solar deity, One Hunahpu. The Hero Twin myth was the primary element of Copán mystery rites, which included the sacred ballgame, ceremonial dances, plays, and initiations into esoteric knowledge involving astronomical cycles. Fash and other researchers report that the iconography and architectural alignments at Copán reveal an interest in celestial bodies such as the Milky Way, Venus, and the moon.

    Fash recently discovered a stela under the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairway dated 9.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count, which supports a founding date for Copán around the completion of the ninth baktun (December 9, 435). The ruling dynasty of Copán was founded in A.D. 426 with the accession of Yax-Kuk-Mo' (Blue-Quetzal-Macaw). A total of sixteen kings descended from Yax-Kuk-Mo' and ruled Copán for the next four hundred years. The thirteenth successor was a powerful man named Eighteen-Rabbit who, with his predecessor Smoke-Imix, ruled during Copán's zenith, from A.D. 628 to A.D. 738.

    Conservation is a high priority for the directors of the Copán project. A virtual museum housing exact replicas of Copán's sculptures and building façades is being built near the site. Copán's progressive educational museum was inaugurated and opened on July 22, 1996.

    In the lowland areas of the Yucatán to the north, in places like Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Labnah, and Kabah, Maya culture took different forms, especially in regard to architectural design. These sites are impressive, and reveal that the people who built them were interested in Venus, the moon, and other astronomical bodies and events. For example, the Nunnery Complex at Uxmal contains a total of 584 windows, which is the number of days in a Venus cycle. Uxmal also contains an interesting and unique oval-shaped pyramid, called the Pyramid of the Magician. Chichén Itzá contains the Caracol observatory and the Pyramid of Kukulcan (the "Castillo"), on which an amazing shadow-play cast by the late afternoon sun can be viewed every spring equinox. During this celestial "hierophany," the late afternoon equinox sun casts a shadow-image of the Maya snake deity Kukulcan against the balustrade of the north stairway, heralding the return of the life-giving serpent power and the continuance of life. Since the 1970s, this event has drawn increasingly large numbers of observers, who witness firsthand the amazing architectural and astronomical abilities of the ancient Maya. In looking closely at the esoteric symbology of this event, I discovered an alignment between the sun, the Pleiades, and the zenith that has until now gone unnoticed. I explore the implications of this lost cosmology, encoded into the Pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichén Itzá, in Part II.

    In the ninth century A.D., Maya civilization began to disintegrate. Central autonomy and control fell apart due to a variety of factors including warfare, environmental degradation, drought, and diseases. Scholars attribute the Classic Maya collapse primarily to the proliferation of minor princedoms, each seeking its piece of the pie. In other words, greed contributed to the Maya downfall, a sobering message for our own times. By A.D. 950 the former glory of the Maya was no more. However, the Maya did not simply disappear, as has often been written. Their style of living changed, and their culture became decentralized, adapting to the effects of the collapse. In fact, certain Maya areas of Mesoamerica thrived after the collapse.

THE POST-CLASSIC PERIOD

    The period between the Maya collapse and the arrival of the Spanish, roughly A.D. 900 to A.D. 1520, is called the Post-Classic period. Around A.D. 1200 the highlands of Guatemala were colonized by the Quiché and Cakchiquel people, who by 1520 had established an impressive empire. In the Yucatan peninsula, Toltec refugees from Teotihuacan arrived around A.D. 800, following long-established trade routes, and inspired a Post-Classic renaissance that we may call hybrid Toltec-Maya. The east-west cultural division we identified for the Classic era Toltec and Maya cultures thus shifted to a Post-Classic north-south division in which certain basic Toltec concepts and beliefs were transferred to the former lowland Maya realm of the Yucatán, while uniquely Maya traditions were preserved to the south, in Chiapas and Guatemala. This distinction will be important as we look at the calendric and cosmological traditions from these different areas, how they were designed to calibrate alignments in the precessional cycle, and how they were synthesized at Chichén Itzá.

    The Post-Classic period also saw a flowering of Toltec-derived cultural traditions in Central Mexico. By the time of Spanish contact, Mixtec, Huastec, Mazatec, Aztec, and Zapotec people dominated the cultural scene. These groups lived in the mountains and wide valleys of Central Mexico, claimed Tollan (probably Teotihuacan) as their ancestral homeland, and spoke various dialects of the Nahuatl language. In this way, Toltec traditions continued to grow and had spread as far east as the Yucatán. As mentioned, the Quiché and Cakchiquel Maya settled areas of the Guatemalan highlands in the Post-Classic period. The Quiché capital was at Kumarcaaj (near present-day Santa Cruz del Quiché). Kumarcaaj became known as Utatlán, and detailed dynastic histories of the Quiché are preserved in the Popol Vuh and various colonial documents. After Spanish contact and a dramatic battle between conquistador Pedro Alvarado and the Quiché leader Tecun Uman, in which Tecun Uman was killed, the Spanish established and administered a new capital at Iximché. Today the Quiché are a vital people, despite being marginalized and persecuted by the Guatemalan government.

    With all the intercultural activity in the Post-Classic Yucatán, Chichén Itzá and its sister city Mayapan experienced a series of political intrigues. Mayapan was founded in the tenth century A.D., and eventually formed a triple alliance with Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, called the League of Mayapan. These three strong cities were to exert equal power, but from the beginning Mayapan sought sole control. While peace lasted, the land prospered, art flourished, and architecture soared. Eventually, because of the treachery of Hunnan Ceel, leader of Mayapan, the league erupted into civil war. The Itzás warred with Mayapan, but Hunnan Ceel brought in Mexican-Toltec allies and defeated the Itzá. The Xiu lineage began at this time, and is traceable up to the present day. In the 1450s Mayapan was utterly destroyed. All the Xiu nobility were killed except for one son, Tutul Xiu, who happened to be away at the time. Tutul Xiu reestablished his lineage at nearby Mani, and when the Spanish arrived, he was ruling that province.

THE POST-CONTACT

    After contact with European invaders lusting after gold, Mesoamerica was radically changed. This period was nothing short of a holocaust for indigenous peoples, many dying of disease and many others subjected to a quick journey into Christian hellfire by way of torture and dismemberment. Many material artifacts of Maya culture and genius were destroyed at this time. As documented in recent ethnographic studies, it is miraculous that many indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica have been able to preserve their traditions to the present day. The highland Maya in particular have continued to follow many central traditions of the ancient Maya religion, including the 260-day sacred calendar. In fact, they preserve the ancient Classic-period placement of the 260-day calendar, itself based upon the earlier Olmec placement, indicating a Mesoamerican continuity of calendar tradition extending over 3,000 years. In comparison, the continuity of tradition in Central Mexico and in lowland Yucatán, areas subjected to greater persecution, has not fared so well. In Mexico, Maya tradition is preserved to a large extent in the highlands of Chiapas, and in Tzotzil and Tzeltal towns such as San Larrainzar, Chamula, and Zinacantan. But recent events in Guatemala and Chiapas have devastated traditional Maya culture. Probably more disruption and destruction of Maya culture has taken place since 1970 than in the last three hundred years. Sadly, these events result from our movement into a type of transnational feudalism driven by Wall Street and other U.S. money-engines. In other quarters, observers report a healthy resurgence of Maya culture and an avid interest among young Maya in their own history and cultural identity.

    The epic span of Mesoamerican history is impressive, reminding us that here, in this "new" continent, a self-sufficient and vital civilization once lived. The descendants of this civilization are still with us, and we can learn much by listening to them and studying their culture. Mesoamerican civilization pioneered many original traditions, a complex hieroglyphic writing system, and brilliant cosmoconceptions not found elsewhere in the world. The unique calendar systems developed in Mesoamerica most clearly testify to the genius of Mesoamerican thinkers, who wove together mythology, political organization, religion, and astronomy into one seamless whole. As the true implications of ancient Maya cosmology resurface, the renaissance of indigenous cultures should be stimulated even further. The year 2012 may be a rallying cry for the modern Maya to understand and reclaim the greatness of their peoples' past achievements.