My next destination was Yaxchilan, a ruin secreted in the jungle about eight miles from Bonampak. I decided to try and hack my way there with a machete, against the advice of the natives, who had warned me: “La selva está cerrado!” They were right. I gave up after a grueling four-hour stint in which I traveled less than a quarter of a mile, spent mostly on my belly trying to avoid razor-sharp thorn shrubs. The insects were ravaging my body.
Yaxchilan is situated on the river and is alleged to have been the center of the flourishing Mayan civilization in this region. In February 1989, James O’Kon did manage to make it to this site, one that archeologists had been studying for a century. A particular mound of rocks caught O’Kon’s trained eye. Scientists had dismissed it as a minor mystery but the amateur archeologist was also a forensic engineer, and he immediately knew what this mound really was: part of a bridge.
He turned to modern technology to help prove a bridge had once existed at the site. O’Kon, a former chairman of the forensic council of the American Society of Civil Engineers, had used similar techniques during routine investigations. He compiled field information at the Mayan site and used computers to integrate archeological studies, aerial photos, and maps; to develop a three-dimensional model of the site; and to determine the exact positioning and dimensions of the bridge.
O’Kon ended up making a startling discovery: The Maya had constructed the longest bridge span in the ancient world. When he finished his calculations and computer models, the bridge turned out to be a six-hundred-foot span, a hemp-rope suspension structure with two piers and three spans. It connected Yaxchilan, in Mexico, with its agricultural domain in the Peten (now Guatemala), where Tikal is situated.
What archeologists had assumed was an insignificant rock pile turned out to be part of a crucial finding: a pier twelve feet high and thirty-five feet in diameter. Aerial photos located a second support pier on the opposite side of the river. Both piers were constructed of cast-in-place concrete with an exterior of stone masonry, which is exactly how the Mayan pyramids were made.
In interviews O’Kon, who has been studying the ancient Maya for thirty years, said, “The Maya were very sophisticated mathematically and scientifically.” He claimed that the design requirements of the Mayan bridge paralleled twentieth-century bridge-design criteria.
Today we marvel at the ruins and speculate on how and why the Maya built the ceremonial sites. We shouldn’t forget that they were an advanced race. They understood astronomy. They had an accurate calendar. They understood the concept of “zero” at least seven hundred years before the Europeans did. The Maya built paved roads and, as we have now learned, the longest suspension bridge in the ancient world.
What occurred to me while standing atop another pyramid, at Coba in Quintana Roo, surveying a trackless jungle was the fact that the Maya had achieved all this in a jungle. No other advanced civilization I could think of had emerged from a jungle environment. It deepens the mystery of this lost race.
The sacbe are a system of roads that interconnect the sites. This is another feature that has long puzzled scientists and independent investigators alike. The roads were built up with rocks, leveled, and paved over with limestone cement. They vary in width from eight feet to thirty feet. The mystery is simple: Why would a “Stone Age” people without wheeled vehicles or dray animals need such an elaborate and sophisticated road network?
O’Kon turned his attention to the sacbe after finishing his work on the bridge and discussed the fact that he had found the sixty-mile road that extended from Coba to Yaxuna to be as straight as an arrow with a negligible deviation. His studies have revealed the Maya were not Stone Age (he refers to them as “technolithic”). They didn’t use iron, because the nearest mines were 1,500 miles away. O’Kon claims, “They used jade tools and they were harder than steel.”
You almost have to stand at a site and imagine the scene as it was during the peak of Mayan civilization to really grasp the magnitude and appreciate what this culture achieved. Today we see ruins and jungle and pyramids that are little more than bare stone, crumbling buildings surrounded by wilderness. However, in that day, the pyramids were coated with stucco. They were smooth and they gleamed in the sun. The walls of the structures were painted in various designs of bright colors. The courtyards were paved. The flat white roads radiated out in all directions, connecting the centers.
Yet despite the Maya’s advanced knowledge of astronomy and mathematics and their achievements in art and architecture, scientists still consider them a Stone Age culture.
Time is the essence of life. Human beings have always been immersed in it, and have kept track of it in one way or another: measuring it as minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, and millennia. We know of many of its dimensions and we have used them to our advantage. We know, supposedly, how long ago dinosaurs roamed the earth, how long it takes for various radioactive isotopes to decay, when our early hominid ancestors branched off from apes, the layout of the human genome, the exact dates of lunar and solar eclipses long into the future.
Time causes all living things to grow old and die. It seems so obvious and ubiquitous, we are like fish and time is water. We never ask the basic questions: What is time? Do we understand it? Is it more than a system of measurement, whether of the present moment or of the age of the universe?
All cultures certainly have a focus on time; however, the Maya had an obsession with it. They tracked and measured the synodic period of Venus, which is 584 Earth days. The 365-day Mayan calendar year was more precise than the Gregorian calendar. They devised three different calendrical systems: the tzolkin (sacred calendar), the haab (civil calendar), and the long count.
The tzolkin is a cycle of 260 days (thirteen months of twenty days each) and the haab is the solar cycle. These two calendars were combined in an interlocking fashion to produce a cycle of 18,980 days, which was known as a calendar round, about fifty-two years.
Each day had a particular glyph and meaning ascribed to it, and at the end of the fifty-two-year cycle a renewal ceremony would be performed. The long count period lasted for about five thousand years. This was equivalent to an age. According to the Maya, humanity is in the fifth “Sun” or “Age.” That will end about five thousand years from the beginning of their calendar, which started in 3011 B.C.E. and expires in 2012.
The longest cycle in Mayan cosmology is 26,000 years, which corresponds to the precession of the equinox. Why did the Maya have such a fascination with astronomy? Why did they create such an intricate calendrical system? Would a Stone Age agrarian society need all this advanced astronomical and mathematical knowledge? How did they acquire it in such a short time? How would they have had any awareness of such a complex phenomenon as the synodic length of Venus or the precession of the equinoxes?
The Maya are either more ancient than science allows or they had more sophisticated technology than we know of. Perhaps someone passed down this knowledge to them? Is it coincidental that the beginning of the fifth Age was 3000 B.C.E., which corresponds to the birth of the Jewish and Chinese calendars? The assertion that the “world” is only five thousand years old may have more truth to it than we know. Is it also a coincidence that so many Christians believe we are now in the end of times?
The Mayan obsession with time may have been based on a deep awareness of how it functions on a cosmic scale and then unfolds on Earth in short-and long-term cycles. That may be the message that the lost civilizations have been trying to deliver to us, and we may just be starting to get it.
16 Destination Galactic Center
John Major Jenkins Thinks Today’s World Has Much to Learn from the Ancient Maya
Moira Timms
Ancient Mayan trumpets erupt in a wash of primal, shamanic sound. The huge dome of the planetarium, like some fish-eye lens, glows with myriad pre-dawn stars. As the sun rises and breaks through the artificial horizon to everyone’s left, the ancient music fades, and the crack between the worlds is open o
nce more. In his calm, focused way, the researcher and author John Major Jenkins begins his presentation and delivers the goods: According to ancient Mayan cosmology, we live today in a time of rare galactic alignment, when our solar systems with the heart of our galaxy, the galactic center. Our age is a time of transformation fixed by the Mayan calendar’s end date on December 21, 2012.
Jenkins, an internationally recognized expert on ancient astronomy and the Mayan calendar, recently spoke of his work and life. “I am devoted to reconstructing lost cosmologies,” he says, “to unraveling the knotted threads of a vast, global paradigm now forgotten.” He emphasizes that his work is both an explication and a celebration of the Primordial Tradition, or perennial philosophy—terms that refer to the universal truths at the core of the world’s major religions and philosophies that have endured down the ages.
“I believe the human race can grow spiritually by reviving the ancient Primordial Tradition that has become buried beneath the materialism of the modern world,” he says. And it is Jenkins’s discerning and painstaking retro-sleuthing into that tradition that has penetrated the rich substrata beneath the materialism of our time and discovered ancient hidden “treasure”—namely, the galactic alignment not only at the core of the Mayan calendar, but also at the center of Vedic cosmology and various Old World traditions, including Mithraism, sacred architecture, and Greek sacred geography. He lays out the details of his progressive reconstruction in two groundbreaking books: Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date and Galactic Alignment: The Transformation of Consciousness According to Mayan, Egyptian, and Vedic Traditions.
In the mid-1990s, while researching the 2012 end date of the Mayan calendar, Jenkins decoded what he calls the “galactic cosmology” of the Maya. He realized that the ancient Maya understood the 26,000-year cycle known as the precession of the equinoxes and the earth’s changing orientation to the galactic center. For the ancient Maya, tuning in to this stellar shifting inevitably led to the realization that at some point in the far future, the December solstice sun would with the Milky Way’s center, which can be seen as a “nuclear bulge” between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio. The Maya thought of the Galactic Center as the ever-renewing womb of the Great Mother, and targeted the alignment with the end date of their calendar.
Jenkins’s approach is to skillfully cross-pollinate the discoveries of archaeoastronomy, iconography, and ethnography, blending them into a profoundly coherent synthesis. This has enabled him to revive a fragmented worldview that he calls “multidimensional.” He is interested not in inventing a new system, but in reviving the old one, one that because of its galactic focus is advanced in ways that modern science can barely appreciate. By accessing the myths, symbols, texts, and voices of the Primordial Tradition, Jenkins says that “it is clear that the Primordial Tradition is galactic in nature—the Galactic Center is its orientational locus and is the transcendental source of the wisdom it encodes, which now appears ready to make a dramatic appearance on the stage of human history . . . like a lost Atlantean dimension of the human soul.”
Because the astronomical mapping laid out in Jenkins’s recent books plugs so meaningfully into the sockets of the alignments and geodetics of so many sacred sites, the esoteric Hermetic dictum of “As above, so below” is now revealed fact. This is particularly true at Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico. “This is the site that gives us the 2012 calendar,” says Jenkins. “Here, the Mayan wisdom about what the 2012 alignment means for us is encoded into the monumental sculpture!”
Three ceremonial monument groups at Izapa contain the “legacy” to our time in terms of understanding the galactic cosmology of the ancient Maya. Jenkins decodes the ball court group at Izapa as “ground zero of this knowledge, and there is plenty there to help us understand what we, today, are fated to live through. The encoded message of the ball court is a testimony to the brilliance of the ancient Izapan skywatchers.”
A VISION QUEST
Jenkins recalls that as a child he was fascinated by gadgets and science. “I would take things apart and—sometimes—put them back together. Thomas Edison was my hero.” By high school, Jenkins says, he had exhausted science as an avenue of self-knowledge and began reading philosophy. “And that,” he says, “led to Eastern mysticism. This opened up a Gnostic path for me, a path of inner knowing, and I began to practice Yoga and meditation. I studied Tibetan mysticism, practiced celibacy, and wrote devotional poetry. I was trying to grow spiritually and free myself from the suburban nightmare of materialism that surrounded me.”
By the time Jenkins reached twenty, that which was building within him was difficult to contain. “An inner spiritual crisis was welling up inside me, and I embarked on a pilgrimage that took me around the southeast United States. My mobile hermitage was a 1969 Dodge van that I lived in for seven months. As my pilgrimage reached a crescendo, I meditated, chanted, and fasted, in locations along the Gulf Coast or in Forest Service campgrounds in the Florida panhandle.” Jenkins wrote of this period in his 1991 book, Mirror in the Sky. “This is the first time I have publicly shared this aspect of my past,” he says.
“The pilgrimage spontaneously culminated in a three-day vigil, crying for a vision, chanting, and praying. It was a crisis of connection with a higher guiding force that I yearned to serve. In the early predawn hours on the cusp of Pisces, I had a mystical vision of the boon-bestowing goddess Govinda, who I also call the Earth Guardian.” Jenkins says that the experience was attended by what is called, in Yoga, a kundalini rising. “It wasn’t ‘just’ a dream or vision, as it was attended by an actual physical process called ‘a turnabout in the deepest seat of the being’ or ‘the backward flowing method’ described in the Taoist book The Secret of the Golden Flower.”
Jenkins believes this experience with the goddess was the “boon” that bestowed upon him his mission, that led him to the Maya, a path that he now pursues in service to the Great Mother and the perennial wisdom. “It opened up a path of knowledge for me,” he says. “Less than a week after that vision, I met the person who encouraged me to travel to Mexico and visit the Maya.” Around that time Jenkins also read (the now classic) Mexico Mystique, by Frank Waters.
Today, almost twenty years later, Jenkins says that the connection with that original guiding force “continues to actively work within me, so I can continue to be a mouthpiece for the perennial philosophy. But balancing that call with the demands of making a living and paying the bills has, at times, been daunting.”
THINKING AND KNOWING
Jenkins’s mystical leanings are not that apparent in his recent books, which are academically rigorous and well documented without denying the deeper spiritual truths. In his view, “The intellect is not inconsistent with spirituality. Early on in my research, when my writings shifted from poetry and song writing to nonfiction research, I felt it would be critical to be clear and concise with my findings, mainly because spiritual materialism in New Age publishing seemed to be diluting the pristine purity of the universal truths with which it was coming into contact.
“Metaphors drawn from the profane modern culture and new terms were being coined for eternal truths . . . distortion of the ancient wisdom was happening. So I decided to place my rational intellect in service to the higher intellect, which is to say the heart. The heart is really higher than the brain.” With this approach, Jenkins’s work exemplifies the ability to go beyond the astronomy and venture more deeply into the metaphysics of spiritual transformation that awaits us on our approach to the galactic gateway.
The galactic gateway, and its meaning for our time, is the focus of Galactic Alignment. As we approach the 2012 end date of the Mayan calendar, it is clear that the knowledge expounded in many of the world’s wisdom texts regarding the end of the present world age comes together and is solidly interpreted in Jenkins’s latest book. According to his findings, the last of the four Hindu cycles of time, called Yugas, completes in synchrony with the Mayan end
date, as does the Age of Pisces.
Christian millenarianism, via the year 2000, is also surprisingly close to the galactic alignment. The 2012 date itself is the astronomically defined time when the winter solstice Suns with the center of the Milky Way. Jenkins surveys the work of the galactic philosopher Oliver Reiser to offer a scientific interpretation of how our solar system and the galactic plane become aligned, and what possible effects might result for life and consciousness on Earth.
An inevitable question is, “Does our changing relationship to the greater universe mean anything?” Jenkins’s anticipation of this question is fully developed in Galactic Alignment, but the basis for a response to the question, he insists, is that “what is happening now was the centerpiece of many, many ancient systems and ancient philosophies, in virtually all of the world’s traditions. If our own civilization—including our scientific and religious leaders—fails to see any meaning in this factual event, then we stand alone, divorced from the world’s traditions that did.”
Professor Jocelyn Godwin, of Colgate University, himself an author on esoteric subjects, sees value in exploring the 26,000-year processional cycle (of which the galactic alignment is the “completion” event) in terms of what it means. He says, “John Major Jenkins is the most global and erudite voice of a swelling chorus of ‘Galactic Center’ theorists. By framing the subject in the context of the Primordial Tradition, he raises it to a new level of seriousness, and of reassurance.”
Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization Page 16
