In the Courts of the Sun (7 page)

An Ancient Book . . .

Whoa. Tzam lic.
That is, that sheet lightning under the skin.

An Ancient Book with Modern Relevance
Comes to Light in Germany

The “Codex Nurnberg”—an eighty-page Mayan book that has been gathering dust and speculation in that city’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum since the 1850s—has, finally, been read.
The lead photo showed the top half of a page from a Maya codex, a delicate drawing of what they call Waterlily Jaguar sitting in a field of Classic-period-style glyphs. That is, the forms were pre-900 AD.
Ni modos.
No way, I thought.
“¿ Joaquinito? ¿Está allí?”
Mother Flor’s voice asked.
“¿Madre? Perdóneme,”
I said.
“No estoy teniendo mucha suerte con las calaveras esta noche. ¿Usted piensa que podría venir mañana y la intentaremos otra vez?”
She said of course, dear. I said thanks and clicked off.
En todos modos.
I blew up the picture of the Codex—which, since the release of that pinnacle of human achievement called the Logitech laser mouse, I could do just by waving a finger—and zoomed in on the number glyphs. Hmm. The calligraphy looked a little post-Classic to me. It didn’t look like a forgery, though. Forgeries are usually either way bad or way too good. And from what I’d heard the Nurnberg book had a pretty clear provenance. People had been coming up with schemes for reading it for at least fifty years. Maybe it was a post-Classic copy of a Classic text—
Huh.
One of the date groups looked a little unsettling. I blew it up and enhanced it. It was fuzzy, but it seemed to be 7 Quetzal, 7 Snatch-bat, 12.19.17.7.7, that is, June 2, 2010 AD, which was the date of the particle accelerator implosion at the Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca in Oaxaca. Two members of a Tzotzil Zapatista group had gone to prison for sabotage, for supposedly somehow causing the thing, although I and every other right-thinking person thought they weren’t guilty. Aerial views of the blast site showed a shallowly scooped-out area over a half-mile across, lined with sand that had been fused into dark-green obsidian.
Hmm . . .
After it arrived in Europe from the New World, the fig-tree-bark pages of the book—possibly written more than a thousand years ago—fused together over the centuries into what amounts to one solid brick. Researchers were unable, until now, to separate the accordion-folded pages due to the Mayan technique of priming the pages with gluelike compounds made from animal hides. The solution: the Scanning Tunneling Acoustic Microscope, or STAM, which “sees” ink through stuck pages.
“This is the biggest thing in our field since the discovery of the palaces at Cancuen in 2000,” gushed Professor Michael Weiner, a researcher in Mesoamerican Studies at the University of Central Florida and director of the decipherment project. “Only a few scraps of Mayan literature survived the Conquest,” he said, referring to the Spanish invasion of America that started around AD 1500.
Oh,
that
conquest of America.
The Codex (much of the contents of which will be published next year in the prestigious
Journal of Ethnographic Science
) is one of only four other Mayan “books” known to have survived the hands of Catholic religious authorities.
Weiner and his research team so far remain silent as to the exact content of the book’s glyphic text. However, rumors have spread through the tight-knit community of Mayan scholars that the book contains a drawing of a cross-shaped “divination layout,” a sort of game used to predict the future, and a string of eerily accurate predictions of actual catastrophic events, many of which occurred centuries after the book was written.
The Mayans, who flourished in Central America between AD 200 and their mysterious downfall around AD 900, were a highly advanced civilization with a complex writing system and a mastery of mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and engineering, as evidenced by the massive pyramids they built from Honduras to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, now a chic vacation destination. More mysterious and unsettling was their unique spiritual life, which involved bloodletting rituals and human sacrifice, as well as an intricate system of interlocking calendars, which tracked starry events and predicted earthly ones far into the future. At least one of these dates has long been familiar to Mayan scholars and, in the last few years, has become known to many nonspecialists as well: December 21, 2012, or, as it is more popularly known, Four
Ahau.
They meant
Kan Ahau, Ox K’ank’in,
or 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowness, 13.0.0.0.0. The old End of the World
bolazo
again. Dolts.
Maybe I should mention that I’d had a pretty big attitude problem about that date since about the seventh grade. People always asked me about it and I had to keep explaining that saying it’s a doomsday thing was a huge, huge overinterpretation. The twenty-first was an important day, no question, but not necessarily the end of anything, let alone everything. It’s only a big deal because there are a lot of deeply spiritual cretins out there, and they’re disappointed by the lack of disasters at the turn of the Christian millennium and the fact that 9/11 took their gurus completely by surprise. So they’re looking for another convenient deadline. Any time the world’s going to end, church pledges go up. Because, you know, why save? It’s an old scam ever young.
If you happen to be even one-eighth Native American, you already know how these airheads keep coming up to you and acting like you’ve got some kind of spiritual aura. If there’s an Indian character in a movie, chances are twenty to one that he’s got ESP at least, and probably telekinesis, hands of healing, and, somewhere, a third eye. And the 2012 thing is the worst. Everybody’s got a different interpretation, and the only common denominator between them is that they’re all wrong. The Maya tracked an asteroid that’s going to crash into the earth on that date. The Maya left their cities and flew to Venus and that’s the ETA of their return flight. The Maya knew that on that date there’d be a major earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a plague, a flash ice age, a drop in the sea level, or all five. They knew that on that date the earth’s poles would reverse. On that date our yellow sun’s going to go out and a blue sun will take its place. Quetzalcoatl is going to reemerge out of the transdimensional vortex in a jade-green flying saucer. The all-flowering oneness of the universal sea-sky-earth-goddess-truth is going to autopropagate through the cosmic oom. Time will get back in its bottle. Aurochs and mastodons will stampede down I-95. The Lost Continent of Mu will rise up out of the Galápagos Fracture Zone. The true Madhi, Joseph Smith Jr., will appear on the Golan Heights wearing a U2 T-shirt. Shirley MacLaine will shed her human form and reveal herself as Minona/Minerva/Mama Cocha/Yoko/Mori/Mariammar /Mbabamuwana/Minihaha. Scarlett Johansson will give birth to a snow-white bison. The NASDAQ will hit 3,000. Pigs will fly, beggars will ride, boys will be boys . . .
Although, on the other hand, you had to admit that the exactness of the date, 12/21/12, does have a sinister specificity about it that gives you a queasy feeling. I mean, it’s not like Nostradamus, where it’s so vague you can make up anything and it seems to fit. Of course, we, I mean, we Maya, had always been pretty sure of ourselves.
This is the long-awaited last date of the Long Count, the Mayans’ astonishingly accurate ritual calendar, which can be precisely correlated to days in the Christian one. A year from now, on this date, the current cycle of Mayan time comes to an end.
Weiner is dismissive of doomsday scenarios. “We weren’t planning to release this until a year or so from now, after the twenty-first,” he says. “People can get ridiculous, and besides, we wanted to finish the research.” However, he says, “With all the speculation about the comet, we thought we’d release some of the interesting Ixchel-related findings.”
Could the Mayans have timed their calendar to the appearances of Comet Ixchel? Its discoverers at Swinburne University, in New South Wales, who named their find after a Mayan goddess, clearly think so. Soon to be visible to the naked eye, Ixchel has a 5,125-year periodicity—or orbit—around the sun, meaning it was last seen in 3011 BC—Year One of the Mayan long-count calendar. If any ancient people could have honed in on its return, that people were the Mayans. Determined doomsayers will need to find some other threat: The ball of rock and frozen gases will miss the earth by at least fifty thousand miles.
For the 2.3 million Mayans still living in Central America, the date betokens something nearer home: The twenty-first has also been set as a limit for talks in the renewed treaty effort between the small Central American state of Belize, a British protectorate, and the Republic of Guatemala, which in 2010, for the fourth time in a hundred years of disagreement, again claimed Belize as its twenty-third state, or
departamento.
If the opportunity passes, the day might bring another era of disaster to the Mayans—but a resolution could begin a new era of peace in the troubled region.
U.S. efforts to aid the peace process have been complicated by the fact that the Mexican government has blamed a 2010 accelerator explosion in the Oaxacan city of Huajapan de León—in which over 30,000 people were killed—on Zapatistist indigenous-rights groups, Indian revolutionaries operating out of Guatemala and Belize. But if the region is not stabilized, there’s also media trouble ahead: Many observers fear that the International Olympic Committee might favor other sites than Belize for the 2020 Summer Games.
What clues are there in the Codex Nurnberg? Along with the astronomical data usual to Mayan texts, the book is said to mention both the date of the accelerator blast and a celestial event that could well be Comet Ixchel. Predicting the future based on images of “year-bearers” in the images of rabbits, centipedes . . .
Whoa.
The old squirt of tzam lic under my left thigh. Something wasn’t right about that last word.
Centipedes.
I couldn’t get a grip on what it was, though, and of course the harder I tried the more it slipped away. Come back to that one later.
. . . centipedes, blue deer, and green jaguars may seem a bit far-fetched. Interpretation will be, to say the least, a long and difficult process.
Aside from the Codex, does the divination game itself have anything to teach us? Professor Taro Mora, a physicist and specialist in prediction models who has been studying Mayan games with Weiner’s help, clearly thinks so. Mora, a spry sixty-eight-year-old who spends most of his eighteen-hour days “teaching computers to teach themselves,” waxes enthusiastic over its potential.
“There is much to learn from ancient approaches to science,” Mora says. “Just as we are using Go [an ancient Japanese strategy game] to help computers develop basic consciousness, we may use other games to teach them other things.”
Way to go, Tar babe. That’s the way to wax, if you want to wax at all.
Asked whether the game held any insights about the world’s eventual end, Mora joked, “No, but if the universe does disappear, at least we will know the Maya were on to something.”
Could the End Date foretell an unhappy event for the Mayan region, or even for the entire world? And if so, what should we do about it?
Many people’s answer seems to be, “When on Mayan time, do as the Mayans do.” Thousands of visitors from all over the world, and from all walks of life, are already planning trips to Chichén Itzá and other popular Mayan sites, waiting to salute the comet, greet the dawn, and ask the old gods for another five thousand-plus years for humanity. And while most of us wouldn’t go that far, we should be willing to entertain the possibility that the mysterious Mayans had far-reaching spiritual insights into their future—and, possibly, our own.
Pendejos,
I thought. Morons.
No, wait.
I’m
the moron.
The minute—well, the decade—that I leave Taro alone, he comes up with the goods. I felt like I’d held a stock for thirty years and sold it just before it took off.
Well, I thought, I certainly can’t just wait until you decide to publish. I need to see that game board this minute. This second. This picosecond.
I searched up Taro’s page. It said he was at the University of Central Florida, and that the lab was now being sponsored by grants from the UCF Corporate Exchange Program. And funding for the UCFCEP—as I found with only minimal snooping—had come from the catastrophe modeling team of the Simulated Trades Division of the Warren Investment Group. I remembered the company because it was a big employer in Salt Lake, and I’d seen in
Barron’s
that it had had some ethics problems with an alternate-energy thing a few years ago. Well, whatever.
I tried Taro’s old filter password. It still worked and got me into his personal box. I couldn’t come up with some other excuse for writing, so I just wrote that I’d seen the article and wondered if I could come by soon, like, say, later today. “Send,” I said. It sent.
Estas bien.
I switched the screens to tank monitor mode. It said the Gulf tank was low on calcium, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. Maybe he won’t write back, I thought. No, he would. One of the good things about now is how you can lose track of someone for years and then get back in touch in a trice. Or even a half a trice. Except you also need to come up with more excuses.
Hmm. 4 Ahau. 12/21/12. So it’s a big deal again.
Well, just wait until the twenty-second. Nothing gets old faster than an apocalypse that didn’t happen.
Right?