The 2012 Story (40 page)

But we haven’t gotten yet to the bomb. Michael is an epigrapher, having worked for years as a grad student under Macri and Looper, compiling the new catalogue of Maya hieroglyphs and the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project. He can read the inscriptions, and he said the text associated with the eclipse date could very well be read as an “eclipse of the moon in the celestial caiman.”
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Like Stela C from Copán, it indicates that the dark rift was envisioned as a portal into the celestial caiman! Michael also pointed out that there are crossed bands in the eyes of the caiman glyph, significant as a symbol for the cross formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic (which targets the southern terminus of the dark rift). I e-mailed him back with the further observation that the next date in the hieroglyphic corpus from Tortuguero, the Tun ending from Jade Celt 1, was 174 days after the eclipse text—the eclipse half-year period, indicating when the next eclipse was likely to occur.

Michael responded that evening with a report that he had just completed a thorough examination of the text on Monument 6 and couldn’t believe what he had found. He said he was tracking the events in the life of Balam Ajaw, the king who ruled when Monument 6 was dedicated. It was apparent that the king had a special relationship with Bolon Yokte, the deity who appears on the 2012 date and has transformation and warring attributes. Balam Ajaw was somewhat of an aggressive reformer, transforming his kingdom through waging wars on neighboring kingdoms. These kinds of rulers typically saw themselves as following a divine mandate, blessed by the culture heroes and creation deities. In the same way that Pakal, the king of Palenque, and 18 Rabbit, the king of Copán, created propaganda monuments that placed them into mythic narratives with cosmological Creation events, Balam Ajaw claimed Bolon Yokte as his totem and 2012 as his cosmological mandate. He, too, would create a new world, a new kingdom, through the auspices of his tutelary creation deity. In the same way that 2012 could be called upon to consecrate a house or building dedication, it could also be invoked to confer blessings and legitimacy on a
royal
house.

This scenario makes sense, but what Michael found really nails it to the wall: Balam Ajaw was born between November 28 and December 8, 612 AD (one of the dot-and-bar sections is eroded), with the probability being for December 3. This means, importantly, that he was born when the sun was precisely in the dark rift. These hierophanies did not go unnoticed in the Maya world. Wars were timed with Venus movements, eclipses had their auguries, and we’ve already seen that the dark rift was depicted in the iconography in specific ways involving birth and transformation themes. Balam Ajaw’s birth, and therefore his identity, was seen to have a special connection with the Creation events—not those of 3114 BC as at Quiriguá and Copán, but those of the future cosmogenesis event, in 2012. That sounds reasonable enough, but the smoking gun lies in recognizing the only reason why this would be so. And that is because the astronomical configuration of his birth was analogous to
what they knew
would be happening in 2012: the solstice sun in the dark rift. The key that makes the 2012 scenario unique is that it involves the solstice sun, but the parallelism was clearly compelling enough for Balam Ajaw to claim a special relationship with 2012 and the deity connected with it, Bolon Yokte Ku.

Michael found further support for the above precessional calculation elsewhere in the text from Tortuguero Monument 6, which mentions another date on an exact winter solstice on 9.10.17.02.14, as well as another pair of dates separated by 137 years, 9.03.16.01.11 and 9.10.15.01.11, which place the sun in the exact same sidereal position, while the tropical year has shifted by two days.

Dr. Aveni, in his talk at Tulane, said there was no evidence that the Maya made forward projections in their calendrical calculations and rituals. This is abundantly untrue, the best example being how Pakal, the king of Palenque, noted a special connection he had with a 20-Baktun cycle ending, one that comes to pass in the forty-eighth century AD. He found it useful, as a political stratagem, because it just so happened that the date of his own coronation (his ritual birthing as king) fell on the same day in the solar year that this far-future cycle ending will fall on. He, like his contemporary Balam Ajaw, cast himself into the narrative of creation to increase his status in the eyes of his subjects. Both used their own “birth” event as a connection point to the cosmological birth of a large period-ending, understood to be a World Age birth. He may have done this as a copycat to what Balam Ajaw did, also perhaps one-upping the Tortuguero king by using a larger cycle of 20 Baktuns.

The king of Copán, 18 Rabbit, did something a little different with the dark rift. After showing himself on 9.14.0.0.0 as the sun-king in the dark rift, he erected a series of stelae in the great plaza of Copán. His Maya name, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil, references the deity K’awil. In the many inscriptions he recorded, he honored a ritual involving K’awil performed by one of his lineage ancestors on a Baktun ending, 9.0.0.0.0. Other inscriptions infer that he likewise wished to claim the next Baktun ending, in 830 AD, as his own. Since he ruled in the early eighth century, that would be too far off for him to live through, but he nevertheless needed to relate himself to cycle endings and their attendant creation imagery. His entire corpus of inscriptions, building dedications, and activities are astounding and require thorough investigation.
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What follows provides more evidence for the role of the dark rift in transformational creation imagery, with a special focus on the motif of sacrifice that the Maya believed was necessary at cycle endings.

Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s namesake, K’awil, is the deity associated with God K and the planet Jupiter. Helen Alexander writes that God K “is the power behind conjuring, transformation, and transcendence in Maya ritual practice; he is the essence of the
och chan
, the bearded dragon of
Xibalba
; he is the essence of the sacred dance that empowers the Maize God to dance out of
Xibalba
; he is the essence of human royal power that allows mankind access to the cosmos from the heavens down to earth and into
Xibalba
itself.”
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A strange event brought this king’s forty-three-year reign to a sudden, perplexing close. In 738 AD, just after he made the final dedication on his new ballcourt complex at Copán, he was captured by K’ak Tiliw, the king of nearby Quiriguá, and held prisoner. No resistance, no Copán militia was sent to rescue him. On the solar zenith passage day, May 1, he was marched into the Quiriguá plaza and decapitated. This ritual sacrifice was reminiscent of the beheading of One Hunahpu by the lords of the underworld in
The Popol Vuh
. The event is recorded in four surviving inscriptions at Quiriguá and Copán. The most official report, from Quiriguá Stela F, reads: “He is decapitated, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil; under the supervision of K’ak Tiliw, it happened at the Black Hole place.”
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The black hole? Years ago, in a review-essay I wrote on place-names and Maya Creation Texts, I concluded that the hiero-glyph translated as “black hole” probably represented the dark rift in the Milky Way.
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So I suspected that something relevant happened in the dark rift on the day of his decapitation. Looking at astronomy software, there it was, the most appropriate possible astronomical configuration one could imagine: Jupiter was perfectly aligned with the dark rift. Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s head, Jupiter, the dark rift, transformation, sacrifice, Creation Myth themes, are all wrapped up in this event.

Most strikingly, because of the odd circumstances of this important event in Maya history, namely its providential timing, we must entertain the possibility that the Copán King went willingly into the black hole and his sacrificer was accomplice to a historically enacted mystery play. Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s apotheosis ensured his legacy by laying him to rest in the heart of heaven. We think of the Passion of the Christ as a mystery play full of drama and theological significance. These events at Copán may have had a similar powerful purpose and meaning for the ancient Maya. If Jesus could willingly go to the cross, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil could willingly drop his head into the dark rift. As we can see, calendrical inscriptions indict meaningful astronomical configurations intimately involved with the end-date alignment theory.

The “black hole” glyph can clearly be identified with the dark rift. The controversial half-eroded glyph next to the Tortuguero 2012 inscription is identified, with fair confidence, as containing a “black” element. Scholars, such as Susan Milbrath, believe that the dark rift is associated with skeletal maw imagery.
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The Black Hole glyph, for example, is miniature shorthand for skeletal jaws, also sometimes identified as incised bones. An entire range of hieroglyphs can now be suspected as being related to the dark rift and the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center (see cloud center glyphs, page 274).
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These are found in meaningful ballgame contexts and in relation to other monuments dated 9.14.0.0.0 (sun in dark-rift date) at Tikal, Calakmul, and Dos Pilas.

Yaxchilán provides a special example for a probable dark-rift association in its place-name,
Pa’ Chan
. Translated as “broken sky” or “sky cleft,” epigraphers think it represents jagged mountains along the horizon or refers to the fact that Yaxchilán is situated in a dramatic hairpin loop of the Usumacinta River. It is recognized that Yaxchilán is just about halfway between the source and mouth of the Usumacinta River, placing it in its “middle.” This great riverine highway of temple sites flows roughly north-south. In many places in Indian America and in fact around the world, rivers were seen as earthly counterparts to the celestial river, the Milky Way. The sacred Urubamba in Peru, the river flowing through Rabinal in highland Guatemala, and the great Ganges in India are just a few examples. It would be surprising if the Usumacinta did not have this meaning for the Maya. In this context, Yaxchilán’s location in a hairpin coil of the earthly Milky Way is reminiscent of the dark rift’s situation between two white branches of the Milky Way. Since the dark rift’s mythological meanings include hole, cave, cleft, portal, road, birthplace, and maw, to say it could be thought of as a “sky cleft” is not at all far-fetched. Could this be the meaning of Yaxchilán’s hieroglyphic place-name? Maybe. It sounds more reasonable, given these considerations, than its representing jagged peaks along the horizon.
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The dark rift was a significant reference point in so many different meaningful contexts it boggles the mind. When the sun, moon, eclipses, Jupiter, or other planets aligned with it, Creation imagery occurring at cycle endings, building dedications, transcendence and transformation, death and rebirth were evoked. I suspect that other inscriptions will yield secondary references to 2012 via the astronomical image-complex of “sun in dark rift.” The epigraphic code for this will probably involve the many dark-rift glyphs combined with a “sun” infix or prefix. I argued in earlier work that the upturned frog-mouth glyph (which means “to be born”) relates to the dark rift. Significantly, it is prominent in the iconography at Izapa and is found in its later hieroglyphic forms in Classic Period inscriptions.

We shouldn’t forget that this new evidence augments my previous work, which argues for the end-date alignment being encoded into ballgame symbolism, the Creation Myth, birthing symbology, and king-making rites. The “integrative continuity” of the entire picture virtually eliminates the possibility that all of these connections are pure chance. This work may perhaps find its best ally in good old-fashioned common sense: “Given the integrative continuity of its monuments, sculptures, calendrics, and alignments, is it possible that Izapa
does not
have anything to do with the precessional convergence of Milky Way and solstice sun?”
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Thankfully, Barb MacLeod herself said the obvious: “It’s not a coincidence.”