a darkness to Gerardo that is immensely appealing. He’s the man you’d want along with you on a descent into the underworld, the realm of Balam, the black jaguar god in Mayan mythology.
Gerardo was, in fact, trained in darkness, placed in a tiny, pitch-black room deep underground for about two weeks. After a while he lost all track of time and space, night and day. He began to hallucinate and soon was able to visualize separately and distinctly hundreds of Mayan hieroglyphs used in their various calendars. In the black room he also heard a secret language he did not understand, though he was sure, if he paid attention, the language would one day help guide his prognostications.
Immersion in darkness is a theme in Mayan shaman training. Gerardo explains that sometimes the elders know a child is destined to become a great shaman while still in the womb. When the baby is born, they wrap thirteen bandages around its head, covering the eyes. Those bandages will stay on until the child is either nine or thirteen years old, loosened periodically as the head grows. The elders do this to sharpen the young shaman’s other senses and also to enable him or her to read auras. In the final year of this imposed blindness, one bandage is removed each lunar month, so the eyes gradually get used to the light. The final bandage is removed inside a sacred cave, gently illuminated by candles. The first thing the young shaman focuses on is a Mayan codex, an ancient sacred book made of bark paper and deerskin and filled with colorful, intricate hieroglyphs, the same ones Gerardo visualized.
Lore has it that some ancient astronomers knew the sky so well that they could be kept in the dark for weeks until they lost all track of time and space. Then, on the first night they were brought out to observe, these astronomers could look up at the sky, sift through their memory, and tell the exact day and date by the position of the stars.
IT HAS ONLY BEEN for about half a century or so, a tiny fraction of human history, that mass communications have made it possible for us to respond emotionally to situations such as the Indian Ocean tsunami. Gerardo therefore observed that humanity is still in its infancy in its ability to empathize with the feelings of people far away. Nonetheless such empathy is crucial for the survival and transcendence of the species, which is why this skill is part of the coming reckoning.
The coming reckoning … are we talking Judgment Day?
Gerardo explained that in different stages of human history different messiahs come. This is an age where there will be lots of small guides, rather than one great messiah, according to the elders.
Gerardo booted up his awesome HP laptop, and the giant screen filled with images of elders, most men, mostly old, all with penetrating gazes. He and Carlos spent twenty years going from village to village throughout the Mayan territories in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, searching out these elders. Some were still living in the same caves to which their ancestors had retreated to escape the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest that nearly extinguished the Mayan culture.
Gerardo has personally seen six codices saved from the Inquisition and is aware of the existence of several others. But the Mayan elders safeguarding these sacred texts have shown little interest in sharing the contents with Anglo-European scholars. Once burned, twice shy.
“It is not yet time to reveal their secrets,” he huffed.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISTS
For a moment during lunch with Carlos and Gerardo at Arbol de Vita, I caught myself wondering if maybe the whole 2012 apocalypse thing weren’t some sort of sneaky Mayan revenge hoax on the North. Lord knows they have their reasons. Sitting in the same restaurant where Sonny and Cher had actually once dined, it struck me that damn near every winner of every Academy Award, Emmy, Golden Globe, Grammy, People’s Choice, you name it, had had their children raised, their homes kept, and/or their gardens tended for a comparative pittance by labor, legal and illegal, provided by Mexicans and Central Americans of Mayan or other indigenous descent, none of whom had ever received so much as one of those thank-yous that gush like cheap champagne throughout the award show proceedings. It’s macabre, the dichotomy of how famous are Hollywood glitterati and how invisible are these people who hold the stars’ lives (frequently very messy) together.
The Barrios brothers shrugged at Hollywood’s condescension but boiled when I brought up the subject of archaeologists, who are a pet peeve with the Maya and many other indigenous cultures. Gross inaccuracies, cultural biases, self-aggrandizing personal agendas—the litany of complaints against archaeologists is endless, though in truth these are more criticisms of bad archaeology than of the discipline itself. For example, the image that emerges from centuries of “scholarship” on the ancient Mayan ball game, where two teams kicked a latex rubber ball up and down the field and attempted to put it through a hoop, is that the game was bloodthirsty, because it ended with the execution of certain players. In truth it was rather civilized. Instead of going to war over key trade routes, feuding parties would field their best teams. Losers would be sacrificed, preventing a much larger bloodbath on the battlefield. True, there were times when slaves were forced to play, and the losers killed for no other reason than blood sport, but that was an abuse of an otherwise reasonable war substitute.
There were also times when the winners met their death. For major celebrations, such as the end of a sacred fifty-two-year cycle, it was not unusual for Maya to volunteer themselves for sacrifice. What a way to go! In Tikal, for example, throngs of extravagantly clad citizens would fill the plaza, sitting before the steps of the pyramid of the Giant Jaguar, where priests dressed as animal and mythic entities performed rituals that taught basic Mayan precepts of cosmology and morality. The possibility of being sacrificed as part of this festivity drew more hopefuls than could be accommodated, so the candidates were divided up into teams that played the ball game. The winners got their reward.
What rankles deeper is the archaeologists’ presumption that they are rediscovering “lost” cultures. How insulted would the average Italian person be if it were generally assumed that the fall of the Roman Empire meant that all of its linguistic, cultural, and technological accomplishments were lost by descendants too ignorant or careless to preserve the legacy? The Maya do a slow burn when self-impressed scholars elbow their way past native elders filled with the wisdom of the ages to foist their own interpretations on ruins and hieroglyphs.
The cultural imperialists’ need to discover something that they are sure all indigenous sages have somehow overlooked can be vexing. For example, John Major Jenkins, author of Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, a dogged freelancer who, by sheer dint of will, has thrust himself into the debate over Mayan history and culture, believes that Izapa, a little-known ruin just across the Mexican border, was the center of an empire that eventually gave rise to the Maya. Jenkins deploys page after page of complex and frequently far-fetched calculations using maps, calendars, and sky charts to bolster Izapa’s prehistoric legacy. The Barrios brothers politely acknowledge the scholarly interest but strain with ennui when told by outsiders that Izapa is their true Vatican.
Archaeologists are impertinent. They compare cultures, and rate them on scales: technological development, legal codes, governance structures, and health and sanitary systems. Under the Mayan column, there’s no check in the box marked “invented the wheel,” a very touchy subject. Although the Mayan ancients grasped the concept of circles, cycles, and orbits more thoroughly than any of their contemporaries and in some ways better than we do today, they never translated that concept into actual, tangible wheels. Neither did any arches grace ancient Mayan architecture, roughly covering the two-millennia span from 100 BCE to 1000 CE, millennia after other cultures had discovered the beauty and utility of the curve.
All too often, archaeologists become lightning rods for a culture’s insecurities. The Barrios brothers’ feeble rejoinders that wheels wouldn’t have worked so well in the jungle are easily dismissed when one visits the massive Mayan temples and wonders whether those diminutive slaves whose job it was to hoist 110-pound
