“And, though I can’t explain how it happened, my memory was somehow erased. In my mind I can see every detail of that ceremony, but since that day I have never been able to remember where is the field where those things are buried,” Carlos averred.
He hung out with the Tibetan group for the next few days and learned that the lamas had been traveling a 10,000-mile path, repeating this ceremony at key geomagnetic nodal points along the way, in order to shift the Earth’s sacred energy field from the Old World, Mount Kailas, also known as Kang Rinpoche or Precious Snow Jewel, in the Himalayas, to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.
“My imagination was so excited by all of this that I decided then and there that I had to go to Tibet. But the visa and the ticket were very expensive, $10,000, so I sent to my father asking him for the money. He sent back a telegram that said, ‘Ha ha ha!’ ” recalled Carlos, still chuckling forty years later.
Carlos is an Ajq’ij, a Mayan priest. He is trained in the use of earth, air, water, and fire, which, as in many indigenous traditions, are the four basic elements. Mayan shamans specialize in the use of one of these elements to heal, to predict the future, and to harmonize space. Carlos’s specialty is fire, which re-creates the power of the Sun. Once again Kukulcán, the feathered god, snakes my attention as Carlos explains that fire is the door to other dimensions, the “stargate,” or portal, through which the great wise men and women of the past are returning. According to contemporary Mayan belief, the ancestors already have started to come back and are mixing in with the population. They are not, Carlos says, interested in being recognized. By 2012 they will all have returned to fulfill the sacred mission of that momentous year.
“The Resurrection is being accomplished in the children being born today. Everyone who was ever born and died in the past will have returned by 2012,” said Carlos, nodding when I asked if the world’s population explosion is evidence of this mass reincarnation. He explained that there’s always a reason a soul’s incarnation cycle hits a dead end. For some souls, the stumbling block may be love, for others, courage.
“Between now and 2012, we all will have an opportunity to face, and overcome, the challenges to our personal evolution. Those who pass their tests will move on to enjoy an enlightened new era.” Carlos added that those who fail will be stuck in this dimension for many thousands of years, at which point presumably they will get another chance to take the test.
Carlos’s brother, Gerardo Barrios, coauthor of The Maya Cholqij, arrived. The sensitive caveman, long black hair and beard, not a hint of gray even though he is at least sixty, ordered a papaya soy shake. Carlos and I got another beer.
“Why are you writing a book about 2012?” demanded Gerardo, catching me off guard. Journalists, like all other prosecutors, are there to ask the questions, not answer them.
“It was the only thing I could do to feel better,” I blurted. Nonsense vomited all over the lunch table. I covered by claiming that what I really meant to say was that I had been going through a divorce and found the work a welcome distraction. “I feel bad, so the rest of the world must die,” I deadpanned.
Carlos smiled at the joke, but Gerardo wasn’t so sure about the crazy gringo.
“The year 2012 is a seam in time, the juncture of two different ages,” said Gerardo. “Death, possibly a great deal of it, will be part of that transition.”
Is 2012 the equivalent of a “punctuated equilibrium,” Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the jumps and rough transitions by which evolution proceeds? Or, in the language of cybernetics, will we in 2012 make the leap from one steady state to the next? Gerardo nodded, but then modified his assent.
“The change will be gradual, more like the deepening of twilight than the flick of a switch.”
Twilight fades fast, which means we’d better bone up for this test.
“The elders say that in the new time coming, after 2012, pain and happiness will be shared more and more. Mass communication makes us more like brothers and sisters, more like a family. In 2012 there will also be collective tests in harmony and understanding,” said Gerardo.
I noticed that Kukulcán, the snake-bird, tugged at my eyes only when Carlos spoke; he seemed an other-worldly feathered serpent himself. By contrast, there is 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