Grid of the Gods - Farrell - de Hart

7 M AYANS, M YTHS, AND M OUNDS: THE Mancient ANIPULATION M IND, Aancient ND M AN “Their day wasOF notMaATTER great ,one,these people only wanted conflict, their ancient names are not really divine, but fearful is the ancient evil of their faces.”

The Popol Vuh1 Having gone in the previous chapter from a survey of technological anomalies to a survey of the mythological and cultural contexts surrounding them, we now reverse the process, and go from the mythological context to the technological, to see if perhaps we can begin to peel back the layers of both to an understanding of the mysterious forces that people were trying to manipulate with them.

Accordingly, we shall focus here upon three sites — Tikal, Chichen Itza, and Teotihuacan — and one mythology, the Mayan?Popol Vuh. The beginning of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Meso-America in the sixteenth century saw the burning of many priceless records and books of the indigenous cultures, the records of thePopol Vuh, or The Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, among them.

Backed by means of persuasion that included gunpowder, instruments of torture, and the threat of eternal damnation, the invaders established a monopoly on virtually all forms of visible public expression, whether in drama, architecture, sculpture, painting or writing. In the highlands, when they realized that textile designs carried complex messages, they even attempted to ban the wearing of Mayan styles of clothing. Hundreds of hieroglyphic books were burned by missionaries, but they were still in use as late as the end of the seventeenth century in Yucatán and the beginning of the eighteenth in highland Guatemala.2 In the midst of this destruction, the Mayans acted to preserve their culture by adopting a rather clever strategy, using Christian saints to disguise references to the ancient gods and using Roman alphabetic characters “as a mask for ancient texts.”3 Humanity would know little, if anything, about the Mayan creation myths and