Grid of the Gods Read Online Free PDF Page A

records of the Popol 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 legends were it not for these efforts, for the Popol Vuh as we have it now was the effort to preserve in alphabetic writing those myths, an effort undertaken by the three noble houses of the Mayans: “the Cauecs, the Greathouses, and the Lord Quichés.” 4 The book itself, as extant today, is as much a mystery as its authors, and it is best to cite its English translator, Dennis Tedlock, at length here:
At the beginning of their book, the authors delicately describe the difficult circumstances under which they work. When they tell us that they are writing “amid the preaching of God, in Christendom now,” we can catch a plaintive tone only by noticing that they make this statement immediately after asserting that their own gods “accounted for everything — and did it, too — as enlightened beings, in enlightened words.” What the authors propose to write down is what Quichés call the Ojer Tzij , the “Ancient Word” or “Prior Word,” which has precedence over “the preaching of God.” They have chosen to do so because “there is no longer” a Popol Vuh, which makes it sound as though they intend to re-create the original book solely on the basis of their memory of what they have seen in its pages or heard in the long performance. But when we remember their complaint about being “in Christendom,” there remains the possibility that they still have the original book but are protecting it from possible destruction by missionaries. Indeed, their next words make us wonder whether the book might still exist, but they no sooner raise our hopes on this front than they remove the book’s reader from our grasp: “There is the original book and ancient writing, but the one who reads and assesses it has a hidden identity.” ...If they are protecting anyone with their enigmatic statements about an inaccessible book or an anonymous reader, it could well be themselves. 5 Fascinating as the history of the Popol Vuh and Mayan culture are, however, our attention must remain fixed upon its contents and its implications for our study of the Grid. But before we examine its contents, one last point must be mentioned, for one of the things that clearly emerges from Mayan culture is that its frequent references to a place called “Tulan” or “Tula” mean precisely the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan, outside of Mexico City. 6 We shall have much to say about this site later in this chapter.
    A. The Popol Vuh
1. The Primordial Triad and Differentiation:
The Topological Metaphor, Mayan Style
     
    Like the Hindu cosmology laid out in stone reliefs at Angkor Wat, The Popol Vuh begins in an abyss of mystery, an abyss laid out in eloquent and elegantly simple words and imagery whose power is made even more manifest by their poetic simplicity:
    This is the account, here it is:
Now it still ripples, now it still murmurs, ripples, it still sighs, still hums, and it is empty under the sky .
Here