Grid of the Gods (34 page)

Thus the name, “Plumed Serpent.” They are great knowers, great thinkers in their very being.

And of course there is the sky, and there is also the Heart of Sky. This is the name of the god, as it is spoken.

And then came his word, he came here to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, here in the blackness, in the early dawn.... Thunderbolt
Hurricane comes first, the second is Newborn Thunderbolt, and the third is Sudden Thunderbolt.

So there were three of them...
⁷

By now, this powerful, evocative imagery should recall the image of Vishnu at Angkor Wat, superintending the cosmic tug-of-war of the great
naga
serpent in the Milky Ocean.

Yet, this appears half a world away, in an entirely different culture!

Note too, that the
topological metaphor
of a primordial trinity is preserved. Everything begins as an emptiness “under the sky” and there is not yet any differentiation within it: “there is not yet one person, one animal” and so on. There is only an empty sky, and pooled water at rest beneath it. The only thing existing is Sovereign Plumed Serpent and a mysterious reference to “Bearers” and “Begetters in the water” who are described as “great knowers, great thinkers in their very being,” who are later found, just like Vishnu, to be manifestations of Sovereign Plumed Serpent.

The
Popol Vuh
is telling us, in other words, the same thing we saw at Angkor Wat: there is a primordial “nothing”, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, and then there is a primordial “trinity,” of endless indistinct “sky” and below it a “sea”,
and the implied common surface between the two.
Nothing else whatsoever, at this juncture, exists, except a faint “murmuring” and “rippling” in the night, implying somehow that
sound
,
frequency
,
vibration
give rise to all the fecund distinctions and variety to follow.

Indeed, at the very beginning, the
Popol Vuh
informs us that “This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called Quiché. Here we shall inscribe, we shall
implant
the Ancient Word,
the potential and source for everything done
...in the nation of the Quiché people.”
⁸
Note that the Ancient Word is something to be
implanted
, again recalling the imagery of Vishnu ejaculating into the primordial sea, which was but himself under another manifestation. Note too the very suggestive notion that this Word, this sound or vibration as it were, is “the potential and source for everything done,” that is, that all the diversity that arises, arises from this pure and infinite potential.

Consequently, it would appear that the
Popol Vuh
, in its very opening pages, is suggesting the very
same
topological metaphor of the physical medium that we encountered in chapter three, in connection with Vishnu’s “trifurcation” and differentiation of himself as a primordial Nothing, and that we also discovered operative in some passages in the
Hermetica
, which were of
Egyptian
provenance, only here the metaphor of that “differentiated Nothing” is even more clearly suggested by the notion of an endless sky and endless sea, in neither of which nothing else exists; there is only the sky, the sea, and the surface touching, differentiating, or bracketing, both; again we have three entities of yet another primordial triad.

Thus, our chart from chapter three now looks like this:

So now, we may add to what we stated about this topological metaphor of the medium in chapter three, for now we encounter yet more imagery — sky, sea, and the implied surface between the two — all saying the same thing: that we are dealing with a differentiated Nothing, whose first differentiation must always be triadic or trinitarian in nature:

1) the “bracketed” region of Nothing, or
, Hermes’ “Kosmos”, the
Padama Purana’s
Shiva, and now, the
Popol Vuh’s
“sky”;

2) the
rest
of the Nothing, or
, Hermes’ “God,” the
Padama Purana’s
Vishnu, and now, the
Popol Vuh’s
“sea”; and,

3) the “surface” Nothing that the two regions share, or
, Hermes’ “Space,” the
Padama Purana’s
Brahma, and now, the
Popol Vuh’s
implied common surface between “sea” and “sky”.

However, the
Popol Vuh
goes on to make an even more interesting and suggestive set of statements that would seem to associate the creation of mankind itself with this process of emerging differentiation from some sort of
materia prima
or “primordial nothing.”

2. The Engineering of Man

Very quickly after this account of the initial “trifurcation” of creation, the
Popol Vuh
moves to the creation of mankind himself, after the creation of land and animals,
⁹
and it does so once again, in equally evocative, elegant, and powerful poetic imagery:

Again there comes an experiment with the human work, the human design, by the Maker, Modeler, Bearer, Begetter:

“It must simply be tried again. The time for the planting and dawning is nearing. For this we must made a provider and nurturer. How else can we be invoked and remembered on the face of the earth? We have already made our first try at our work and design, but it turned out that they didn’t keep our days, nor did they glorify us.

“So now let’s try to make a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer,” they said.

“So then comes the building and working with earth and mud. They made a body, but it didn’t look good to them. It was just separating, just crumbling, just loosening, just softening, just disintegrating, and just dissolving. Its head wouldn’t turn, either. Its face was just lopsided, its face was just twisted. It couldn’t look
around. It talked at first, but senselessly. It was quickly dissolving in the water.

“It won’t last,” the mason and sculptor said then. “It seems to be dwindling away, so let it just dwindle. It can’t walk and it can’t multiply, so let it be merely a thought,” they said.

So then they dismantled, again they brought down their work and design.
¹⁰

Note that the rough order of creation in the Mayan mythology is that of the biblical Genesis: land forms, then animals of various types, and then finally this first “protohuman.”

But what is very
different
about the Mayan version is the clear indication that mankind is the result of an
experiment
, one that was for the express purpose of creating intelligent servants to “the gods.” In other words, the Mayans are reproducing, centuries later, and half a world and an ocean away, and what was first suggested in the texts of Mesopotamia: mankind was an engineered creation, created for the express purpose of servitude to the gods. He was
property.
¹¹
Life, on this view, was less a
gift
, than a
debt
to be paid in endless service.

The
Popol Vuh
gives a further hint of this concept of mankind as an experiment, and with it, the Flood is introduced:

This was the peopling of the face of the earth:

They came into being, they multiplied, they had daughters, they had sons, these manikins, woodcarvings. But there was nothing in their hearts and nothing in their minds, no memory of their mason and builder. They just went and walked wherever they wanted. Now they did not remember the Heart of Sky.

And so they fell, just an experiment and just a cutout for humankind. They were talking at first but their faces were dry. They were not yet developed in the legs and arms. They had no blood, no lymph. Their complexions were dry, their faces were crusty. They flailed their legs and arms, their bodies were deformed.

And so they accomplished nothing before the Maker, Modeler who gave them birth, gave them heart. They became the first numerous people here on the face of the earth.

Again there comes a humiliation, destruction, and demolition. The manikins, woodcarvings were killed when the Heart of Sky devised a flood for them. A great flood was made; it came down on the heads of the manikins, woodcarvings.
¹²

A little further on, there is even more commentary:

Such was the scattering of the human work, the human design. The people were ground down, overthrown. The mouths and faces of all of them were destroyed and crushed. And it used to be said that the monkeys in the forests today are a sign of this. They were left as a sign because wood alone was used for their flesh by the builder and sculptor.

So this is why monkeys look like people: they are a sign of a previous human work, human design — mere manikins, mere woodcarvings.
¹³

In other words, there is no notion or conception of anything resembling evolutionary theory; rather, monkeys are the signs of another failed attempt at “the human work and design.”

3. The Primordial “Masculine Homosexual Androgyny” of Man and the Tower of Babel Moment

The strangest aspect of the Mayan account of the creation of mankind is its suggestion of a kind of “primordial masculine homosexual androgyny” for the creature, and its coupling of the subsequent division of the sexes with a loss of human knowledge and intellectual power in a kind of Tower of Babel moment.