Posts Tagged ‘Mayan’

The Temple of the Inscriptions

The History Channel got my attention this week, running almost constant stories about ancient alien astronauts…a lot of it centered on the Mayan culture. How could I NOT be attracted to aliens, ancient space travel, and the Maya? In earlier days, I spent a lot of time hiking through ruins and hacking through jungles while dodging snakes…and monkeys. Actually, monkeys are worse than snakes in a way. If you make one of them mad, they ALL gather above and urinate on you. NOBODY messes with monkeys.
I even visited Palenque, an impressive and beautifully restored Mayan site situated at the base of a small mountain with temples peeking through foliage almost all the way to the top…except for one spot. About halfway up, one of them was truncated, only a flat platform. When I asked my guide, an archaeology student from Mexico City, why he thought they had left it that way, he answered very softly, almost whispering, “That’s where they landed.”
When I asked him what the hell he meant, he told me about a man who was exploring the ruins at the time. He usually met with the guides at night and told them stories about ancient astronauts, aliens visiting the area in space craft. Now…this was the first time I had ever heard such stories, and Palenque is way out in the middle of jungle and nowhere, a perfect spot for nuts and screwballs to accumulate.

Small Temples at Palenque

A little wild, the settlement is tiny, mostly populated by indians and occasional TV crews and archaeologists. The two-room hotel’s phone number was three, and when I asked my guide who were one and two, he said the mayor was two but the one guy had died. In a place like that I wasn’t about to get dragged into a conversation with somebody who saw aliens visiting that isolated spot, so I told him it was complete nonsense and he should stop listening to that guy, whoever he was.
He took that kind of badly and was clearly upset when we went to see Pacal’s tomb in the base of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Actually, it was just below ground level, but to get to it you had to climb all the way up the damned thing then back down on a dark, dank, slippery stairway…with a flashlight. When we got to the tomb, he instructed me to shine my light with his on the tomb cover…and there it was, a carving of an ancient astronaut.
There’s no other way to describe it. Seated in a capsule with all sorts of knobs and instruments around him, a typical Mayan figure was moving something with his hand, one foot on some sort of pedal. There were even flames coming out of the back of the vehicle…completely different from all the other Mayan carvings I had ever seen, completely strange and very unsettling.
Two other events at Palenque are lodged in my memory. One was personal, but it’s one of my favorite stories. After we had hiked around for a couple of hours, much of it up the mountainside, I was beginning to suffer from the heat and oppressive humidity. The guide took me to a large, raised bowl-like pool at the base of the mountain and told me it was the queen’s bath, cooled by a waterfall and wonderfully clear and pure…most likely snowmelt from peaks in the distance.
When he told me I should have a swim, I told him I hadn’t brought a swimsuit, but he assured me the only people likely to be around were Mayan indians and they ran around nearly naked most of the time anyway. They wouldn’t mind…so I stripped and climbed in. He told me I should join him at the main camp when I had cooled off…and the pool was wonderful, about twenty feet across, a good five feet deep at the center, and overflowing with refreshingly cool water raining in above.
I was having a spectacular time when I heard a voice from the jungle. “Excuse me, young man, do you speak English?” I had been discovered by five ladies from the Southern Baptist Convention…viewing ruins after visiting missionaries. Somehow, they’d been separated from their guide and were quite lost. “Hang on, Ladies, I can help you, but you gotta go back in the jungle a little way for a minute or two.”
I could hear their conversation while I dressed. “Emma, he was NAKED!” “I know, Bess, but he’s all we have. We’re LOST! Just stick close together.” I took them to the main camp and found their lost guide while the church ladies shuffled in a tight, pastel little circle far behind…constantly keeping their eyes on me. At camp they were given water and some food, which they relished…but they stayed as far away from me as possible. The whole episode amused my guide no end.
He kept giggling when I joined him for further exploration of those magnificent ruins, and toward evening, a man up on a temple platform waved to us. “That’s him!” he said, “the guy I was telling you about. I told him what you said and he wants to meet you.” By that time, I wasn’t interested in further adventure. I was tired and the church ladies already thought I was crazy. Talking to that nut would only prove it, so I said no.
Despite my feelings about ancient astronauts, my guide and I parted friends. I never saw him again, but I DID see that other guy one day…actually, not the guy himself but a life-size cardboard cutout. I was walking past a bookstore on Canal Street in New Orleans and there he was, Erich Von Daniken, the author Chariots of the Gods. I had actually SNUBBED the famous writer…and he wasn’t a nut. He was crazy like a fox…and very successful.
Of course, I bought his book; I kind of had to, but it took me a long time to change my way of thinking. These days I find I agree with much more than I did that day in the ruins when I first heard his ideas. Maybe that WAS a landing platform and aliens HAD visited Palenque in the ancient past. Maybe they even swam in that wonderful pool. I’m writing my own books now…and keeping an open mind; I have to. Too much has happened to me since then…and there’s still that tomb cover I can’t explain away.