Forward to the Series
These papers deal with unusual themes; they attempt to reconcile the European and American Mystery Traditions. Some of the ideas will therefore seem strange if one has no background for them. For those conversant with Rudolf Steiner's material and style, reading from the beginning will present no particular problem, although referral to his source material (Appendix I of Section II) might be necessary.
The material herein does not lend itself to either a novelistic or a quick-read, gee-whiz manner of presentation, so those of us spoiled by either high literature or pop culture may have a bit of a tough time with it. Hopefully, the significance of the content is such that the reader will find him- or her-self engaged - if not challenged.
As Steiner requires - and Wittgenstein states:
“I should not like my writing to spare people the trouble of thinking.”
Our crises are deep and manifold, our solutions will not be obtained without the most rigorous, penetrating, agenda-free, and unconventional scrutiny.
If I have not made at least a good start in this, I will consider myself to have succeeded in my intention if you, dear reader, are impelled to do different, or better.
Best Wishes and Warm Regards,
Stephen Clarke
American Chapters - Section I
Mythos, Undertow, & Destiny
“The past is never dead.
It's not even past.”
- William Faulkner
“The mission of man is to remember. To remember
to remember. To taste everything in eternity
as once in time. All happens only once but that
is forever.”
- Henry Miller
“The Future ain't what it used to be.”
- Yogi Berra
rev. 3 -28 - 2003
The first time around (Section II, in this edition), we started from Rudolf Steiner's indications about what happened two thousand years ago in Mexico, and tried to bring them into relation with some of what can be known about such events from current scholarship and research.
This installment will proceed from in an alternate direction. We shall start, not from the Cosmic Vision of a respected initiate who looks directly into the nature and events of a past age, but from the personal perspective of a more ordinary individual who proceeds backwards from Year 2002, from the ground of a very particular slice of American soil. Those writing on the topic as a result of different life-experiences or from an upbringing arising from a different part of the Continent would write a different piece. I sincerely hope that there are some who will do so!
This report is an expanded and revised version of a presentation made to a small Santa Fe, NM working group in the later part of the year 2000, originally entitled: America, The Bomb, and Our Own Dark Goddess - An Introduction to the Deep Background of Los Alamos National Laboratories, but it has long since burst its birth-bonds. It can be read as an historical analysis, as a collated set of diary entries, or as a meditational workbook. In the last resort, it is my story; a fragment of my biography. Face-to-face, it would recount differently. Although I have made every effort to relate my speculations to what is known through the work of others, the results and any mistakes herein are my own, and I can and will answer for them. My approach is eclectic; I do not work from Steinerian - or any other - doctrine. Just as one cannot make a gumbo from one ingredient, neither have I attempted to derive everything from one source.
Los Alamos is the birthplace of the atomic bomb and a prime hub of the post-WWII military-industrial complex. The intent of this piece is to look at the implications of America's pre-Columbian spiritual culture from the perspective of 21st C. USA and to establish a foundation for this juxtaposition.
The rise of the USA into the reigning world power in the aftermath of WWII and the Cold War (which impacted unresolved conflicts into a world-wide state of continual state-sponsored global terrorism via US and Soviet collusion in Mutual Assured Destruction: “MAD”) is a development fraught with decisive complications for the future of the American Dream, as all can agree - no matter how that dream may be conceived, whether be it by a Chomsky or a Brzezinski. The set of influences which constellated around Los Alamos in the 1940's and which continue to propagate into the ongoing global drama reflect many of these considerations. The abrupt ascendance of technology along with all its myriad diffuse ramifications reveal many of these - but many still remain concealed. One main theme of this paper is that this driving impulse of technology and technocracy is not unprecedented, although its modern emergence within a culture dominated to a singular extent by atheistic, utilitarian, and cynically materialistic values is indeed a new development, one fraught with perverse complications.
I will introduce unfamiliar details of a long-standing, still developing trajectory; it is a theme and variations extending far back beyond any historical record, and it integrates European and American influences. Our founding mythos in the USA may be one of “A New Start”, yet its sacred pedigree constitutes a persistent bass pulse behind the scenes, one perhaps all the more powerful for being unconscious in recent generations. The story of America extends much further back than 1776 or 1492; indeed the term America denotes everything to do with an entire continent - or two of them! Recent events (those of Sept. 11, 2001) bring these considerations into a sharp focus and still deeper significance, and renders Albert Einstein's remark all the more relevant: “Insanity is doing the same old thing, the same old way, while expecting different results.”
But - and this is the important part - in counterpoint to the depressive spiral of conclusive doomsday warnings, I will also indicate the light at the end of the tunnel, which, contrary to expectations from both the Left and the Right, is not by any means a train. Hope is valiant, but Faith is better: it is confidence in the substance of things known, not yet manifest. The fruit and source is Love: the short cut, and the only way. Is there a place for this in the “Real World?” I will be saying “Yes!” - and in extensive detail. There is much death in the world these days, but death and birth are mirror-images of each other. What is being born? How are these transformations effected? To address these questions will entail some wide-ranging investigations.
What do we find if we dig around outside the sandbox of profit-motive scientism (in effect, the modern superstitious, if materialistic, religion) and try to find threads of inner continuity with what has gone before? What lessons have been learned in the past? Are they forgotten and impossible to access? We are recently confronted with fundamental questions in the vein of: “What is the mission of America? What is Greatness, and is it synonymous with Power? What is true Power; is it outer military and economic might, or more subtle cultural influence, or does it possibly have a more numinous inner basis; one with potentially more benign effects?” While too much of modern spirituality is the most banal variety of narcissistic bourgeois wish-fulfillment, I will introduce some elements of firmer substance into the mix, elements which are novel even for many of the most venerable and ancient wisdom teachings. While this writer recalls that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, (one historian has defined History as “one damn thing after another”) corresponding positive possibilities of an unprecedented nature are also active in our past. They reveal themselves even within the most formidable of our present-day crises. While we shall investigate unusual considerations which range across a very wide spectrum of Good and Evil, the overarching Vision is an active one of integration, reconciliation, and renewal. I hope to provide something to energize each one who reads this, no matter what their background.
Regarding the local situation in New Mexico: While great controversy swirls about the interpretation of the significance of Los Alamos in the history of the late twentieth century, few of the essential facts are in dispute. Very little, however, is known about the prior history of the area or of the long-range impulses behind the technology of nuclear energy, or even of technology itself. The questions arise: “Do present developments in and about Los Alamos, NM have an historical precedent? Does the activity of Los Alamos National Laboratories have any relationship to the terrestrial forces of this part of the continent, forces, which have always figured strongly in the religious practices of local populations? What were the religious practices of the indigenous people, and how, if at all, did they contribute to the web of influences in which Los Alamos flourishes? And: Are the ancestral Traditions native to newly-arrived Europeans in now living in the Americas relevant?” In short, and as usual, the questions boil down to the simple: “Why are we here?” and “What do we do about it?”
It is the contention of this writer that not only do various branches of neglected European Tradition allow us to pose these questions clearly, but that it also encourages and enables us to investigate possible answers to them. Although it is not possible within the confines of this article to detail the actual methods used by this writer, the substance of it involves contact with the same, if constantly transforming, beings who have always formed the original inspirational core of European and American religions, mythologies, spiritualities. Suffice it to say that “(persistent) intention is everything.” In some cases, seemingly disparate deities reveal themselves to be one and the same. In other cases, obvious correlations prove misleading. Gods, like men, change over time, as a result of interaction - and the time-span under consideration here is large. Nonetheless, efforts made in this area by this writer over a period of many years has engendered not only a strong sense of hope for both the answering of these sorts of questions, but also for then finding of long-term solutions to the dilemmas which provoke them. Herein I share some of those results, for the purpose of sharing information, encouraging complementary research, and provoking access to the deep reservoirs of divine influence so unique and so close to us in this part of the world. It may become clear that Europe and America do have something good for each other, along the lines indicated by the Hopi legends of Pahana, the Mexica characterization of the (next) Fifth Age as the Age of Flowers, and the pervasive Legend of the trans-cultural Rainbow Warriors.
Our gaze will swing southwards in trail of our muse.
Until the War of 1848, the territory within the present boundaries of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and much of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado were not yet part of the United States, but were claimed by Mexico, and previously, by Spain. Although these northern territories were settled and colonized from out of the Spanish South, not from the East by the English or French, they were in rather tenuous association with the heartland of the Spanish Empire in the New World, and many ad hoc arrangements, free from imperial oversight or rule of law, sprung up between various fluid constituencies in this large area. Although travel and communication between different parts of this widely-flung territory were difficult at best, there is no dispute over the tremendous influence that Hispanic government, culture, and religion have had on the post-Colombian history of this vast area. Perhaps nowhere in the USA has the influence been more pervasive and long-lasting than in Northern New Mexico, where it has deep roots in the ethos of rural agriculture; where local families trace their roots back some 450 years and where many people still speak only a local Spanish dialect. Long before English, German, and French settlements gained footholds on the Eastern Seaboard of the continent, Spaniards had carved out and established their loose empire in the southern reaches of the continent, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Florida, across the entire Gulf of Mexico, across much of the South American coast, and up along California. Continuous settlement in New Mexico dates from ~1608, with Coronado's expedition of 1540 - 1542 traversing the expanse from Southern California through Arizona as far north as the Grand Canyon, the across expanses of New Mexico, and up into Nebraska and central Kansas! No doubt some stragglers set up stakes at various places along the way, or became involved in odysseys a la that of Caveza de Baca. Santa Fe, NM, was officially established in 1610, with casual settlement before that.
The Hispanic influence and experience in the Americas has been strongly modified and attenuated by the physical distance from its homeland and, initially, was not buffered by an only marginally superior technology. Much of this presence was further diluted and subject to reciprocal influence from the native population because of outback location from coastal areas, involving long and tortuous routes of communication and supply.
Ethnic identification with Mexico is strong among many sectors of modern New Mexican society, and intermarriage between European and American; Hispanic and Indian, in Mexico and New Mexico has been commonplace for centuries, and probably it is this last factor which has been most responsible for its long-term cultural integrity. It is this stable yet also energetic amalgam of influences which has provided a matrix for these reflections: this writer has lived here for over thirty years.
Not only that, but the local Native population itself, which has always lived here and there about the general area, has roots that go back much, much further - further than anyone can trace. Trade routes between peoples of the Colorado Plateau/Rio Grande Valley area and the peoples of central Mexico are of great antiquity and importance, and a surprising amount of cultural interchange has taken place over them. Known as the Turquoise Trail, and extending far down into South America via coastal shipping, the network is the American analogue of Asia's Silk Road. For instance, the merchant-traders that worked this web of intercourse were often governmental ambassadors of high rank, empowered to make treaty, for trade goods were not bulk consumables, but precious ritual objects and supplies: quetzal feathers, obsidian, copal, sage, turquoise, gemstones, pigments and dyes, and the like. In addition, along this route, sons and daughters of nobles were given out in dynastic barter, along with transmission of sacred teachings.
Interestingly enough, the Toltec and Aztec empires of central Mexico traced their origins to migrations from a mythical North. It is tempting to consider connections to the fabled Anasazi, especially since the Anasazi underwent their final demise and exodus a couple of hundred years before the Azteca arrived in the Valley of Mexico; enough to permit a mass-cultural migration complete with occasional settlements during planting and harvesting cycles, but with details lacking about this possible link, the question is an open one.
So various ties inextricably bind this area of New Mexico to Old Mexico. The most obvious and significant of these for our purposes - the figure of the local Mexican Goddess Nuestra Senora de Guadaloupe - has her deepest cultic connections north of the present US-Mexico border in Northern New Mexico, and we shall refer to her repeatedly, for her role is pervasive and central. On the simplest of levels, the polarity of long-time religious & artistic Hispanic/Indian/Chicano culture of Santa Fe on the one hand and that of the upstart secular Yankee Los Alamos on the other, close by; one on either side of the Rio Grande valley rift, falls neatly into the categories of right-brain feminine/nurturing and left-brain masculine controlling, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. We can take this a lot further, but here we shall simply introduce the yin-yang imagery of impacted critical-mass force swirling with fractally dispersing goddess grace.
One branch of the European Tradition - the Rosicrucian-Anthroposophical one of Middle Europe - has insights revealing connections to the south of a highly unusual order. In one of the most singular instances of representative Rudolf Steiner's perplexing way of tantalizing the reader with utterly original yet profoundly unsettling statements, in his Inner Impulses of Evolution lectures he relates events which, if true, are of decisive importance for understanding the inner nature of the Los Alamos phenomenon. “Los Alamos”, for present purposes, will be our shorthand for the advent of “the Bomb” and its concomitant deployment of the full array of the subnatural electronic, magnetic and nuclear forces within matter by modern technological civilization - all this impossible without the full mobilization of resources by the modern nation-state and its Social-Darwinist ideologies and its unique channelling of the forces of violence. He also relates important precedents for this national security-state paradigm within the not so ancient Roman and Mexican empires,
What Steiner has to say in that occasion in 1916 (while obliquely fleshing out the picture continually throughout his life-work by developing various considerations stemming from other cultures and eras) is relevant because he implies that the modern-form disciplines of physics and chemistry - the hard core basis for our technocratic belief system - developed to their present sophisticated state from out of prior engagement with these same forces in a less manifest formby certain factions within the ancient religions. Among these influences certain cults within the more monumental Mesoamerican civilizations are likely to have been in the forefront. The proposition that technology is simply one form of magic is not a particularly profound insight; the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is well-known for his observation that any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic. (While true enough in its own way, the difference lies in the fact that what is fully within the personal consciousness of the adept in magical practice finds itself disassociated and removed from the interiority of the practitioner in technology; operated by remote control and automatic means - the process of relationship is rendered as unconscious as possible and disassociated in the extreme. This is a critical distinction which would be lost on Clarke.)
We have become so blasé about the powerful wonders of science and technology, that for most people who have no idea how things work, the phenomenon of the common light bulb or television is just as esoteric as Maya ancestor-invocation via blood-letting! Yet the illuminating paradox is that the ideological materialist cannot refrain from using the language of the mystic! Wonders, miracles, magic, transcendence, fulfillment, wizardry - these words are used out of context without shame as they are drained of all significance by the cynical knowing and self-mocking smirk of clever advertising propaganda. If this is the smoke, where is the fire…? Is there a fire? Language reveals as much as it conceals!
This thesis as it applies in detail to mesoamerican shamanism and nuclear physics is derived from correlation of many published studies and from inner work with the same substance in overlapping European and American Mysteries, yet the simple picture of such a correlation is sustainable by anyone who has studied the sources of science and religion. While some might maintain that the initial tendencies necessary for the incorporation of such impulses into European civilization may have indeed come over from Islamic Arabic and Persian cultures, I maintain that the deepest sources of these proto-scientific forces lie within the Mesoamerican milieu. Steiner makes a crucial contribution by stating that Mexican cults channeling such impulses were the prime opponents to the Deed of Christ (this to be understood in a way free of any subsequent religious associations) - but that this anti-cult encountered successful opposition from other indigenous Mexican forces. A few of the details of his provocative statements are at variance with not only the theories, but also of the evidence of modern scholarship in the field, and these raise questions of a different nature; they were addressed in the first installment of this series: Issue #20 of Southern Cross Review.
Many uncertainties revolve around his sketchy indications of 86 years ago, and contemplation upon them only generates more. For example, one basic question that arises is: “If the appearance of Christ marks a turning point in time - as is reflected in the structure of our calendar system, for instance - is this a global constant, or is it an ethnocentric blip? Do we see evidence of a similar pivot-point in the broad sweep of mesoamerican affairs?” Not only is intimate familiarity with the essence of the original Christian impulse required but also a penetrating objectivity in order to profitably approach this question from the European side. Not easy to come by! The difficulties are of another order of magnitude altogether for the approach from the other direction. No wonder most conscientious researchers beg off from considering the prospect, covering themselves by declaring a priori that it's futile. Better to sift midden-mounds and base a career on safe documentable minutae. Yet it is well known from their own researches that spectacular transitions took place in 1st-century Mexico, as we shall indicate throughout this piece.
With these profound questions before us - questions that comprise multiple dilemmas; epistemological koans, even - research in the scholarly literature of the archeology, anthropology, and ethnology of ancient America takes on a real urgency and a novel focus. Once one delves into the mass of scholarly research into the matter, a field that was in its infancy only a few years ago - the Mayan script has only been readable within the last few years, and there are still no indications of any Teotihuacan or Toltec language! - one is immediately amazed at how much does remain from centuries of systematic attempts to erase the historical record, efforts of which the Spanish Conquistadors and the follow-on corporate mono-culture of mass-media and World Bank economic “development” are only the most recent. On initial encounter, it can be a bewildering welter of unrelated detail, but this begins to resolve itself if one perseveres.
Literary intuition can perceive the essential nature of the thing:
“Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it
back
Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora.
What's it to you, old man?
The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Hear me. Ye carry the war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than dogs.”
It is long overdue that insight born from the spiritual Traditions of Europe (the “West” of Asia but the “Middle” of world-culture, and which by no means except conceit is a continent of its own) be brought into relationship with those of the cultures which lie across the Atlantic in the Far West. After all, since it is admitted, though at the same instant usually disregarded, that these latter were spiritually-oriented cultures of the first degree, and that the overlapping transpersonal causes and human motivations for their existence and cycles of transformations lay in those spiritual bases, it is fundamentally absurd to look elsewhere than in those inner realities for our understandings of them. Examination of potsherds and corpses, temple architecture and comparative iconography, the evidences of trade economics, etc. can give illuminating data and insights, but broad conclusions derived from them are nonetheless voyeuristic and speculative, with their emphases revealing more about ourselves and what is important to us than about what may have been important to them. The questions we ask, and the manner in which we ask them determines the nature of the answers received - and which questions are rejected out of hand. Informed spiritual insight can be exactly that: in-sight. Not a replacement for scholarship or study, but a complement that is glaring by its absence. The dynamic of cultural invasion, annexation, and disassembly which began at the outset with Columbus and Cortez continues. While the physical residue of civilizations long extinct are exhumed and scrutinized with laudable rigour, the living soul and spirit of the peoples are dismissed, not honored, and, not observed by quantifying methodology, accorded only the passing indulgence due a fantasy.
So it is by use of a method suited to its subject that we quest to understand these cultures which are so seemingly Other, ones which have only quite recently become overlaid by our own imported one. Although these alternative modes of access and perception are thoroughly discounted by most academic professionals, they offer great promise for overcoming that hurdle of the onlooker status which is part and parcel of the modern scientific method, a stance which has only a temporary and limited if spectacular utility; one which is showing clear signs of unraveling about the edges. Other essential questions: “Is the mythos of the ancient cultures really lost? What has changed in that mythos - for better and for worse, and what is invariant?”
While there is no lack of those who have “gone native” to one degree or another, including a surprising proportion of those who write about indigenous cultures, what I am talking about here is cross-cultural contemplation from an equivalent esoteric basis; from an peer level of vision, so to speak. Of course, this is only an initial attempt at such an endeavor, but that such an approach as is attempted here is sorely needed, there can be no doubt. Nothing ventured, nothing gained - and yes, we know it has been proved that bumblebees can't fly…and in the late 1800's the head of the U.S. Patent Office officially proposed that his department be shut down because everything inventable had already been invented! So let us not waste too much time looking over our shoulders to see whether the skeptics are giving their benediction!
It has been profoundly satisfying for this writer that his multi-disciplinary investigation into ancient American spirituality goes a long way towards answering Rudolf Steiner's injunction: “Precisely from the example of agriculture, we can see how necessary it is to derive forces from the spirit; forces that are as yet quite unknown. This is necessary…so that human life on Earth can continue at all…” (emphasis added). Our glance into mesoamerican spiritual impulses will bring us into close proximity to these very forces - forces which can be so threatening, but which also have within them the deepest rejuvenating possibilities!
It is significant that this statement comes from the Agriculture Course, in which Steiner gives his most detailed indications for the healing of the natural order of the Earth, and during which time he also had his very revealing private conversations with his hostess, the Countess von Keyserlingk concerning the golden core of the Earth and the rescue of Persephone. One can only note with a poetic irony that what was the deepest and most taboo-ridden esotericism for that European culture was the simplest common knowledge for most native peoples in the New World.
Again: a link with La Guadaloupana Tonantzin, whose lovely and vastly tender demeanor is so different from the devouring catabolic aspect of prior Aztec goddesses. How this change in aspect came about involves appreciating the inner nature of this being; her role in earth-evolution from the very beginning, and her relationship with other difficult derivative beings of another quality who are relative latecomers onto the world-stage.
Notwithstanding the fame of their astronomical science and calendar lore, the InnerWorlds of the Mesoamerican civilizations were strongly oriented towards the UnderWorld. In European lore, by contrast, the Underworld is generally denied and considered, when it is considered at all, an extremely unfortunate place: aphorisms like “better a beggar in the land of the living than a king in the realm of the Shades” or imagery of the burning sinners in Hell dominate the mind or represent the general level of appreciation of the UnderWorld by those with either classical education or no education at all. It is beyond the scope of this presentation to trace the esoteric lore of the UnderWorld in Western thought. Although it does quite definitely exist, it lies outside the boundaries of the standard-issue maps and catechisms. It will also be impossible to present the vast scope of the Chthonic realms (a.k.a. “UnderWorld”) in Mesoamerican mythology and practice, not least because so much of it is still unknown - and it is also in the midst of a profound revealing of a new metamorphosis! A remarkable amount is known about it, however, and strong illuminating parallels exist within our own Western European Tradition; most significantly in what has to do with the vicissitudes of the Divine Feminine and the Celtic sources of the Grail-Mythos. Contemplating these parallels sheds an unexpected light in many directions! We will allude to certain of its elements in the course of relating the implications of the encounter between the Magi of Black and White Magic at America's Turning Point of Time.
What is the gist of these insights? To recap, they relate a struggle in the first century AD between an unnamed representative of greatly devolved “Mexican Mysteries” (Steiner's term), one who attempted to thwart, not the birth of Christ as did Herod of Palestine, but the purpose of His Sacrificial Death: the at-long-last fully realized archetype of the Rite of the Sacred King. What really gets our attention is that he places this attempt within the historical record for the years 30 - 33 AD. Against this, he also relates how an advanced initiate, of origin and pathway unidentified, stepped forward to deny this malign intention so that the Deed of Christ could complete its full arc. Not only that, but he states that human evolution would have ceased altogether if human souls would have refused to incarnate due to the dislocated occult forces provoked by the “Black Magician”. Steiner relates that the “White Magician” was named “Vitzliputzli” (an archaic form of “Huitzilopochtli”).
Here we are in deep and unprecedented waters, even for those who are well acquainted with the standard studies in archeology or ccultism! Yet even a casual review of precolumbian mythologies reveal a preoccupation with continual struggles between humans and demons, evolved humans and degenerate humans, and the historical record of the peoples themselves indicate the same - for instance in the archetypal saga of the downfall of king Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl (935 or 947 CE to exile c. 987), famous ruler of Tula and the Toltec empire, at the hands of the evil shaman-priesthood of Tezcatlipoca. Enacting the archetypal drama of his namesake, under the totem-influence of his planet Venus, he was exiled, but with prophecy of his return. Cortez had the wit to capitalize on this universal expectation, having the good fortune to show up on the indicated year and day of his return!
Although the investigative method of active inner participation allied with strict observation and discrimination as utilized in this article is dismissed by the official referees, it offers great promise for overcoming that hurdle of the onlooker status which is part and parcel of the modern scientific method, a stance which has only a temporary and limited if spectacular utility. One which is showing clear signs of unraveling about the edges. It is admitted, though the implications are promptly disregarded, that ancient cultures did not live and die by the measurable data which remains to us, but by an agreement unknown to us which was for them the controlling reality. Another essential question: “Is that mythos really lost? What has changed in that mythos - for better and for worse, and what is invariant, and similar to the core insights of all cultures?”
Within the Mexican mythos we have a key for the resolution of the problem of evil - a situation always in the forefront of mesoamerican spiritual striving, a striving that was, by all evidence, a concerted public and social enterprise. Were they really on a constant wartime footing? The late-period Aztecs in particular seem to have been driven to frenzy by a sense of overwhelming necessity in the face of cataclysmic struggles. Was this sense of apocalypse always latent within Mesoamerica? Perhaps: even the “cosmic” Maya are now known to have been inextricably involved in continual and complex calculation of conflict.
The reason that all this is directly connected with the case of Los Alamos is that examination of the nature of the forces which power modern technology - the subnatural forces of electricity, magnetism, and the nuclear forces - quickly bring one into proximity to the beings which stand behind them. For this assertion we can reference the traditional understanding that the natural forces which we see all around us: the forces of weather, gravity, seasonal cycles, the regulated growth into metamorphosing form occurring in natural organisms, etc., are all merely the shadows cast by the activity of very specific spiritual beings - some vast, some miniscule, all embued with great and strange powers (as are we, if we but had the wit to recognize it).
Natural “laws” describe how certain elemental beings without the faculty of free will or responsive sensibility act. “Fields”, “energy”, or “forces” are their traces.
We introduce the idea of successive octaves or orders of reality, for both the higher supersensible and the lower subsensible forces: though they are outside the range of the five senses, they are analogous to the also very real if invisible infrared and ultraviolet frequency-realms which lie past the narrow visible spectrum - in two very different directions. In these passages we enter the area in which Rudolf Steiner's work is most unique and relevant for our modern age. Also whose implications are most unappreciated, even for his advocates!
In the case of the technological forces just mentioned, the beings which stand behind them are, respectively, the various strife-inducing beings (Luciferic, Ahrimanic, Asuric, according to one format) that are described by European-based lore as the great Adversaries of humanity. Although there is some debate as to exactly how to apportion these forces among these beings, there does not seem to be much doubt in those circles about the general outlines of the matter.
(Oriental perspectives on this, deriving from eras of a much more ancient vintage in which these subnatural forces were still in nascent form and the their psychological and cultural manifestations in an embryonic stage, do not involve themselves in such considerations as are here the forefront of our present discussion. Recent attempts to find straightforward parallels between Eastern mysticism and Western physics, a la Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics (cf. Bib. III), while laudable for their good intentions, are rife with critically significant distortions and frequent outright errors of spiritual fact. Subnatural forces within matter, to be bluntly explicit but also completely accurate about it, are death forces. Buddhism, of whatever variety, is ultimately life-affirming through liberation from earthly forces; its attentions do not penetrate into those deathly regions for their transformation. While correspondences and parallels can be drawn between affairs, levels, and energies within the higher and lower realms, there are critical inversions within the reflections. Blissfully unaware of the crucial distinctions, assuming that whatever is not “physical” is “spiritual”, Capra conflates the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic; for him the “spiritual” is completely undifferentiated. Does he think his discriminatory scientific mind can go on vacation when in the “spiritual”?
I have stated that the point-centered forces of modern science - electricity, magnetism, and the atomic forces - are subnatural forces. How is this to be understood? First of all, insight unique to the Rosicrucian-Anthroposophical Tradition has it that it is by a combination of subtle and dense forces - both outside the range of normal sense perception - that sensible material substance has arisen, and also that the development of this condition lies at the heart of the case of “The Fall”. Past one end of our normally perceptible field, much the same as ultraviolet lies beyond the range of visible light in the direction of higher vibration, lies the immaterial forces of the subtle ethers, ones which are the dynamic templates of the classical physical-material solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasmic states of matter: the spontaneously life-organizing forces. (The terms Earth, Water, Air, and Fire were used to refer to the unmaterialized and archetypal generative counterparts of these physical conditions.) Yet these higher ethers would never have had an “incarnation” into physical form; they would have remained as “laws” (Platonic Ideals) without material referents if it had not been for the agency of their counterparts - their dark twins; the subnatural forces which lie past the other end of the sensible spectrum; ones analogous to the infrared…our modern genies of electricity, magnetism, and the nuclear forces. It is in the interaction of the supersensible and the subsensible that we have the resultant sensible state of existence, one that, in reality, is quite restricted. We all feel it. No wonder the beings responsible for this precipitating influence are seen as adversaries, or as evil: hence the disturbing qualities of what are known as “aliens”! Not from distant physical stars, they are allied with corresponding starry forces within the earth, but have become overly identified with their tasks and are disturbed by humanity's perverse tendencies. In the process, they have gotten into even more trouble than has mankind. Inner apprehension of their state of mind and environment is a seriously mind- and emotion-altering process, it is so strange and, indeed, “alien”, yet their coincidence with the Dark Side of our own reality is disturbingly intimate. Their agony of spirit is awesome, their lack of and violent reaction to “soul” is frightening. However, the disturbing effect of the resonance which encounter provokes is precisely because they are not so “alien” after all: they represent a relatively pure counterpart of our own Shadow and Double forces; the Shadow and Double beings of the planetary body! Hence it is a pernicious falsehood to call them extraterrestrials, for this only dislocates us from our earthly kinship with them.
What put us in this straightjacket gets sequestered behind prohibition of taboo - and when taboo begins to reveal itself in spite of relentless avoidance and denial, it gets placed as far outside ourselves as possible: even into realms as far off as distant star-systems. However, when the water table rises, it can't be plugged. So, for reasons that are complicated but whose effects are apparent, these forces are making a bid to have their day in the sun. Cell-phone towers, television, electric illumination - it is all around us and we can't even begin to imagine how we could live without this corporate-sponsored wizardry. We take it for granted but are puzzled by the social and environmental consequences. Yet the subtler energetic bases of physical reality have hardly even begun to be examined by main-line science, notwithstanding the trillions of dollars spent to date on high-energy particle physics research and the like. This is as much a hall-of-mirrors enterprise as the legendary Cub Scout snipe-hunt, yet one which reinforces itself; the same conceits that gave rise to the enterprise which was, in its first instance, the smashing of a bug by a boy with a rock.
Our initially noble paradigm of “objective analysis” in the service of a disinterested scientific inquiry has developed into a fixed and categorical refusal to allow consideration of the essential subjective core within all appearance. “There are no objects; there are only subjects”: says the magician. Exile the subjective in the observer, eliminate the subjective spirit in the World-Body, and what remains but a flux of blind forces? Blind to us, that is. When this model is then applied back upon human and biological culture, what we get is exactly what we have: blind chaos and entropy, with a wild looting scramble for insufficient resources - exactly as determined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics! No solutions to our human problems will be found inside this box! Forgotten in the shuffle is the simple fact that the ultimate purpose of science is to comprehend the scientist.
“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them”: Albert Einstein.
What is the “solving” level of awareness that is needed for these crises? Todorov offers the kind of incisive insight that brings all kinds of things into clearer focus. He offers that, in order to relieve the inevitable if not entirely similar stresses that occur within human societies, Europe and America chose different strategies. Europe - with significantly weaker Double forces - chose repression and became a massacre society, while America, faced with the unavoidable reality of overwhelming chthonic powers, chose integration and participation, becoming a sacrifice society. The reader may decide for him- or her-self which one shed the most blood or which one was the more debased at the time of contact.
It must be noted that the outcast (“damned”) status of these genies/demons of the point-centered forces - or of the personal Dark Side - is not permanent. They were given a job to do, and they did it, and are doing it. Our lessons are difficult - but so are theirs. We are joined at the hip, and together we stand or fall - this is our secret. Let us also consider the insight that if it is admitted that certain things can only be learned from one's enemies, what does it mean to consider them enemies? Here we have a key to the resolution of the problem of evil - a situation unsolvable at arm's length. Plus: we may not need them half as much as they need us; passage through our consciousness may be the catalytic effect they are really seeking in their missing heart-of-hearts!
So - all this is relevant because examination of the possible method of the retrograde adept of ancient Mexico, based upon what Steiner relates concerning his method of practice in conjunction with: 1: what is known about the general mythology of the Mesoamerican civilizations, 2: the considerations of natural and etheric geography which would greatly condition a Land-based spirituality (e.g.; strong telluric forces as reflected in the gigantic N-S ranges of the Rockies and Andes mountains and the vast weather and volcanism patterns), the constellation of the bio-regions, traditional-culture awareness of geomantic power-regions, etc., 3: knowledge of the relationship between and the ongoing changes within the super- and sub-natural forces, and, 4: the comparison with equivalent evolved and devolved chthonic elements of other spiritualities - our own Orphic one not least - lead inexorably to the conclusion that it was these same beings just referred who stand behind the subnatural forces who were worshiped and invoked in certain of the ancient Mexican cults. As they were in their idiomatic forms by other civilizations - but considering these would lead us too far afield. Extensive work by this writer in the realm of self-directed experiential-visionary activity confirms and greatly amplifies these associations - this paper is the result.
I am proposing that he specific cults that are related to the case of "Los Alamos" had their most prominent area of development within the Valley of Mexico in central Mexico, site of present-day Mexico City, and had their history within the Olmec culture, the first monumental civilization of Mesoamerica. The contribution of modifying factors local to the Upper Rio Grande Valley/Jemez Caldera area - home to Los Alamos - remain to be investigated in detail, but what is gleaned from many years of living in the area corroborates the general outlines of what is presented here, and provokes speculation on deeper pre-Columbian links between New and Old Mexico. It can hardly be simple coincidence that the Los Alamos Laboratories complex was situated upon the flanks of the world's largest above-ground volcanic caldera as they descended in eroded mesas to the canyons of the Western Hemisphere's largest rift valley - all signature features of the intrusion of chthonic depths into the surface-world.
It is clear to this writer that entirely appropriate and forward-looking means for dealing constructively with these same forces and beings were also cultivated within parallel and consecutive American Traditions; ones fostered in diverse significant cultures such as the Hopi, or Algonquin/Iroquois, all of which had deeply positive relationships to the Earth Mother and who managed to deny the lures of Empire.
The Pueblo peoples of the Upper Rio Grande Valley are seem to have finally arrived at a amore stable form of society after their exodus from the Anasazi lands to the west - not long before the European invasions altered their possibilities.
Here I need to suggest that the solution to the riddle of the “Mexican Mysteries” cannot be found unless our conception of the term itself is refined. Fuzzy language = fuzzy thinking. If “Mexican Mysteries” means nothing more sophisticated than the spectre of a culture ruled by the bogeyman, this is only a failure of the Imagination, even if the imagination itself is easily captivated by visions of such macabre scenes, firmly fixed in the popular mind, of the brief late-terminal phase Aztecs. And macabre compared to what? Does our ethnocentrism blind us to the excesses of our own culture? Was the trench-warfare of WWI, the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, the siege of Stalingrad, the Rape of Nanking, or the Holocaust of the Jews evidence of high civilization? Yet we also have our Bachs, Mozarts, Rothkos, Ellingtons, and the Gothic cathedrals. All cultures show evidence of the highest and the lowest in human nature. Can we try to progress to an objective, non-reactive appreciation of a culture that is, in the last analysis, merely different?
I propose: the beings related to these Mysteries of America, though metamorphosing according to their own internal dynamic and in relationship to the cultural conflagrations of the 1500's and beyond, remain quite active. It cannot be otherwise, for they regulate the most long-range of planetary cycles.
Nuestra Senora de Guadaloupe is a local agent for these Saturn Mysteries
- the American Mythos.
II
Both the devolved and evolved Mystery Streams of America are spreading
their wings and girding their loins for battle. Both camps, greatly augmented in scope and power, are now more active than ever. Reflection on the substance of what is revealed by participatory access leads us to expect both the progressive and retrograde forces to deploy new aspects in the times to come; indeed, in the times in which we are living right now. The role of Los Alamos as a prime focal point for the introduction of subnatural forces into the natural world is a result of the ability to commandeer resources that only the modern National Security State can deploy. This also is a recapitulation of the spiritual and political history of Mesoamerica: the history of great religious-militaristic empires - and one which is in syncopated counterpoint to the legacy of Rome in Europe.
The massive effort of the Manhattan Project which spawned Los Alamos National Laboratories and the ability to wage the Cold War revealed an intention of Ahrimanic seriousness of unknown to the Germans or Japanese of the 1940's - but not to the Leninist-Stalinists of Russia, on whose soil 80% of WWII in Europe was fought and won. Hence the almost inevitable squaring-off of the two survivors, for Ahrimanic power does not allow for power-sharing.
In the USA, our history in this is impressive: our command of the skills of economic mobilization, strategic military planning, and operational logistics far outstripped anything that the Axis Powers could develop, fought the Second World War on two fronts, and won the overall WWII/Cold War struggles for our brand of empire. “Empire”, in this sense, can be a value-free term denoting a situation and infrastructure in which 5% of the world's population consumes over 60% of its resources, and determines the priorities within its sphere of influence.
Our pre-history for this lies in Mesoamerica: for instance, from 150 AD to 750 AD, Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities in the world: population 200,000. Only Rome and Beijing compared in size, and the regularity of its urban organization was not duplicated until the great industrial centers of North America arose in the late 1800's. There, the ubiquitous pyramids of the South were replaced by equally prevalent smokestack factories. Within, the impulse was the same, though the rites might differ: to concentrate and mobilize for ideological purposes the terrestrial subnatural forces and the correspondingly deep psychological forces of the folk. Outwardly, the procedure was the same: the total engagement of the civilian population for a state-directed - if mostly unconscious and esoterically manipulated - enterprise. We have our heroes and our sloganeering: Paul Bunyan and Manifest Destiny, Democracy and the Rights of Man. It is not implausible that equally pervasive motivations of a more blatantly religious or subtly occult nature motivated the mesoamerican pyramid-builders. What might they have been?
Steiner's insights are as good as any, and better than most. Out of a gigantic spiritual-cultural upheaval in the 1st Century AD, new forms of expression arose to celebrate and institutionalize these epochal changes. Not all of humankind's problems were solved in a stroke, however. Conflicts and stresses remained and found new and expended fields of expression. Were the successful efforts of the proto culture-hero Vitzliputzli coopted in short order, or did they have a long period of efflorescence? From the evidence remaining to archeology, it is difficult to determine which purpose was served by the mighty pyramids of Teotihuacan and the Mayan lands. That there was an explosion of unprecedented social vitality across Mesoamerica in the first century of the Christian era is undeniable, although the significance of it to the people on-site at the time is not easy to determine. It is one of the central facts of European and Anglo-American history that it only took a few hundred years before the radically grounded compassionate gnosticism of Jesus Christ became synonymous with Roman state power. What was the arc of development of the Christ-initiate's impulse in America? This questions pleads to be asked and addressed in detail, but acknowledged in even the most general terms, it can act as a mighty orienting lodestone for a multitude of inquiries.
The reactionary portion in Mesoamerica was the old one of Law and Order as a bulwark against the New. Its intended result, unglimpsed by those who put their shoulders to the wheel, was the suppression of free human soul-life and its replacement by a programmed existence of a wholly different order, one with no relationship to the Creator Beings, the originating cosmos, the natural world, or the core values of the heart. In spite of the gloss of shiny consumer products and an entertainment industry that services a leisure culture (when we find time for it!), one could make a good case that we in Year 2001 America have progressed far beyond the Aztecs in the institutionalization of horror and the realization of the cyborg. Our desensitization is well progressed. Although emphasizing the fantastic, the movie Matrix is insightful in the extreme in portraying the logical conclusion to our current trends, and Ray Kurzweil eagerly awaits the day when he can download himself into his software, dispensing with his obsolete carbon-based body!
Rudolf Steiner, in one of his very few references to the Mexican cults outside of the cited lectures, speaks of Henry Ford's assembly lines and their philosophy of mass-production as deriving directly from millennia-old impulses within one aspect of the American Folk-Soul. It is known that Teotihuacan did pioneer a mass-production system for the production of consumable ritual objects. This example might be one face of the chthonic impulse in America. And as much as William Blake's “Dark Satanic Mills” look ahead to the American Matrix-future as they describe his present of Industrial Revolution England, the foundations of them go back to Mesoamerica. The dreams of Atlantis die hard, and proliferate in nightmare vision as fast as their shoots are cut off. Who will pull them out by the root - or will it be by agency of the Core UnderWorld that they will be extruded into our hands for their Manichean transformation?
As far as Steiner's indications go about the positive side of these late Olmec-period developments, he stresses that things would have certainly been much worse if their progressive elements had not triumphed at that decisive moment in time, and that the more long-range our perspective becomes, the more effective those elements will seem. He also emphasizes in that regard that these are the positive virtues of Atlantean culture which are still preserved within the Land of America - as we have seen with Vitzliputzli. As some positive impulses went East with Manu/Noah, so also did some go West. Unfortunately, his reticent comments about things American do not expand on the local detail, and his temperamental antipathy to things Mexican in general do not allow for an easy unfolding of the implications of his remarks.
The other face, totally congruent with the most forward-looking impulses, may equally well have inspired the construction of the early grand ceremonial complexes. Does Teotihuacan reflect one or the other - or a complex mix of both? It would seem plausible, that considering the apocalyptic demise of its predecessor and neighboring rival Cuicuilco, that either way, the Teotihuacan impulse was relatively pure, at least up until its mysterious implosion. It was certainly a zero-year starting point for all subsequent civilizations in the area, and its legendary fame may derive - spiritually - from the regeneration of all the old God and Goddess forms by the stroke of Christ's passage through the UnderWorld - in Mexico an appreciation certainly very different and much more complex than possible in Europe!
In our times, and on a corresponding octave of the evolutionary spiral, releasing atomic energy into the mix of evolution was a dangerous attempt at the destabilization of the natural order; a counterproductive absurdity, for it would be a long climb back up the evolutionary ladder if the “nuclear spasm” had been triggered. This precipitous result was averted. But - it was extremely effective in instilling an unprecedented level of constant fear and anxiety into entire population of the planet. Now Los Alamos seeks to maintain its position in the forefront of technological progress, not only by developing a new generation of nuclear weapons (what ever happened to the “Peace Dividend”?), but by moving into the field of genetic engineering and beyond; into the realm of genetically engineered bio-weapons: super-anthrax and the like, and, inevitably, into attempts to “improve the human breed” via the eugenics of DNA code-manipulation. If future developments are unclear in detail, past and current “revolutions” stemming from scientific discovery should be a good indication of what to expect: it won't be all it's cracked up to be, especially if, as it is, much of the research is driven and funded by military and trans-national corporate agendas, with benefit and profit secularly sanctified by the legal blessing of “intellectual property rights.” It's still the tantalizing but elusive promise of the “Wonderful World of the Future”: a fantasy carrot and an all-too-real stick, with the profits privatized, the costs subsidized, and citizens paying the price. Who will be the enemy, if not ourselves, and who will be the bill collector, if not America, Inc.?
There is an eerie parallel to the splitting of the atom: the unlocking of the psyche and the subconscious in psychology. The discoveries were simultaneous, the biographies of the pioneers in each field similar. The promises, also, were either false or subverted - witness the role of the modern pharmaceutical industry in behaviour modification, with the distinction between good and bad drugs more political than medical.
Spiritual struggles of the most intimate and profound nature swirl about these “developments”; ones which recapitulate, in an amplified way, ancient history. Note, in the case of the Manhattan Project physicists, the almost mystical devotion to their “pure” science that drove them, the esoteric nature of their cultic enterprise, the priestly caste of the initiates themselves, and the public veneration accorded them and their authority. Team leader Oppenheimer's mystical ruminations are most instructive. Here we have the cult of the scientist raised to its apotheosis - except that, once again, the God was an imposter; the goods hijacked. The science was never “pure.” (The recent movie Wag the Dog could not be clearer in its depiction of the seduction of Genius by Power.) That the modern secular initiate is ostensibly an atheist or agnostic is of no account. Whether priest, initiate, or expert, the function is identical: to mediate the will of the cosmos; the “gods”, “history”, the “Invisible Hand”, or “the facts” to the rest of humanity and direct their activity. On a mundane level, we have the scientific pundit who speaks decisively on a variety of subjects ranging from the global economy and the origin of the universe to shampoo rinse and weight-loss diets. The question remains: which god will we worship; which reality do we choose? That each one nowadays pretends to be a realist serving only himself or herself is the ultimate anarchy; a complete delusion. It is the essence of “facts” to compel; the real Gods value human freedom and moral initiative above all else - we are their religion. By this standard of our true worth, how should we be judging those other “gods” who come bearing shiny trinkets and promised wonders, their price being a gutting of the psyche? When modern guru Steven Spielberg announces that the new generation of digital special effects will perfect the art of Imagination, and that: “Someday the entire motion picture may take place inside the mind, and it will be the most internal experience anyone can have”, one can hear William Blake's anguished howl of protest.
Abdication of responsibility is surrender of Self; if those who have undergone make-over under the influence of ET reprogrammers, plastic surgery, or too much TV are the walking advertisements for the New Star-World Order, it is yet another fresh shock to consider how low our standards have fallen.
We may be a secular society, but it is an illusion that we are free of superstition. We may abjure formal religion, but we still bow down; we relinquish our moral autonomy, capitulate to circumstances: to Market Forces, to Policy, to Expediency, to the Experts - to Convenience. Even while retaining links to formal religion, many are still huddled in the corner of a mind-numbing conformity: “Experts agree: Everything is Fine!” What absurdities sneak in under the cloak of “freedom” or “democracy?” We still believe in what we cannot bear witness to, and live on a faith which may be more superstitious than that of the fabled witch doctor. Who takes the power which is so cheaply given up; where does it go when we sell out?
We have been referring to struggles around these issues, struggles ancient and modern. But struggles imply at least two sides, more or less equal. Who is on the other side? We shall go there shortly, but tho our bitter cup is not yet drained, the Goddess waits in the wings; she will be entering shortly….
The connection with Rome, mentioned in passing earlier, is significant for many reasons. One can easily place the dynamic of the rise of Roman civilization in juxtaposition to the parallel contemporary events taking place in Mexico. (Some musings place the southerly Maya, in the role of classical Greece, in counterpart to Romanish Toltec and Aztec, but although this speculation is heavily discounted nowadays there may be some imaginal truth in it.) Recall all the various indications that exist regarding the significance of the immense legacy of Roman culture and its pivotal and continuing influence on the subsequent development of European civilization. Many diverse and pervasive influences; none horrible in themselves or in theory, but, in practice, and as implemented by fallible men, and without counterbalancing impulses, are developments which have run off the tracks to a large extent and which have done a great deal to undermine hopes for more just and peaceful societies. They continue to form a persistent knot in our mass-cultural psyche. The lure of resuscitating this dream of centralized world hegemony has resonated throughout European history, although the ability to realize this dream has only been possible in recent decades (in large part via the instrumentality of the threats issuing from Los Alamos & Co.) and has always been opposed by unique brands of idealistic utopianism and Native wisdom. Traces of this bipolar tendency in the USA can be seen in the facts that the present site of Washington, D. C. was originally an Algonquin Council site and originally named “Rome” by the earliest European settlers. Note the remarkable effect of the visuals in the movie Gladiator and its success in communicating a simultaneous sense of revulsion and exultation with the ethos of that era; “The Glory of Rome…the corruption…”; a thrill from each, a pride in both. The Roman Empire may have been ruled by monsters as often as not, but at least they were our monsters! This writer experienced the most strange sensation during the movie of looking into both the Roman and the Aztec world; seeing the Coliseum superimposed by a pyramid, the gladiator by the spiritual patriot, etc. The archetypal patterns are universal….
Los Alamos is a prime indicator for just how far down the road to logical insanity the ambition-filled impulse of the all-powerful state can be taken. Not to gripe overmuch, but it requires a relentless look at our own culture's Dark Side if we are to be able to look past or through it to something better. It is our own Lesser Guardian of the Social Threshold, fully incarnated in and among us, which is now walking and talking through all avenues of the media. Any entry into the spiritual world (whether “up” or “down”) which does not face it down as it reveals itself within the subjectivity of the individual is illegal and illusory and will backfire - and is backfiring, as we can see all around us: it refuses to be ignored, and demands attention in exteriorized and projected fashion.
We have seen the omen of this dynamic in the shockingly realized image of the Trump of The Blasted Tower which has been so relentlessly driven home since Sept. 11. This is a law of initiation and a universal admonition: confrontation with one's Shadow, the personal Double, the macrocosmic Double, the Lesser Guardian - all aspects of the same thing, basically - cannot be avoided. One is proactive in the encounter and one grows - and the social situation becomes healthy, too. One avoids…and one still learns, but as victim - or fights the integration - as oppressor. From the European side of this mix comes the prediction that early on into the 20th Century that humanity would be presented with a choice between the Easy Way and the Hard Way as the century developed: with the recapitulation of a 2,000 year cycle foreseen by the simple devout and seers both and due to begin in this time-period, there would be both great opportunities and great dangers confronting humanity. The adversarial influences in evolution would be flushed out from their hiding places to walk about in the light of day and great changes in humanity and in the spiritual world would take place that would make possible the autonomous reentry of humanity into the spiritual worlds, and a push towards a reintegration of diverse aspects of our greater human nature. The countercultural adage: “You are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem” sums it up quite nicely.
It appears from all indications that, once again, humanity has chosen the hard way, and that, with everything encapsulated and represented by “Los Alamos”, our own United States of America and our own beloved New Mexico has the dubious privilege of playing Bethlehem to The Beast. Is it so incomprehensible that there might not be mixed reactions from the periphery to this juggernaut of “Progress?”
Positive balancing contributions from the Middle and East of the planet seem to be held up in accounts receivable while elements within European culture which attempted to provide alternatives to this relentless momentum of state hegemony represented by Rome were subjected to ruthless and successful elimination. From the campaigns against the Gnostics in the early Christian centuries, against the Pagan Tribes of northern Europe and the prechristian yet Christian Irish, to the squashing of the Templars, Cathars, and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment of the 1600's, the Ahrimanic impulse of “whatever is not compulsory is forbidden” has held sway and has continued to metastasize. The predominance of this impulse has been remarkably continuous throughout the various changings of the guard that took place as Roman Empire reconfigured to Holy Roman Empire, to the diversified Royal Houses, to the Third Reich, to the squeeze-press of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, to WTO. “The Fascist movement is a spontaneous return to the traditions of ancient Rome.” The periodic wars that have devastated Europe throughout the last two millennia did nothing to shake the power of this impulse. In fact, every war seems to have entrenched it ever more deeply, in spite of the efforts of saints, patriots, and famous wise people of all stripes. But here, also, Steiner finds a positive note in that the dominant Roman impulse towards centrist legislation and regulation was undermined and weakened by fortuitous Italian counter-tendencies of rugged egotism.
It was somewhat different in central Mexico. Here, where the terrestrial hardening forces were even stronger than in Europe, counterbalancing forces of the fractal periphery were also stronger, and the Double was integrated to a greater extent; great empires rose and fell, but each one was separated by great gulfs of discontinuity from its antecedent and successor. The nature of time was more cyclic than continuously linear. The acceptance and integration of these forces also tended to give them effective limits. Fantastic and futuristic Teotihuacan, already referred to, arose out of at least 1500 years of Olmec prehistory to replace its predecessor Cuicuilco in the period 150 BC - 50 AD when Cuicuilco was buried under more than one immense lava flow from its neighboring volcano Xitli. The succeeding empires of the Valley of Mexico each suffered corresponding abrupt demise, as each successor attempted to carry on the proto-Imagination of Imperial Atlantis (Aztlan!) - but with decreasing effectiveness and increasing use of force and violence. Teotihuacan suffered cataclysmic internal collapse of unknown motivation but of singular ritual intent - a societal disassembly of such magically effective intensity as to prevent any subsequent resettlement of the site. This in spite of its being revered by all succeeding local cultures as “The Birthplace of the Gods” and the place where the present World-Age of the Fifth Sun was inaugurated. A hundred and fifty years later the Toltecs arrived from the “North” to found their empire's capital city of Tula 60 km to the northwest. 375 years later - half the life span of Teotihuacan - Tula was gone, for similarly mysterious if equally conclusive reasons. When the Aztecs arrived in the area two hundred years later - from the verifiably physical North - they found only a miscellany of feudal fiefdoms scattered around the central lake of the Valley of Mexico, none of which were directly related either in scope or political history to the fabled Toltecs, although the claiming of it was universal. Kind of like the touchstones of “Mom, apple pie, and Babe Ruth” which are claimed by all segments of the political spectrum of those of us in El Norte, all in Aztec times bowed in the direction of mythical Tula. The fact that more than one Aztec ruler destroyed the records of previous local eras and stripping Tula to furnish Tenochtitlan, for example - may have inspired the Spanish to do the same. The Aztec apocalypse, although of a slightly different circumstance - military defeat - was abrupt and conclusive.
Or was it? The indigenous American expression of culture and spirituality were dealt a devastating blow in the encounter with Europe, and its expression and memory ruthlessly and carelessly repressed, but what is repressed does not simply go away; it bides its time and resurfaces via novel forms of expression, sometimes with a nasty twist, sometimes with renewed; purer, vigor. Having died to outer expression in the Season just past, it is now reborning. Can we be alert enough to recognize it as it emerges within us? What will it look like?
Since I have not been able to track any historical data linking an Azteca “Tonantzin” (a generic, not a specific mother-goddess) and a post-Colombian “Guadaloupe”, and any free-floating assertion of a simple identity between the two cannot but seem arbitrary to one who does not a priori believe it, I shall instead insert here a lengthy set of passages from a highly respected scholar who offers some provocative yet solidly grounded speculations on the nature of the “Goddess” in the singular and seminal civilization of Teotihuacan. In no other Mesoamerican culture did the Goddess have such prominence or such unique and varied iconography. Attention has been drawn to Teotihuacan's singular placement in time. If “Guadaloupe” now resurfaces from the same deep reservoirs of significance as gave rise to Teotihuacan's major deity, examination of the latter's milieu may assist in tracking her more recent permutations.
Note: Let me take pains to be absolutely clear: I am not postulating an identity between The “Great Goddess” of Teotihuacan and Nuestra Senora de Guadaloupe nor between either of these and any other aspect of the Feminine Archetype. I am suggesting that the Goddess-orientation so dear to indigenous sensibilities finds expression in both phenomena, and that some of what is learned about the nature of one might facilitate a sensibility and appreciation of the other. It has done so for me.
Prof. Pasztory's treatment is also a splendid introduction to the world of modern scholarship concerning American origins, and for that reason alone, its length is not out of place. Its inclusion here is by her kind permission.
Teotihuacan - The Pyramid of the Sun and the Goddess
In 1968 workmen consolidating the Pyramid of the Sun noticed air arising between the attached adosada platform and the pyramid and discovered that a long tunnel-like cave went from the entrance to the center. The cave had been closed up during the Tlamimilolpa phase (A.D. 200-400), perhaps for fear of a collapse. Nothing spectacular was inside - bits of broken Veracruz-style mirrors and evidence of some burning, of some flowing water. But the existence of the cave immediately suggested that the Pyramid of the Sun might have been built over a sacred natural location.
It has long been known that the Teotihuacan area is full of caves. In 1906 Porfirio Diaz had lunch in a restaurant in a cave called La Gruta that still provides fare for tourists, not far to the east of the Pyramid of the Sun. In the 1980s Linda Manzanilla explored the terrain with remote sensing equipment and found that the entire site is full of caves and tunnels. She found, for example, that the tunnel underlying the Pyramid of the Sun continues both in front of and behind the pyramid, as part of a larger system. She also found a strong correlation between caves and three-temple complexes, most of which had been built near caves. lndeed, in one Aztec glyph, Teotihuacan is represented by two pyramids and a cave. Evidently, then, it was a city famous for its caverns and tunnels. The cave under the Pyramid of the Sun has become significant in the interpretation of its meaning and the possible deities to whom it was dedicated.
No known textual sources reveal to which deities the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon were dedicated. Because the Aztecs placed one of their creation myths - in which the sun and moon were created at the beginning of the present era - at the site of Teotihuacan, they named the massive structures the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The Spanish, eager to simplify Indian religion to "sun and moon" worship, continued the myth. To attempt an identification for the Pyramid of the Sun, one must consider Aztec practice and what scholars know from the excavations of the Aztec main temple, the Templo Mayor. The abundant sixteenth-century texts and recent archaeology indicate how difficult the question is. The main Aztec temple was a twin-pyramid, dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc and the war god Huitzilopochtli. All sixteenth-century texts say so, and many refer to the statues of these deities in the temples on top. Those statues have long been destroyed, but many sculptures are among the nearly seven thousand objects uncovered in excavations directed by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma in the 1970s and 1980s in the interior of the pyramids. Many images of Tlaloc exist in clay, onyx, and greenstone - but none of Huitzilopochtli. In fact, there are no identifiable images of Huitzilopochtli among the many hundreds of Aztec stone sculptures. (Although other characters in the Huitzilopochtli mythology were given sculptural form.) Thus, if it were up to archaeology alone, there would be no way to know that the other half of the temple was dedicated to Huitzilopochtli.
…The archaeological identification of the gods to whom temples were dedicated is thus problematic. None of the temples of Mesoamerica built prior to the Postclassic period can be identified as being dedicated to a specific deity, nor are images that could clearly be deity cult images identifiable….
The other half of the temple was dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc. This division suggests a dichotomy between the cult of war and the cult of agricultural fertility. However, the situation is more complex than that because one of the ostensible aims of war and sacrifice was the support of the cosmos and, certainly, agricultural fertility. Moreover, although Tlaloc (a Jupiterlike deity of storm and lightning) was one of the preeminent gods of agricultural fertility, he also had civic aspects. To the Aztecs he was the god par excellence of the defunct earlier civilization of the Toltecs, including Teotihuacan. In raising a temple to Tlaloc the Aztecs were thus also venerating the ancient cultures of the Basin of Mexico.
Perhaps the term should be propitiating - hoping that old and new, Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli, would coexist in the harmony of the empire. The choices of the Aztecs were based on their historical position in Mesoamerica. They were conquerors who came from an allegedly nomadic background to an area with over a thousand years of settled civilization and with ruins like Teotihuacan. The mere fact that they thought that Teotihuacan had been built by the gods indicates that they could not imagine such a place built by man and felt small in comparison. Their consciousness was therefore strongly historical - as the many archaistic sculptures and heirlooms collected in the Templo Mayor indicate. Political acts (such as marriage into Toltec dynastic lines), twin-pyramids, and eclectic monuments testify to the fact that the Aztecs were not only trying to synthesize the past and the present, but were also maintaining the differences between a constructed past and present. They could, after all, have presented their own view of life and the cosmos and let the past take care of itself.
Teotihuacan, however, emerged in a completely different situation. Preceding it were only small centers, the largest of which was Cuicuilco (destroyed by a volcanic eruption), with stone architecture of a very modest scale dating to 400-200 BC Prior to that the basin had been inhabited since before 1000 BC but only by people living in villages of various sizes without significant monumental architecture or sculpture. At the time of Cuicuilco's prominence Teotihuacan was a provincial village in the northeast of the basin….
How did these events come about, and what led Teotihuacan to initiate monument building and urban living on such a colossal scale? I believe that in contrast to the Aztecs (who looked back into history and traditions of greatness) the visionary individuals responsible for the early growth and plan of Teotihuacan looked to a future they hoped to create, one they convinced others they could create. A particular crisis that might account in part for some of the special features of Teotihuacan is the volcanic eruption that covered Cuicuilco, which is dated to 50 B.C. The Basin of Mexico is ringed by volcanoes; eruptions and earthquakes were frequent and were perhaps in part responsible for a Mesoamerican view of the cosmos as hostile, powerful, and unpredictable. The significance of the eruption of Xitle that covered Cuicuilco is, however, specific and local. Even in Mexico only infrequently does a site or city lie directly in the path of a volcanic eruption, but at Cuicuilco the main pyramid is covered by several meters of lava….
Geologists have determined that Xitle was a monogenetic volcano of the Paricutin type, in an area where there are many monogenetic volcanoes. The most recent explosion was that of Xitle, which in the past had been dated anywhere from 400 B.C. to 400 A.D. but is now dated to around 50 B.C. The flow is estimated to have lasted ten years and covered 80 square kilometers known today as the Pedregal area of Mexico City. The thickness of this lava layer varies anywhere from a few meters to more than a hundred meters….
It is very hard to reconstruct ancient history on the basis of archaeology and geology, especially relying on radiocarbon dating. Many accepted "facts" of one decade change in the next, and new excavations rewrite history, sometimes completely. Whatever happened to Cuicuilco is hard to reconstruct…. Certainly at one point (generally believed to be at the time of the change of Teotihuacan from a large village to an urban state) Xitle erupted, covering a part of the site, in a process that might have taken something like ten years. Though the country is dotted by volcanoes and people are used to earthquakes and periodic ash faIls from the great poligenetic ones, eruptions that had such a direct effect on human life were extremely rare and must have been seen in ancient times as very significant….
I suggest a scenario in which civic-religious leaders proposed a "new order" that would guard more effectively against such a catastrophe. A defensive ideology might have been very helpful in getting the population to move to Teotihuacan or to justify its forcible move. The pyramids may have been both propitiations of the gods and indications that humans could now rival the powers of the gods - could build their own volcanoes. The scale of the pyramids was perhaps assurance that the leaders and the community were so powerful that they had nothing to fear.
Did Teotihuacan continue Cuicuilco traditions or depart from them? This question is difficult to answer in view of the fragmentary nature of the information about Cuicuilco. Little clay censers representing old men were copied at Teotihuacan in stone versions, indicating the continuity of household and family ritual. Yet the orientation and layout of the centers are very different. Cuicuilco appears to have been oriented to the cardinal directions, judging by the east-west orientation of the stairway of the main pyramid and the other structures. Teotihuacan was oriented quite differently, 15 degrees 25 minutes east of north, suggesting that it was based on new and different astronomical calculations. Teotihuacan seems to have chosen an astronomically derived order for itself that was consciously different from that of Cuicuilco and was very likely a part of its ideological "defense.”
Rene Millon saw the beginning of Teotihuacan thus: an audacious ruler proposed that time began at Teotihuacan, at the site where the Pyramid of the Sun was later built, using astronomical observations. He conquered the people of the valley, resettled them at Teotihuacan, and organized them into huge building crews. He is buried in the interior of the Pyramid of the Sun. The conquests were continued by the next important ruler, who is buried in the Pyramid of the Moon. The monuments are thus monuments to autocratic rule, like the pyramids of Egypt.
I accept Millon's idea of a "new era" as the foundation of Teotihuacan, but I have a different "story" to account for it. I agree that the city may well have been consolidated through conquest, which is true of most large chiefdoms and states. Ideology is almost always a part of a conquest. Great would-be world conquerors, like Napoleon Bonaparte, for example did not win merely by superior force of arms and manpower but by promising superior new political conditions. Conquerors often claim to "free" their victims in some fashion. Ideology is essential both for the followers of the leader and for the conquered if they are to be assimilated into a new polity. Moreover, the leader too is most convincing if he believes to some extent in his own cause.
Most Mesoamerican warfare, even in the famous Aztec empire, was designed to gain tribute and not territory or population. Its ideological justification was the acquisition of victims for sacrifice to maintain the cosmic cycles of the universe. The conquered people shared this ideology. Conqueror and victim were often represented on monuments that dramatized and celebrated this situation of "eternal warfare." Historians have shown that the Aztecs did not have the practical resources - including roads and transportation facilities - to maintain a large territorial empire and to incorporate the conquered population permanently. The Aztec solution, punitive wars and sacrifices, followed from the problem of the instability of the empire. Such a pattern was probably characteristic of endemic Classic Maya warfare, sacrifice, and tribute collection as well.
The founders of Teotihuacan had, for their time, the novel concept of creating a large and unified political territory justified by social harmony rather than by conflict. They evidently wanted to concentrate the population of the Basin of Mexico in one center. While this goal may have had clear advantages in terms of social, political, and economic control, I imagine that the ideological justification was the creation of a place "free" from the unpredictable forces of the cosmos and based on models of order, harmony, and control rather than chance and conflict. Teotihuacan was going to outdo the gods through knowledge and organization.
All settlements in the basin need not have been conquered; some could have been persuaded to participate in the new community by privileges or threats. I suggest that the leaders of Teotihuacan presented themselves primarily as priests, rather than as the dynastic rulers common in Mesoamerica and perhaps also at Cuicuilco. I assume this from the lack of ruler representation and the lack of dates and inscriptions at Teotihuacan that are common in other Mesoamerican cultures associated with dynastic rulers. In my view, the founding leaders of Teotihuacan emphasized their knowledge of the will of the gods and their superior propitiating abilities, abasing themselves in the process. These early political-religious leaders may well have been buried in the great pyramids, but I doubt that the pyramids were dedicated to them.
The art of later periods indicates the Teotihuacan insistence that it was not governed by a dynastic family. Either Teotihuacan selected rulers from certain families and did not focus on primogeniture and descent, or if Teotihuacan had a ruling dynasty it chose not to dramatize its rulers. This anonymity could have been either because rulers were so much in control that they did not have to bother with ritual and artistic legitimation or because a low profile was their chosen strategy. Like the Inca, whose power is symbolized by great walls and not portraits, the rulers of Teotihuacan are portrayed in colossal architecture. The nature of Teotihuacan imagery makes me feel that the rulers chose to rule through the deities and the forces of nature that they represented, as a more effective approach than the cult of their own personality. Such "austerity" may have made them more impressive in the eyes of a heterogeneous population and hence was a superior form of legitimation….
…At its inception, Teotihuacan must have been an ethnically diverse place, with the elite from Oztoyahualco. It must have been a rare feat of social engineering to organize a heterogeneous, rapidly expanding settlement in one crowded place into a cooperating whole. The great pyramids prove that in some fashion this unification was accomplished. Moreover, farmers were persuaded to live in the city and go quite some distance to their fields.
Ideology must have been a crucial tool in this organization, since voluntary participation is more cost-effective than force. Some scholars have suggested that the Olmec and Maya were "theater" states that used architecture, monuments, and ceremonies to create elite power. With its colossal pyramids, avenues, and plazas Teotihuacan is the greatest "ritual theater" in all of Mesoamerica, with both "performers" and "audience" living in the "theater" at all times. The architectural scale of the city literally competes with nature and was perhaps meant to be intimidating both to men and to the gods.
Millon sees a far greater role of force and centralized control at Teotihuacan than I do. I imagine force playing a role, but primarily through the creation of a psychological atmosphere of fear attributed to the demonstrably hostile outside forces. The rulers would then have offered "protection" and were not themselves the threat. I also think that in exchange for control, the population of Teotihuacan enjoyed certain very real benefits….
…In my view the rulers of Teotihuacan would have used force, provided some benefits, created a myth that made sense of the world and of everyone's role in it, and created a convincing show of living up to their values. The notion that all past cultures relied primarily on brute force as social control is based on the Enlightenment concepts of human rights in which governments are believed to crush human liberty unless they are consensual and constitutional in the modern sense. We have thus inherited the idea that all ancient states were absolute and evil.
Concentrating the population in one large city may have been an easier way of enforcing control, but it was also dangerous in that uprisings or factional conflicts could occur on a much larger and potentially lethal scale. In fact, eventually, such an internal crisis may have resulted in the collapse of the city. As I see it, the ideology Teotihuacan propagated was twofold: partly it was defensive and relied on the power of the gods (and the priests who contacted them) to protect the city from environmental disaster, and partly it was positive and promised agricultural fertility, wealth, and social and cosmic order.
Unlike the arts of most of Mesoamerica that glorified violence and dissension, art at Teotihuacan emphasized harmonious coexistence. As striking as the lack of themes of conflict is the lack of dates. Teotihuacan presented itself as a timeless place, as if it had existed from time immemorial and would exist into eternity, outside of history and historical contingency.
Teotihuacan seems to have been the first culture in Mesoamerica to put the emphasis on the gods and the supernatural rather than on the human world in artistic commemoration. Most Mesoamerican monuments depict rulers, prisoners, ballplayers, and more rarely deities. Ancestor worship may have been the major cult of the elite, and many images (such as the well-known Monte Alban urns) appear to represent ancestors rather than gods. The deities in Classic Maya art are usually shown as small creatures under the control of the rulers or as a part of their costume. In the Post-classic period there are more deities, and the appearance is standardized in the divinatory codices….
The most intriguing Teotihuacan deity is the Goddess, who seems especially strongly associated with masks. She is generically related to the various water, fertility, and death goddesses of Mesoamerica, but her specific form has no ancestry outside of Teotihuacan, and with the possible exception of some Xochicalco images, she has no visual descendants. Three colossal statues in Teotihuacan style depict this goddess as a neutral or benevolent power. The representational strategy of Teotihuacan was thus seduction rather than terror. A feminine major deity serves to emphasize cosmic rather than political issues, and a benevolent appearance emphasizes positive values.
Doris Heyden suggested that the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun was like the Chicomoztoc, or Seven Caves of Origins, of the Aztecs. According to Aztec migration legends, their barbarian ancestors emerged from caves. Karl Taube suggested a variant interpretation more in line with what scholars know of Teotihuacan: rather than a cave of origin and the beginning of a migration, he suggests that this was a cave of emergence more on the model of Hopi belief. (Although the Hopi actually believe that after emergence they did go on a migration.) He suggests that the people of Teotihuacan may have believed that they were autochthonous and that they came out of the earth at that spot.
On admittedly slight evidence, I had developed the hypothesis that if the major deity of the Pyramid of the Sun was one of the ones we know, it was the Goddess. Although I am technically the "discoverer" of this goddess in the iconography of Teotihuacan, others, such as Hasso von Winning and Clara Millon, saw her importance long before I did. Hasso von Winning calls her the Great Goddess, but because of all the controversy that surrounds the concept of an ancient "Great Goddess," I call her "the Goddess." My original discovery of her was through simple Selerian identification. I noted that most Storm God images had very clear facial features and costumes: ringed eyes, a moustache-like upper lip, a water lily hanging from the mouth, and a five-knot headdress in the case of Tlaloc A and similar facial features, a long tongue, and a variety of headdresses in the case of Tlaloc B (As mentioned earlier, a larger sample studied by James Langley shows that this division is illusory because many intermediate forms exist.) I noted that several deities, such as the Jade Deity of Tetitla and the Deity of Tepantitla, which are usually called Tlalocs, lacked every one of these features. Instead, they shared a frame-headdress with a zigzag border and a bird in the center, a yellow face and hands, a mask, and a nose bar of some kind. At Tepantitla this figure was the major deity, and the Storm God was relegated to the borders….
The femaleness of the Tepantitla and Tetitla deities was at first hard for me to accept completely, and I thought that they might be bisexual. The best evidence for femininity was the presence of a spider in both murals. Metaphorically, spiders represent weavers and are symbols of women and feminine activity from Mesoamerica as far as the American Southwest. (Taube goes so far as to call the Teotihuacan goddess "Spider Woman" as in Southwestern mythology.) In addition, at Tepantitla the elite "priests" flanking the deity wear skirts and huipils rather than male garments. Whether they are male or female, they appear to be dressed as women; the priests of deities often dressed in male or female attire matching the gender of the deity in Mesoamerican rituals.
At Tepantitla the half-body of the Goddess rises from a talud/tablero platform ornamented with flowers and feathers. In the center of the platform, an upside-down U shape frames a space, in which seeds are represented, that I have interpreted as a symbolic cave. This central symbol emerges from a wavy body of water in which shellfish swim. Its top is an imaginary ground line on which plants such as maize and fruit trees grow. A branch or vine divided into a red half and a yellow half emerges from the back of the - Goddess, full of spiders and butterflies. The tree is laden with flowers in bloom, seemingly weighted down by drops and streams of water, as after a rainstorm. Birds hover around it. Although the Goddess is masked, her hands with painted fingernails are very visible. She holds huge drops of water. The Tetitla version of the Goddess lacks the elaborate setting, but the outstretched arms giving gifts are very similar. Instead of drops of water, she presents streams of liquid full of little green Both the Tepantitla and Tetitla Goddess images are from apartment compounds and date probably to the late Metepec phase (A.D. 650-750). The Teotihuacan Goddess images are far less standardized in form than are images like the Storm God that were established prior to the rise of Teotihuacan. Because so much variety of representation exists, there is no way to be certain whether all the figures I will mention represent one being or perhaps several. They share certain iconographic features, such as yellow body color or a zigzag-bordered headdress, as well as thematic features such as cavelike interiors or hidden faces. I have argued in the past that circumstantial evidence makes this protean figure one goddess, and I still choose that interpretation to tell my story of Teotihuacan here. I am, however, very aware that the Goddess is a construct and that other explanations may hold for the same images. I have no doubt, however, that the three colossal stone images found at Teotihuacan - the so-called Water Goddess, the so-called Tlaloc figure of Coatlinchan, and the fragment similar to the Water Goddess - all represent persons in female dress, thus making a female figure the most important visual image at the site….
In one mural the Goddess seems to be represented merely by a frame-headdress with the yellow and red zigzag borders, while the mural shows in abstract and decorative ways wavy lines for water, water lilies, shells, and sea creatures, and hidden among them, seeds: images of water, flowers, and agricultural fertility like the more anthropomorphic Tepantitla mural. The seeds are protected in cavelike enclosures. The presence of the goddess is merely implied by the headdress.
The other mural shows matching enigmatic forms at the two sides of the painting, blending the silhouettes of a mountain, a pyramid, and a woman wearing a skirt and a huipil. Each of these forms is personified by earplugs, nose bar, collar, and headdress, but is otherwise "faceless." The interior of each is cavelike, has a small structure, and contains scrolls that suggest smoke or sound. Small human figures present offerings to these two distant and seemingly indifferent beings. At the lower border, seeds are placed within wavy lines that signify water. In this mural the Goddess is present not as a person but as a personified mountain or temple, literally represented as a force of nature.
The two Temple of Agriculture murals may also represent the Goddess in a less human form than the later ones. She is represented either only by her headdress or by a very generalized and impersonal form. A vast gulf in size and scale separates her from humans. This difference in scale is not unlike what must have been the difference between the modest perishable homes of the Tzacualli phase and the Pyramid of the Sun.
Why should the Goddess be related to caves? Clearly she is an earth or nature goddess whose realm includes water, agricultural fertility, minerals, and wealth. She is shown as giving these as gifts. Sometimes she is shown only by hands pouring gifts. Three representations suggest caves: the mural of the Deity of Tepantitla and the two murals of the Temple of Agriculture. There was and is a great deal of cave lore in Mexico, and much of it concerns a powerful fe