The 2012 Story

evidence for the role of the dark rift in transformational creation imagery, with a special focus on the motif of sacrifice that the Maya believed was necessary at cycle endings.

Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s namesake, K’awil, is the deity associated with God K and the planet Jupiter. Helen Alexander writes that God K “is the power behind conjuring, transformation, and transcendence in Maya ritual practice; he is the essence of the och chan, the bearded dragon of Xibalba; he is the essence of the sacred dance that empowers the Maize God to dance out of Xibalba; he is the essence of human royal power that allows mankind access to the cosmos from the heavens down to earth and into Xibalba itself.”¹¹ A strange event brought this king’s forty-three-year reign to a sudden, perplexing close. In 738 AD, just after he made the final dedication on his new ballcourt complex at Copan, he was captured by K’ak Tiliw, the king of nearby Quirigua, and held prisoner. No resistance, no Copan militia was sent to rescue him. On the solar zenith passage day, May 1, he was marched into the Quirigua plaza and decapitated. This ritual sacrifice was reminiscent of the beheading of One Hunahpu by the lords of the underworld in The Popol Vuh. The event is recorded in four surviving inscriptions at Quirigua and Copan. The most official report, from Quirigua Stela F, reads: “He is decapitated, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil; under the supervision of K’ak Tiliw, it happened at the Black Hole place.”¹² The black hole? Years ago, in a review-essay I wrote on place-names and Maya Creation Texts, I concluded that the hiero-glyph translated as “black hole” probably represented the dark rift in the Milky Way.¹³ So I suspected that something relevant happened in the dark rift on the day of his decapitation. Looking at astronomy software, there it was, the most appropriate possible astronomical configuration one could imagine: Jupiter was perfectly aligned with the dark rift. Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s head, Jupiter, the dark rift, transformation, sacrifice, Creation Myth themes, are all wrapped up in this event.

^{Hieroglyphic text from Quirigua Stela F describing Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s decapitation and apotheosis at “the black hole,” when Jupiter was aligned with the dark rift in the Milky Way on May 1, 738 AD. Drawing by the author}

Most strikingly, because of the odd circumstances of this important event in Maya history, namely its providential timing, we must entertain the possibility that the Copan King went willingly into the black hole and his sacrificer was accomplice to a historically enacted mystery play. Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s apotheosis ensured his legacy by laying him to rest in the heart of heaven. We think of the Passion of the Christ as a mystery play full of drama and theological significance. These events at Copan may have had a similar powerful purpose and meaning for the ancient Maya. If Jesus could willingly go to the cross, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil could willingly drop his head into the dark rift. As we can see, calendrical inscriptions indict meaningful astronomical configurations intimately involved with the end-date alignment theory.

DARK-RIFT GLYPHS

The “black hole” glyph can clearly be identified with the dark rift. The controversial half-eroded glyph next to the Tortuguero 2012 inscription is identified, with fair confidence, as containing a “black” element. Scholars, such as Susan Milbrath, believe that the dark rift is associated with skeletal maw imagery.¹⁴ The Black Hole glyph, for example, is miniature shorthand for skeletal jaws, also sometimes identified as incised bones. An entire range of hieroglyphs can now be suspected as being related to the dark rift and the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center (see cloud center glyphs, page 274).¹⁵ These are found in meaningful ballgame contexts and in relation to other monuments dated 9.14.0.0.0 (sun in dark-rift date) at Tikal, Calakmul, and Dos Pilas.

^{Portals to the Underworld and the Cloud Center Place. Drawing by the author}

Yaxchilan provides a special example for a probable dark-rift association in its place-name, Pa’ Chan. Translated as “broken sky” or “sky cleft,” epigraphers think it represents jagged mountains along the horizon or refers to the fact that Yaxchilan is situated in a dramatic hairpin loop of the Usumacinta River. It is recognized that Yaxchilan is just about halfway between the source and mouth of the Usumacinta River, placing it in its “middle.” This great riverine highway of temple sites flows roughly north-south. In many places in Indian America and in fact around the world, rivers were seen as earthly counterparts to the celestial river, the Milky Way. The sacred Urubamba in Peru, the river flowing through Rabinal in highland Guatemala, and the great Ganges in India are just a few examples. It would be surprising if the Usumacinta did not have this meaning for the Maya. In this context, Yaxchilan’s location in a hairpin coil of the earthly Milky Way is reminiscent of the dark rift’s situation between two white branches of the Milky Way. Since the dark rift’s mythological meanings include hole, cave, cleft, portal, road, birthplace, and maw, to say it could be thought of as a “sky cleft” is not at all far-fetched. Could this be the meaning of Yaxchilan’s hieroglyphic place-name? Maybe. It sounds more reasonable, given these considerations, than its representing jagged peaks along the horizon.¹⁶

The dark rift was a significant reference point in so many different meaningful contexts it boggles the mind. When the sun, moon, eclipses, Jupiter, or other planets aligned with it, Creation imagery occurring at cycle endings, building dedications, transcendence and transformation, death and rebirth were evoked. I suspect that other inscriptions will yield secondary references to 2012 via the astronomical image-complex of “sun in dark rift.” The epigraphic code for this will probably involve the many dark-rift glyphs combined with a “sun” infix or prefix. I argued in earlier work that the upturned frog-mouth glyph (which means “to be born”) relates to the dark rift. Significantly, it is prominent in the iconography at Izapa and is found in its later hieroglyphic forms in Classic Period inscriptions.

We shouldn’t forget that this new evidence augments my previous work, which argues for the end-date alignment being encoded into ballgame symbolism, the Creation Myth, birthing symbology, and king-making rites. The “integrative continuity” of the entire picture virtually eliminates the possibility that all of these connections are pure chance. This work may perhaps find its best ally in good old-fashioned common sense: “Given the integrative continuity of its monuments, sculptures, calendrics, and alignments, is it possible that Izapa does not have anything to do with the precessional convergence of Milky Way and solstice sun?”¹⁷ Thankfully, Barb MacLeod herself said the obvious: “It’s not a coincidence.”

^{The Black Hole Place in Maya inscriptions. Drawings by the author}

Michael, Barb, and I continue to collaborate on various investigations relating to precessional astronomy. I am learning to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions, which I had previously left to others. The findings of other scholars are starting to converge, adding more support to my end-date alignment theory. It doesn’t matter whether or not the alignment directly causes some kind of change or transformation. That never was central to my work, although by route of coincidence or providence the unprecedented events occurring in today’s world are undeniable. The galactic cosmology I identified at the heart of the Maya Long Count can now be shown to be more deeply interwoven into core Maya traditions, important historical rulers and astro-theological rites than I ever dreamed it would be. The dark rift, the womb of creation, the sun’s sacrifice and rebirth at the end of the cycle, has meaning in direct proportion to the depth that you meditate on it. For me, it is enough to know that such a beautiful vision once existed and has now been pulled out of the shadows.

The entire history of the 2012 story in Part I, from the rediscovery of a lost civilization to the vicissitudes of reconstructing lost pieces of a massive cosmological and cultural puzzle, to appropriations by New Age inventors and the endless resistances of academic gatekeepers, has led us to the cusp of 2012 and we are now seeing ancient Maya cosmology for what it truly was. Its ultimate orientational nexus was the rare galactic alignment. However one wants to limit the fact of this by paring down the definition, that nuts-and-bolts fact remains. This is the bare-bones conclusion: A precession-based galactic cosmology was pioneered in ancient Mesoamerica more than 2,000 years ago.

Now we have to attend to the Big Picture and the real interesting 2012 question: What does it mean?