Forgotten Mayan Prophecy and Lost History Unveiled with Ed Barnhart

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1:27 Now let's dive in to today's episode. I like to welcome the show, Ed Barnhart. How you doing, Ed, I'm doing great.

1:34 Thanks for inviting me.

1:35 Thank you so much for coming on the show, my friend. I am excited to talk to you about the Mayan history, Mine Lost history, all the Minds are one of my favorite cultures to study. Is one of the first ancient civilizations I was exposed to. When I couldn't go to Egypt, I was like, well, I'm in my twenties, let's go down to Mexico. And that's what I went. And I saw to Jenny, to loom Coba and a couple other sites as well, and it really kind of changed my perspective on ancient civilizations. So I am really excited to talk to you. You are an expert in Mayan civilizations and how many years have you been studying the Mayan culture in general?

2:16 Oh? Gosh, you know, I get older every year. I think it's over thirty years now. Wow.

2:23 Jeez. So my first question I have to ask you is, you know, the when I was down in Chichuanitza and I saw the pyramid and the observatory and that whole area of that site, the one thing I kept thinking about, even back when I was in my twenties, just like, how is it that Egypt and the Mayans, and the Chinese, and the Indonesians and the Japanese they all have pyramids, but yet none of these cultures technically should have ever known about each other or ever connected from your experience, how do you explain that kind of coincidence.

3:04 If you will, Well, you know, I'm a dirt archaeologist, so my explanation might be a little boring for your audience, But I think it's basically trial and error. You know, if you give a kid a set of blocks and tell them to build the tallest structure he can, he builds a tower a couple of times, but without rebar and cement, it falls over. If you want to build a tall structure that's not going to fall down without cement or metal, then you're going to make a fat base and you're going to build it up to the tiny top. And that's how you make the biggest structure in a very basic way. And I think the trial and error for all of these groups, some of them dirt, some of them stone, they figured that out.

3:49 Well, how do you explain, Like again, when I was at to Janizza, the amount of the architecture of that one site is so remarkable, how tight everything thing is, how beautifully is designed. How did the people of that time build something so sophisticated to the point where, and I'm sure you've done this, you sit at the steps at the bottom and you clap your hands and you hear the bird chirping kind of thing. That's a fairly sophisticated building technique. You know that generally speaking can't be I mean, I sure can be done today, but it takes another level of engineering to do stuff like that.

4:27 How do you explain that? How they build it in general?

4:31 Well, you know the bird call thing aside. It really chi Chen is a magnificent urban metropolis. That's what it is. What you see as a tourist is just part of it. It was a city of some thirty five thousand people, and you know, for a radius away from the big pyramid in the middle, there's buildings everywhere, So it's even more impressive than people think. But you know, it's the Maya as a culture, as a civilization went on. You know, really, if we keep the clock going till today, they've been at it for almost five thousand years. So by the time Chichen Itza was built, let's say, you know, it's it's post classic start was somewhere around nine hundred AD.

5:18 The Maya had been building pyramids for almost two thousand years. So these guys stood upon the shoulders of giants who created all of their engineering and architecture and probably transmitted it through their hieroglyphic language.

5:34 Well that was This is the first time, and again please excuse me, ignorance, this is the first time I've heard that the Maya being that old of a culture, you know, And so that's kind of new to me because I haven't really I knew that they were, you know, maybe a thousand years prior to you know, maybe around the time of Jesus. Let's say that there was something starting.

5:54 But what you're saying is they're going back towards the Egyptian times, you know. Yeah, actually that like five thousand years back. So if my math is correct and I'm not good at math. We're talking at about three thousand BC is kind of where they started. Where are if that's the case, and where are these other structures that they've been building up that you found?

6:15 Oh oh, we have an entire chronological narrative of them. You know, if we go back to three thousand BC, people are building, you know, in the Maya highlands of Guatemala and down by the coast, they're building the first stone and dirt structures, and then you know, but as we go up, we go into a culture called Mokaya, and then we get into Maya, but that's still you know, we're looking at a thousand BC, So three thousand years ago they're building major pyramids in along the coast of Chiappus and up into the highlands of Guatemala. At the same time, the ole Nec culture is happening and making their you know, colossal heads and these multi ton statues that everybody's crazy about. That's going on too. And then

7:06 between them and some the other cultures like the Zapaitecs and the people that are in the Valley of Mexico, they start regularly building big stone pyramids and palaces and ball courts, and all sorts of things. So, you know, but let let me revise and say it was eighteen hundred years before Cucinitza starts building their architecture, that the Maya and their neighboring civilizations are experimenting with and improving engineering and architecture.

7:37 Are The Almoics are fairly mysterious because there's not as much information about them. They are a much older civilization than the Maya or the Aztecs.

7:47 Correct, yes, some would call them the mother culture. They are the first real ones to start putting out big, huge, religious pieces of architecture. All of their buildings are packed earth, which is a little a little strange that they would drag a twenty ton monument into a plaza and then build an earthen pyramid in front of it. It's a little odd. It's explainable because there wasn't much stone where they chose to live. But they are the oldest ones. Nowadays, we have more of a nuanced understanding that they're kind of interacting with the people that are the proto Maya and the proto Zappaitechs and the proto kind of way proto Aztecs in the same region. Valley of Mexico, and so those cultures all kind of help each other up

8:40 in what we call the pre Classic. Then we hit the Classic period where tons of Maya cities are being built up in the jungles of the ten. They're also all over Yucatan where chichen Itza is, but there are other sites that are older around it that are less visited. And then finally that all falls apart what we call the classic Maya collapse, where all of those cities get abandoned for reasons fully not understood still, and then they evolve into this post classic form where in the Yucatan Chia is the capital city.

9:15 So the collapse of the Maya, which is when I was down there, that was something that they kept saying a lot of my tour guide and stuff like, yeah, they just disappeared. They just disappeared. And you know, we're talking about essentially millions of people across across the continent. I mean, it's a lot of people. It's not like a village, it's a lot of people. I've heard an explanation that it was possibly the Spanish who brought over disease and just wiped out, wiped out large swaths of people, is that something that makes sense or is there any.

9:48 Explore that indeed did happen, but at like fifteen hundred CE. Okay, the famous Maya collapse where everybody just abandons the city that happens between eight hundred and nine hundred a d or CE.

10:05 And there's no explanation of it.

10:07 Well, you know, we have various theories suations, but big cities winners that there was a big civil war between the cities that basically were either team t Call or Team klack Mule, the two big cities that finally settled out, and it seemed like the winners would take their bigger chunk of land and the other ones that'd be quiet and be subsidiary. But instead everybody from the winners and loser cities, those cities depopulate.

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10:46 Really, and they don't put up any more monuments. There's no more pyramids. They just walk away from them. Now, the general population, they could have gone, you know, ten ten kilometers out and started a little far and archaeology had never see it. But where did all the ruling class go. Some people think they filtered their way into places like Yucatan and back down into the highlands of Guatemala and started the post classic cities there. There's some evidence to suggest lineages from those abandoned cities started places like chichen Itza.

11:22 Wide leave. It's like essentially New York, New Yorkers leaving New York and going down, going down to Colorado.

11:29 Uh. You know, a general societal wide loss of faith in the power of these divine kings that could have been a factor. There are environmental factors that people bring up. Jared Diamond's books famously. He wrote one called Drought where he suggests from meso America all the way up into North America that there was this terrible period of drought that destroyed all the civilizations at its time. It doesn't really work like that, because there's tons of rivers that they that they went away from, and a lot of them clustered in one of the driest parts of the Yucatan, so that the evidence that they ran because of climate change doesn't fit everywhere. Again, the Maya world is so huge to try to say one environmental factor affected the

12:21 people in the highlands and the lowlands on the coasts and the Jungles, It's it's complicated.

12:28 It would it be the equivalent of something like that happening to the United States. Let's say, like one event has taken over, has taken the west coast, aust taken the east coast, alst taking, taken the middle of the country out. It's like it would have to be something so massive that it wouldn't just happen to the United States, who probably happened to the entire world.

12:43 Right, even in the drought hypothesis, there were parts of the United States, like all the civilizations that grew up around the Mississippi River that didn't miss a beat when this drought period was there. It destroyed the American Southwest, but it empowered the Mississippians. No, there was another culture.

13:03 Yeah, exactly, very different than the Mayan. Uh. Now, there was something else I learned about, which is and I don't know if the exact name of it, but the black Earth that they figure out a way to create to regenerate soil, to make it very fertile, and it was and it was they found they have found it, but we haven't been able to redo something like that, and like making you know, a barren land fertile all of a sudden with a technique.

13:33 If I understand what you're talking about right, you're talking about the stuff specifically in the Amazon.

13:39 Yes, exactly in the Maya.

13:41 We don't have to guess whether there were people living there that build pyramids on top of it. And the Amazon, you know, we always had. The old theory was Betty Metger's theory counterfeit paradise, that though it seemed so resource rich that you couldn't possibly farm there. And then they start finding all these archaeological sites where there's clearly farms, and then there's some things where you know there's nobody there.

14:07 But what you're talking about this black earth that anthropology calls it an anthropogenic landscape, that a huge area has much much richer soil than it should. The idea, the thought is that civilizations had actually been manipulating that soil for thousands of years and it turned it into this fertile soil. And the Amazonian tribes that sit on it today and farm are farming basically in thousand year old mulch.

14:47 Which is why our.

14:48 Civilization that we don't see because it's a perishable world. If they're all building their things out of wood and feathers and pelts. All we're going to find is black dirt.

15:00 Right exactly from what I understand though, if you took some of that black dirt now, even it's so fertile that it can actually help regenerate other earth. It's like a weird I saw something about that on a documentary somewhere, maybe on the History Chattel or something, But.

15:15 Well, it is incredibly fertile. And I did a couple of years back, I did a little boat trip up the Amazon and into the Rio Negro side, specifically visiting tribes and seeing where they lived. And every one of these you know, really remote tribes could talk to me intelligently about this black earth and that that's why they put their village there, because it's a big, huge patch of black earth and they can do all this farming, and that they know that there are places along the river that doesn't have the black earth, and that would be a stupid place to build their village because they can't farm. They are taking advantage of it. So in many ways, you know, archaeologists got the idea to look for this from the natives, which happens all too often.

15:59 An archaeolic there's always some you know, white guy in a hat going I've discovered this with my little friend here, who showed me where it is.

16:07 Exact, except I think that happens in all cultures essentially, UH and all and all UH, in all findings in archaeology, there generally seems to be that. And he jumped into his indesia. So on. One thing I was going to ask you is what, out of all the mysteries that the minds have, and there are many, which is the one that most intrigues you that it just keeps you up at night, just like how is how did that happen?

16:36 Or where did that? Like questions that are just mysteries that have not been solved yet.

16:41 Oh that's a good question, you know. I'm I'm a math and science nerd, so I look a lot at you know, the way their mathematics work, and their way their astronomy works. I wonder things like that. I wonder, you know, just how exactly they made their observations. I mean, like way too deep into the mechanics of the Maya calendar.

17:03 And there's a couple of things that just make their math break. If we take their word for how the calendar works. There's this whole like the world resets at thirteen bocktunes thirteen four hundred year periods. It doesn't actually work with the rest of their math in many ways. And there's such magnificent mathematicians. I can't imagine they got it wrong. It bugs me that I'm probably getting it wrong.

17:30 There are things even with it. For a guy like me that has studied it for twenty years, I'm still scratching my head about, you know, certain aspects of their math. Another one is the Dresden Codex's Venus pages. Teams of people for generations now have been trying to decode the entire meaning of the math that lies beneath it, and they're still unanswered questions.

17:55 How could a culture that quote unquote primitive comparatively to where we are today have such an advanced understandings of mathematic and astronomy.

18:07 Well, I mean, you know, I would respectfully say, sometimes we need to rethink our definition of primitive, because those guys were just as smart as we are. And the Maya, unlike a lot of the North, the American cultures created a writing system, so they actually had the ability for one generation to do studying of the sky and take notes and do math, and then hand it to the next generation who continues the observations and after a while you get pretty darn good at it. They get a foundation of knowledge which they build, and probably writing was a big part of that, but also they just had a mentality to understand their universe. They probably did it, you know, in the search for God rather than science

18:57 like we think we're doing these days.

18:59 Well, the thing is one thing that was always fascinated me about the Maya as well, is that, and especially some of the pyramids and structures that they built, they're all so perfectly aligned to the stars at a level that is almost perfection, to where the equinox, the solar equinox and the lunar equinox create that dragon that comes down the steps. If I'm not mistaken, it's the equinoxes that create that twice a year. Yeah, yeah, the snake, excuse me, not dragon, but this, Yeah, the snake out of the stairs. The amount of the amount of intelligence and knowledge and engineering to do something like that at that time period seems insane to do. And as well as the as well as the bird clap thing, like

19:46 I still. You know, if you could explain that to me, I'd be really interested they did that.

19:50 You know, I'm not sure about the bird clap. There's a that's in a lot of Maya sites, and there there's a quality where stone will bounce off and and echo the you know, the the Greeks did it too, on purpose, to a great extent in their theaters and auditoriums. Sometimes when the.

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20:19 When the sound bounces off a building like that, you know the the uh the guides always say it's the it's the voice of a catsal. Yeah, you know you know why they say it's the voice of a catsal. Nobody's ever heard.

20:33 Of cats and.

20:35 We will buy it. Yeah, but very few people know what the heck of ketsal sounds like. It's it's a cool effect. I do not know whether the ancient Maya meant it to sound like a bird, much less a catsal or.

20:48 Even But it's like if you but you have to stand at this one space up the stairs perfectly a line if you move over five feet and move over five doesn't work. But anyway, but how but that's that's that's that's almost a parlor trick comparatively to understanding the stars and understanding the equinoxes and how the sun is going to lie it hit the pyramid at a certain time period to create this effect of the snake. How do how do you explain or is there an explanation of how they understood the stars so well?

21:16 Well, it's certainly the arrangements of the buildings at certain sites like Chichinitza and this example with the snake coming down at equinox. That is, you know, that's urban planning. That is somebody getting out there with a crew and an engineer and workers and looking at where the shadows will land, first making models and then and then perfecting it.

21:41 It took a lot of organization. They were a very organized, smart people, and you know they were also on agricultural people. So things with the sun are what most we see when we talk about alignments of buildings. It's a lot of the sun like this example, but not much of the planets. Only a little bit of that that we find in their books, we find their calculations. But they were so in the sun was so important because of the agricultural cycle, and so the march was the beginning of a season of the cycle. So they would all get together to celebrate that would.

22:21 There be an instant and correct me if I'm wrong. If the priests, let's say, of the culture, the higher the the the royalty, whatever you'd like to call it, understood things that that they had access to the books, had access to the knowledge, and they knew that if they stand at the top of the pyramid at this day, at this time, the sun's going to come through and create this this kind of shining light and almost godlike image would appreciate it. He would, let's say that ruler would say on Tuesday at six o'clock, I will show you my power, and they would there and do that, and everybody will go, oh, is that something that is that something that would have would have happened back then?

23:07 Well, it's possible. Uh, we you know, we really are all recreating the what would have happened. I prefer to look at it somewhat the opposite that if the majority of Maya are corn farmers, every farmer I've ever met knows exactly on his own, on his own land, when to plant and when to sew. He says, you know, when the sun comes up over that hill there, it's time to plant, and when it sits over near that tree, it's time. The seasons are changing. So I don't think to think that regular Joe farmer Maya didn't know how the sun worked seems strange to me. I think instead of these priests and rulers lording over special knowledge that they keep in books about what the sun's going to do, those celebrations that are happening at solar stations are honoring

24:04 the farmers and the thing that ties all of society together. I think those are those are honoring shared knowledge and shared important things, rather than a elite teaching an ignorant published population how to do their job.

24:19 Is the Maya. From my understanding, the Maya were not as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs, let's say, with sacrifices and throwing people off of pyramids and decapitations and things like that. Is that is that true? Or was there a phase or a stage in their evolution that because they have that game that I guess just the ball through the little hooper. It's basically a basketball essentially almost something like basketball, but if you lost, you died or something along those sides.

24:49 If Apocalypto showed us.

24:51 Anything, Uh, Apocalypto showed us very little. Yes, beautiful movie then, I mean it was a good movie. It was a great but it was not a accurate on the Maya by any stretch.

25:05 Yeah, that's when I saw that because I understood that Maya were not that blood thirsty, that we were not that sacrificial. Aztecs were much more known for that than they.

25:13 Well, it depends on what phase of Maya you're talking about. You just mentioned that. It really is dependent. As we see time pass. For the Maya, the Classic period people they're doing a lot of warfare against each other and they are sacrificing people that they bring back from war. So there was some sacrifice there, But the main sacrifice of the Classic period was and what we call an auto sacrifice that the king would do. He would blood let himself and then connect to his ancestors. So that was. Uh, there's more of that displayed, at least in their art than the sacrifice of people. But once that Classic period ends and the post Classic begins, the Maya get a lot more in influenced by the people from Central Mexico

26:03 who eventually evolve into the Aztecs, but they are a much more bloody and sacrifice oriented civilization, and as they influence and interact with the Maya, the Maya picked that same bad habit up. Like in Chichinitza, there's actually in between the ball court and the big pyramid there is a platform that carved All the way around it are skulls on stakes, stacked like they're a shishkebob, And that looks just like the Aztec skull rack from their main city that's now Mexico City. So it looks pretty darn clear that chichen Itza had a skull rack full of people that heads that were sacrificed at that site at chichen Itza. I think by the time the toll tech start influencing them, the ASTech do get a lot more

27:02 bloody and sacrifice oriented Classic period, not so much Chi in the post classic.

27:09 Yeah, is that so after that that stage? Is that when they disappeared after that stage or how many more years before they disappeared.

27:17 No, they never really disappeared.

27:20 But abandon the abandoned.

27:22 Oh no, the you're talking about the mysterious collapse of my society. That's like seven hundred eight hundred, So that's that's the end of that period where they're not doing that much sacrificing. Then we have a couple hundred years that we call the Terminal Classic that we don't really everything's evolving so fast it's hard to see pinned down.

27:41 And then it settles down at about a thousand into the post Classic, and that's where they interact with the Toltec and Central Mexicans more and get considerably more sacrifice happy.

27:54 Were the Toltecs sacrifice happy?

27:57 Yep, they seem to have been, and the as texts hold up the Toll texts as their model. So there there's an indicator for you too.

28:07 How did the how did the Toll text create some of those these giant heads that everyone talks about. There's they're pretty sophisticated carvings for such a brutal quote unquote time in their in their evolution. It's sometimes it just doesn't connect with me. Where you know a culture that would build something like Chichnitza have that intelligence of the stars and mathematics and are pretty pretty smart and pretty evolved.

28:39 Yet they are sacrificing and you know, cutting hearts out and cutting heads off and putting them on steaks and things like that. There's a disconnect for me there because like right now, we are quote unquote at a very civilized time in our in our history as as as a as a as a as a society quote unquote, I say, but at least most of us, exactly. And there are sections of the world that are very barbaric and still are doing barbaric things. And there are sections of the world, like in the Amazon, who are living like they did five hundred years ago almost exactly. So there's a little bit of everything all over the place.

29:15 So I'm curious on what you think, how do you kind of put that those two things together. Something that's i mean, the intelligence and the wisdom of mathematics and almost like almost philosophical the Greek period almost in philosophy, that they were so advanced, but yet just killing people, decapitating them and shoving them down spikes. It just seems a real big disconnect.

29:41 I totally agree with you, And you know, from our Western perspective, those two elements of society do not belong together. But you know, my mentor Linda Sheila used to tell me when I was a student and if you don't stop thinking like a Westerner and try to put yourself in the shoe of how these Mesu American people live, you're never going to understand anything. And I think that, you know, I'm still struggling to understand, but I have at least accepted that the Aztecs, the Maya, the Zappatas, especially the Aztecs are proof that, you know, a lot of things that we count as civilized behavior and barbaric behavior can coexist in a single society. The Aztecs, they probably really did sacrifice twenty thousand people in a three

30:35 day period to inaugurate a temple.

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30:48 But on the other hand, their leaders were supposed to be poets and statesmen, and they were supposed to be able to at a party just get up and re site a poem that everybody knew, or maybe a new one they made. And they could play instruments, and they were the and they loved flowers. The gardens of the Aztecs were magnificent. There were so many aspects of art and culture and nature and beauty that they appreciated hand in hand with murdering each other. And uh, you know, it's kind of one of the magnificent things about studying anthropology.

31:26 There's there's a revelation humans can actually live and prosper like that too, and did prosper When the Spanish out there, they said that the Tenos Tittlan was the biggest market that they had ever seen in their life. There were sixty thousand people mulling around a very prosperous economic market.

31:48 That must have been mind blowing to the Spanish when they came. I mean it must have didn't No, I know, the Spanish basically took over most of South America as well. They mostly all speak Spanish now. But how I know the stories of the Aztecs and what they did with the Aztecs and the Inca, they did the same thing with the Mayans as far as they just came in and they gave them disease, you know, accidentally or on purpose, and they just basically destroyed them essentially. Is that true?

32:21 Yeap, That is you know, in a nutshell, that is absolutely true. It took them a little while longer to get to the Maya because the Maya had nothing. They want no gold, cities have any gold, and they didn't have much in the way of commerce. Eventually they figured out they had some things they wanted, and they were also independent city states. Where the Aztecs you could really chop the head off the snake and just go through the rest of it. If you took out the capital city, you owned the empire. But the Maya you had to do it city by city by city, and it was much more tedious to get to them all. And they didn't really have any gold they were looking for, you know, they were golden city goals to convert, so they were

33:06 you know, they were on the list, but they were there. But I think the lack of resources that they were looking for kept the Maya safe for a bit. But eventually, you know, really before the Spanish even started swinging swords in the Maya area, people were getting sick everywhere, the deadly diseases. You know. I think that modern studies now are proving fairly conclusively that ninety to maybe ninety five percent of people died in the first fifty to one hundred years of contact. There were like ten percent of Maya left by the time the Spanish really started taking over.

33:48 Now with the new technology that we have with a sonar and aerial sonar. If I'm not mistaken, they're discovering pyramids throughout the Amazon, completely covered and have not been excavated yet. How exciting is that for you? And where do you think? Is there any site that you have seen that they go, Oh my god, there is this giant temple there. It's just you can't get to it right now. It's costing too much money or something like that to even get to that place. Are there any site that you've heard about that you were just dying to get to?

34:25 Oh gosh, I mean, there is a lot of progress. It's coming too fast and furious. I don't even know what's going to come next. It's a lightar is the technology that's it, and it kind of takes the trees away and shows us the landscape, and we're seeing all sorts of interesting networks of cities down in the Amazon.

34:44 What they do is they build up these big earthen berms and they live on top of those, and then they make causeways to other earthen berms, and the whole thing looks like a big spiderweb from the sky, but collectively it's like city centers and naborhoods that have tens of thousands of people, some of them some of them in the Bolivian rainforest and a part called a Beny.

35:08 Have these just huge civilizations. And it's funny the researchers down there looked through all of the religious conversion documents from the Franciscans and Jesuits that there were people down there in the late fifteen hundreds that were trying to Christianize Amazonians and they saw these big pure these big mounds, and the causeways going out, and they were they grumped about.

35:37 They said, They've built this incredible network in the urban center in the middle of the jungle, and all they ever used these causeways for is to go from party to party. These people are totally unproductive and won't do what they're told. So they were having a grand old time living in a big city that nobody ever realized was there. The Jesuits did, they just gave up on them because they were shiftless.

36:06 Which brings me, which brings me to my next question about the Catholic Church, which is obviously with when Spain came over, they brought over Jesus because obviously God forbid that these these heathens have not not been exposed to Christianity. But from what I understand, they were priests who burned all of the knowledge and libraries of I guess scrolls or what did they hold this written knowledge that you're talking about.

36:37 Codexes. They were kind of fan fold books that you could open up in the pages. Instead of having a spine and opening up like like wings, you'd open it up like an accordion and lay it long ways across the table to read it. Right.

36:50 So, they that they burned so much knowledge and history of the Maya. Is that a true statement.

36:56 It's exaggerated, but true. There are sometimes we get the impression that they just, you know, they burned them everywhere. There was one big episode where uh Diego de Landa and the Yucatan burned a whole pire of books and people too. He burned people with the stakes in the same in the same event. We tend to not talk about that as well as the books in this conversation, but uh, yeah, they were burning them. They were they were looking to eradicate, especially religion, to replace it with the new one.

37:27 And how many of these these the accordion esque books have you found of ancient minds have been found and been translated.

37:38 We have four. We have four left on the planet. Maybe that's all we've got. I have found them archaeologically, But in the jungle they're like stains. They're just goo, piles of pigment. The paper's all gone, and so I we they used to have tons, a lot of them did. That's why I said exaggerated a lot of the books.

37:59 Just you know, if you put a book on a shelf in a jungle, it's gone in ten years.

38:06 But in the desert of but the deserts of Egypt, it holds because it's dry.

38:10 Exactly exactly all those things held up, all those scrolls. So the ones that we have were ones that the Spanish took to Europe and then they filtered around for a couple centuries until somebody figured out, hey, those are Maya. One of them almost got burned up in the library in Paris. It was in a stack that was going to go into the furnace to keep the building warm in the eighteen hundreds, and somebody somebody said, hey, yeah, isn't that a isn't that a Maya codex? We should we should keep that.

38:40 So how did was there a Rosetta stone that allowed us to figure out that the writing of the Mia.

38:47 Not exactly a Rosetta stone, but there it's actually worked thanks to the work of the same guy that did all the book burning, Diego Dealanda. He did a big ethnography talking to the Maya, and he had an informed and try to explain to him how their alphabet worked. So he had him say out like he said in Spanish, right ah here, right be here, right, say here, and the guy just wrote, he wrote what he heard. They actually have a syllabarry, so that not really in alphabet that DeLanda recorded his book in the fifteen hundreds turned out to be the key to helping us break the code.

39:30 Now you talk about religion, you know, trying to eradicate the first religion to bring in the new religion of Christianity. What was their religion or spiritual practices throughout the from as far back as we can go to where to where they till the Spanish showed up.

39:46 Well, from the Maya they had a pantheon of gods that that evolved and changed slightly over the thousands of years. But there was a pantheon. There's not necessarily a king of the Maya gods like Zeus, which like Maya society with their city states. They it was kind of a council of gods.

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40:16 And so you know there's there's a number of them. There's a corn god, there's a sun god, there's a death god. So it's a you know, that's fairly you know, run of the mill kind of assignment of natural forces gods. But they followed those gods until the Spanish showed up. Now, the thing about that was so that the circumstances were perfect for this conversion in the regard that Maya and really all of the Native American societies before the europe showed up, believe that illness is a supernatural attack. It's not a it's it's not a physical thing. You don't get a cold, you get imbued by some spirit, some bad spirit makes you sick, and you're well, not necessarily possessed, but you know, it's it's the disfavor of some supernatural thing.

41:13 Like so when somebody gets sick, they think, oh, you know, some witch made them sick. We got to make we got to bring our nice switch over here to Corindero to fix them, because everything has kind of you're all part of an animate spirit. But when everybody starts getting sick, then they conclude that their gods are angry with them and that the gods are making everyone sick. So that's that's how they interpreted everybody getting sick, just in time for these guys in brown robes to show up and say, oh, by the way, there's only one God, and if you just let me splash this water on your face, you'll be baptized and maybe you'll save you. Oh jeez, was that water infected? Oh sorry about that. I guess I

41:53 actually accelerated the disease with that.

41:59 Oh my god. You see the more you get into history, sometimes you see how.

42:03 Long that was the real tragedy. Those those priests really did want those people to stay alive and be good Christians, but baptizing was actually accelerating the spread of the disease. One bowl of holy water would be splashed on one hundred people who would walk up willingly to follow this new God if it meant they stopped dying, But they got delivered the disease right to their face.

42:24 So as far as spirituality is concerned. Was it more, Was there ever a point where they began to transcend these these kind of elemental gods, and was there always it was it always kind of like a poly when there's multiple gods, I forgot the word, you know that kind of like worshiping multiple gods. Or did they ever at one point exactly did they ever look inward kind of like the Vedic texts or the or the Vedic cultures or the Indian cultures, that they start to look inward for answers as opposed to always looking outward.

43:04 No, I don't think we have any hint of that. And again, you know wonders of anthropology, everybody does something different. They were very unique religions. Now there were elements of things that we would call shamanism or ancestor worship that were part of it. An interesting thing about the Maya who have a pantheon of gods, say, versus the Greeks who have a pantheon of gods. The Greek gods and humans are interacting all the time. The Maya never directly interact with the gods. They have their ancestral spirits who live in the world of the gods act as liaisons.

43:42 That was somewhat of the right to rulership for Maya kings, that they had people in important places that could act as liaisons. But gods did not directly communicate with humans. Humans. They communicate with the spirit world, which is somewhere between the level of the gods and the spirits, and a lot of what happens in the spirit world is communicating with ancestors. The modern Maya today who live in Guatemala, have a group of people called daykeepers. There's over seven thousand daykeeper priests and an association still, so it's a strong tradition. Millions of people see this and they talk about the twenty days of the Maya calendar as spirits that are all ancestors, and that they all have different

44:32 powers and do different things, and they're all collectively called the mom, which is the grandmother's grandfather spirits, and these daykeepers can commune with those spirits and divine what's going on. They kind they can help people that are sick. Why are you sick, Well, you need to do this, You need to pray at this shrine to this particular mom.

44:55 Or should I get married to this girl? Well, you know your grandparents up there and and say that they argued back in the forth, and you need to mend some fences here before you should get happily married, that sort of thing. But they implore wisdom from this middle level, not the gods, but this spirit level that's all about ancestors.

45:15 And when we talk about that, then it falls into the category of ancestor worship, which also happens all over China today and in the past, so that in that regard, they're not completely isolated in what they think. They have a lot in common with early religions of China, I think.

45:33 Which is odd as well, since they should have never spoken to each other. But also it seems but it also seems that they have something in common with the Native Americans up in the north, which are very much ancestral worship and also animal worship or elemental worships as well. Correct.

45:53 Yes, yes, there's a lot of overlap or you know, core similarities, I should say, between all of the religions of the America's North America, meso America like we're talking about here, and South America. I see it as you know, my theory is that twelve thousand years ago, now maybe you know, starting thirty three thousand years ago, people started coming across from Asia and as they filtered through they developed their own cultures. But just like languages can be reconstructed to a core language, I think that religions also work that way, where they're core principles, that they're all they're the foundations of all of these religions and they turn out to flower in different ways, but when you

46:41 look at the core things, they're all the same. Like for example, North America versus the Maya, both of them at the core of how they think are cosmos is constructed. They have the four directions and the three levels of the universe, and both of them make all sorts of art talking about that fours and those three levels, but they never met each other. That's a core principle of religion that I think came over tens of thousands of years ago.

47:09 Well, I mean at the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam at the core have very similar ideas.

47:18 Oh, they are a group called you know, Joseph Campbell calls them all the Judeo Christian religions, and then you've got the Asian religions that he called what do you called Confucius their son?

47:30 Not Confucius, Buddhism.

47:32 You know, there's another word. I'm missing that, but there's They lump all those ones together as well, Hinduism and Buddhism of course, are you know Buddhism sprung out of Hinduism. That's that's what the book says.

47:44 It's it's pretty fascinating now about twelve years ago, there was a lot of hoopla going around. The Maya were really in the news in twenty twelve.

47:54 But those were good times for me.

47:56 But I'm sure they were. I'm sure you were an hiden answer, and I demand back then you're speaking right, must.

48:04 Like loved Maya math like a nerd was all of a sudden somebody people wanted to hear from. Those were interesting years.

48:11 Exactly what what can you explain to people what that whole end of the mind calendar was? You know, what the prophecy was and what it actually meant? And did the calendar restart itself after twenty twelve or that was just the end of was it? Obviously it was an end of the world, because you and I are still talking, but it seemed to have been an end of an era, and then certain things have to happen or are happening after this era. What's your take on it?

48:39 Oh gosh, you know, back in those days, I had a whole hour lecture explaining it. Can I do that in a couple of sentences? Let's let let's.

48:47 Yeah, I'll give you. I'll give you, like a few more than a few sentences, go ahead, Okay.

48:52 Well, the crux of the problem was that people believe that the Maya calendar re set itself to start the fourth creation of my of the Maya Creation story in the year three thousand, one hundred and fourteen BC, specifically August thirteenth, and so if it reset itself, it went thirteen sets of four hundred years bocktunes in Maya and then it reset to zero like the odometer on your car.

49:30 So that meant, if you followed that math logically, that when we get to thirteen more four hundred year periods from three thy one hundred and fourteen BC, the clock's going to reset again and we're going to start the fifth creation. Uh oh, what happens to us? The last four creations got totally trashed. Everybody died, and if you do the math, you get to December twenty first, twenty twelve, and so mathematically it looked like the Maya were saying, the world's going to reset in twenty twelve.

50:08 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.

50:17 But that's not really what they meant, and it didn't happen. You can see. Like a math nerd guy like me, I've looked through all of the calindrical math that we have available to us in the Maya, and there are a number of places where they talk about time well after twenty twelve, and they talk about time way before three and fourteen BC. So we were misunderstanding the cycle.

50:46 I still don't have a good answer why the calendar reset at thirteen, five thousand years ago. I think it's the creation story implies that the magical deeds of the hero Twins reset it like pressing the button on eurodometer. But then normally it should run. Each cycle should run in groups of twenty. Maya math is base twenty, ours is base ten decimal, theirs is base twenty vagessimal. So in our little uh odometer analogy, when it clicked to thirteen and zero, zero zero. The next number was zero zero zero zero one for its first day. But the Maya math can't work out like that. That was something I was saying at the start. It the uh, the whole system breaks if it jumps at thirteen there, because it's base twenty, it should be a twenty there. And

51:44 there are a few texts that actually do tell us that it is a twenty there. Because backtuness, four hundred year periods is not the biggest period. The Maya also talk about a pictun which is a eight thousand year period, and a column tomb which is one hundred and sixty thousand year period, and there are bigger ones too. Sometimes they'll talk about millions of years in a calculation. So and that whole, that whole math system of how they tell me to go back five million years, it breaks if it's a thirteen Mathematically the Maya would have never done that.

52:23 So this was this was an example of Y two K essentially.

52:29 Yes, it was, Yes, it was. You know, they were both good excuses to have great parties, weren't they.

52:37 That's without question, without question.

52:40 I attended to people. They were fantastic.

52:43 No, what's fascinating to me is the the the lens that we look back at ancient civilizations across across the world. We look at them through the lenses of our technology today, and we look at them as primitive because they don't have an iPhone or the inn. But yet they in many ways could have been more advanced than us in other aspects of our lives, whether it be mathematics in a way that we just can't grasp anymore. It'd be the equivalent of someone finding an iPhone five hundred years from now and there's then Amazon somewhere and they're picking this up. They're like, what is this? How do I explain it? They have no context or I like, like, you're like your mentor said, you have to think like them,

53:26 But it's very difficult to think like them if you weren't there.

53:29 But that's that's the fun of the job, to recreate these stories. And I'll admit openly, you know, sometimes archaeology is the best story wins. Yeah, that's the coolest story of the that would fit the facts, gets the most, gets the most loved.

53:44 Well, let me ask you this. Being an archaeologist, there is a lot of there's a lot of theories. I mean there's just so many theories flying around about ancient civilizations. Obviously, the History Channel is built an entire billion dollar business around it, without question. But it seems to me that there is some things that when they're brought up to mainstream archaeology in all aspects, that they're very resistance to change.

54:14 So an example is, to my understanding, the concept that the Great Pyramid of Gizas were tombs came from a white guy in the eighteen hundreds who said, oh, this must have been this, this, and this, and they just kind of ran with that idea. And please correct me if I'm wrong, But inside of the Pyramid of Giza, there is no tomb, there is no hieroglyphs. And Egyptians were very well known to do all of that and to talk about everything they've ever done because they love the press. So why do you think that sometimes and do you agree that sometimes mainstream archaology might be resistance to change, as as with physics, as with medicine, as with any major institution.

54:58 Well, it is a conservative to field based on you know, we have very few facts to go on, and we try to conservatively put forward our theories based on those few facts. But yeah, and there are there is a there's a generational thing that goes on. I want to say that I partially agree with that statement, and I partially don't the part that I do. There are people who are just people who have spent their entire life championing an idea and the thought that some new person is going to come with a brand new idea that invalidates your idea and via that your entire life is a hard pill to swallow, fair enough, And people who just will will fight their wrong theories till their deathbed, and they exist within the field definitely. But I'd like

55:51 to say that also, you know, myself and a lot of my colleagues are very open minded about things. We are actually thrilled when we prove each other wrong or or prove ourselves wrong. That's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be advancing for understanding, and oftentimes it means giving up what we previously thought. And I think that, you know, the whole idea of mainstream archaeology is funny.

56:18 That's it's really just a collection of guys like me that get paid professor wages, where mainstream Graham Hancock is mainstream archaeology. We hide in the foxholes of academia with the smaller voices.

56:35 Right, But you're absolutely right, and I have heard that though there are the new generations coming up, the younger uh, the younger professors, the younger just different generations, they're becoming more open to this because you're exactly right. We should be disproving ourselves constantly, because, as history has shown us, man always thought they had it figured out at the moment that they figured it out. And you know, when Zeus was around, I was Zeus. You know, there was there's nothing else. It was Zeus, God forbid it was anything else. And same thing goes. And so when quantum physics showed up through a monkey rented to physics, they're still trying to to try to deal with that. But newer,

57:19 newer generations are going, no, wait a minute, they have no attachment to the status quo, to those old things, those ideas and theories that have been held onto for centuries. They're like, well, wait a minute, there's a new way of doing this. There's a new idea. Let's deal. Let's go into that new idea.

57:34 Would your new techniques give us new information? Things like light ar is is a miracle for archaeology. Another one is DNA studies. I mean, gosh, we have gotten answers to things about, you know, fundamental things like you know, who migrated where were? You know that some of those were terribly wrong in the early publications of archaeology, and DNA has turned us around and really given us a dimension that you know, when I was a young archaeologist, I never thought we'd have that kind of information at our disposal, and it really does change some things we thought were fundamental. And I think it's my job as this generation guys, to accept that and move forward instead of die on my own sword of my old theories.

58:21 Now, you were talking about the cycles that the Mayan were talking about in their calendars. Is there a correlation with the Indian yugas, which is a twenty five thousand or twenty four thousand cycle that repeats itself constantly. Is there any correlation.

58:40 I don't think a cultural correlation, but they are structured similarly. Well, I'd say that they are similar in that they cover vast periods of time. You know, if you take mya period as thirteen bock tunes, which I just explained, I really don't five one hundred and twenty five years, and if you take five of them, that's twenty five thousand years.

59:05 The important number there is that that is the full cycle of procession for it, which is closed all the way around US three hundred and sixty five degrees and come back takes twenty five thousand years, which is essentially about that one degree of procession is seventy two years. And so they would watch that and sometimes that number would pop up in their numerology in weird ways that that's one of the numbers that drive me crazy, and I hunt.

59:33 Yeah. So it does sound that there is a correlation, at least structurally, because it.

59:38 Is twelve hundred, twenty four hundred, thirty six hundred, forty eight hundred, and it goes in a cycle. That's the difference here that once the forty eight hundred one ends, a new twelve hundred year one starts and then the cycle keeps going. The Maya calendar does not cycle, at least at least the long count it is, which is weird because the Maya aren't linear people. They're cycle people.

1:00:05 But that twenty five thousand year cycle, regardless of how it's peace field seems to have correlition with the stars of all the stars wrapping around, so they two different groups figured that out.

1:00:15 And that's like the holy grail of archaeo astronomy. If your culture could actually calculate procession of the equinoxes, they were bad ass astronomers. And the Maya did it, like maybe earliest. It's either the Babylonians or the Maya who did it earliest. And then the Greeks figured it out. The Hindu figured it out, but a lot of cultures.

1:00:38 Chinese does Chinese figure it out. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.

1:00:52 I don't know, I don't know. I think that, I mean, everybody did eventually, but I know for archaeology is like, well, did they hear it from those guys or did they actually calculated on their own? The the Babylonians in the Maya pretty sure they calculated on their own. The Babylonians probably told everybody else and just you know, it kind of fell into a dark hole for a couple centuries and then somebody rediscovered it along for the rest of time exactly.

1:01:19 Now, during with your with your research, have you ever heard of any mystical stories, mystical experiences in the Mayan mythology or religion, anything of anything in the mystical spent in space.

1:01:35 Well it defined mystical.

1:01:37 Mystical uh god like, well things that would if we sound, if we heard today, would be like, oh, well, that's kind of interesting, you know, because there's mystical things that happen in the in the Hindu traditions, there's mystical things that happened in the Chinese tradition, there's mystical things even in the in the Arthurian tradition.

1:01:55 And you're talking about you know, mythology.

1:01:58 Yeah, mythology exactly, Yeah, mystical mystical mythology kind of things.

1:02:02 Yeah, well along the lines of you justified, the Popo Vu is full of that stuff. Their their creation document is full of all sorts of magical mystical things that happen. We follow the adventures of these hero twins who who talk to animals and turn people into monkeys and go down into the underworld and play a ballgame against the lords of death and turn into catfish and dogs, and it's it's a really fun adventure.

1:02:29 So they so they have again it's fascinating that a culture does not connect it to any other culture. They always figure on other cultures on the other side of the world. They have an underworld, they have they have these kind of similar aspects, you know, the connect I'm trying to connect the dots. It's one of my favorite things to do with with everything I do on this show.

1:02:50 It's the connect dots to things that I'm just trying to put it all together. Now just one piece. The Maya is one piece. But there's thousands of cultures around the world at different time periods, and I always like to see what's similar in them. So obviously the Greeks said the underworld, obviously, the Egyptians and now the Maya.

1:03:09 Is that something that's innate in humanity to feel that there is an underworld in a heaven if you will.

1:03:16 Well, a lot of world cultures do think of it that way, a three tiered universe, the world of the living, the upper world in the lower world. I for the Maya, it's a little in Mesmo American in general, it's a little more convoluted. The underworld is not necessarily hell, and the upper world is not necessarily heaven, and the entrance from this world to that is the same. It's you know, sometimes I want to call it the other world, because there's things that are going on in that supernatural world, some low, some above, but they're not necessarily like a bad place. It is that there are scary lords of death in the Maya one, but that's where everybody lives.

1:03:58 That's where all the dead people continue living. That's the world of the dead, and the lords of death are scary guys to the people that are living, but to the people that live in their realm, they're just the people's grandparents are still just hanging out in villages and farming and getting water from the river, just like it is on the on the world above. That's what that's what the heroes Wind's fine down there.

1:04:23 So it's almost it's I wouldn't call it parallel realities, but definitely different dimensions of existence essentially.

1:04:32 Yeah, So it's a little different than you know, the Christian idea of we all go up to the heavens or the hell idea that we reincarnate.

1:04:40 So it's not fear based. It's not a fear based mythology in the sense that if you go down to the underworld. You're going to be poked in with a with a pitchfork kind of thing.

1:04:47 It is a scary place for the living who don't want to die. But once you're dead, they lay off. Then you just get to go live there.

1:04:55 And is it a nice place to live or is it a dark place to live?

1:04:58 It's a nice enough place to live. When the sun goes down, it rises in the underworld, and so they get sun to sun themselves and grow their crops and do their things.

1:05:09 Now about and how about the other world. But they're the the above world.

1:05:12 The upper world is where the gods live. And as I said earlier, they're totally disconnected from the Meso Americans except for liaison of dead ancestral spirits. Maya King's the classic period. Basically, their story of their right to rulership was that their spirits, the ants, their ancestral spirits, went up, they started down, but then they were allowed to ascend to the level of the heavens and they could act as liaisons. Not Joe. Maya's parents are just down in the underworld. He could do he could do rituals to contact them, but he'd just get his grandpa. The king gets his grandpa who's up in heaven and has obviously has has has connections.

1:05:58 Yeah, he knows, he knows, he knows what palms the.

1:06:00 Grease because his dad is up in heaven talking, negotiating.

1:06:04 Well for us, it's fascinating, which is fascinating, which is very similar to a priest or an organization saying well, if you want to talk to God, you got to come through us, and we're the ones that have the privilege of going. So it's again similar ideas that seem to be innate in human just humanity's brain essentially, you.

1:06:27 Know, or or aligned to gain power that we just keep falling for.

1:06:36 There is that, my friend, There is the oh you are you scared? I know someone I follow me, I can help you. I got this though, well he says, he's got it. Let's go follow Joe, and Joe goes up. It is it is really fascinating, the connections between all these cultures and the Maya and I could talk to you for another hour.

1:07:00 It's like it's star Trek, which I'm also that kind of nerdy. They had a theory of human parallel development that it was going all over the universe. Of course that was you know, a little too far, but I like to think of something akin to that, that there are certain qualities that all of us humans, regardless of of the color of our scanner, where we are on the planet, go through levels of discovery and evolution a different time periods, but there's kind of a commonality that you know, that thing that we said at the very start, where humans all across the planet decided that they wanted to build something tall, and they ended up with a pyramid because the because the tower kept falling over.

1:07:44 What is it? And remind me the I always forget the name of it, The Pyramid of the Suna kan Tertia Khan exactly. That's Aztec. I'm mistaking correct.

1:07:57 Before the Aztecs they're actually were enigma. They're not even a culture. We name that culture for the city Tao Tubacan.

1:08:05 So that culture that created those pyramids was not is not they They.

1:08:10 Weren't the Aztecs, No, they were that city burned to the ground in six point fifty AD.

1:08:17 So the pyramids, but the pyramids, so the pyramids were there, so but we don't know who built those pyramids.

1:08:24 Then oh no, we know who the Tao Tubacanos are. It's just a weird culture. They don't They act different than everybody else, and for a while they imposed their will on everybody else all the way down into the Maya world. Tao Tubacan took over, and then the city burned and every and things changed.

1:08:42 Well, isn't there a lot of coincidences between Tootua Khan and Iza in the way it's set up astrologically, The size of the base of Tootuba Khan is the same size as the base of the pyramid, which is exactly half the size. I mean, that's that coincidental, to say the least.

1:09:02 I consider that a coincidence. That the dimasal dimensions are not perfect perfect, they're pretty close, which is weird. And they are. You know that the biggest pyramid by a stretch is Giza Gimes and then well, actually, depending on who I as said that, I mean, I really think that I've betrayed my own hand. But the numbers volumetrically say that the biggest pyramid of the world in the world is Chilula, which is a couple hours away from Teotia Khan and the Pyramid of the Sun. So number two is Giza. Number three is the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotia Kan Both two of the three biggest are in the Valley of Mexico. But they it is weird that they're you know, they're not aligned the same.

1:09:50 That is not true. Neither of all three of them have different alignments. The Chilula is way wider at its base than Giza, and Giza and Tao Tuba Khan have almost it's not perfect, but they are similar in their base, though totally different in the way they pitched. Sure, yeah, they have one has one has step, one doesn't, and one is just smooth and exhibit some some neat geometry that the others don't.

1:10:24 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And it is a fascinating story, my friend. It's the stuff that you could talk to about for thirty years, as you have been doing so, sir, and we'll continue to do so. I appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us about all this amazing stuff. Where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing.

1:10:50 Oh, thanks for asking. Well, I'm the director of my exploration center, which has all sorts of free for the public use. Information on the website. I also run a couple of tours around the world through that most of them are actually sold out this year. Funny enough, I also do a podcast that's you know, that's my biggest hope.

1:11:13 If my appearance on your podcast, I hope it helps my podcast, which is rchaeo ed. It's a bit of a weird spelling. But if it's on all the major podcast things and it's really just me talking like I just did to you for an hour and a half on varying subjects, I'm I'm really happy with it. It's my own thing. I don't have a big crew, it's just me, but I put it out once a month and I hope that your your audience takes a look at it. Now your audience is mostly filmmakers, right.

1:11:44 No, No, that's another podcast, so my podcast. Yeah, my original podcast was Indie Filmhuscle, which is that was all filmmaker based, but my current one is more our ancient civilization's lost history, spirituality, near death experiences.

1:12:02 I'm sure you have some overlap, and I'm always available to help out with films and things. I love doing that, but that also hits your audience very well. Demographically that yes, is the sort of stuff you talk about, so I hope absolutely take a look at it.

1:12:18 My friend. I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much for giving us a really great hour of fun stories and information. So I appreciate you, my friend.

1:12:27 Thank you, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me, Alex.

1:12:33 Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today. If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll find the show notes for this episode at Next levelsoul dot com Forward slash four three zero and if your soul is craving an even deeper journey, step into Next Level Soul TV, our streaming sanctuary for spiritual films, documentaries, original shows, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audiobooks, and transformative teachings.

1:13:00 Space created to support your awakening, your healing, and your return to the truth of who you really are. Begin your journey at Next levelsoul dot tv. Until next time, keep expanding, keep seeking, and keep walking your path towards the next level of your soul.