The Potent Hand - The Meteorite Shower

A Mural of the Hand and the Meteorite Shower
at the INAH Museum in Mexico City.

     A mural I photographed at the INAH Museum in Mexico City a long time ago. I saw the Hand as something extremely important, but could never figure out why. Linda Schele told me that the hand has may uses, so it is an improbable research project. There is no way to determine what its actual use is in any glyph. Yet on the stelae and monuments, glyph texts portray the hand in many different functions. They specifically are not in the process of cooking or using the metatls for grinding. There was some other purpose intended.

     The "Hand" is represented on many stelae and many other monuments and wall murals. When they are collected into what is called a "corpus" or dictionary of glyphs, many of the hands seem to be portraying the same thing.  So the "hand" is given a name in one dialect and many times is used as a segment of a spelled out word. It can be compared with the word "cover" which with prefixes and suffices create such words as: un-cover, dis-cover, re-cover, cover-able, cover-up, etc.

     Here, the hand is thought to be sowing seeds, but does the interwoven border tell us that it is a sky event?  It is as if to say that it referred to the whole sky, not just the sky seen over the Americas,  I wondered why a sky event would be considered as "sowing seeds." The larger items below do not refer to the milpas so important to the Aztecs, the Maya, the Mixtec, or any of the other smaller tribes found in North, Central or South America.

    Do the four tlan glyphs [appearing as teeth might] indicate a "place" in the sky?  Its  iconography over the two hands, the four items below them and toward the right appear to be small blue stars.  However, the picture is small and the time it was taken was long ago. The feathers that are drooping over to the right of the two hands. Feathers indicate"fire" in Aztec symbolism and if, at times, used within the Mesoamerican glyph corpus. If the "two hands" are indicating humans on earth, when the fire rained down from the sky, so be it. The single "Hand" is stellar. The artist, by reason of his own humanity, wanted to portray the role of man in the great meteorite shower of fire from the sky.

     Since that time, I have written three books about the Popol Vuh; the Creation myth of the [Maya] World. The Aztec Ramirez Codex has a similar story, with the blue-cloaked Huitzilopochtli finally established as a main god. He was the patron of the emperors who were crowned with a blue diadem, and enthroned in a ceremony that included blue colored cloaks, emblazoned with rat bones that indicated their pure blood lineage.

     With the histories of the emperors written into the codex-manuscripts that were burned in Mexico City and in the Yucatan, there are only few memories of their conquests or failures, while the omens that gave them the power to rule were destroyed with those manuscript.

     During the third version of my attempts at explaining the Popol Vuh,  I felt that I should examine the constellations once more time. I was given a huge volume called The Glorious Constellations, by an Italian author, [not the same Italian who drew the map of Texcoco in 1538], but a more modern one named, G. Sesti, who authorized his tome in Rome, Italy. One of the items in his book was a peg-board of the gods, the constellations, the months, and the days.

     It was surprising to me that the Romans created this peg board with only 30 days for each month. The board appeared to be a calendar using such pegs to indicate, the god, the constellation, the month and the day of the year for the working people to know how long it would be before they could celebrate the end of the year, or a more simple explanation, when they could stop work when their work duties were over after so many days.

     When I returned to the book for recheck my impression of the black dots in the different categories of gods, constellations, months, or days, I noticed that the knife in the neck of a bull being killed by the Persian god Mithra, has drops of blood under it, even though it was in the process of being buried in the neck up to the hilt. That did not make any sense at all. Rivulets of blood flowing from the gash in the neck would be more appropriate.

An off-center knife by the ear of the bull
portrayed as a Hand with a thumb and two fingers and a hole under the wrist.

     Then I noticed, behind the nose of the bull,  under a tree there was a long tube of metal was similar to those used by an ancient gunner shown with this early "canon" tube in the book by de Sprague, called Ancient Engineers. Strange, why a primitive canon/gun? The god was using a knife to kill an animal that could have gored the man/god at his side. But then it is just a picture, or is it?

A primitive "gun" or ....?

     NASA had put out some beautiful nebulae on the web and I was fortunate that they were available. The first thing I found was in an astronomy school book. It had all the appearances of a knife with the hand-guard, but it was only a artist's rendition of what has been seen. It was called a "bi-polar jet." A knife in the sky, impossible, I thought and I laughed it off. Yeah, just like the astronomer guys to do something like that.

       A bit later, the cinnabar covered skull with an open mouth, identified as NGC 7000;  came out just about the time a rose-like view of the Ring Nebula also emerged on the web. Last but not least what NASA called the "Hand of God." the thumb and two fingers standing up and the ring and little fingers folded down. 

NASA'a Hand of God
Seen only by the Hubble Satellite Telescope
Chandra -ray Observatory via Greenwich Observatory of England.

     The blue gaseous "Hand" was pointing to a oval of red gaseous star forms, that I found later to also have been recorded as a perfect ring in two instances, one the Nuttall Codex and another time in a small painting of 1516. The two pictures below are two native native versions of that Hand.

  As for the "bull's head" in front of the metal tube?  Could it be an ancient telescope instead? How could this tube under a normal tree see something in the sky that only the Hubble can see now?

     The Maya and the Mixtec saw the above versions of the sky Hand. Eric Thompson first mentioned the hand of god his book Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, [that I found on page 132 of the 1971 fourth printing of the third edition of his book.]

 "An association which brings together death or sacrifice, stone knife, and hand is to be found in the Yucatec name for the knife which is:  u kab ca (ku0  or "the Hand of God. (Scholes and Adams, 1938, 1:42)"

     It was not discovered until the Hubble Space Telescope found the nebula that they actually named "The Hand of God."  It was a few months later that I found that this nebula could be found in the constellation Compass located near the South Pole over the Pacific Ocean. The strange part about the Maya and Mixtec information was that this nebula was seen by them in the center of the sky. It may be a further view of the Summer Triangle that was discovered in Peru, to be 90 degrees to the left (of a viewer), with Vega, its brightest star at the top.

     North of the Equator Vega is to the right of the Milky Way within the constellation Lyra. while Deneb is at the top of that triangle created by Vega, Altair [in Aquila] and Deneb as part of the Northern Cross.***

     Nor did it make any sense at first until the lowered trajectory of the comet [Hunahpú] and Stela 22 of Izapa are taken into consideration as actual records of the fact that the sky did change its position even though the earth's orbit stayed the same except fot the extra days added by the earth's new lopsided spin.

     The Persians saw the NASA version with an insignificant telescope that today would be a useless item if compared to our great observatories.  Charlemagne in his Chapel also created a ceiling with the Hand of God surrounded by angel wings, similar to that of Cacaxtla. The Maya "square" symbol with the feet around it, probably indicates the path where this nebula was seen around the square world that they were aware of in the Yucatan.

      The question then remains, are the above "Hands" also part of the stories that the Maya glyphs are portraying on the various stelae around Mesoamerica?  Is it part of the story of the Popol Vuh and the birth of the Twin comets (called Hunahpú and Xbalenqué) which passed through the mouth as spittle from the father's skull, as NGC-7000 located near Deneb and part of the Summer Triangle?

     It appears to be almost the complete story of the virgin mother [called Blood Moon] who conceived the Twins from the spittle of the dead father in the tree (where NGC-7000 is located in the Milky Way). The Maya apparently were able to track the comet from the source of the meteorites that fell from the wrist of the "Hand of God" and sped through the mouth of NGC-7000, arriving as the mythical "magic net" bag that held so much corn for Blood Moon, that the grandmother of the Twins had to accept her as a daughter-in-law, even though the father had died.

     Was Blood Moon, not the moon, but the great eye, decorated with metal, of Seven Macaw who also had turquoise teeth, both of which were eventually removed as debris from the dying star, now called the Ring Nebula located near Vega in the constellation Lyra. How was ir done? Most certainly NOT by aliens from Outer Space. Then, how many years, centuries or eons ago was our earth in a position to see such stars?  Only the glyphs will be able to tell us when and why. They may even give us the proper Maya date.  (See the Map of Tezacoalco, it appears to have the name of the astronomer attached to the trajectory of the comet???)