Death Penalty for Strong Swimmers?

     A long time ago, when I was at the University of Texas at Austin, I visited the Harry Ransom Center museum. Among the items that were displayed was a Greek vase with a warrior presenting a long cloth to his "intended [?]" before his journey to a distant battle; In the lower part of that vase was a goose, a guardian for Aphrodite's home, which in a text or two gave townspeople warnings of an invasion of strange warriors. Immediately, my intuition said that the cloth was nothing more than a chastity belt, an old fashioned method of keeping his espoused virgin wife-to-be safe from predators. This may not have been the purpose of that vase, but it was a very strong impression that I felt.

      As I was walking through the exhibits, I came upon another surprising item: A stone "yoke" reportedly having been used around the hips to bounce the ball hard enough that it would be shot through one of the two rings at the top of the Maya ball courts.

        The first clue I had about the yoke was an article about 10 years ago,. It was reported that a test game with a stone yoke place about the hips of a player was successfully played and the player with the weighty stone said it was an easy adjustment to make. It was said, that once the momentum of the player was started, the weight of the stone yoke made it possible to hit the ball harder. Such a yoke  on the hips of a player' maybe, would allow the ball to enter one of the rings above their heads.

       It was many, many years later, that I saw a good photo of tourists below the ball court rings. How far above, I did not know until a month or so ago. The tourists were standing directly under the rings. But those rings were basically at least a length of two persons standing one above the other over a third person on the ball court floor. In  an American baseball game, with a bat swung directly at a ball, it is possible that this sort of height and distance drive is possible, but such a target as two rings above the ball court is not a practical shot.

     Even in American football, the goal posts for a good strong kick is placed wide enough apart that any player with good leg power can kick a ball between the goal posts. But to get the ball through a ring on either side of the goal post, or even in the center, it is highly unlikely.

         The trajectory would be at an angle, whereas the rings are not set in at an angle, they both are  squared off as horizontal and veritcal to the wall. There is no other angle for entry of the ball itself. Maybe in a pool game with sticks called cues are used but there are at least three pockets on one side that the ball can rebound into, but only when that ball hits the bumpers around the table.

       What was bothering me and not letting me accept the conclusion of a proper ball game with a very heavy stone yoke, was reinforced the the skulls that were cut between the first and second vertebra and buried with honors near Lake Xaltocan, near Teotihucan.  about 30 miles from Mexico City.  This particular yoke in the HRC had a glyph of an owl in the exact center of the front edge. The Owl was, and probably still is, the harbinger of Death. The implication has always been that the loser would forfeit his life if he lost the game.

         Then I remembered a lesson in my Greek classes about Tacitus and his History of Germany. When I first read Tacitus, I found many small insignificant items about the Mexican land masses.  At that time, I ignored the impressions that were coming at me.

        They were not very believable about Germany, even though they have marshes and lakes;  but on the oth er hand, I knew only a little about Mexico geography. The Maya have more coastal waters than Germany which also has similar water configurations that includes many lakes but no estuaries along the coastal areas as Mexico has.

". . . . .poor fighters and evil livers are plunged into mud of marshes with hurdle on their heads. . . ."                   [Tacitus, p. 281]

       Hopefully, "livers" is a typo on my part and it really says "divers." Nevertheless, the image of death with a stone near or on top of their head, a yoke would be more feasible, since a common round stone on the head could shift away at any time. Even a flat one would tumble to the side at times.  However, a heavy stone yoke would have two heavy legs that would dig into a muddy bottom and pull the face of the warrior into the mud.

        It would be impossible for the victim to dig himself out of the mud before he suffocated in the morass. A concerned relative, would want the body salvaged from the mud for a decent burial. A different diver would go into the water and cut the head from the body haphazardly, with one or more vertebra; it did not matter. The stone around the neck might shift at any moment. To take out the body might take longer to cut and there would be no identification for the family. The two "legs" of the yoke made it possible to obtain either the head or the body while the instability of the stone in the mud would make it very difficult to acquire both head and body at the same time.

      A German method, or a Mexican method, it make little difference, who was first. A mass grave would not be a sacrificial site, it would have been a mass execution of brave warriors who lost a major battle with the help of efficient divers who knew the waters well enough to sabotage  the boats of the enemy. Basically, since all the skulls were in a proper burial grid, not haphazardly or buried within the homes, but were recovered later when the conquerors was had left the area for a time, or were temporarily on another quest.

        Why is it so hard for people to understand that all countries around the world honor their dead warriors who fell in major battles, I do not understand.  Maybe because our children no longer visit the graves of their soldiers on November 11 any more. They mau just go to the Vet parade and watch it for hours as the tools of the trade move past them.  The personal aspect of visiting the dead is missing from our lives. It has been so for many years now.

If the original story is not known. . .? ? ? ?

Vega within Asteroid Belt

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Calte\

 01/19/13  I just ran into a web news article entitled: Vega- Two Belts and the Possibility of Planets 

[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/pia16611.html]  

from the NASA  Spitzer Space Telescope, associated with many Hubble sky photos that have been amazing, to say the least, [even though all seem to be lab enhanced].

     The article, only as a tiny blurb, attached to a picture from NASA [See above] but the text refused to come in as a believable reference. The comment refers to a newly discovered asteroid belt around Vega while the one furtherest from that star is a cooler, well-known belt that only contains comets. The inference is that when and if, the warm and the cooler elements will migrate together, they would create an active "nursery" for baby stars.. However, 

"Astronomers think that the gap in the Vega system may be filled with planets, as is the case in our solar system. 

     The propotions for such a possible scenario is a 1:10 ratio that is also a ratio for our own galaxy, even though Vega was never considered as a galaxy center before. Well, that may be fine for speculation, but it is not an option to speculate until one knows the complete story about Vega. There is a possibility that the story could explain both the asteroid and the comet belts around that star. The story is contained in a mythic journey of the Twins to a place known as Xibalba. the Underworld. 

     However, that story is said only to be one of many Creation myths around the world, most of which are used as religious bases for the cultures in which they are found. Such myths are supposed to be "primitive" and cannot be accepted as stellar confirmation through the proper discipline of modern astronomy.

     Nevertheless, one aspect of the belt of comets and the newly proposed asteroid belt, point not  only to the nearby Ring Nebula with its strange shape: that of a beautiful rose, but  that Nebula is also located in the constellation Lyra, very close to Vega. 

    Now, I know I gave NASA, one of my books, and apparently, there is now quite a bit coming over the WEB from NASA that seems to refute what I have said, or seems to be a one-upmanship. I have no problem with their conclusions, but I do wish they would connect to facts instead of imagined and supposed  activities of stars that they are not old enough to follow from centuries back.

      The only people I know who have traced the stars for centuries, are the Babylonians, those from India and the Maya, together with the Aztecs, and a few other Meso-American and North American entities.  The one I know best is the Hopi prophecy [really,  a Prophecy?] The Popol Vuh, as an astro-creation story completely agrees with the data contained in the "prophecy." Yet, it is really not a prophecy of the future. Instead, since the other eight "prophecies are actual historic statements of our changes in our desert lands in the southwest,  It is and always has been the very first historic event, that the Popol Vuh recorded accurately.

      Even so, there seems to be absolute faith in a Hopi version of a disaster that happened centuries ago. It now also has a pseudo-historic notation made, as an after-thought, whenever that prophecy is described.  That odd statement is that Hopi children come from the Ring Nebula, the nova that exploded in the VII century. Only, the Hopi called it a planet, . . .  or the translator did. . . . to prove what? That there are many people in our world who want changes but do not know how to ask for them? 

     Since Greenwich has verified that nebula never was a planet, the only way anyone could have come from that star was, when the boy met the girl of his dreams out under the stars, where the blue star as bright and lovely, . . . .and, oops,. . . the girl got pregnant.  Later, when young children asked where they came from,  Well, gee whiz, there is not a father or mother in their right mind who would tell their children about sex at that early stage. Some parents tell their children, that momma swallowed an watermelon seed, or some other neat little reason that her girth is getting wider. 

     One would assume that the young couple loved their children. Their memory of  that night when the blue star in the sky was impressive; why would they not have remembered that night  and later when the children were born, the story the new parents decided to tell their offspring was that he/she came from a certain beautiful star in the sky. When the child asked which sttar? The Ring Nebula would be pointed out. . . . Why not make it a lovely story for the child? So much for aliens from outer space!

? Don't we say, in our modern languages, that the child was given to us by the Fairies, by God, or by one of his angels, but never as a virgin-birth. That birth event is reserved for the Gods.

.

The Green Boy on Wheels of Fire
The Asian Version of the Aztec Twin Comet Quetzalcoatl

     The Chinese version of Quetzalcoatl was "the Green Boy with flaming wheels of fire under his feet." This male version of the stepmother of Snow White can be found in The Journey to the West, the story of a Monkey King "who was born from a stone egg far across the ocean/sea to the east." A very popular story from the T'ang Dynasty in the VIII century AD.[1] The yoke around his neck and waist skirt both appear to be the Chinese version of the "venus" glyph, so popularly called the Venus Planet. Yet the planet never moved so fast that it could have been on wheels.

      It actually has an orbit around the Earth that returns in eight year cycles. So it would appear in the first orbit say, coming from the east and does not reappear in the east until the next year eight different times. My co-worker at the motel where I worked, gave me his chart of Venus, the planet, for those eight years. His chart ended in the year 2012 and it contained all the planet's azimuthal (degrees) sightings because he found that it was as regular as clockwork.

       It appears to me, that if the event was astronomy, then the whole world would have seen the same thing, so there would have been nothing strange about the Chinese, thinking that the Green Boy with fire at his feet, moved across the sky for the first time. . . . so they claimed that the comet was a boy, and not a man-size yet. At a time, when there were no Palomar or Greenwich observatories, nor radios, or even telephones, the description was appropriate.

     Yet, the story was said to have begun in Persia in the XI-th century AD, not Peru or Mesoamerica. The author of the original story was thought to be Ferdowsi. [2] Even though it came from the well-known story of many more sources than Disney ever imagined existed. It swept the continent as one of the many stories of the great knights of warrior status, who came to magically save their princesses. Children were eager to hear about knights and princesses who were threatened by the dragons.

      This reminds me of another memory of mine, about a calendar that was designed to convert from the Cesarean calendar to the Christian calendar, an event of the XIII-th century AD. The message, with that calendar, claimed that the process was so simple that even a child could do it easily. [3]

     Myths [Fairy Tales] are for children. Parables are for grown-ups and Truth is to be ignored as "Logic" laboriously pulled out of a complex system of analogies, syllogisms, and other complex methods of reasoning. It makes perfect sense for Logic to be presented as an adult think process, but the real truth is  meant to be found with children's simplicity; something that a person studying Logic would never dream of considering as valid knowledge.

     Looking down his nose sternly, a knowledgable professor could easily cower any bright student of philosophy in about two seconds. And they would never again mention any detail they had suddenly visualized after reading a myth or a Fairy Tale to their small children. Emphasizing "a more Intelligent level of study" instead of silly myths or fairy tales is a great way to guard closely information that was in the process of government censorship and apt to be wiped out completely from the history books.

1  XiYou Ji, The Journey to the West, the story of a Monkey King who was born in a stone egg far across the 

    ocean/sea to the east. A very popular story from the Tang Dynasty in the VIII century AD.

2  Ferdowsi (1967)  The Epic of the Kings, Shah-Nama:  The National Epic of Persia (Levy, Reuben, 
   Trans.). Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press

3  Keller, John Esten (1967). Alfonso X: El Sabio. (Twayne's World Authors Series (TWAS 12): A Survey  of the 
    World's Literature.(Gen.ed) Sylvia E. Bowman, Indiana University, (ed)  

Peruvian or Maya Story?

        A long time ago, in 1986, Linda Quist did a dictionary of sorts about the various Maya glyphs and where they were to be found.

        By the time 2012 came around, prophecies were the big deal:  the world was going to end on December 21st, even though the Maya themselves told everyone who would listen, that it was just the end of a calendar sequence, no more, no less.  

        What I had discovered in the meantime, was a comet passing the Ring Nebula in 2006, just as one fit the description of the double comet in the Popol Vuh. Two years later, in 2008, it again repeated the sequence from the Popol Vuh as it was very close to the earth arriving at our northwestern states with a light so bright that he seemed to be 1,000 transformers exploding at once., It also created a noise that was just as deafening. It  seemed to me that it was the PV comet that returned and died on it final journey since no debris fell from the sky. . . or was just never reported in the papers or on the television programs since the comet had damaged nothing on earth, even though it came very, very close.

         In September of 2012, Gary C. Daniels wrote about the upcoming prophecies, and wrote this lovely thoughtful gem:

>>> … before we can properly decode and understand this prophecy we must first dive deeper into Mayan religion and mythology to build a solid base of knowledge from which to interpret this ancient text …[which many believed contained such prophecies of total destruction for 2012.) [1]

     Myths are for children. Parables are for grown-ups and Truth is to be ignored as "Logic" laboriously pulled out of a complex system of analogies, syllogisms, and other complex methods of reasoning. This method of reasoning was introduced during the Middle Ages in Europe.

        It was sometime after 1994, when I joined the Austin Writers' League, that we were sent out to the various schools to promote writing skills to the students. For some unknown reason, I ended up in a kindergarten class. Since I cannot sing or even tell funny children's stories, to connect to that age group, I had no idea what to say to them about writing.  It seemed to me that all those young ones were Hispanic; their young fresh faces looking up at me in anticipation of another game or silly rhyme that  would bring laughter to their tiny serious souls.

     Pushing my calendar backwards again to 1982, one of my fourth grade students had copied out a poem by a Peruvian poet about the two lovers who had become two mountains called Popocateptl and Ixtacuihautl. I thought of it as a similar tale that Disney created for the Silver Screen: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.   It was perfect for this class. So I asked the question, Who knows about Mexico?

     Not one hand was raised. But when I asked if anyone knew about Snow White, every child raised their hand and waved them. It had just popped out, but apparently I had a inkling somehow that Snow White was the Mexican Princess of the Disney version. I told them all about what I knew about the Comet (as the stepmother); the Hunter (Orion) and the Seven mini-miners of wealth in the seven mountains.

Snow White as Ixtacuihatl the White Lady
with the Stepmother who was the female version of the Comet  Quetzalcoatl
Looking into the "Magic Mirror" Lake called Texcoco

    The mirror on the wall, was Lake Texcoco, that could see the passing comet, and the beautiful snow capped mountain that looked like a sleeping lady. The story from fourth grade told of the prince who was sent to battle by the father who did not want his daughter to marry a soldier. When he returned with many honors and awards, the lovely princess [Ixtacuihuatl] had died. He carried her to the mountain and sat nearby [as Popocatepetl] for days on end.

His horse waited patiently behind him.

       Finally, the dwarves had to tell him it was time for him to go. So he asked that they raise the cover of her crystal casket. He then kissed her and the poisoned apple fell out of her mouth and she lived again. The prince [Popocateptl] and the princess [Ixtacuihuatl] got married and lived happily ever after. Oh, we cannot forget the prince's horse that took them away on their honeymoon: La Nevada de Toluca, where the horse is still waiting patiently for his master.

   But the hour was over and I had to leave the class of youngsters who thoroughly enjoyed the story about their prince and princess of the land they heard about, but had never gone there.  As I was leaving the teacher stopped me at the door. "Did you know that the stepmother was punished by having to dance in fiery metal shoes until she died?"  I stared at her aghast. She had just supplied me with the one thing that was lacking for my "imagined" comet.

   The comet over Mexico, during the great disaster, had dropped magnetic metal meteorites on the land. Those pieces of metal, when found, were considered to be part of "the heart of the sky." Every temple had one as their sign that the Gods had not forsaken them. Their [star] god had sacrificed pieces of his own heart so that the people of Meso-america could live happily ever after.

      And so the tale is complete, Disney saw it as a European story; the Meso-Americans saw it as the  story of the mountains, and, for those who lived along the Amazon River in Brazil, only saw it as a girl coming back to life when her father blew smoke into her lungs.[3] The Peruvians wrote the poem about that wonderful magic mountain range above the Equator. [4]

1 Gary C. Daniels, (2012-09-24). Mayan Calendar Prophecies| Part 1: Predictions for 2012 and   
   Beyond  (Kindle Locations 698-700). The Real Mayan Prophecies.com. Kindle Edition.

2  Daniel Ruzo, (1977) El Valle Sagrado de Tepoztlan, (2a. Edición), Editorial Posada, S. A.

3  Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1971). Amazonian Cosmos:  The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano   
    Indians. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. p. 29:  daughter [Ixtacuihuatl] 
     became a rock but Sun could revive her by smoking tobacco.

4  Peru,(1982)  The poem about the story of the lovers, Popocatepetl and Ixtacuihuatl, from one of my 4th grade
    students In Tapachula, Mexico.

     

   

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