© Lloyd

__VOL I, No. 24 October 20, 1997

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (8) By David Talbott

CONTENTS: VENUS AND COSMIC UPHEAVAL
VENUS AND THE END OF THE WORLD
CALENDAR
52-YEAR CALENDAR ROUND
ONE FEAR, MANY EXPRESSIONS
DEMONS OF DARKNESS

VENUS AND COSMIC UPHEAVAL

Across Mesoamerica Venus was celebrated as the radiant heart and soul of the great cultural hero whom the Aztecs called Quetzalcoatl. Yet enigmatically, the appearances of the star after periods of absence stirred extraordinary fear. The noted archaeoastronomer, Anthony Aveni, observes:

"Evidently, the reappearance of Venus in different quarters after a prolonged absence carried various evil connotations for the people of Yucatan ... Obviously, they were deeply concerned about where and when Venus might appear to reverse their fortunes."

Expressions of this fear will be found at all levels of the culture. There is the general association with death, as noted by Thompson and others, but also the more specific association with the death of kings. Thus the Mayan date name of Venus, Hun Ahau was a day of "death" and "darkness." But more specifically, the same day among the Aztecs signified the death of Quetzalcoatl and the transformation of his "heart-soul" into Venus.

"There seems to be no doubt that unlucky days were associated with the heliacal rise of Venus (its first appearance as morning star, after a period of absence), each to be regarded with appropriate ritual," Aveni writes.

The fear engendered by the heliacal rising of Venus was noted centuries ago by one of the earliest European chroniclers, Sahagun:

"And when it (Venus) newly emerged, much fear came over them; all were frightened. Everywhere the outlets and openings of [houses] were closed up. It was said that perchance [the light] might bring a cause of sickness, something evil when it came to emerge."

In response to the new and bright appearance of Venus, kings called for sacrifices of captives to please the gods, for it seems that the planet's appearance could invite great calamities — from the outbreak of war to famine and flood. Could this be a key to understanding the mysteries of Venus-portents? As will become clear, the perils of Venus are the perils of the COMET in the global lexicon.

We have already noted that, throughout the ancient world, the comet portended the death of great kings. But interestingly, the heliacal rising of Venus conveyed the same celestial message, as reported by Brundage.

It is curious that the Mesoamerican peoples thought of the morning star so consistently as malign. He was to them, whether they were Aztec or Mayan, the very father of calamity. The dates of his heliacal rising were forecast so that the dooms ahead could be adequately read and prepared for ... Significantly, his malice could also be directed at rulers, for if he arose on the trecana opened by one-reed, then great lords sickened and died.

Thus, the Anales de Quahtitlan, a chronicle from the Mexican highlands (colonial times), describes the perils of the "piercing rays" of Venus. On the day One Reed, (the day of Quetzalcoatl's birth, and the day of the same god-king's death), the rising of Venus is deadly: "It shoots the kings," the texts say. Notice here that an underlying logic is at work, running from the specific to the general, from the archetype to the symbol. Quetzalcoatl died at a critical moment in cosmic history, a moment signified by both the end and the beginning of the time-reckoning cycle, mythically the end of one world age and the beginning of another. In the calendar system and in the sacred rites, the cyclical principle established by the life and death of Quetzalcoatl is both repeated and generalized: as above, so below; as before, so again. Hence, kings will die on the day One Reed, the day that Quetzalcoatl's heart-soul departed to become the planet Venus.

What, then, is the significance of the fact that the symbolism of Venus replicates so precisely the global symbolism of the comet? The new appearance of Venus as morning star is a moment of great peril for the kingdom (the "world"), as is the appearance of the comet. It harkens back to the death of the god-king, as does the comet. It is the heart-soul of the god-king rising in the sky, as is the comet. Is this, then, just another "coincidence" to add to all of the others previously noted? The further one descends into the various cultural levels at which the fear was expressed, the more clear becomes the equation: the fear of Venus' rising was, in every way, identical to the fear instilled by the arrival of a COMET.

VENUS AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Immanuel Velikovsky, in developing the theme of cometary disaster, noticed that one ancient culture after another spoke of former catastrophes so devastating that the "world" came to an end. This collective memory, in turn, seems to have given rise to the general notion of recurring cycles, or world ages. While Velikovsky noticed surprising parallels among far-flung nations, including the Babylonians, Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, and Polynesians, he was particularly fascinated with the Mexican ideas:

""An old tradition, and a very persistent one, of world ages that went down in cosmic catastrophes was found in the Americas among the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas. A major part of stone inscriptions found in Yucatan refer to world catastrophes. "The most ancient of these fragments [katuns, or calendar stones of Yucatan] refer, in general, to great catastrophes which, at intervals and repeatedly, convulsed the American continent, and of which all nations of this continent have preserved a more or less distinct memory." Codices of Mexico and Indian authors who composed the annals of their past give a prominent place to the tradition of world catastrophes that decimated humankind and changed the face of the earth.""

In the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it is said: "The ancients knew that before the present sky and earth were formed, man was already created and life had manifested itself four times."

To Velikovsky, this language sounded remarkably close to that of the Greeks and other ancient peoples, who similarly recounted the passing of former ages and destruction by water, fire, wind or flood. For some nations, he said, the transition from one age to another meant a new "sun" in the sky.

An oft-repeated occurrence in the traditions of the world ages is the advent of a new sun in the sky at the beginnings of every age. The word "sun" is substituted for the word "age" in the cosmogonic traditions of many peoples all over the world.

The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their consecutive suns. These were called Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, Fire Sun. "These suns mark the epochs to which are attributed the various catastrophes the world has suffered."

"The nations of Culhua or Mexico," Humboldt quoted Gómara, the Spanish writer of the sixteenth century, "believe according to their hieroglyphic paintings, that, previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had already been successively extinguished. These four suns are as many ages, in which our species has been annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests." ... Symbols of the successive suns are painted on the pre-Columbian literary documents of Mexico.

"Cinco soles que son edades," or "five suns that are epochs," wrote Gómara in his description of the conquest of Mexico.

To Velikovsky, the idea of former "world ages" or "suns" belonged to a collective memory of upheaval and world-changing shifts in the order of the solar system. The earth was disturbed in its rotation, its axis tilted, the path of its revolution around the sun changed, and vast nations were devastated. Then, from the ensuing chaos, the world was born anew under an altered celestial order.

CALENDAR

Sacred astronomy throughout Mesoamerica was particularly conscious of the heliacal rising of Venus, the planet's first annual pre-dawn appearance (beginning its phase of greatest brilliance due to its proximity to the Earth). According to Aveni, this first appearance as Morning Star "was probably the most important single event in Maya astronomy."

One of the extraordinary "coincidences" of Venus' present behavior is the resonance of its observed cycle with our year of 365 1/4 days. Like clockwork, due to the synchronous movements of Venus and Earth we noted earlier, Venus first appears as morning star on the same calendar day every eight years, and during that span of time it rises heliacally a total of five times.

This synchronous relationship of Earth and Venus is reflected in the Mesoamerican calendar rites. Many centuries ago, a sacred calendar system was perfected within a cultural environment that is not yet clear to archaeoastronomers. The original system is unknown. What we do know is that at the time of the Spanish invasion, all of the primary Mesoamerican cultures shared a common calendar structure, an outgrowth of the unidentified "original system," in which the Venus-cycle played a crucial role, but not one that appears fully comprehensible to the scholars seeking to understand it.

The calendar combined two time-keeping systems: one based on the familiar solar year, which was divided into 18 "months" of 20 days, to which five "unlucky" days were added at the end of the year, rounding out a 365-day year. In their veintena festivals, the Aztecs celebrated the end of each 20-day cycle of the solar year, making sacrifices and offerings to the gods in the hope that the sun and stars would continue their orderly movement across the heavens.

The other calendar was based on a 260-day cycle whose original meaning is still being debated. Enigmatically, this ritual calendar appears to have no self-evident logic in terms of the natural cycles one would expect to find reflected in calendar phases. And yet, for ritual reasons, the sacred 260-day calendar dominated the solar calendar. This, Robert and Peter Markman tell us, was "a sacred calendar tied directly to no single cycle observable in the world of nature." Rather, "it embodied and celebrated the essence of cyclicity abstracted from its occurrence in natural phenomena. This was the calendar used for prophecy and divination since in its workings it allowed man his closest approach to the world of spirit." How, then, did it connect mankind with the world of the gods?

The 260-day ritual calendar combined two different sequences, one a series of 20 days-signs, the other a sequence of 13 day-numbers, so that there were a total of 260 combinations of the two sequences to complete a sacred calendrical period. Since each day and each number had its own gods and associations, every day in the 260-day cycle had a different ritual significance. The Markmans write:

"Understanding calendrical lore allowed a special group of priests to understand the implications of the signs of the calendar and to divine the future ... These periods could determine the augury of each of the days, since the essence of the day (kin among the Maya) was itself the prophecy (also kin)."

Possibly, the authors say, there was a connection of the 260-day cycle with Venus: "The interval between the appearance of Venus as morning and evening star is close to 260 days."

The mystery is heightened by another fact that rarely receives attention: in the Maya calendrical ritual the listed movements of Venus do not accord with the planet's observed movements today. The synodical revolution of Venus divides into four periods:

1) after inferior conjunction Venus appears as Morning Star for an average of 263 days;

2) during superior conjunction the planet disappears for an average of 50 days;

3) the planet reappears as Evening Star for an average of 263 days;

4) Venus then disappears again for 8 days during inferior conjunction; after which it reappears as Morning Star, to complete the synodical period.

But these are not the values in the Maya Venus cycles, which seem to follow an unfamiliar logic of their own. The considerable discrepancy is emphasized by Aveni:

"They assigned an eight day period to the disappearance at inferior conjunction, which is close to that observed today. But, peculiarly, their manuscripts recorded a disappearance interval of 90 days at superior conjunction, nearly double the true value. Furthermore, they assigned unequal values to the intervals as morning and evening star: 250 and 236 days, respectively. In fact, the true intervals are equivalent at approximately 263 days. Since we know that the Maya were careful and exacting timekeepers, there may have been ritualistic reasons for these changes which overrode the observations."

It seems as if another anomaly rears its head: the ancient Mesoamerican astronomers, so admired for their accurate record keeping of Venus' motions, do not have Venus moving on its present course. Yet Aveni assures us that the Maya developed the observational precision and reasoning power to predict eclipses and to determine "the length of the Venus year and the lunar month to accuracies of less than a day in several centuries." Thus, the calendar discrepancy, to say the least, should draw one's attention!

In considering this mystery, we [do] well to remember Velikovsky's admonition on the subject of recurring anomalies — the true key to discovery. It is a fact that the recorded anomalous motions of Venus in the ritual calendar — a calendar originating in an undefined period preceding any of the known cultural variants — has a significant and more ancient Near Eastern parallel. As Velikovksy himself observed almost 45 years ago, the Babylonian astronomers, in the famous Venus tablets of Ammizaduga, recorded extensive observations of Venus' movements. Like their Mesoamerican counterparts, these founders of astronomy were revered for their observational skills and mathematical accuracy. Nevertheless, the Ammizaduga records of Venus' appearances and disappearances are filled with "errors" suggesting that (in the minds of the stargazers, at least) Venus did not move on its present visual path.

And speaking of recurring anomalies, the seemingly preposterous 90-day disappearance of Venus at superior conjunction may prove to be more of a headache for orthodox archaeoastronomers than they have bargained for. In the "erroneous" Babylonian records of Venus, one encounters a 90-day disappearance as well! Aveni reports:

"It is curious that the Babylonians also counted a three-month disappearance interval, indicating that the planet would move approximately one-fourth of the way around its cycle in the tropical year."

While an anomalous variance in the movement of Venus may frustrate mainstream investigators, for anyone believing that Velikovsky's comet participated in Earth-disturbing events as recently as a few thousand years ago, the troublesome records of Venus' motions are more likely to bring a bemused smile. Following the great cometary catastrophe recorded in the myths, nothing would seem more reasonable to the Velikovskian researcher than a transitional period — perhaps millennia — in which Venus did not move on its present path as seen from the earth.

The larger issue, of course, is that posed by the very existence of the sacred 260-day calendar. How could it be that a calendar with no firm basis in an observed natural cycle could have had such a broad cultural influence? Even as late as 1940, the ethnologist J.S. Lincoln was able to confirm that the Ixil peoples of northwest Guatemala continued to use this calendar. Ethnologist J.A. Remington, living among the Quiché and Cakchiquel peoples of the Guatemala highlands, found that the 260-day cycle was still practiced for purposes of forecasting, with this "unnatural" calendar still dominating the time-keeping rituals.

When it comes to ancient calendars, one of the possibilities that should be considered — but never is considered — is that of a shifting length of the year. Velikovsky argued, for example, that in former times a calendar of 360 days prevailed throughout much of the ancient world, and that the five added days (called "nothing days" by the Aztecs) came only after a disruption of the earth's motions. Though I have some doubt about this, there is no reason in the world to exclude such possibilities in advance of serious consideration.

But whether or not calendar changes are indicated, one can be certain that the 260-day ritual calendar bore an extremely significant relationship to the myth of collapsing world ages, as we shall see.

__VOL I, No. 25 November 3, 1997

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (9) By David Talbott

52-YEAR CALENDAR ROUND

Across Mesoamerica, the combination of two calendars, the solar or seasonal calendar and the 260-day ritual calendar, produced an extended sequence of sacred time, in which the two calendars concluded on the same day only once every 52 solar years — a cosmic cycle of extreme import.

This 52-year cycle the Maya called the Calendar Round and the Aztecs a "bundle of years" or "Perfect Circle" of years. Interestingly, to Sylvanus Morley observes that the Maya "never indicated dates in hieroglyphic texts or historical documents by the solar year designation alone. Most often the date was specified by its designation in the Calendar Round."

Among the Aztecs this extended cycle was intimately tied to the myth of Quetzalcoatl, who was born on the day ce acatl ("One Reed") and departed on the day ce acatl 52 years later. He will return, the Aztecs claimed, on a future day ce acatl. It is only reasonable to assume, therefore, a close relationship between the symbolism of the Calendar Round and the symbolism of the founding god-king.

Mesoamerican timekeepers show an extreme ambivalence about this extended calendar period. Its conclusion was both a renewal — the end of the old cycle and the beginning of a new cycle — and a potential moment of disaster, since the Aztecs believed that the entire world order was then in jeopardy. At that critical moment the astronomer priests anticipated world destruction by fire, wind, or water, repeating the great cataclysm that ended the golden age of Quetzalcoatl.

The synchronous Earth-Venus movements appear to have figured prominently in the calendar, enabling priest astronomers to draw on the mathematics of Venus cycles to anticipate the recurrence of doomsday. For example, 65 Venus cycles were equivalent to 104 solar years, or two 52-year cycles, which the Aztecs called _huehueliztli_, an old age or "long-period."

To Velikovsky, this role of Venus in calculations of world ages was, at the very least, evidence to be considered in assessing Venus' catastrophic role in the past.

The works of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the early Mexican scholar (circa 1568-1648) who was able to read old Mexican texts, preserve the ancient tradition according to which the multiple of fifty-two-year periods played an important role in the recurrence of world catastrophes. He asserts also that only fifty-two years elapsed between two great catastrophes, each of which terminated a world age.

Now there exists a remarkable fact: the natives of pre-Columbian Mexico expected a new catastrophe at the end of every period of fifty-two years and congregated to await the event. "When the night of this ceremony arrived, all the people were seized with fear and waited in anxiety for what might take place." They were afraid that "it would be the end of the human race and that the darkness of the night may become permanent: the sun may not rise anymore."

It happened that the end of a cycle occurred in mid-November, 1507, and available records give us a good sense of the collective fears embedded in the symbolic rites of renewal. It is said that five priests moved in procession with a captive warrior out of the city of Tenochtitlan to the great ceremonial center on the Hill of the Star. The occasion was [?]proceeded by ritual extinction of fires across Mexico, the casting of statues and hearthstones into the water, and rites of sweeping — all of these gestures bearing a significant symbolic tie to an ancient cultural memory of catastrophic transition. We are also told that on this frightening occasion women were locked in granaries to avoid being turned into man-eating monsters, pregnant women donned masks of maguey leaves, and children were kept awake to keep them from turning into mice while asleep. (That these fears trace to the cosmic night and the associated chaos hordes should become clear in the course of this series.) David Carrasco writes:

""For on this one night in the calendar round of 18,980 nights the Aztec fire priests celebrated "when the night was divided in half": the New Fire Ceremony that ensured the rebirth of the sun and the movement of the cosmos for another fifty-two years. This rebirth was achieved symbolically through the heart sacrifice of a brave, captured warrior specifically chosen by the king. We are told that when the procession arrived "in the deep night" at the Hill of the Star the populace climbed onto their roofs. With unwavering attention and necks craned toward the hill they became filled with dread that the sun would be destroyed forever.""

When the priest astronomers did confirm that the heavens were still in order, the country broke into celebration, the Sacred Fire was rekindled, houses, roads and walkways were swept clean and normal life resumed, the gods having granted man another 52-year cycle.

As in the case of disaster portents, the fears implicit in the calendar symbolism flowed from a core idea of recurrence. In the same way that the appearance of a comet OR the rising of Venus recalled the world-ending catastrophe, the calendar system (which undeniably related to observed Venus cycles) rested on a memory of former upheaval, when heaven fell into confusion. Could the terrestrial king, whose life always mirrored that of the founding god-king, escape the fate of the great predecessor, whose death ENDED a cosmic cycle? Would the world itself survive a full turn of time's wheel?

It's too easy for archaeoastronomers, when chronicling the calendar symbolism, to slip into a state of enchantment over the system's mathematical symmetry, forgetting that there is a far more vital question: what were the experiential origins of the collective fear — the fear of a world falling out of control? And why did the planet Venus figure so prominently in the calculations of world ages?

Perhaps the answer lies with the famous Calendar Stone, on which the time-keeping hieroglyphs are recorded. Enclosing the stone, and thus encompassing the entire cycle or world age is the two-fold form of the great serpent Xiuhcoatl, the mythical parent of comets, the great celestial torch launched against the rebel powers when the world was overrun by demons of chaos. That the archetypal comet should define the great cycle of time does not surprise us. For it seems that bringing one world age to an end and inaugurating another is, in the universal tradition, the comet's most distinctive role.

ONE FEAR, MANY EXPRESSIONS

Due to the progressive fragmentation of evidence over time, the experts have missed the most significant fact of all. Mesoamerican cultures as a whole expressed the doomsday anxiety in pervasive ritual practices which themselves offer vital keys to the nature of the original events: the rites of sweeping practiced in every sacred precinct; the great festivals reckoning with critical moments in the calendar and repeating memorable episodes in the age of the gods; the virtually endless rites of sacrifice, by which tens of thousands died in a culture-wide bargaining with celestial powers; and the ritually-ordained wars by which the city's bravest and strongest repeated the catastrophic interlude between two world ages. Together with the available information on disaster portents, these mythically-rooted themes provide a great reservoir of evidence as to the character of the remembered catastrophe. (See sections to follow.)

The repeated ritual patterns re-enacted on every scale (from household sweeping rites to nation-wide celebrations of the 52-year cycle): a world falling into darkness; the death of the creator-king, whose heart-soul was torn from him to soar aloft as a comet-like "spark"; the end of the kingdom (symbol of the "world"); a sky filled with celestial dust and cometary debris — the feared chaos-hordes; the gathering of great armies in the heavens to wage celestial combat; and overwhelming commotion: reverberating shouts and cries, the earthshaking moans of the great goddess, the shrieks of whistles, trumpets blaring, the beating of drums, and — in the very midst of this world-ending havoc — a smoking star (the prototypical comet of the Aztecs and Maya, the planet Venus) announcing the disaster in the most literal, causative sense, and presiding over the recovery of order, as if sweeping clear the darkened and cloud-filled sky.

To see how these vivid memories of cometary disaster found expression in the local rites, we shall next turn to the role of the feared chaos hordes in the remembered events.

Dave Talbott

__VOL I, No. 26 November 15, 1997

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (10) By David Talbott

DEMONS OF DARKNESS

Let us now consider the role of darkness in the myths of the Great Comet.

Throughout Mesoamerica, the arrival of the cosmic night was a pervasive subject of ritual re-enactment, from macrocosm to microcosm; the darkness into which the world sank symbolically at the end of the 52-year cycle was the same darkness remembered with each setting of the sun, as every household recalled the dangers of the greater darkness in primeval times.

But the doomsday fears of Mesoamerican peoples do not just reflect the ancient experience of a darkened world. At the root of these fears is a memory of the "chaos-hordes" let loose, the great cometary cloud which overtook the world in the mother of all catastrophes. Numerous ritual celebrations represented this swarming cometary debris by crowds of warriors and other participants adding through their dress and gestures the elements of commotion, disarray, darkness, and mock combat — these frenzied crowds being as much a part of the ritual occasion as the officiating priests or sacrificial victims. The panoply of images involved here will provide countless details about an event far more terrifying than historians have dared imagine.

The crucial principle is the connection between ritual symbols and remembered events: the local rites commemorated death and disaster on a COSMIC scale. Thus, all of the components of the "darkness" theme are significant — throngs of people shouting in confusion or running about; the feathered ornaments; paper streamers waving in the wind; a pervasive fear that their children will be turned into mice; the fear that monsters with disheveled hair (a global cometary motif) will rise out of the darkness to devour them. Indeed, such themes constitute a tapestry of ancient cometary myths and symbols. And the repeated fears and gestures are not fixed to a single rite or to just one symbolic occasion, but to every level at which the darkness theme occurs.

Symbolically, for example, every setting of the sun contained an aspect of the former disaster. When dusk arrived it came as a reminder of the cosmic night — the twilight of the gods. Natives of pre-Columbian Mexico retired to their own dwellings and covered themselves. At night the chaos-demons were out, and children could be turned into mice (a mythical form of the swarming celestial debris with cometary tails, the "children" of the comet-goddess). And while the people slept, it was the priest astronomer's duty to monitor the heavens at dusk, midnight and dawn, to "divine the course of events." In the shadow of the remembered catastrophe, every form of darkness contained a seed of uncertainty and terror.

Then, in the morning, the obligatory sweeping of patios and walkways occurred — symbolically, the sweeping away of the night. Not just the darkness, but the gathered dust and clutter filled a special role in Mesoamerican daily life and ritual, as symbols of the great dust-cloud which overtook the world in ancestral times. So in the sweeping rites, we see the dust as an analog of this cloud — the chaos hordes — together with the symbolism of the female head of the house as "sweeper," a role defined by the mother goddess Toci herself, whose "broom" is a prominent feature in the commemorative rites (see discussion of Toci and sweeping rites in discussion to follow; also later discussion of the "broom" as universal comet glyph; in the form of a "broom," "flail," "fan," or "whisk," the Great Comet itself "scatters" the chaos-cloud.)

No doubt such symbolism at the daily, microcosmic level was diluted over time and progressively gave way to the growing complexities of culture and practical necessity, but the residue of an ancient and unrecognized experience was still there at the time of the Conquest.

Of course, the recollection of the cosmic night appears in more dramatic forms when an UNUSUAL occurrence of darkness breaks the normal pattern. Consider Sahagun's description of the people's response to an eclipse:

"Then there were a tumult and disorder. All were disquieted, unnerved, frightened. Then there was weeping. The common folk raised a cup, lifting their voices, making a great din, calling out, shrieking. There was shouting everywhere. People of light complexion were slain [as sacrifices]; captives were killed. All offered their blood, they drew straws through the lobes of their ears, which had been pierced. And in all the temples there was the singing of fitting chants, there was an uproar, there were war cries. It was thus said: "If the eclipse of the sun is complete, it will be dark forever! The demons of darkness will come down, they will eat men!""

In these fleeting moments of the eclipse, the people relived the unforgettable night, repeating the great din of the world-ending catastrophe and venting their fears of the devouring chaos hordes. Were these fears, in origin, different from the (tempered) fear of dusk, or different from the terror aroused by the conclusion of the 52-year cycle (noted in our previous submission)? An examination of the different contexts will show that the entire complex of "darkness" fears always recalls the same comet-like cloud descending upon the world.

It should not surprise us, therefore, that the very same fear is seen in relation to the eclipse of the moon.

When the moon was eclipsed, his face grew dark and sooty, blackness and darkness spread. When this came to pass, women with child feared evil; they thought it portentous; they were terrified [lest], perchance, their [unborn] children might be changed into mice; each of their children might turn into a mouse.

Such fears are rooted in myths and memories the modern world has failed to comprehend. There is an ARCHETYPE of cosmic "darkness," with deeper and broader meaning than could be extracted from any single commemorative occasion. Alone, the symbols can only point ambiguously backwards to unrecognized trauma. But in combination, the symbols will provide a rich profile of the world-ending catastrophe, accessible to any researcher willing to break free from a methodology that sees only fragments and asks the fragments to explain themselves in isolation from the whole.

Of course, the planet Venus would seem an unlikely source of sky-darkening clouds (or of sky-clearing "sweeping," for that matter). And yet the remarkable Mesoamerican association of Venus with the eclipse and darkness has been documented by the vigorous research of Ev Cochrane. "Like most ancient peoples, the Maya considered eclipses of the sun to be a time of dire peril," Cochrane writes. "It was commonly believed, in fact, that the world might end during a solar eclipse. In the eclipse tables contained within the Dresden Codex, an eclipse is symbolized by the figure of a dragon descending from the glyph of the sun."

On the relationship of the "eclipse"-dragon to Venus, Cochrane gives us the verdict of the eminent Mayan scholar, Sir Eric Thompson:

"The head of the monster is hidden by a large glyph of the planet Venus. One is instantly reminded of the Aztec belief that during eclipses the monsters called Tzitzimime or Tzontemoc (head down) plunged earthwards from the sky. These monsters include Tlauizcalpanteculti, the god of Venus as morning star. It is therefore highly probable that the picture represents a Tzitzimitl plunging head down toward earth during the darkness of an eclipse. A glyph immediately above the picture appears to confirm this identification, for it shows the glyph of Venus with a prefix which is a picture of a person placed upside down."

A remote star could darken the entire sky? Here we see, in a clear profile, the dilemma for conventional study. Under the standard approach to this subject, the images are far too incredible to have any foundation in natural experience. Hence, they must be entirely fanciful. And hence, any attempt to see natural experience in these hieroglyphs must be preposterous.

That is the fundamental circular reasoning on which the modern understanding of myth and symbol has been constructed. As a result, the patterns suggesting deeper levels of coherence are not even noticed. What is unthinkable is of no interest. So we do not realize that the fear of darkness is not just the fear of being unable to see clearly. As concretely expressed in myths and rites, it speaks for a collective memory; and even the lesser expressions of this fear are but shadows cast by a far greater terror, when the whole sky became the theater for the twilight of the gods.