The Sun'll Come Up To Maya

The Maya culture presents us with problems, much as a white-knuckled fist hurtling toward our nose by a perfect stranger presents us problems. We can close our eyes and just avoid the whole thing, but that is going to help us for all of a split second. And it will do us absolutely no good in trying to understand the situation.

Or we can actually strap on our big boy boots and make a stab at trying to understand this most mysterious aspect of our past.

I say let’s go for the latter.

First question: Where’d they come from? Well, of course, from Mesoamerica, but I mean the entire culture seems to have sprung into full-blown maturity without preliminaries.
Evolution that crosses species is just downright nuts, but evolution within species, and within man’s cultures, is absolutely correct. The technology of today didn’t just come into being over night but evolved, and those steps can be traced backward in time. Occasionally, cultural evolution gets a goose in the behind by the appearance of a genius (think Newton) or an accident (think discovery of penicillin), but in general, we march forward at a pretty steady, predictable pace.

But the culture of the Maya does NOT seem to have evolutionary roots. BAM! Here it is, full blown and amazing, and don’t ask any questions about how it got here. Now, I suppose that the evolutionary steps might have been present, might have involved a logical progression of steps toward an incredibly sophisticated science, architecture, and art, steps which have been lost in jungle humidity and rapacity, but to date nothing, not a single thing, has turned up that shows this evolution.

Did they, illogically, rip down all their previous attempts once a new piece of knowledge became clear, thus obliterating their evolution? I mean, one doesn’t just go from primitive jungle dweller pulling leaves over his head to protect himself from the rain to sophisticated architect and mason raising pyramids of incredible complexity. And surely one of those experiments would have been left standing. There HAS to be some intermediary step—but in the Mayan world, there isn’t.

Second question: Why is their representational art so similar to that of ancient Egypt’s? Granted that both societies raised monumental pyramids without any seeming communication or collaboration. And I can accept that two cultures that had absolutely no connection could just possibly end up building incredibly similar structures.

But that these two cultures would also produce representational art in exactly the same way beggars the imagination. Both the Maya and the ancient Egyptians presented the human figure exclusively in profile with non-realistic shoulder presentations—i.e., an alignment of head and body that is impossible in reality.

Yet, in both their three-dimensional art, there is a very realistic presentation. Both societies were able to create fantastic works of architecture and art and science, yet neither was able to utilize even rudimentary realistic perspective in one-dimensional presentation?

Were both societies blind to reality in the just the same way and did they create exactly the same kind of artistic mistake, or did they both share a similar artistic sensibility? If the former, I merely scoff. If the latter, then we have more than just pyramids in common.

Question three: How could a civilization as mathematically and astronomically advanced as the Mayas not have utilized the wheel?

If they made their own astronomical calculations, were they not aware that everything was running in a circular or elliptical pattern? And surely someone would have finally had a “Eureka!” moment when it became obvious that it would be easier and more efficient to use a round object to help move stones—and themselves. But apparently this moment never came.
There is nothing in their representational art or in the detritus of their remains to suggest that wheels were ever used.

Now, you may say that they didn’t have horses, so why would they have had chariots? True enough about the horses. But still—doesn’t the three-year old in his play, no matter what culture, find that moving things on round objects beats moving them by dragging?

I mean, a dislodged stone doesn’t slide down the mountainside—it rolls!

But this connection didn’t occur to a society so advanced that they could make incisions into the human skull and have the person survive.

Question four: Just what the hell happened to these people? The current explanation requires us to buy into eco-nonsense. The Mayas simply exhausted the natural resources; drought overtook tropical Central America, blah, blah, blah.

Sociologists would have us believe that their blood lust for human sacrifice made them vulnerable to resentment by outside forces or from within. Possible, of course, but without a scintilla of evidence.

And do people who have lived with and possibly created such monumental cities just drift away, en masse. If Detroit still exists, then so should the Mayan cities.

And are the poor people who claim to be remnants of the Mayan civilization (living now in squalor in Central America) really the descendants of what has to be a pinnacle of man’s brilliance. Wow, then there really IS a falling off that is beyond imagining! Could people really fall so far so fast and yet be so near?

I don’t have definitive answers for any of these questions (nor does anyone else, by the by, so my theories are as good as theirs). But I do know that the evolution of the Mayan culture is all backwards, just as is that of ancient Egypt. They both seem to have sprung into being, fully loaded, then languished, then precipitously declined and disappeared, all of which is contrary to natural evolution within cultures of our acquaintance.

Only an outside force (and I do not mean necessarily an alien force--though I certainly don't exclude an alien force) could have established such a culture. And that there are two cultures so similarly inclined but so geographically separated supports the theory that the knowledge that was imposed on these people was shared in common, though the homo sapiens were not.

From wreckage, there was a jump-starting of civilization by beings that had extraordinary knowledge. Man was new but the knowledge was old. Whoever or whatever implanted knowledge into the Egyptian and the Mayan culture was not of them, but was rather part of some other time, possibly place.

This force was trying to jump-start what it had known, what it knew, and was putting its knowledge and ideas into minds not evolutionarily ready to accept this knowledge.
Great structures were created, art was invented, mathematics and astronomy were thrown into minds barely evolved enough to grunt.

And it all probably worked for a bit. But it was all doomed to disintegrate, because it didn’t have natural evolution as its foundation.

And so we are left with monuments and knowledge that are, really ARE, impossible for the primitives to have created. Like monkeys conscripted to build a spaceship, early man was forced to waltz before he was able to crawl.

Then the brilliance of the Creators could only be sustained by mindless rituals and brute force—and our Creators were forced to watch the knowledge of the ages they'd so carefully saved from obliteration being devoured and destroyed by primitive beings knocking around in the temples of gods, not of reason but of incomprehension.

New knowledge would arise, but it would have to evolve naturally, through the painful trial and error that has marked mankind’s history since about 3000 BC.

Yes, we are reinventing that which our Creators already knew, but without that reinvention, it wouldn’t last, because it wouldn’t be ours.

The greatness of the time of the Creators ended, and they wanted it to go on, seamlessly, but rather than create a new human race that would take up where they left off, what they did was erect barriers to our understanding the past.

They left us mysteries, puzzlements, insoluble conundrums—and we have been trying to sort out those things, when we should have been getting on with things. They didn’t trust us to be able to discover things on our own.

Like parents who refuse to believe that their children will actually ever amount to anything, they gave us EVERYTHING—only to discover that all we really needed was a cardboard box and our imagination and a little time to grow into our brains.

Imagine ourselves, citizens ensconced in the computer age, where our every desire can be summoned effortlessly from the ends of the earth, being faced with the extinction of all our modern wonders. If a few of us survived, wouldn't we try to impart our wisdom and accomplishments to whatever intelligent race might be struggling to establish itself on this planet's bleak remains? And so we impart to them, DO for them, what they cannot imagine or do for themselves. How long will what we’ve set up last?

Well, give a library of the world’s greatest intellects to a bunch of six-year-olds, and see how much of it is left in twenty years.

The reason “Lord of the Flies” is such a disturbing book is that it shows us just how quickly and utterly all of our civilization can be, and will be, wiped out. The book has such a deus ex machina ending because it is obvious where this story is heading—into our unthinkable beginnings.
But that is where things must actually begin—and man with his reason will pull himself out of the blood swamp into the light. And if we try to speed it along, we will face the same frustration and anger of our Creators, who created not a fast track toward the top but rather a constant inexplicable diversion that pulls back to the past.

We would have been much further along by now if our Creators hadn’t tried to get us to move forward faster. Sad, so sad.