The 2012 Story by John Major Jenkins Read Free Book Online

Aztec legend of Quetzalcoatl was connected with Plato’s myth of Atlantis. He elaborated the theme freely and asserted that in 10,500 BC a sequence of four cataclysms occurred and that human civilizations originated not in the Middle East but in a continent that once extended from Yucatán into the Atlantic Ocean. Having sunk beneath the waves in cataclysmic upheavals perhaps triggered by meteors, the remnants were the Canary Islands. Here we find the seed point for much Atlantean speculation and writing that is a constantly resurfacing theme in the treatment of Maya history.
    Perhaps a grain of truth is preserved in the persistence of this Atlantis mythos. The Maya were indeed advanced in ways bizarre and difficult to fathom. They held metaphysically elegant and spiritually profound doctrines that the modern scientific mind-set in particular is ill-disposed to grasp. Did they achieve a kind of consciousness fundamentally different from modern consciousness, and might that consciousness in some way be called, with good reason, “Atlantean”? Certainly the topic has been distorted, used, and abused through the years, but its very persistence suggests that it would benefit from a reappraisal.
    Brasseur’s critics, once his fans, observed his increasingly alienating interpretations with disappointment. His perspective grew more and more strange, such that serious scholars who had once deferred to him became less and less confident in his ideas. Brasseur, for his part, insinuated that his critics had not studied the traditions of the Americas enough and harbored Old World biases. World history, he insisted, would be incomplete if the documents of the New World were left out. Despite his fall from grace in the eyes of his contemporaries, he is remembered as single-handedly bringing to light many hidden and forgotten texts of great importance, earning him a place of respect in the annals of independent sleuth-scholarship. Many of Brasseur de Bourbourg’s insights have slipped into consensus with barely a mention of credit.

DR. LE PLONGEON RAISES THE CHAC MOOL
    The curious career of Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon was passed over almost without comment by Michael Coe in his book Breaking the Maya Code . But of all the fascinating characters that have danced on the stage of Maya studies, he should receive top billing. Completely self-funded, the sheer commitment and effort of Le Plongeon to recover monstrous stone artifacts and explain their perplexing circumstances are amazing to consider.
    Born in France in 1826, he came to idolize John Lloyd Stephens, whose accounts of traveling among Maya ruins must have stimulated his young mind. On his way to the Americas at age fourteen, he was one of two survivors of a disastrous shipwreck. He lived in South America for some years before arriving in California in time for the ’49 Gold Rush. There he became a surveyor, practiced law in San Francisco, and acquired a degree in medicine (how he acquired it is not very clear). Traveling around the world, he eventually set up a private hospital in Peru in the 1860s, offering an experimental therapy of applying electrical current to medicinal baths. Always attentive to the mysteries that surrounded him, he studied Inca ruins, history, and culture. While in Peru he wrote religious books on Jesus and a practical manual on photography.
    In 1873, Le Plongeon traveled to Yucatán with his new wife, twenty-two-year-old Alice Dixon. He was always quick to mention his wife as his collaborator in the field, and they spent twelve years exploring the Maya ruins in Yucatán. Together they lived near Chichén Itzá while taking more than five hundred photographs, making drawings, surveying buildings and site alignments, and unearthing a huge sculpture of a reclining Chac Mool, a Yucatec Maya deity whose belly contained a stone bowl in which new fire was ceremonially drilled. Those days in Yucatán, a distant backwater from the ruling center of Mexico City, were