During the First Gulf War, my son, Joel, and I began thinking about ancient sites in Ur/Iraq—Babylonian walls, statues—all in danger of being blown up. Shortly after the Taliban exploded the giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan into dusty fragments, we wondered, “Why have some ancient artifacts and sites survived our best efforts to destroy them? And what are they telling us?”
We started collecting images of ancient earthworks, petroglyphs, pottery from all around the globe.
Joel drew all 77 images; I scanned and squeezed them through Photoshop. Together we created a system of interrelated images and concepts that eventually grew into this collection of 77 essays and meditations. They relate to our body’s chakra energy system and are arranged from red to violet in 38 “body” images and 38 “spirit” images, with “39” being the central green-heart core: relationships and love.
Over the years people have performed planetary acupuncture by marking certain places with stones and structures and honoring them through ritual and meditation. Later, other groups of people co-opted them for their own sacred spaces. Holy wells, stones, and mounds became platforms and platforms became cathedrals, temples and mosques. We continue to journey to these places from Egypt to the Yucatan and all over our planet to visit and honor these sacred spots. For many, they feel like homescapes.
Archetypes
Images connect us to big ideas. Carl Jung called them archetypes. They help us better understand the interconnections of our minds, emotions, and spiritual constructs with the world around us. He wrote, “…certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.”
These archetypes are big ideas capable of exploding us into different dimensions of understanding. They can heal us, restore our balance, energize our creativity and if we allow them entrance they can move us deeply. Particularly when we pose meaningful questions, individually or as a group. Symbol-code language prompts us to access our own forgotten wisdom in thought-provoking ways. Archetypes tell stories and invite us to journey inward.
Hunab Ku
Our thirteen year journey of creating Hunab Ku was published by Crossing Press in 2005. The images in Hunab Ku offer a virtual pilgrimage to 77 places. Each image can be viewed as a milestone marking our individual and collective human journey. Some images, like this cave lion, call us back as far as thirty thousand years.
At the center of the book, where “body” and “spirit” meet, lies the Hunab Ku, the Mayan glyph or symbol that represents movement and energy—the principle of life itself. Similar to a yin-yang symbol, this “spiraling butterfly” embodies spin and counter-spin, harmony and balance, duality and unity. It invites us into the age of consciousness which, as the ancient Mayans predicted, will dawn on December 21, 2012. This pulsing image means “One Giver of Movement and Measure.” The Galactic Butterfly. The Mother Womb birthing stars.
The Maya believed in harmonic resonance. All of life’s cycles and passages are woven on what they called “Loom of Maya.” Hunab Ku is the “Lord” that ushers us all through passages between worlds. To Andean people the Mayu or Milky Way acted as an axis and a map telling them not only where they are, but also who they are. Time becomes meshed into finely turned calendars of a multi-dimensional time, recurring, recurring.
Amazingly enough, Dr. Scott Hyman of Sweet Briar College has been recording energetic radio emissions from the center of our Milky Way. He and other astronomers have verified some “whirling disk” there—a Black Hole swallowing and giving birth to new stars. Our Spiraling Universe
“Strange Rumblings at the Center of our Galaxy” by Hector Carreon
Scholars differ in their assessments of our galactic center and what specific alignments within the Milky Way may occur. John Major Jenkins, for instance, writes about a massive black hole in his Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: “Something very profound and mysterious is going on here. Is it just a coincidence that lurking deep within the dark-rift ‘black hole’ is the very real Black Hole at the center of our Galaxy? If not a coincidence, the dark-rift itself might indeed by the surface signifier of deeper cosmic mysteries, ones that the Maya were well aware of.”
Ancient Mayan astronomers predicted that the Earth, the Sun, Pleiades and the center of our Galaxy will line up in 2012 to mark the end of a long cycle and humanity will experience a new beginning. Upcoming changes will be caused, according to people such as David Wilcock, by our Solar System now moving into a new zone of energy in the Galaxy.
We know our icecaps are thinning, but most of us haven’t been paying attention to NASA. Since 1997, their scientists say the shape of our earth is bulging. Becoming more egg-shaped. Our equatorial bulge is flattening, affecting our gravitational fields.
All of this foretells massive earth changes. But rather than viewing this as some sort of “ending,” this may mean that we’re ready, as the Mayans were, to view time as non-linear. Mayans believed time was cyclical and there was a beginning and an end to all things; but they also believed time originates out of Hunab Ku the god who consistently creates new beginnings.
That means, we live on a spiral, not on a line.
A Bronze wire brooch, 899 B.C.E., Greece
On December 21, 2012 around 11:11 Universal Time, our Sun will align precisely with the Hunab Ku and the spiral may pulse a new energy into our fields. These energetic outbursts may cause severe weather, earth changes, cultural upheavals.
Look around. It is already happening. Yet the message of this Galactic Archetype seems to be telling us that life will go on. We will find ourselves in what the Maya called the Age of Itza, the Age of Consciousness.
We need not succumb to apocalyptic fever, but we can take advantage of using archetypes and images for staying calm and balanced while we enjoy our front row seats for the coming moment. We can choose to pass through this great moment together, not mired in confusion and fear, but filled with grace and love.
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