Theos-Talk Archives (March 2006 Message tt00203)

This was written as an introduction to the codices associated with 
the Toltec that Blavatsky mentioned several times.  Krsanna

DEATH OF THE SUN-GOD AND ANCIENT AMERICAN CODICES

Traveling to the Americas in 1851 after reading James Fenimore 
Cooper's novels, Helena Blavatsky commented about "the sad examples 
of the rapid demoralization" of Native Americans as soon as they 
live in close proximity with Christian officials and missionaries.  
Realizing that the wisdom teachings in North America had been 
submerged by Christianity, Helena Blavatsky changed her itinerary 
and traveled to Mexico and Central America.  

The literature of ancient Mexico recorded the most sophisticated 
calendar to ever exist had been burned by conquering priests in the 
16th century.  When the Spaniards arrived in 1521, the priests were 
mightily concerned about the "Christian" symbolism and ritual that 
was already prevalent in Mexico.  After much correspondence about 
the cruciform, trinity and baptism in ancient Mexico, the priests 
concluded that the devil had beguiled the people before the 
Christians arrived must be driven from the people by burning their 
literature, after shipping a small number of manuscripts to Europe.  
The Aztec's pyramids in the cosmopolitan center of what is now 
Mexico City were dismantled to build cathedrals.  The Christian 
Conquest was complete with only overgrown relics remaining of the 
grandeur that once dominated the Mexico Valley.  

Surviving fragments of Mexico's pre-Conquest literature had been 
spared only when it had been shipped to Europe, mostly in private 
libraries, where it was lost and found, and lost again before taking 
its place in the literature of the world.     

Among hundreds of tribes in Mexico, in an area where the Aztec are 
dominant, Blavatsky commented twice on the forebears of the Toltec, 
the tribe most closely associated with builders of the pyramids at 
Teotihuacan, the oldest and largest pyramid complex in Mexico and 
Central America.  By the time the Spaniards arrived, the abandoned 
pyramids at Teotihuacan had long been overgrown with vegetation.  
The accomplishments of the builders of Teotihuacan, 35 miles north 
of Mexico City, are still being discovered in ongoing excavations of 
the complex.  More than 100 years after Blavatsky's death, in 1993 a 
color restoration of a codex likely associated with the Toltec, the 
Codex Borgia, was produced for the popular press.  We can now 
compare the restored Codex to stanzas of The Secret Doctrine and 
other ancient literature.  The Codex is stunning for metaphysical 
components corresponding with the world's oldest literature, derived 
as Blavatsky's explains, from a single parent manuscript.  In The 
Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky traces the origins of Hebraic, Chinese, 
Egyptian, Indian, and Chaldean literature to the parent manuscript 
but only mentions the Toltec, whose literature had been burned and 
removed from Mexico.  

Although she spoke little about Mexico except for brief comments 
about the Toltec, Blavatsky identified the forebears of the Toltec 
as those most closely associated with the ancient doctrines.  

"…taken down in Senzar, the secret sacerdotal tongue, from the words 
of the Divine Beings, who dictated it to the sons of Light, in 
Central Asia, at the very beginning of the 5th (our) race; for there 
was a time when its language (the Sen-zar) was known to the 
Initiates of every nation, when the forefathers of the Toltec 
understood it as easily as the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis, who 
inherited it, in their turn, from the sages of the 3rd Race, the 
Manushis, who learnt it direct from the Devas of the 2nd and 1st 
Races."

Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy

Synthesizing science, religion and philosophy in The Secret 
Doctrine, Blavatsky sought to show that the ancient "Wisdom 
Religion" was the source of both old and new religion and 
philosophy.  Revealing their common source, she hoped to show how 
disfigured they had become.  

"My chief and only object [in The Secret Doctrine] was to bring into 
prominence that the basic and fundamental principles of every 
exoteric religion and philosophy, old or new, were from first to 
last but the echoes of the primeval "Wisdom Religion." I sought to 
show that the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, like Truth itself, was ONE; and 
that, however differing in form and color, the foliage of the twigs, 
the trunk and its main branches were still those of the same old 
Tree, in the shadow of which had developed and grown the (now) 
esoteric religious philosophy of the races that preceded our present 
mankind on earth… simply to give THAT WHICH COULD BE GIVEN OUT, and 
to parallel it with the beliefs and dogmas of the past and present 
nations, thus showing the original source of the latter and how 
disfigured they had become."  (LUCIFER, June 15, 1890, pages 333-35.)

Blavatsky cited the sciences of her day from newspapers, magazines, 
and new publications to put the facts before her readers.  In the 
century after her death, developing sciences required leading 
scientists to look at the ancient with new eyes and add their own 
observations.  Among these were Robert Oppenheimer, father of atomic 
physics:  "The general notions about human understanding… which are 
illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature 
of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new.  Even in our 
own culture they have a history and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a 
more considerable and central place.  What we shall find is an 
exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." 

Scientists in many disciplines examined ancient wisdom with new 
respect in the light of improved observations made possible by 20th 
century technologies, exemplified by satellites and electron 
microscopes.  Quantum sciences provided credibility for connections 
between mind and nature and the life force espoused in ancient myth 
and religion in a generation of science for the popular press:  The 
Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra; The Non-Local Universe, by Robert 
Nadeau and Menas Kafatos; The Field, by Lynne McTaggart; and 
Wholeness and The Implicate Order, by David Bohm.  

Satellite observations yielded secrets of solar physics that 
revolutionized long-held concepts of the sun, central to ancient 
sciences and religions.  Revered as the governor of life on earth 
among the ancients, solar knowledge was relentlessly attacked by 
Christian armies around the world who held that the earth was the 
center of the cosmos, with the Pope in Rome acting as the infallible 
agent of God himself.  Challenges to the Pope's supreme rule of 
God's creation in anciently synthesized religions and sciences, 
particularly the sun as the governor of life on earth, offended 
Rome.  The literatures, almanacs and calendars with accurate solar 
counts were systematically destroyed and replaced with Rome's 
doctrine of the Pope's central infallibility.

Solar science is critical to the literature of ancient Mexico and 
Central America, where the Maya knew the correct solar year, 
observed sunspots, and predicted eclipses with the most accurate 
timekeeping system that existed on the planet until the mid-20th 
century, when the atomic clock was invented; and, even with the 
atomic clock, the Mayan calendar remains the most sophisticated 
calendar ever devised.  The calendric system that was the basis of 
the Maya's timekeeping, the proto-Mayan calendar, was stylized and 
developed differently in various regions, while a 260-day ritual 
calendar with 20 glyphs and 13 numbers, often called the book of 
days, was used throughout Mexico and Central America.  Calendric 
symbols are so deeply embedded in all the literature of ancient 
America that a passing acquaintance is essential for even cursory 
review.  

The basic structure of the ancient calendar necessary to review the 
Codex Borgia will be addressed after a few basics of the physical 
and metaphysical features of the solar science that must certainly 
have been known in ancient America.  So central was the sun in the 
creation of successive worlds that each world was identified as a 
sun.  Each sun, or world, was presided over by a deity and a race of 
people that were either destroyed or transformed into a specific 
creature.  

In Central Mexico, the home of the Toltec, the world is in its fifth 
creation, or fifth sun.  Characterized by "movement," the fifth sun 
began after the fourth sun ended in flooding and the people were 
transformed into fish.  This period very likely corresponds with 
planetary cooling that resulted in stormy weather and flooding 
worldwide that began around 3250 BCE and lasted for nearly a 
millennium.  After the flooding ended, The Feathered Serpent 
(Quetzalcoatl) and the god of rulers, sorcerers and warriors 
(Tezcatlipoca) raised the heavens by transforming themselves into 
trees to recreate the world as the fifth sun.  In this world of 
movement, migrations of populations, many of which originated in 
Asia, have spanned the globe time after time: The Aryans to India, 
the Etruscans to Italy, and the Toltec to Mexico names only a few.  

The solar eclipse of July 11, 1991 was accurately predicted in 755 
AD in the Mayan codex taken from the Yucatan in Southern Mexico, and 
is commonly called the Dresden Codex, because it is still housed in 
Dresden, Germany.  This eclipse was especially important because it 
lasted almost seven minutes, making it one of the longest on 
record.  The ancient Maya prophesied that a period of large 
earthquakes would begin with the 1991 eclipse preceding the 
beginning of a new sun, or world, to be characterized by cosmic 
consciousness.  The largest earthquake in recorded history occurred 
13 years later on December 26, 2004 near Sumatra, Indonesia.  A 
glyph in the Dresden Codex points to Sumatra when it is laid over a 
world map and aligned with the Atlantic coast of South America.   

Predicting this eclipse more than 1,000 years before it occurred 
required accurate knowledge of solar and lunar cycles and the 
algorithm of eclipses in 755 AD, a time when Rome believed the earth 
was the center of the universe and used the Julian calendar with an 
inaccurate solar year.  The accuracy of solar counts and astronomy 
in ancient America cannot be debated, even though the modern world 
still does not understand how the ancients were able to obtain the 
information in the absence of technology that makes sense to the 
modern mind.  

The beginning of the Mayan long count in 3113 BCE points to a period 
of critical change in the planet's climate, almost certainly 
associated with the solar cycle and sunspots.  While it is clear 
that the Maya observed sunspots, their knowledge is lost with the 
almanacs burned in the 16th century.  The Chinese observed sunspots 
as early as 800 BCE, and Galileo began observing them circa 1610 AD 
with invention of the telescope.  Sunspot cycles extending into the 
ancient past have been constructed from old records and good guesses 
by modern scientists, who still cannot explain the physics of 
sunspots and how they relate to long-term solar cycles.  

As a general rule, maximum numbers of sunspots populate the sun's 
surface to produce a solar maximum in about 11 year cycles, 
sometimes a little sooner and sometimes a little later.  Sometimes, 
numbers of sunspots decrease over long periods to produce global 
cooling; and sometimes they increase over long periods for higher 
global temperatures.  A series of exceptionally cold winters 
throughout Europe between 1645 and 1715 occurred in a period of 
minimum numbers of sunspots, known as the Maunder Minimum.  In 
contrast, a Medieval Warm Period between 1100 and 1250, a period of 
very warm climates on earth, coincides with large numbers of 
sunspots.  

The loss of radio and radar during periods of maximum sunspots, a 
solar maximum, earned new respect for sunspot cycles in 1989 when 
Air Force One lost all communication while in flight with the 
President of the United States.  Since 1900 sunspot counts have been 
higher than usual, and has prompted some scientists to call the 
present period the Modern Maximum.  High temperatures worldwide 
began setting new records in 1998, at the same time the polar ice 
caps began melting at unprecedented rates.  Solar brightening that 
causes higher temperatures throughout the solar system has been 
increasing for 100-150 years.  

After a meticulous count for 5,125 years, the Mayan long count 
inexplicably will end in 2012 AD.  An explanation for the abrupt end 
of the long count is not given in the literature that survived 
Conquest.  Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that long count's end is 
115 years after the end of a 5,000-year cycle in the Kali Yuga that 
ended in 1897-98.  Solar activity, storms and earthquakes in the 
20th century that broke all records suggest the correspondence 
between the ends of two cycles anciently predicted is more than 
sheer coincidence.  Viewing the 115 years between 1897 and 2012 as a 
transitional period could explain much about human, earthian, and 
solar behavior in the 21st century now upon us.  Clearly, systemic 
heating caused by solar brightening and radiations would affect the 
complex of interactive systems that comprise the earth's biosphere 
and the potentials of life within it.

The Sun-god's Death & Birth of the 5th Race

The Mayan long count and the Kali Yuga both began within a century 
of the cooling trend that produced wet, stormy weather and flooding 
circa 3250 BCE, that very likely was associated with the solar 
cycle.  In this period, when temperatures cooled following a long 
heating trend when the ice sheets melted, the 5th race was born in 
Central Asia and migrated to India when the Sun-god died.  Solar 
symbolism and counts flourished in geographically distant cultures 
as humans assumed important new roles.

In Egypt, the Sun-god as Ra installed the first pharaoh in 3100 BCE 
when Upper and Lower Egypt were unified.  Egyptians anciently 
commemorated the Great Pyramid, constructed with engineering that 
still cannot be replicated by 21st century technology.  At the 
Stonehenge megaliths, the earliest digging implements are carbon 
dated at 3100 BCE.  Constructed in three phases over more than 1,000 
years, Stonehenge continues to serve as a solar-lunar observatory, 
where the summer solstice sun rises directly over the heel stone 
aligned with the main axis of the megaliths.  This modern alignment 
of the solstice sun puzzles astronomers, because the alignment was 
not apparent when the heel stone was set in place.  China's first 
emperor, Fu Xi, reigned a century after Krishna's death, or about 
3000 BCE, to introduce the trigrams of the I Ching that served as 
the basis of Chinese writing.  Richard Wilhelm in his book I Ching, 
which introduced the ancient Chinese system in the West, reports the 
Chinese account of their first emperor:  "Then came Fu Xi and looked 
upward and contemplated the images in the heavens, and looked 
downward and contemplated the occurrences on earth. He united man 
and wife, regulated the five stages of change, and laid down the 
laws of humanity. He devised the eight trigrams, in order to gain 
mastery over the world."  

The Ancient Doctrine in America

The Toltec were the first of seven waves of Nahua migrations from 
Asia to Mexico, starting around 600 AD, and settled near the 
pyramids at Teotihuacan as the original builders were abandoning the 
complex.  As the first Nahua migration to the Mexico Valley, the 
Toltec had access to the pyramid complex and the builders as later 
migrations did not.  After a brief, bloody war, the Aztec, another 
Nahua migration, declared themselves the heir of the peaceful Toltec 
in 1325. The Aztec adopted the Toltec culture hero and deity, The 
Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl), and installed him as a secondary 
god under the Aztec God of War.  A migratory tribe with little 
cultural history, the Aztec conquerors of the Mexico Valley 
inherited the abandoned pyramids at Teotihuacan, but never had any 
direct contact with them as the Toltec had.  

If Blavatsky had seen Mexico's ancient literature in 1852, she would 
have found themes familiar to Platonists, Egyptians, Christians, 
Hindus, and Buddhists:  The trinity, baptism, crucifixion, 
resurrection, ritual and solar calendars.  The trinity is the 
centerpiece of arcane science that unfolds in primary principles 
that remain recognizable despite untold cultural permutations 
through the ages.  It retains its essential meaning whether 
expressed by Toltec shaman as the power of the world, Christians as 
the redeeming design, or Krishna as the intelligent logos.    

In Mexico, the triune principle of one god existing as three 
persons, of whom one became man, was represented in The Feathered 
Serpent.  In the language of Southern Mexico, the first was called 
Izona, and all creation was attributed to him; the second was called 
Bacam, the son of Izona, and the third was called Echuah.  Like 
Krishna in India, The Feathered Serpent in Mexico was both a man and 
a god revered as a great reformer.  In the Toltec language he was 
called Quetzalcoatl and in Maya he was Kukulkan, both names meaning 
The Feathered Serpent in their respective languages.  Displaying 
multiple guises, The Feathered Serpent was also the god of the wind, 
the invisible medium of diffusion associated with flight.*  When the 
people lived in darkness, Native American accounts relate, The 
Feathered Serpent brought them letters and numbers.  

Like The Feathered Serpent in ancient Mexico's literature, Krishna 
is both a man and a god in the Bhagavad-Gita of India.  In Notes On 
The Bhagavad-Gita, T. Subba Row uses the sun as a simile for the 
logos and the trinity.    

I shall explain to you what I mean by this acting through the Logos 
by a simile.  Of course you must not stretch it very far; it is 
intended simply to help you to form some kind of conception of the 
Logos.  For instance, the sun may be compared with the Logos; light 
and heat radiate from it; but its heat and energy exist in some 
unknown condition in space, and are diffused throughout space as 
visible light and heat through its instrumentality.  Such is the 
view taken of the sun by the ancient philosophers… Now we see the 
first manifestation of Parabrahmam is a Trinity, the highest Trinity 
that we are capable of understanding.  It consists of Mulaprakriti 
[the veil of Parabrahmam], Eswara or the Logos, and the conscious 
energy of the Logos, which is its power and light; and here we have 
the three principles upon which the whole cosmos seems to be based.  
First, we have matter; secondly, we have force – at any rate, the 
foundation of all the forces in the cosmos; and thirdly, we have the 
ego or the one root of self, of which every other kind of self is 
but a manifestation or a reflection.
 
Ancient traditions recognized physical and metaphysical components 
of all existence, the sun and cosmos, and employed similes, 
metaphors and allegories to compare the tangible physical with the 
intangible metaphysical with greater sophistication than generally 
recognized by Europeans and their EurAmerican 
offshoots.  "Classical" European science, extracted from the older 
Greek and organized by Rome's Empire to pay tribute to Rome, 
developed without the benefit of initiation into the mysteries 
provided by older traditions closer to the Tree of Knowledge.  As 
might be predicted, European sciences began perceiving the mysteries 
of ancient similes, metaphors and allegories between 1897-98 and 
2012, the transitional window between two ancient counts that began 
long before Rome raised its army.   

The emerging vista of ancient Mexico in this transitional window of 
opportunity enables us to piece together this important component of 
civilization, as necessary to the whole of human history as India, 
China, or Egypt.  It enables us to iterate more completely the 
ancient of ancients.  In doing this, we must carefully strip away 
the veneer of Aztec and Spanish conquests and Toltec bias to find 
the fundamental principles common to every exoteric religion and 
philosophy, old or new.

(To be continued with images from the Codex Borgia and an 
introduction to the 260-day ritual calendar.  A color restoration 
can be purchased from Amazon.com:  The Codex Borgia: A Full-Color 
Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript, by Gisele Diaz and 
Alan Rodgers.)

*Compare the principle of diffusion to the medium of descent of the 
dove, representing the divine presence, shekhina, when John the 
Baptist baptized Jesus.   

ÓKduran 2006

Krsanna Duran
Missoula, Montana