OUR SPIRITUAL HERITAGE #3 - EL CASTILLO, CHICHEN ITZA

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EL CASTILLO - CHICHEN ITZA, YUCATAN

The most impressive of all the pyramid temples is the great structure of El Castillo.

Researchers in Guatemala and Mexico has brought to light the same brilliant illumination of ancient truth which gave immortal glory to the reign of Akhenaten in Egypt...which later enabled Posidonius markedly to influence the intellectual and spiritual trends of Europe.  It also blazed quite as powerfully for a thousand years over the history of the whole Maya empire.

Mayan traditions hold that they came from some region in the sea to the east; but why they came is not in evidence.  Their ancestors, no doubt, had their origin in Atlantis or Mu; but these ancient lands had sunk thousands of years before the Mayas arrived in the last land of their adoption.  Certainly they did not wander about on the open sea from 9,000 B.C. until a hundred years before the commencement of the Christian era.

As yet we do not know from whence they came to Guatemala and Yucatan; but their own account tells of their leader, who piloted them to safety, taught them writing, architecture, agriculture, astrology and the civilized arts and kept them faithful to The Religion of the Stars for a thousand years, until a foreigner, through military power, gained dominance over them.  The name of the great Maya initiate, whom they held to be a white man, was Itzamna.

The Spaniards, when they arrived, took great pains to destroy the Maya libraries, so that the details of their history and of The Religion of the Stars as they observed it are lacking.  Yet on their stone monuments, which the Spaniards could not destroy, we have the precise dates of the chief events and practices covering a period of about 1,500 years.

During this time only two names stand out as of unusual and universal significance.  One is that of Itzamna, the great initiate who led them to safety and gave them their arts and religion, and the other is that of the black-bearded Toltec military leader, Kukulcan who, after inter-tribal wars had weakened them, imposed his will, crushed out the pure practices of The Religion of the Stars, and introduced barbaric Toltec religious customs, including the savage abomination of human sacrifice.

Here we have, on the American continent, an example of the contention of the two ancient forces which gave Atlantis and Mu their glory and which when the constructive element was defeated, ultimately sank them.  A thousand years of light, of joy, of happiness and of constructive effort by the Maya people; and then the forces of darkness, of cruelty and of greed gained the victory and there was quick intellectual and spiritual decay.

When the Spanish invaded Mexico and Central America, their priests sought out all the books and consigned them to the flames.  One Bishop Diego de Landa was highly successful in suppressing the ancient wisdom of the Mayas, who at the time had a national library of literature, of science and of history in the form of books written in their hieroglyphic characters, as de Landa records.  The national library, and the books in various cities of the empire were not available to the public, but only to the Maya priests and rulers, who were greatly esteemed for their wisdom.

The books were written and painted on a paper of fiber composition coated with stucco, which made exquisite art work possible.  De Landa had a systematic search made of the entire Maya nation for all such books, gathered them in a great pile in the public square of Mani, and burned them while the populace looked on, powerless to prevent this atrocious vandalism.

Thus of all the Maya books, invaluable treatise on their beliefs and sciences, only three escaped, no one knows how, and persist to this day.  They are:  The Peresianus Codex now at the Biblioteque National, Paris, France; the Dresden Codex, now at the Royal Library at Dresden, Germany; and the Tro-Cortesianus Codex, now at the Royal Academy of History, Madrid, Spain.  Parts of the Tro-Cortesianus appeared in two different countries, and each for a long time was believed to be a separate book.  They are now considered as halves of the same book.

If their history is ever fully recovered it will reveal, no doubt, much about the most remarkable of all initiates to set foot on American soil.  Itzamna taught his people not only architecture the equal of any to be found in the Old World, a hieroglyphic written language, and an unshakable belief in astrology, but even taking into consideration the precision of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Greeks of that time, a knowledge of astronomy unrivaled anywhere in the whole world.

As to a still earlier occurrence, thousands of years before Itzamna brought his followers to the land that became theirs, the Tro-Cortesianus Manuscripts record:

"In the year 6 Kan, on the 11 Muluc, in the month of Zac, there occurred terrific earthquakes which continued until the 13 Chuen without interruption.  The country of the hills of earth - the land of Mu (some translate it as Atlantis) - was sacrificed.  Twice upheaved, it disappeared during the night, having been constantly shaken by the fires of the underneath.  Being confined, these caused the land to rise and sink several times in various places.  At last the surface gave way and the ten countries were torn asunder and scattered.  They sank with their 64,000,000 inhabitants 8,060 years before the writing of this book."

EL CASTILLO - the pyramid castle - consists of a series of square terraces with stairways up each of the four sides to the temple on top. Sculptures of plumed serpents run down the sides of the northern balustrade. During the spring and autumn equinoxes, the late afternoon sun strikes off the northwest corner of the pyramid and casts a series of triangular shadows against the northwest balustrade, which creates the illusion of a feathered serpent "crawling" down the pyramid. Each of the pyramid's four sides has 91 steps which, when added together and including the temple platform on top as the final 'step', produces a total of 365 steps (which is equal to the number of days of the Haab' year (the Maya version of the 365-day calendar, which approximated the solar year.