What Happened At The Last World Age Change

Above is ‘The Mysterious Seven Macaw’, 35cm x 50cm, Single Edition Digital Print on Cotton Satin, 2007. A digital piece exploring the K’ichee Mayan conception of what happened at the last World Age Change, as narrated in the Popol Vuh. The best translation on the market is the one by Dennis Tedlock, aided by K’ichee Mayan Daykeeper Andres Xiloj Baruche, which lends the translation a genuinely indigenous *Mayan* understanding of the text, including both spiritual insights and bawdy jokes. Definitely recommended.

I was thinking recently about the last Great Change, around 2000 years ago, and how the way it happened can help us learn and co-create the best Great Change that is coming up. To my mind, when people consider 2012 as the dawning of the New Age, there are usually three modes of thought that come up – I give them here without judgement:

1. On December 22, 2012 (or thereabouts), a Great Event will happen which will change world consciousness forever.

2. On December 22, 2012 (or thereabouts), nothing will happen and there will be much disappointment.

3. Sometime before or after December 22, 2012, the world community will come together to resolve to effect a great change regardless of whether something happens on that date or not.

Now, for me, I tend to take the very long view. In a previous blog I mentioned my 2005 essay ‘The House Of the Sky’, which takes a (admittedly rather naïve) view 8000 years into the past and 2000 years into the future. So I think looking at the last World Age change might give us some pointers as to which of these three options might be most likely. Predicting the future is of course a bit haphazard, but it’s worth a try.

The last World Age dawned about two thousand years ago with, as I’ve said previously, “an obscure Jewish prophet from an obscure Galilean town [being] executed for sedition against the Roman state at around the same time that the Lamb of God sought to turn into the Fisher Of Men”.

Essentially a glorious immolation which functioned as the Arian lamb acting as the scapegoat sacrifice for all the world’s sins, Jesus sought to become the Fisher of Men for the Piscean Age, to bring about a global community of fraternity. This fraternity never quite came to pass, but what is interesting is how few people knew of this immolative act until later.

It is as if the World Age had changed, but many people didn’t know about it. The message took a few hundred years to spread across Eurasia, but by about 500AD it had pretty much spread from Britain to China, in one form or another, whether Catholic or Gnostic Christianity, Nestorianism or Manichaeanism. Information travelled slowly in those days.

In the Americas, a very interesting parallel mandala comes up, that of Seven Macaw (Vucub Caquix). The Hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque are walking around the world, setting it to rights (which in itself speaks of changing the world to fit the new World Age), bringing thigns into order when they encounter Seven Macaw, sat atop the highest branch of the highest tree, boasting that ‘I am the greatest, I am the creator of the world’.

Now they were pretty angry, since they had done so much work setting the world to rights, and indeed, they knew for a fact that their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were the creators of the world. So who the hell was this usurping Demiurge?

Well, one morning they shot Seven Macaw out of his tree with a blowpipe, shot his beak clean off with a dart so he could boast no more.

For me, the parallels with the World Age changing story of Jesus are clear: one who hangs/stands upon a tree dies and the New World Age begins, although in the Mayan case, Hunahpu and Xbalanque become the saviours of the world rather than Seven Macaw, the one who dies. Now Seven Macaw bears all the hallmarks of being one of the old gods, now discredited in the New Age: witness the Christian re-casting of the Greek Olympian Gods as either junior saints or outright demons.

As the Popol Vuh progresses, we hear of a number of Seven Macaw’s sons and followers who haven’t heard that Seven Macaw and the Old Age are finished: his son Zipacna most notably. Hunahpu and Xbalanque finish him off in the most humiliating way, by crushing him with a crab, an event which Andres Xiloj says has distinctly sexual overtones.

This strikes me as significant for our three options above, and makes me think that a fourth option might be possible and even likely:

4. On December 22, 2012 (or thereabouts), a Great Event happens, but no one hears about it at first, and it’s significance is only realised in hindsight.

This could be because it occurs in an obscure and unexpected part of the world (Jerusalem was a relative backwater compared to Rome, Alexandria and Ctesiphon) and news takes a long time to get out from that place. There again, we all know how isolating and anonymising metropolis life can be - perhaps it will take place in Tokyo or New York but to someone in their flat too scared to leave and ignored by their neighbours for weeks on end...

Or perhaps it occurs delocalised across the visionary space of thousands of people and it takes many years to collate that data into a coherent vision (given my bias towards Partnership and Psychedelic models of society, I like this idea best!).

Or perhaps it occurs in plain sight, televised live, but in the very dimly-understood language of the New Age, so that it just seems plain weird to us still grappling with these new energies and mandalas. Imaging how an aeroplane might seem to a Minoan…

Or perhaps it’s because it’s already happened. January 1, 2000, was a significant date for many and it’s close enough to 2012 on a historical timescale to fall into that ‘or thereabouts’ mentioned in each option above. Perhaps then, December 2012 is the time when the thing that’s already happened becomes clear.

Now in my case in the early hours of January 1 2000, I experienced a huge ecstatic vision which I have not really spoken about very much (and here is not the time or place). I know for a fact I’m not the only one – several of my subsequent friends experienced visions at that time too. Is there perhaps a single vision out there that will be shared that will map out the New Age when its significance is realised in 2012 (or thereabouts)?

Or will the combination of all our visions had over the past few years or decades suddenly start to coalesce into the mandala we are seeking?

We need, I think, to be open to all these possibilities. Luckily for us, information travels faster these days, so its important we keep talking, keep swapping ideas, keep reporting what we perceive and sense, to begin building the elements of our New Mandala. Evolver is a good place for that.

One thing for sure, I do not want to be thinking of Seven Macaw on December 22, 2012 (or thereabouts). I want to be Xbalanque in his jaguar skin (why have I always been attracted to Xbalanque as a role model?) wielding his blowpipe ready to shoot the Old Age off its perch!!

Bruce
www.biroz.net