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‘Star Wars’ and the Lid of Palenque [1]

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Date: 2022-08-24

Funerary mask of King Pakal of Palenque

When fascism is around it’s guaranteed history will be undertaught and frequently revised around fascist talking points. As a result, I’m not surprised that pseudohistory thrives as it once did when Erik von Daniken sold no end of books claiming aliens had visited the Americas over a thousand years ago. The comparison of ‘alt historians’’ account and archaeologists views presents one means of uprooting fake history. Indigenous art throughout the Americas has long been kept distant from European/ white art, because doing so reinforces difference, rather than emphasising the similarities of thought, concerns and understanding that underpin human cultures.



Mayan Palenque

The Lid of Palenque is an elaborately carved stone set on top of a tomb in the Temple of the Inscriptions in the Maya city of Palenque, which is a pyramid of nine levels built in about 682 CE. (The Classic Period ran from about 250–900 CE). There are two main views on what the carvings in the stone show and it is not uncommon for those discussing the topic to have a good understanding of one interpretation but not the other. Key points put forward by the competing approaches seem to be largely as follows.

Ancient Astronauts - the pseudoscientists explanation:

🛸 The carvings are seen as showing a reclining figure posed in an unusual position, which is similar to the position some Apollo astronauts sat in during early spaceflights.

🛸 The reclining figure is wearing headgear which looks similar to the headgear worn by astronauts during early manned spaceflight, because it can appear to have tubes or pipes of some kind attached to it in the manner of a diver’s helmet.

🛸 Parts of the image are seen as resembling parts of C20th rocket engines and this can be interpreted as showing the astronaut seated inside an image of a spaceship.

🛸 With no other human culture capable of spaceflight at the time the preferred explanation is Maya culture was influenced by an extra-terrestrial culture.

🛸 It may then be argued that, because Maya culture was run by ‘aliens’, parts of the Lid of Palenque and limited understanding of other nearby ‘alien’ structures couldn’t and don’t need to be explained beyond recognising they are alien and so too much for humans to take in.

🛸 Other ancient civilisations have left images where parts of the image resemble modern items and this can be taken as evidence of alien interference in many ancient cultures previously understood to have been human cultures.

🛸 The story ends there, with much of human culture seen as based around alien intervention, until such time as the aliens return or reveal themselves.

‘Star Wars’ - the archaeologists’ interpretation:

⭐️ The tomb represents a Maya king portrayed as a regenerative corn-god. He is set upon a throne that is itself set upon the Maya World Tree or Axis of the World. At the base the carvings show the jaws of the Maya Underworld, while above the Maya World Tree reaches up to the heavens where we are shown the shamanic bird associated with Itzamna, the Maya creator god and a broader context of ancestor worship.

⭐️ Pacal, the king in urgent need of renewal, is in a pose that can be interpreted as falling into the jaws of the Maya Underworld, but while this is a tomb scene the same pose appears in Maya ceramics of the Classic period in connection with childbirth.

⭐️ Juxtaposing life and death in such a way seems more consistent with an image of death and rebirth than a purely funerary function. A situation where Pacal is, perhaps, more suspended in mid-air than reclining or falling, which allows him to ‘remain in play’ as a regenerative ancestral figure serving as a conduit between the underworld and the heavens.

⭐️ Kings have a tendency to build monumental structures intended to allow them to continue beyond the grave. Structures and statues get you part of the way there, but the underlying worldview has to persist through temples, ceremony and ritual. The Lid is not the only feature of the Temple of Inscriptions concerned with connecting the underworld, the world and the heavens. A ‘psychoduct’, basically a channel or air duct, runs through each level of the whole structure of the temple, connecting Pacal to the world of the living as he lies in state.

⭐️ The design appears concerned with a ‘continued agency’ or ‘rebirth’, as Pacal rests in a 9-tiered pyramid, corresponding to the 9 tiers of the Maya Underworld, Xibalba, and his tomb has thirteen corbel roof sections connecting him, and the duct, to the chamber at the top. The Maya heaven has thirteen levels and it is possible, but not necessary, to see the whole temple as a metaphor for the slain king travelling to the Maya Underworld and ascending to the Maya heavens using the World Tree.

⭐️ Maya culture involved city states/ principalities vying for resources while sharing culture. As part of this the status/ worth of a city state was connected-up to the Maya world view. As a result, ritualised warfare between city states followed a cosmic ordering where sports, (‘the Maya ballgame’), sacrifices, raids and capturing prisoners, like the art and architecture, moved to the rhythm of the observations and calendars of the skies as observed and interpreted by ancient sky watchers.

⭐️ There was a widespread and longstanding practice of conducting ritualised ‘Star Wars’ between Maya principalities where, for example, raids would take place on what were considered (by the Maya) as astronomically fortuitous occasions or an important captive’s sacrifice might be delayed for years to suit a particular event in the night sky.

⭐️ No aliens were required for the Temple of the Inscriptions to happen. Maya and related Mesoamerican cultures such as the earlier Olmec and Teotihuacan had far, far earlier origins from across the Americas, including the step pyramids and standing stones/ omphalos found at Caral in what is now Peru and dated to about 5,000 years ago.

⭐️ The story continues in all sorts of directions from there, including looking further into Maya lifestyles and kingship, as Pacal’s world was and is every bit as intriguing as his tomb. I have relied on the slightly dated but readable David Drew’s The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings here, but there are new sources appearing on a continual basis, (that are easy to get for free off ResearchGate). Aerial surveys found no end of Mayan stuff fairly recently, so we’ll be finding otu a lot more.

Vista desde la Pirámide de la Luna - Teotihuacan. Creative Commons 4.0: Page.

Teotihuacan

The site has hundreds of pyramids including the massive Temples or Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Much of the ‘Star Wars’ culture involving competing principalities engaged in ritualised warfare later found among the Maya, Mixtecs, Zapotecs and other Mesoamerican cultures were fully-formed at Teotihuacan. That includes elaborate, colourful zoomorphic costumes, monumental architecture on a colossal scale and the sacrifice of captives according to a ‘cosmic’ calendar of astrology and horizon astronomy.

Neolithic America

However, at present, the earliest site showing pyramids and identical elements of ritual architecture in the Americas is in Peru at Caral, a Caral Supe Neolithic site with datings between 2630-1900 cal B.C.E.. It follows that the origins of Mayan and Mexica culture can be traced back thousands of years to Peru. That said some of the ideas and architecture seem a little too polished to have developed in total isolation, so Caral is likely a very significant milestone in the context of a more ‘civilised’ early Americas than we envisage. If there’s a pyramid and an omphalos chances are shamanism, totemism and naturalism were all at play as part of even older traditions.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/24/2118593/--Star-Wars-and-the-Lid-of-Palenque

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