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Bill Mullen

Ever since the appearance of Worlds in Collision those who have taken it
seriously have been aware that it offers the possibility, not merely of
solving more and more problems by the methods of the established
specializations, but further of restructuring knowledge as a whole.  Dr.
Velikovsky showed himself conscious of his challenge to the structure of
knowledge when he set as epigraph to the book a question by the Roman
polymath, Seneca: "Quota pars operis tanti nobis committitur?"  "What part of
so great a task is committed to us?"  And he has given a kind of private
answer to that question by devoting the most massive share of his researches
in the last twenty five years to the historical sciences, as represented by
the expansion of the sequel to Ages in Chaos into several still unpublished
volumes.  In itself Ages in Chaos remains deliberately independent of Worlds
in Collision, only taking as its starting point the event of 1500 B.C. as
described in Hebrew and Egyptian sources.  But in a larger sense Ages in Chaos
is an extension of the historical method at the basis of Worlds in Collision,
and thus will continue to serve as a model to those undertaking to
reconstruct the history of other peoples from 1500 B.C. on.

In both books the study of man is at the center: what he has done (his
migrations and his rituals), what he has made (his monuments and his symbolic
art forms), and what he has said (his myths and his annals). Two specific
methods stand out in Velikovsky's effort to order this material. The first is
chronological: to extract from the great mass of human testimony all those
elements that can be dated and to synchronize them.

The second method is interpretative: to extract common elements describing a
given real event from all the varying patterns of significance which
different cultures have assigned to it.  This second method has consistently
been the stumbling block for his critics, and it is probable that only a
patient elaboration of it by many hands in many cases will make it
sufficiently familiar to them. But it also raises a major question for those
attempting to measure the full potential of his work.  In order to understand
the nature of certain fateful events in the history of the solar system, we
must divest human testaments of their patterns of significance and use what
we have culled as raw scientific data.  But in order to understand how human
behavior was affected by these events, it is precisely to such patterns of
significance that we must return. The final goal of our research, therefore,
is not simply to have a better understanding of the history of the solar
system.  It is rather to enter into a more vibrant perception of the history
of man's efforts to bring order out of chaos.

In this paper I would like to take one great civilization, the Mesoamerican,
and show how Velikovsky's historical method might be applied to it.  It has
long been recognized that only the concept of a single civilization is
adequate to explain the similarities between a set of cultures stretching
from the Mexican highlands down to Honduras.  The oldest of these cultures is
now accepted to be the Olmec, which established itself around the northern
coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.  Inheritors of this culture lie in all
directions from the Isthmus.  To the southwest the earliest high culture is
the Zapotec, centered around Monte Alban in the present province of Oaxaca. 
To the northwest lie the series of cultures centered around the Valley of
Mexico where Mexico City now sprawls, starting with the "hegemony" of the
metropolis of Teotihuacan and ending with the "empire" of the Aztecs.  To the
east and south are the highland Maya cultures of Chiapas and Guatemala and,
preeminently brilliant, the lowland Mayas stretching from the Peten across
the Yucatan peninsula.  Different authorities make different lists of traits
common to these cultures but among them the following are agreed upon: 1) the
development of a form of urbanism in which large populations were spread
around single great ceremonial centers; 2) the belief in cyclical world ages
ended by different cosmic agents (jaguar, wind, rain of fire, water,
earthquake), and the practice of calculating and recording these and lesser
cycles by means of a glyphic system; 3) human sacrifice; 4) a ritual ball
game; 5) worship of the planet Venus.  In applying Velikovsky's historical
method I will try to establish two conclusions following from its two
aspects.  The first is that recent archaeological explorations of the oldest
stratum of Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmec, have constructed a record
which suggests with very satisfying chronological correspondence the events
described in Worlds in Collision.  The second is that in the only perfectly
preserved sacred narrative left us by any Mesoamerican people, the Popol Vuh
or Book of Counsel of the Quiche Mayas, these same events are stated to be the
unifying cause for the complex of practices by which Mesoamerican civilization
is everywhere defined.  To support this second conclusion I will adduce more
fragmentary narratives from other Mesoamerican cultures which clearly refer
to these same events even though the mythical molds into which they cast them
differ substantially from the Popol Vuh.  The first conclusion is
chronological, the second is interpretative, and only through combining the
two can the unity of the civilization be appreciated.

I.  ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE OLMECS

The archaeological record first, then.  The general reader is fortunate to
have at his disposal a thorough and recent summation of this evidence in a
book entitled The Olmec World, written in 1968 by Ignacio Bernal.  Bernal
takes the three major Olmec sites excavated so far, La Venta, Tres Zapotes,
and San Lorenzo, to comprise what he calls the "Metropolitan Zone" in which
the first flowering of Mesoamerican civilization is to be traced.  In his
scheme this flowering begins around the 12th century B.C., and its
antecedents, the "specialization of a regional style," begin around the 16th.
Surveying the Olmec artifacts found in other regions before the 12th century,
he notes that they never allow us to think of a civilization but only of an
advanced culture: there is as yet no urban planning or monumental sculpture,
only ceramics (Bernal, 1969: 106-7).

Already in this general scheme readers of Worlds in Collision and Ages in
Chaos will recognize a congruence.  One of the first consequences of
Velikovsky's alignment of the fall of the Middle Kingdom with the Exodus was
to allow him to reinstate the roughly 400 year period for Hyksos rule in
Egypt which scholars had originally felt reasonable (Velikovsky, 1952: 76).
In the revised chronology this corresponds to the 400 year period covered by
the Books of Joshua and Judges, and the shaking off of the Hyksos yoke is
shown to be the work of a coalition between Saul and Ahmose in the 11th
century.  The suggestion is that this 400 year period was one of extreme
chaos and terror due to recurring threats from the close passage of Venus, a
time in which cultural enterprises were almost totally thrown over in the
struggles of separate and often still migrating peoples for survival.  Since
Worlds in Collision does not undertake to specify precisely how long before
the 8th century Mars and Venus came into the close approach which resulted in
minimizing the danger posed by the latter planet to the Earth, it is possible
to speculate that the 12th century marks a crucial phase in that event.  In
any case, the Olmec flowering gives an example from the other side of the
globe of a people coming to life after the same centuries of paralysis.

Let us now look more closely at the datings which Bernal has correlated from
the work of archaeologists at the three principal sites of the Metropolitan
Zone, La Venta, Tres Zapotes, and San Lorenzo.  The first period from 1500 to
1200, which Bernal calls Olmec I, corresponds to La Venta I in the
nomenclature of Pina Chan, Early Tres Zapotes in that of Drucker et al., and
pre-San Lorenzo in that of M. D. Coe.  The second period, from 1200 to 600,
Bernal's Olmec II, corresponds to La Venta II and Middle Tres Zapotes.
However, according to the finds of Coe at San Lorenzo, the cultural period
beginning in 1200 ends abruptly in 900 with indications of a movement of the
inhabitants of that site two or three miles north to what are now the banks of
the Rio Chiquito at the town of Tenochtitlan (M. D. Coe, 1966, 1967, 1967A;
also Stirling, 1955).

Finally, at the beginning of Bernal's Olmec III, there is a sudden cessation
of major construction in the La Venta and Tres Zapotes ceremonial centers
around 600, and in the La Venta III and Upper Tres Zapotes sequences that
follow cultural life is at a markedly inferior level.  The Olmec primacy
seems then to be passed on to the cultures of Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico,
who are approaching the beginning of their classical periods (Bernal, 1969:
106-117).

The signs of abrupt cessation noted by the various archaeologists, and the
causes adduced for them, bear close examination at each site.  I will
consider chiefly La Venta here, not because there is a consensus that it
preceded the others in its growth, but because, during the flowering of the
Metropolitan Zone in Olmec II, it is by far the largest of the centers and
thus likeliest to give clues to both the intentions and the misfortunes of
its builders.  Here are to be found the major Olmec expression of the two
features which will continue to distinguish the Mesoamerican ceremonial
center: pyramids serving as platforms for temples, and subsidiary courts and
mounds all strictly aligned according to a north south axis.  The existence
of a ceremonial center at La Venta during Olmec I is far from established; it
has only been inferred from the presence of three stratigraphic levels under
a layer of sand (Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, 1959: 38, 44; Pina Chan and
Covarrubias, 1964: 18).  Bernal infers that it was completely destroyed by
invaders whom he calls simply the Olmec II people (Bernal, 1969: 109).  The
Olmec II ceremonial center, by contrast, was clearly recognized by the
original excavators to have gone through three major renovations under one
continuous group of leaders; the area in question was termed 'Complex A' and
its history divided into Phases I through IV. In 1957 Drucker and Heizer
obtained radiocarbon dates for nine wood charcoal samples from Complex A:
five from Phase I, one from Phase II, one from a trench cut into the north
platform of the great pyramid and presumed to be from Phase III or IV, and two
from the lowest level of the drift sand mantling the site and interpreted as
of early postphase IV date.  The five Phase I specimens covered a timespan,
within one sigma, from 1454 B.C. to 304 B.C., and averaged to 814 B.C.; the
two postphase IV specimens averaged to 309 B.C. (Drucker and Heizer, 1957). 
On the basis of these the four phases were assigned to the period 800-400 B.C.
; subsequent study of the dates retained the 400 year period but revised it
back to 1000-600 B.C. (Berger, Graham, and Heizer, 1967).

The overlapping of these dates with the catastrophic events assigned by
Velikovsky to the 8th and 7th centuries evokes two contradictory reactions. 
The first is that the whole set of dates should be held in reserve because of
the possibilities of contamination during large-scale combustions attendant
upon the events (Velikovsky, 1973: Pensee IV, 12 ff.).  A particularly
forceful example of such contamination is to be found at Tres Zapotes, where
a C14 dating of a piece of wood charcoal from the Early Period yielded the
date 9000 B.C. (Bernal, 1969: 109, n. 7).  Examination of the sample showed
that it was mixed with asphalt, as was also the case with one sample from San
Lorenzo (Coe, Diehl, and Stuiver, 1967: 1400).  Moreover, much of the Early
Tres Zapotes level was sealed with volcanic ash (Drucker, 1943: 34).  Coe
reports that lumps of asphalt were found everywhere at the San Lorenzo
excavation.  Their presence accords with Velikovsky's comprehensive
documentation of bituminous deposits around the world connected with the
events of 1500 B.C. (Velikovsky, 1950: 53-58; 1955: 64-67).  In presenting
the radiocarbon dates for San Lorenzo Coe notes that the 'true' age for the
beginning of construction activity may be pushed back from 1200 to 1350 if
the correlation taking account of the fluctuation of C14 activity of
atmospheric C02 is used.  So far he has only specified the time of
construction at this site as within the general Mesoamerican period called
the Early Formative, 1500-800 B.C.

The second reaction is that the dates as they stand, particularly according to
the revision proposed by Berger et al., bring to prominence the kinds of
explanation for the four phase sequence at La Venta which the catastrophic
hypothesis would suggest.  In a simplified version, the complete destruction
of the Olmec I ceremonial center would correspond to the beginning of a new
phase of celestial instability; the three renovations of the Olmec II Complex
A would be accounted for by recurrent destruction caused by the close
approaches of Mars; and the final abandonment of the site would reflect the
last acts of the celestial struggle.  In a more complex version, some of the
destructions might be attributed to the migrations of warrior hordes such as
Velikovsky has proposed elsewhere were initiated by the Mars events (cf.
Velikovsky, 1950: 25-34); some of the renovations to propitiatory planetary
cult; and the final abandonment to the collapse of a theocracy whose self
proclaimed power to regulate celestial events had been proven manifestly
lacking.

A yet more sophisticated explanation of these destructions, renovations and
abandonments exists which in a sense bridges the gap between the present
uniformitarian school of Mesoamerican archaeology and the emerging
interpretation of the school of catastrophism.  That is that they were all
grounded in the familiar Mesoamerican rituals based on large cycles of time. 
The practice of ritual mutilation, applied to everything from elaborately
carved stelae to simple household objects, is well known among both the
lowland Mayas of the Classic Period and the Aztecs right up to the Spanish
Conquest.  Heizer, one of the three in the original excavating team at La
Venta, used this concept in several ways to explain the state of the finds
there (Heizer, 1960: 218-220).  He noted that 24  of the 40 monuments showed
clear signs of mutilation.  In this he is supported by the even more
impressive evidence registered by Stirling at San Lorenzo (Stirling, 1955: 9),
where the stone monuments "appear all to have been intentionally overthrown
and many of them cast into ravines."  This was later interpreted by M. D. Coe
as a 'revolution' against the priestly caste which brought the San Lorenzo
culture to an abrupt end ca. 900 B.C. (M. D. Coe, 1967A: 21-26).  It should
be noted that the change from San Lorenzo to the Rio Chiquito site near the
present village of Tenochtitlan seemed explicable to Stirling by a change in
the course of the river, except for the puzzling fact that the stone
monuments were not moved when the change was made.  A catastrophic
interpretation would solve this discrepancy by assuming that at a time when
planetary instability was causing, among other things, the change of river
courses, there were simultaneously violent cult reactions of which the
mutilation of monuments or ritual casting of them into ravines might form
part.

Heizer went on to suggest that the apparent regularity of the La Venta
renovations, one every hundred years, could be correlated with the great
ceremonies performed in cycles of 52 or 104 years.  He even toyed with the
idea that "when the site was first built the intention was that it should
serve its function for a predetermined span of time, such as eight 50 year
periods or four 100 year cycles" (Heizer, 1960: 220).  This seems less
implausible when we consider the central importance of the 400 year cycle
(baktun ) to the Classic Mayans and the evidence of ritual destruction at the
end of them.

The fact seems to be that this kind of interpretation, when applied to sites
of the period of La Venta, affords the spectacle of the catastrophists and
the uniformitarians approaching from opposite directions and meeting at the
same place.  Velikovsky has argued that the obsessional fear connected with
the termination of the 52 year cycle is to be explained by the original close
passages of Venus at that interval starting around 1500 B.C.  Heizer, on the
other hand, has no explanation for the obsessional force of these cycles but
finds the testimony for them compelling enough in later Mesoamerican cultures
to be willing to project them back into the Olmecs.  In this he is supported
by the evidence from late Olmec stelae (particularly the famous Stele C from
Upper Tres Zapotes) that the Olmecs used the same calendrical cycles as are
later found in such abundance among the Mayans, including the Long Count in
which the 400 year baktun is the initial unit.

It is unnecessary to try to reach a conclusion here as to the fate of the four
phases of Complex A at La Venta.  Enough has been said to show that a
complete reevaluation of the Olmec archaeological evidence in the light of
catastrophism would be fruitful.  We have in fact been brought to the verge
of the mythological aspect of the record, and before passing on to that I
would like to look briefly at what the great Olmec stone sculptures themselves
seem to be representing.  The Olmecs have been called the "people of the
Jaguar" because that animal, chosen as the most ferocious known to them and
thus the best symbol of a terrifying force which is divine and must be
propitiated, was the major subject for the sculptor's skill.  Mythical
testimony from both the Mayans and the Aztecs associates the jaguar with one
of the world destructions.  In the opening pages of the Annals of Cuauhitlan
it is stated: "The second sun was founded and '4 Jaguar' was its dayname; it
is called 'Jaguar Sun.'  In its time the sky was destroyed, and the sun did
not follow its path; it was noon and then suddenly it was night, and when it
became night the people were eaten up" (Lehmann, 1938: 61, #33).  In the
first part of the Popol Vuh it is stated:

And so they were killed;
They were overwhelmed.
There came a great rain of glue
Down from the sky...
There came Lurking jaguar
and ate their flesh.
There came Aroused jaguar
And tore them open,
And shattered their bones
And their cartilage
(Edmonson, 1971: 26-7, 11, 691-7040).

Thus there is little difficulty in reconstructing among the Olmecs the
original meaning of their supreme symbol.

To strengthen the connection with later mythology, it should be noted that
rarely is the jaguar sculpted in its natural form; the predominant mode was
to infuse elements from other creatures and thus create a monster even more
irrefutably divine.  In a few instances these elements include a bifid tongue
representing the snake and feathers representing the bird (Bernal, 1969: 979),
so that the great image of the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, is shown to have
its first expression among the Olmecs.  The serpent motifs have also led
scholars to recognize in the Olmec jaguar the predecessor of the omnipresent
Mesoamerican gods of thunder and rain, the Tlalocs among the Nahuatls (Caso,
1942: 44) and Chacs among the Mayans (Thompson, 1951: 1, 36).  These gods were
unquestionably worshipped in later times as the source of rain necessary for
crops, but as with the Greek Zeus, sender of rain and wielder of clouds and
thunderbolts, the earlier planetary nature of the deity lingered to create
awe.  In the Florentine Codex the separate functions are stated in the terse
definition given of the nature of the god: "Tlaloc: to him was attributed
rain; for he made it, he caused it to come down...And also by him were made
floods of water and thunderbolts" (F. C. I, Ch. 4; Anderson and Dibble, 1950:
II, 2).

Sometimes human elements are also infused into the face of the jaguar, or else
a man's face is shown emerging from a jaguar's jaws or a jaguar headdress. 
This situation of the human is in turn symbolically interwoven with the few
other standard representations of the human face which the artistic canons
allowed.  Basically there are three human types represented in pure or mixed
form: the baby, the dwarf, and the athlete.  The baby and the dwarf have been
explained as subjects because they seem to have been preeminent victims
chosen for human sacrifice. The victim sacrificed is considered to represent
the god, hence to be divine and worthy of being sculpted.  The athlete's head
has been explained in several ways. Since he was a participant in the ritual
of the sacred ballgame which is known from Toltec and other sources to have
ended with decapitation of the leader of one of the two teams, there may be a
peculiar appropriateness in the practice of always sculpting the head alone
without the body. This ritual ball game, as will be shown later, was itself a
reenactment of the celestial ballgame, played at a time of world destruction,
in which the sun and moon defeated the lords of hell who were disturbed by
the shaking of the earth which their ball practice had caused.  Hence the
element of human sacrifice in the reenactment is again to be explained by the
traumatizing hold of the cataclysmic prototype.  Another explanation has been
given for the peculiarly shaped helmet to be found on many of these athletes;
it is seen as reflecting the devices by which cranial deformation was
practiced on infants, among the Olmecs and among the Mayans (Davalos and
Zarate, 1953: 99). It has been observed that this kind of deformation may
produce a V-shaped cleft in the upper part of the head which is to be found on
the head of the jaguar in its natural state (Bernal, 1969: 72). Hence the
victim of this deformation, whether the symbolic athlete or the real infant,
is merely one more material in which the Olmecs sculpted their obsession.

II.  MYTHOLOGY AND THE POPUL VUH

When we turn to the mythological record, our earliest indigenous written
testaments are separated by approximately two millennia from the end of the
Olmec flowering.  I am taking the Popol Vuh as my chief source because it
seems to be the only Mesoamerican epic the telling of the story of a people-
which was written down in the true form and at the full length an ancient
narrator would originally have used.  It was not extracted by a monk or an
anthropologist; rather, one of the Quiche learned men consciously chose to
preserve it and had the fortune not to be censored by the new regime.

To illustrate Velikovsky's method of extracting common elements from various
accounts, I will juxtapose to its main sections legends from the Valley of
Mexico-that is, from the Aztecs and from peoples of neighboring cultures who
were absorbed into the Aztec empire and brought with them their more ancient
'Toltec' traditions.  The two principal sources for these legends are the
Annals of Cuauhitlan and the Florentine Codex.  It is unnecessary to trace
here the sequence of cultural intervals connecting the Olmec people with whom
we began and the Quiche and Nahuatl peoples whose annals we are now to listen
to.  This has been one of the principal tasks of Mesoamericanists from the
start, and however well they have been able to perform it there has been no
doubt but that the sequence is unbroken.  Many migrations and conquests occupy
the interval, but there seems to be no case of a people totally exterminating
the culture of those they conquered.  Rather the opposite phenomenon seems to
have continually occurred, namely that strange process by which a conquered
culture conquers its conquerors, submitting to their sway while
indoctrinating them in its ancient beliefs.

Nevertheless something should be said about the structure of the annals in
order to defend our contention that they in fact span, if they do not fill,
the whole period of time from the catastrophe of Venus to the catastrophe of
the Spanish Conquest.  If Mesoamerica had enjoyed the awesome dynastic
stability of literate empires such as Egypt or China, or if it had developed
the linear temporal sense of peoples sustaining the tension of an historical
burden such as the Romans or the Jews, then there probably would have existed
at the time of the Conquest books accounting for every generation from the
earliest Olmec migrations to the last Aztec king.  No such books survive and
there is no ground to suppose they existed, for the simple reason that each
people that did give an account of itself insisted on beginning it with their
own migrations and ending it with their submission to the Spaniards.  In each
case the generations memorialized are those of the people's period of
greatness as symbolized by its successive rulers, and these seldom amount to
more than twelve.  Rulership had to come from the gods, and the times when
the gods manifested themselves were the times when the people migrated under
their commands until it came to the place where it had been destined to rule.

Now it would be wishful thinking for the catastrophist to assume that all
Mesoamerican migrations occurred during the times of planetary instability. 
But the present uniformitarian approach is no alternative, for it is always
forced to throw out the first part of an account as 'legendary' and begin
computing chronology only when kings and their years of rule begin to be
mentioned.  The efforts of Mesoamericanists to give historical substance to
the catastrophic legends by which the period of migration and foundation is
always preceded are unimpressive, in the few cases where they have deigned to
make them at all. (See for example Recinos, 1950: 61-75; Pina Chan, 1972; 55-
61.) A more complicated case is that of Laurette Sejourne (1957: 53-78;
1969: 17-35), who takes the legends of the five suns and of the passion and
rebirth of Quetzalcoatl as allegories for spiritual initiation bequeathed to
the Aztecs by the Teotihuacanos, whom she identifies with the Toltecs. That
these legends, whose origin was historical and catastrophic, were later placed
at the base of esoteric spiritual cults can neither be proven nor disproved,
but is not at all improbable. (A strong parallel from a North American tribe
which claims itself to be a splinter group from the Mesoamerican high
cultures is to be found in Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi, 1963; this book was
rejected by the Hopi elders themselves as a falsification of their beliefs,
but that fact is not inconsistent with the possibility that they were also
enraged to see their esoteric doctrines in print, however distorted.) 
Nevertheless, a spiritual allegory expounded in terms of Western mysticism
cannot pretend to be an explanation of the legends.  A few scholars have at
least had the anthropological sophistication to recognize that because a
migration legend is not datable it is not therefore to be banished forever
from the effort of interpretation.  Paul Radin (1920: 67) points out that the
interests of most primitive peoples are "centered not on the idea of growth
but of origins," and that this is not inconsistent with the more historical
interest of the highly developed Nahuatl or Mayan cultures in the
"development of institutions." Munro Edmonson, in the notes to the
translation of the Popol Vuh on which I rely here, states that "The central
institution (of the Quiche) was the patrilineage, and all Quiche versions of
the origin myth begin with the heads of the maximal lineages, the First
Fathers.  The suggestion in these myths is strong that the lineage structure
had little depth, perhaps rarely more than six or eight generations, remote
genealogy being made up of syncretistic status claims 'inherited' or
preempted from other families.  The list (of chiefs) appears to reflect,
albeit somewhat confusingly, the changing fortunes of the lineage over a
period of 12 'generations,' probably no more than 220 years" (Edmonson, 1971:
148, n. to 1. 4823, & 254, n. to 1. 8552).

In interpreting the annals a middle course lies open to us.  This is to
suppose that a basic structure for the experience of peoples was laid down in
centuries following the catastrophic events and rigidly adhered to
thereafter.  The structure is essentially tripartite, consisting of 1)
destructive acts of the gods which ended one world age and initiated the
next; 2) wanderings of the people at the time of transition under the
guidance of heroic leaders who interpreted the god's will; 3) termination of
the wanderings with the passing on of leadership by these heroes to the first
generation of rulers in the newly occupied land.  Once this structure was
established it became the basis for every subsequent telling of the history
of the people; and if later migrations occurred and later kingships were
founded they were inevitably accommodated to the earlier ones of the sacred
era, and finally identified with them.  This is in effect the grand structure
of the Old Testament; and how many subsequent groups in the Judeo-Christian
tradition have declared to the world their all-important 'Exodus' from this
or that place or state.  Subtract from such annunciations their dating
according to the system of 'Anno Domini' (itself a testimony to the power of
the lives of significant leaders, when fit into the mold of more ancient
myths, to cause later generations to restructure cosmic time around them);
add instead a complex system of cyclical dating; and you have essentially the
same kind of account as the Mesoamerican annalists leave us.  It was
necessary at all costs to preserve an account of sacred origins, and the
tellers held to their instinct that the sacred had been declared at the times
of catastrophe.  Here is a prime case where the pattern of significance which
a people has given to its experience must be accepted as an obstacle to
reconstruction of the history of events, only to be returned to later as an
essential source in reconstruction of the history of human obsession and of
its metamorphosis into human order.

How then does the Popol Vuh declare the sacred origins of Mesoamerican
institutions?  Let me recapitulate the five I gave at the beginning, placing
them now in the order in which the epic accounts for them: I) belief in world
ages, 2) ritual ballgames, 3) urbanism around ceremonial centers, 4) human
sacrifice, 5) worship of Venus.  Each is in the narrator's mind successively
as he leads us through the fateful events.

The existence of four world ages is the first fact which the author of the
present version of the Popol Vuh gives us after the preliminary statement of
his intention to write down his people's sacred narrative:

We shall save it
Because there is no longer
A sight of the Book of Counsel,
A sight of the bright things come from
beside the sea,
The description of our shadows,
A sight of the bright life, as it is called.
There was once the manuscript of it,
And it was written long ago,
Only hiding his face is the reader of it,
The meditator of it.
Great was its account
And its description
Of when there was finished
The birth
Of all of heaven
And earth:
The four creations, T         he four humiliations...
Four creations, f        our humiliations, it was told...
(P. V. 4764, 7172).

The insistence on four humiliations leads the student of Nahuatl beliefs to
expect that the four agents of humiliation will be forthwith enumerated. In
the "Legend of the Suns" appended to the Annals of Cuauhitlan these four
agents are given in an elaborate systematization: each is assigned to a
different "Sun," this "Sun" like other gods is named by the date of its birth,
this date consists of the number 4  plus the name of the destructive agent,
and the duration of the "Sun's" life is given in years.  The first sun was "4
Jaguar," it lasted 676 years, and finally the people were eaten by jaguars;
the second was "4  Wind," it lasted 364  years, and finally the people were
torn up by wind and turned into monkeys; the third was "4  Fire-rain," it
lasted 312 years, and finally it rained fire all day and the people were
turned into hens; the fourth was "4  Water," it lasted 52 years, and finally
water covered all the mountains and the people were turned into fish (Lehmann,
1938: 323-27, #l400-1403)

In the Popol Vuh no such systematization is to be found. Instead we are told
of the intention of the creators to shape a perfect people to praise them,
and how three times the product did not perform and had to be abandoned. 
First they created the beasts and when the beasts could not praise them they
were simply given over to the wild places (330-422). Second they created men
of mud and when these spoke nonsense they just let them dissolve (423-478).
Third they made men of wood, dolls, but these had no hearts or minds and had
to be destroyed (505 ff.).  Finally they created men of maize, fine men,
handsome men, but these saw too far and understood too much, so they had to
be humiliated.  They were not destroyed, they just lost their great wisdom;
"their eyes were chipped" (4822-5012).

The story of the first two humiliations is told laconically.  For the third,
however, the narrator reserves all his art; and between the destruction of
the third and the creation of the fourth comes fully half of the book, in a
virtuoso narrative sequence whose themes we will come to presently.
Moreover, it is for the death of this third race that the narrator reserves
mention of any real agents of destruction, and when they come they all
descend from the sky at once: a flood (673), a rain of glue (693), aroused
jaguars(701), and a rain of darkness (713-darkness and wind in Nahuatl
mythology being always put together in a linguistic couplet, whether
attributed to Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc or Tezcatlipoca).  Here all the elements
of the Nahuatl annals seem to be thrown together.

Uniformitarian Mesoamericanists have never been bothered by these
discrepancies.  The catastrophist, on the other hand, is faced with the
reasonable task of defining the mechanisms of distortion with reference to
the original events posited.  In regard to the Popol Vuh, it is not hard to
recognize in the four agents of destruction grouped together four phases of
the single catastrophic event Velikovsky has reconstructed involving Venus
ca. 1500 B.C.  The flood is due to disturbed tidal motions, the rain of fire
comes from the hydrocarbon content in the tail of the protoplanet, the jaguar
is a typical animal interpretation of the shape of the threatening celestial
body, and the darkness was caused by the cloud covering in which the earth
lay enshrouded for over a generation.  In regard to the Nahuatl account, it
is necessary to attempt to reconstruct the phases in which such an elaborate
systematization might take place.  Since Velikovsky has indicated that the
two catastrophic sequences in Worlds in Collision are only the last two in a
series, and that the preceding series includes the universally described
deluge (destruction solely by water), it is not hard to see how a tradition
of several world destructions each involving distinct agents might arise.
The systematization then begins when the sequence of destructions is lost hold
of and in its place comes speculation on the fundamental elements of the
cosmos and the capacity of each to cause universal destruction by itself. 
Such speculation is documented in the opening chapters of Worlds in Collision
(Velikovsky, 1950: 29-35).  Then, once a system is established, the desire to
define it numerologically arises, so that calculations of future cycles may
seem to be grounded in the inevitable.  The final step taken in Aztec
speculation, as indicated by their great Stone Calendar, is to assign the
four earlier world ages to the four world directions, with the satisfying
result that the present age belongs to the center of the world, the place
where man likes to think of himself existing.  This spatialization of
temporal sequences still contains some elements of catastrophic experience in
it, insofar as the cardinal points of the present world age were laid down at
the end of the last catastrophe.  The terror of experiencing a derangement of
the cardinal points is transmuted by systematization into the comfort of
knowing that all resulted in placing man at the center.

The ritual ballgame is the unifying subject of the long narrative sequence
interposed between the destruction of the third race and the creation of the
fourth, which despite the lessening of knowledge inflicted upon it is
affirmed to be our own.  In conscious distinction from the sharp horror with
which the third destruction was conjured and the solemn anguish with which the
wanderings of the present race will be sustained, this middle section grants
the gods their full brio.  Only at the end of it, in a calculated stroke, do
we learn that the two brothers who are the winners of this ballgame, Hunter
and Jaguar Deer by name, are our present sun and moon (4693-4703).  Their
antagonists are the lords of Hell, led by I Death and 7 Death, and their
victory is in revenge for the murder of their father and uncle, I Hunter and
7 Hunter, who had played with the lords in an earlier game and lost.  The
lords of Hell had been disturbed by the great shaking of the earth which I
Hunter and 7 Hunter had caused when they practiced (17571773), and so
challenged them to come to the underworld and play. These two descended to
Hell and were put through a series of tortures in various chambers (the House
of Darkness, House of Shivering, Jaguar House, Bat House, Knife House); when
finally they played ball they lost and were decapitated.  Hunter and Jaguar
Deer go through the same series of torture houses but they are wiser and
outwit the lords of Hell in each. When the fateful game comes round Hunter's
head is snatched by a Death Bat and the lords use it for their ball, but a
friendly pig makes a new head out of a pumpkin, Jaguar Deer knocks it out of
court, the lords of Hell run after it, and in the meantime Hunter gets his own
head back.  The two brothers then run off and return disguised as beggar
magicians who can perform the trick of sacrificing each other in an oven and
bringing each other back to life.  The lords of Hell are so fascinated that
they beg the beggars to do their trick on them.  The brothers oblige,
sacrifice I Death and 7 Death, and then, as you might guess, refuse to bring
them back to life.  They solemnly announce to the terrorized underlords that
all this has been in vengeance for their fathers, and that "Never again great
will your sun, Great will your birth become" (4565-4566).  Victoriously they
walk back to the sweet light of the world above and, without a pause,
continue on into the sky where they become the sun and moon.  At this point,
after the generation of darkness, it becomes light on earth. And "they are
still in the sky" (4703)

The Nahuatl parallels to this section of the Popol Vuh are peculiarly forceful
precisely because they maintain the cosmic etiology while dividing the
narrative motifs in many ways.  In the "Legend of the Suns" the story of the
ballgame is given to Huemac, one of Quetzalcoatl's several alter egos, and
his antagonists are the Tlalocs (Lehmann, 1938: 375-382, # 1601-1643); the
prize of the game is rain for Huemac's people, the Toltecs, and as long as
the Tlalocs win, drought and famine hold sway.  The hero of a separate
narrative describing the descent to hell and triumphal return is Quetzalcoatl
himself, and his feat there is nothing less than to bring back bones out of
which the new race of man is to be constructed and maize by which he is
nourished; Quetzalcoatl adds the final ingredient by sprinkling the bones
with his own blood (Lehmann, 1938: 330-340, #l4l7-l452).  Immediately there
upon the fifth sun, "4  Earthquake," rises, "and this is our sun, in which we
live now" (#1453).  The direct affiliation of this story of Quetzalcoatl with
the Popol Vuh's account of Hunter and Jaguar Deer is proven by a remarkable
series of pages which constitute the centerpiece and masterpiece of the Codex
Borgia (Seler, 1963: 1, 29-47).  There Quetzalcoatl is shown going through
houses of torture parallel to those the brothers endured, including a House of
Knives and House of Animals that Cut and Tear.  In these pages, as elsewhere
in the Quetzalcoatl cycle, the triumph of the hero comes when his body is
burned and his heart ascends to heaven as the Morning Star.  Finally, the
brothers' trick of casting themselves into an oven and coming out alive,
thereupon to mount to the sky as Sun and Moon, is duplicated in a different
setting by Nanauatzin and Tecuciztecatl, who during the long darkness at
Teotihuacan willingly sacrifice themselves in order to become the new sun and
moon (F. C. VII, 2; Anderson and Dibble, 1953: VIII, 37).  Thus in every
instance the Nahautl legends also insist that what was at stake in the
contest was the appearance of the luminaries of the present world age.  The
Popol Vuh's account of the third and fourth institutions, the ceremonial
center and human sacrifice, occur in the same stretch of narrative and must
be taken together if their full implications are to be measured.  We have now
left the play of the gods and are slowly and calmly acquainted with the
suffering of a newlyborn humanity.  The narrator uses the device of retard to
make us understand that while man was being created the struggle of sun and
moon with the lords of the underworld was still unresolved; thus the present
race made its first movements in the darkness before the dawn of the new
world age.  The night in which these wanderings occur is clearly described as
occupying a full human generation, and thus supports Velikovsky's contention
that after the first passage of the tail of the protoplanet Venus the earth
was shrouded in clouds which did not dissolve for the period suggested by the
Israelites' "40 years in the desert":

Many peoples they became in the darkness
As they grew,
The sun was not yet born,
Nor the light, as they were multiplying.
They all remained together then,
And very numerous they became.
And they walked along there
At the sunrise.
There was no one to nourish them
And support them,
But they bowed their faces to heaven...
Many were the people's looks;
Many were the people's languages.
Scattered on the flanks were the generations under heaven...
(P. V. 5117-5135)

The turning point in this desperation is the rumor of a great city: "Tula,/
Zuyua,/ Seven Caves,/ Seven Canyons was the name of the city" (5257-5260). 
Here the innumerable wandering tribes assemble, and they bring idols of their
gods with them.  The four First Fathers of the Quiche, who had earlier been
humiliated for their excessive wisdom, bring each his god: Storm, Lord Jaguar,
Fire Peak, and Center of the Valley are the gods' names. During the long walk
to Tula no one possesses fire, and the peoples are shivering with cold when
they arrive.  Only the god Storm of the Quiche has fire, and he tauntingly
offers it to his own people only to take it back by sending a great rainstorm
mingled with hail.  The price he then exacts for its return is the ritual of
'suckling,' which he interprets to them as the offering of hearts to him:

And this was the suckling Storm had named:
For all the tribes were sacrificed before him,
And their hearts were cut out there
On the side,
Under the arm...
...there was flattened then
And insulted then
Great tribe
And small tribe,
As they sacrificed
Before Storm
Giving the blood,
Serum,
Side,
And armpit of the whole people to him.
Immediately in Tula came their glory;
Great wisdom was with them,
And in darkness
And in night time they did it.
And they went right on
And continued ripping things out there.
They stayed on
At the sunrise
(P.V.5558-5562, 55935610).

Wherever its location, Tula is the Mesoamerican prototype of the great city,
and it is the first city mentioned in the epic.  No structures are mentioned
in this early time; the site is only made sacred by the fact that many
peoples found a meeting point there in their migrations and gathered to
perform the ritual which they deemed necessary to their survival.  Three
millennia later the Spaniards came upon the last embodiment of this concept,
the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan.  It was embellished with great pyramids
facing the sunset, but the rituals carried out on them were only the
continuation of the original imperative.  In order to sustain the sun which
had been so perilously born in earlier time, human hearts had to be
continually ripped out.

The Nahuatl parallel to this section of the Popol Vuh had already been alluded
to, in the story of the long darkness at Teotihuacan which could only be
ended by the self-sacrifice of Nanauatzin and Tecuciztecatl.  There too the
motif of fire is central, for the gods are gathered around a fire in the
darkness and it is into this fire that the sacrificial victims must cast
themselves.  The Aztec version is more absolute than the Quiche, in that it
insists that not even the death of the two destined to be reborn as sun and
moon was sufficient, for when they first appeared reborn they remained
motionless and the gods decided that only if they all sacrificed themselves
would the new age see the motion of its luminaries. (This is in part a sacred
play on the name of the new age, "4 Ollin": the word 'Ollin' means both
'Earthquake,' the agent by which it will be terminated, and 'Motion,' the
essential precondition for its beginning.)  At this crisis it becomes the task
of Ecatl to slay the gods and make the sun move.  Ecatl is the god of wind,
but it is agreed that he is to be identified with Quetzalcoatl; hence the
Morning Star in disguise is again made crucial to the appearance of the sun
(F. C. VII 2; Anderson and Dibble, 1953: VIII, 48).

The final element of Mesoamerican civilization, worship of Venus, appears in
the Popol Vuh simply as the logical and joyous end of the story, for in order
for the sun to rise it had to be preceded by that planet in its form as the
Morning Star:

They changed off watch for the Great Star,
The Sun Passer by name.
It was the first before the sun;
Then the sun was born later.
Green was the Sun Passer
(P. V. 55795583).

Even here, though, the grief of the people emerging from a generation of
darkness and cold, wandering and hunger, is given expression.  The Quiche
tribes did not stay at Tula till the dawn; their implacable gods ordered them
to move on until they arrived at their present homes in the Guatemalan
highlands.  There the gods were deposited on separate mountain tops, one of
which, named Fire Peak after the god instated there, was the place where the
tribes found themselves when the dawn at last came (5895-5904).  Incense was
offered to the gods,

And that was what they burned
When they performed their dance...
There
At the sunrise
They wept with pleasure
As they performed their dance...
And there they began their song
Called 'It is Hidden'...
They said
In their song:
'Alas! We were lost in Tula!
We have broken ourselves up.
We have left behind our older brothers,
Our younger brothers.
Where did they see the sun then?
Where might they have been
when it dawned?
(P. V. 5935-5940, 6057-6070).

To overcome the ancient grief that the peoples had been forced to separate
from Tula before the sun appeared, the narrator, for a unique moment in the
epic, draws aside the veil of his people's affirmation of the supremacy of
their own god and identifies Storm with the god whom the Mexicans worshipped
till his own time:

'But really Storm was the name
of the god of the Mexican people.
Rattlesnake,
Quetzal Serpent was his name.
We split up there at his Tula,
At Zuyua.
They were our fellow travelers from there,
And our faces were complete when we came,
They said to each other
When they straightaway remembered again
Their older brothers,
Their younger brothers,
The Mexican people
Who dawned there
In Mexico
As it is called today
(P. V. 60736088).

The god Storm whom they followed in their migrations is called Quetzalcoatl,
and Tula is called 'his.' It was from Tula that Quetzalcoatl, in all the
Nahuatl versions of his passion and rebirth, set out in his own wandering. 
When he arrived at the edge of the sea he burned his own body:

"And after he had completely turned into ashes, then the heart of the Quetzal
Bird rose up.  And as they know, it went to Heaven, it entered Heaven.  The
old men say that it changed itself into the star that shines in the dawn. 
And they tell that when Quetzalcoatl died, there appeared the one who is
called 'Lord of the Dawn.'"  (Lehmann, 1938: 91-92, #150-152).

I hope that this retelling of the Popol Vuh, preceded as it was by the
quandaries of stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating, has served both the
purposes I spoke for at the beginning. We may dismember great epics in order
to reconstruct history by stacking up their bones, but the epics have their
own way of being reborn.  Among the many results of Velikovsky's rigorous
pursuit of his historical method is that the narratives which cultures have
always insisted to be central to them are at last shown to begin in history
as well as to end in it.  Thus a measure of their dignity is restored to those
particular cultures who have happened to be on the other side of the
anthropologist's interrogations.  It may be that more than one tale well told
is destined for retelling, and that a whole consort of scientific disciplines
is going to sharpen our ears to the art and purpose of narrators speaking for
their peoples.

NOTE:  After the bibliography Section there is a contact list for
-----  further information on current Velikovskian research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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