How is it that we have lived in a kind of veiled ignorance for millennia, our books speaking of a history which is hardly ancient, but rather a drop in the bucket of time, accepting simplistic stories of creation and evolution and isolated from other life within the galaxy, barely learning with crude ships how to cross our own seas some few hundreds of years ago? And yet, here and there we have been able to pick up the pieces of lost civilizations whose people somehow seemed to be more in touch than ourselves with origins and endings and with the cyclical nature of time. Such a people were the Maya, whose astoundingly precise calendrical achievements brought them to calculate actual dates going as far back as 90 and 300 million years and into the future soon to be our present!

The Mayas believed, as did the Assyrians and other ancient peoples, that time was a way of measuring the soul of the Universe. The universe breathed in and breathed out. Life was created, destroyed, created anew. One cycle of "inhalation and exhalation" was called a "Great Cycle." The last Mayan "Great Cycle," 4 Ahau 8 Camku, began on August 13th, 3113 B.C. 4 Ahau Cambku is currently in a final phase called "Katun 19, 13 Ahau," which begun in 1992 and ends, with a prophecy of world destruction, on Dec. 23, 2012.

As Graham Hancock reminds us in Fingerprints of the Gods, "It’s been a good deal less than two centuries since the majority of Western intellectuals abandoned Bishop Usher’s opinion that the world was created in 4004 B.C. and accepted that it must be infinitely older than that. In plain English this means that the ancient Maya had a far more accurate understanding of the true immensity of geological time, and of the vast antiquity of our planet, than did anyone in Britain, Europe or North America until Darwin propounded the theory of evolution."

The current revival of interest in ancient civilizations is to be expected at the portals of a new age. Like returning to a childhood neighborhood that once encompassed the child’s world but now seems small, our concept of time and space is destined to change rapidly as we enter the Aquarian Age. Uranus in Aquarius will awaken us even as Neptune, which will enter Aquarius in 1998, will jostle our memory of a past long buried, not only in cities beneath the oceans, but in the collective unconscious.

The word "Maya" is generally thought to be a derivative of "Mayab," the Mayan name for the Yucatan Peninsula. Late Mayan texts like "The Popul Vuh" (the "Council Book") and "The Chilaam Balaam" (a collection of oracles, cures and legends regarding the mythic past) say that the Mayan "arrived from the other side of the sea." Archaeologist and author James Churchward believed the Maya were colonists who came from the lost continent of Mu, called the Motherland or Lemuria. Maya, Maia, Maria all come from ‘Ma’ meaning Mother. Mu, according to Churchward, was a huge continent whose great cities and populace of 60 million people sank beneath the Pacific Ocean approximately 12,000 years ago when the gas chambers that upheld the continent collapsed, volcanoes erupted, cataclysmic earthquakes ensued and the ocean covered the land and its people.

When Mu, the Motherland, became overcrowded, or, among her great navigators, some ambitious and enterprising new company found new and available lands, a colonial development was started. These emigrant children of Mu were called Mayas. Anyone who left the Motherland in any direction was called Mayas. One of these colonies was said to have a populace of 35,000,000 people.

Churchward was able to identify a colony in Egypt by the Nile Delta that thrived some 16,000 years ago. Another ran from Mu to Yucatan to Central America. "This was more than 50,000 years ago, and it might have been tens of thousands of years before that." Churchward translated the enigmatic writing on thousands of stone tablets and carved heads found in Mexico, which are incomprehensible except "one know the language, the symbols, the alphabet and the cosmogony of Mu." The hieroglyphic alphabet of Mu, of the ancient Egyptians and Maya is remarkably identical. There can be no denying the connection between these peoples. And despite the crudeness of some of the tablets, apparently created by novices, the meanings of the designs are esoteric in nature; "displaying a profound knowledge of the ancients conception of the origin and workings of the Great Forces, and a perfect knowledge of life and its origins."

In fact, Churchward, like his friend archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon and modern author Jose Arguelles concur in that here we have evidence of a sacred and ancient science which is yet dawning upon us today. What we look upon as "ancient" Egypt, India, Babylonia were, according to Churchward, but "the dying embers" of the perished Motherland of Mu. Cults to the mother throughout the world echo a dim recollection of a once glorious past.

Le Plongeon follows a similar vein in Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches which documents his conclusions after 14 years of research in the Yucatan and in Mesoamerican studies that Mayan colonists transported their ancient religious rites and ceremonies, not only to the banks of the Nile, but to those of the Euphrates, and the shores of the Indian Ocean, not less than 11,500 years ago. Le Plongeon actually found inscriptions in the Yucatan stating, "The first company of settlers in Atlantis were a company of Mayas from Mayax." Churchward considered the great continent of Atlantis, which eventually suffered the same fate as that of Mu, as the largest colony of the Motherland.

Zecharia Sitchin purports that Thoth, the Egyptian avatar, and the great god-hero Quetzalcoatl or Kulkukan, "plumed serpent," worshipped by the Maya and awaited as a kind of Messiah, were one and the same. Sitchin’s tale goes back even further in time, to a time when extraterrestrials, hungry for blood, arrived in Mesopotamia and from there spread their influence to other parts of the earth. (See The Twelfth Planet and The Lost Realms by Sitchin) Obviously, we’re just scratching the surface.

The Mayans were a people who had no labor-saving devices such as the wheel or metal tools, but whose astronomical knowledge and scientific achievement rank them among the highest civilizations in known history. The Mayan had very accurate solar and lunar eclipse tables. They computed to within a thousandth of a decimal point of accuracy the length of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun. By comparison, consider that the Western World did not correct the disparity between the "Julian" calendar and the actual solar year until 1832.

The Mayans established the time taken for the Moon to orbit the Earth as 29.528395 days. Compare this with modern calculations of 29.530588. They meticulously recorded synodical revolutions (the period of time a planet takes to return to any given point in the sky) and synchronizations of the cycles of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Mayan were particularly interested in Venus, which, like the ancient Egyptians, they recognized as both the morning and the evening star. They referred to Venus as the eighth planet and the earth as the seventh. This and other archaeological evidence has led Sitchin to suggest that they knew of the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto as well and had obtained their knowledge from aliens, whose "count" began at farther reaches of the galaxy.

The greatest mystery of all revolves around the Mayan Calendar. "The calendar," in the words of Ed Seler, "is the alpha and omega of Central American sacerdotal wisdom and the great mass of Mexican and Mayan manuscripts are nothing more than an elaboration of this calendric system in respect of its numerical theory, its chronology and its system of divination." The Mayan employed three calendars whose cycles they interpolated. The first was a day calendar called The Long Count. The second, The Tzolkin, or Sacred Calendar was based on a 260 day cycle. The Tzolkin and the synodical revolution of Venus were intermeshed with such astounding accuracy that the relationship was only off by one day every 6000 years! The Tzolkin and Long Count interpenetrated in such a way as to form a complete cycle in just under 52 years, a number significant not only to the Mayas but also to the ancient Egyptians. The pyramids at Giza were constructed at 52 degrees. Hancock feels that the Maya did not develop but rather inherited their complex and esoteric as well as exoteric science from somewhere else. But from whom? And to what end?

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, in a lecture on "Inca Mysteries" presented in the I Am series Unveiled Mysteries, commented that the original Maya came from Venus, bringing with them some of the arts, sciences and philosophy of that planet. Venus, Earth’s sister star, supports her life on a plane, not discernible to our usual senses and instruments, called the etheric plane.

Arguelles has taken it a step forward. We have misinterpreted the Maya, he claims, because their science was beyond our own and thus we had no measuring rod with which to unlock their mysteries. Arguelles claims that the Mayan Calendar relates not only to the time tables of the earth but to the earth’s relationship to the galaxy, the evolution of the Sun and other planets within the galaxy. Arguelles sets out to prove that within the Mayan Calendar is a Galactic Master Code!

We’re going to have to look beyond the obvious to solve the riddle. On the other hand, we need to be sure the imagination doesn’t try to fit the data into self-made theories. In the next issue of Atlantis Rising we’ll look at the calendar itself; how it works, how the Maya derived from it both personal and planetary prophecy. What is the real meaning of Katun 19, Ahau 13, and how does it relate to other prophecy of our time?