CHAPTER 9: THE MAIDEN PRIESTESS

That night I dreamed about a maiden priestess, adorned with precious jewels and golden bracelets. She appeared to me in her full regalia descending on the rays of a full moon. She wore a cotton headdress of florescent blue and red feathers, plumed out in a display of majestic appearance. In her nose was a moonbeam ring. She was joyful and sorrowful at the same time with piercing eyes that captured the depths of my soul.

I heard her whisper to me, “Why?”

At the same time I turned my face about as the sound of footsteps drew near. What came toward me was a brilliant light that dimmed revealing the corpses of souls still wondering the earth. Rough faces and wrinkled skinned naked bodies of ancient spirits who were still lost in the desolate curses of their greediness for the earth’s energy. She was showing me the sickness and misery from the impurities of their lives.

“Enough,” I cried.

She murmured to me, “Nothing will scare me,” as she embraced me to take away the chill of the darkness that was all around me.

Then she spread her voluptuous body out upon the moonlight beams in a posture that was sensuous and seductive, beckoning for me to take her. I wanted to ravish her because of her compassion and pity for me. My heart wanted to burn next to hers with unbridled passion. But the feeling wasn’t sexual. The sensation was a rapturous quintessence that made my body electric. She smiled a smile that gave me courage to bear the truth in speaking the worst of my deeds. Her eyes turned tender and soothed my pain. I fell into tears, sobbing.

“Be patient,” she said to me in a soft voice forgiving me. “Let him die by my hand, Jules,” she said softly repeating my name over and over again a she faded into the moonlight beam.
Suddenly, there was no air in my chest. “Die,” I cried out in a shriek of anguish, gasping for breath.

“Jules,” Cassarina shook me by the shoulder. “Jules! Are you alright?”

I quickly rose up in my hammock, shocked.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Cassarina said.

Everything about me stood still. I stared at the dense rainforest. As I collected myself, I could see shreds of a white mist hanging about the tree canopy. Jorge and Hornsby were seated at the campfire staring at me. I noticed that Hornsby had his map laid out in his lap. Jorge continued cooking some tortillas over the open fire, but glanced my way every few moments. Baltazar was nowhere to be seen. I had no idea how long I had been talking in my sleep, but it was obvious that they all had been listening to me for some time.

“A bit of a tumble, eh Jules,” Hornsby called out.

“I suppose,” I answered climbing on the edge of my hammock. My mind was still swarming in the priestess’s visit.

The esoteric spiritual truths of Mayan mythology had remained ambiguous to me. They placed such an emphasis on the phantasmagoria of life. We don’t have the ancients to tell us the exact meaning of their evolutionary conception. Each Baktun period translates the prior beliefs into a new assimilation of perspectives. Only the recorded dates exemplify some facts to base our speculations upon their doctrines.

But to have these primordial entities invade your dreams, your subconscious, distorts all that you know as reality, and more so, expands your understanding of life that Western culture prohibits to venture into without costing you a psychological diagnosis of clinical mental illness. What is rational becomes more irrational and vice versa.

The Mayan perspective gives us a contrast to the evolution of our consciousness as determined by the evolution of the universe. It is the same with dream interpretation. A dream comes to us as a holographic resonance field created in the fourth or fifth dimension of reality. It is created within our unconsciousness that manifests the parallels of our self-reflective consciousness, the causation of which isn’t broken during our waking hours. A dream properly interpreted may give a clue for some critical moment in your life to be keenly aware of.

Was dreamtime the underlying mechanism of the Mayan consciousness? Was this the means to peal back the layers overlapping the true self? We are on shaky ground when it comes to dream interpretation, just as we are in decoding indigenous mythology. We know as the Mayan believed, existence was made tangible by the numerical matrix of the Tzolk’in. In Yucatec Mayan, tzol or tzoltik translates into “explain” the root words for the Tzolk’in that was translated by the Quiche Mayan of the Northern Highlands in Guatemala.

What can be foretold in our dreams, as future consequences may be the very essence of what the Mayan have been trying to explain as the divine plan behind the evolution of human consciousness. And most likely this numerical matrix was a correctly calibrated formula that guides us along the natural sequence of cause and effect, past, present and future, the alpha and omega, and our place in the universe.

I was beginning to see that in fact, the complete logical basis of deductive process tacitly underlies the process of human reasoning, the foundation of our archetypal nature. The more I immersed myself in Mesoamerican mythology, the more extra-natural events interfered with my fixed understanding of time and reality. But any admission of such foreign possibilities demands more trustworthy evidence. Any discrepancy that could deceive or delude would be catastrophic.

“What were you dreaming about?” Cassarina said.

“Yes, Jules. You said, ‘die’ in your sleep.” Hornsby added inquisitively.

His attention was riveted upon me as I approached them, sitting down on a blanket next to where Jorge had prepared a stack of fresh corn tortillas. Cassarina followed me over, taking her place on the other side of Hornsby. Weary, I asked about Baltazar, but none of them had seen him. He had left the camp as mysteriously as he had arrived the day before.

Up until our discovery of the cryptic vault, I didn’t know exactly what company I was keeping. As much as the jungle and Lacandon were utterly foreign to me in the beginning, Cassarina and Hornsby seemed to have become foreigners to me. But now I knew I was among honest thinkers, unwilling to deceive themselves or assert their contradicting personal beliefs upon me solely for the sake of preserving the anthropological hypotheses that entertained our expedition. We sought the same answers, to understand the phenomena of the Mayan world, its existence and ancestors with the least amount of ambiguity.

“The correcting process,” I thought, “is not human behavior but the extraterrestrial that possesses a self-aligning power that brings human aberrations back to universal harmony. All inequalities must be balanced. It could be that this was the force I was experiencing, the conditions of the omnipotent time-space continuum.”