CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SOUL CHAMBER

The jungle canopy was so thick that I could hardly catch a glimpse of the hillside terrain. Most of the time I was walking with my head down, hacking away at the endless shrub brush in what felt like a timeless stupor. All the while I remained alert to not plant my foot on some poisonous snake or worse yet, stepping into a bottomless cenote.

We were in some of the most densely overgrown jungle of the Mayab Forest. After a time, I started to hack and clawed my way up against a seemingly endless embankment. The light rain turned into a deluge.

While pulling myself up on hanging vines while digging my feet into the slippery mud my foot landed on something solid. Sensing a flat rock base beneath my foot, I set my weight down to test it. It held my weight. I perceived I must be on a ledge of some sort. The physical appearance of the ground underneath me started to take on a terraced appearance. Through the thick underbrush and muddy soil, I noticed a smoothed out rectangular shape, resembling large stone blocks delineated by thin straight cracks laid at a tiered ninety-degree angle.

A huge underground tree root disarticulated a portion of the mason-type setting. I chopped at the jungle underbrush while pulling on the tangled vines in front of me, to see what lay behind them. The water pooled about my feet, flowing towards the hillside, disappearing into a dark void behind the dense foliage. All the while, Hornsby kept yelling to me.

“Jules, come quickly.”

I abandoned my curiosity and groped my way toward him, who had climbed much further ahead of me. The hurricane, in the meantime, unleashed its fury upon me.

Arriving at the top of the incline, the wind and rain stung my face like a sandstorm. Tree branches flew about me. But in the blur of the storm’s rage, I saw a spectacular sight. The top was leveled off to a form a large square plateau. Shrubs and tangled vines encased the stone ruin. Near each corner of the terrace were the remains of a large elaborately sculptured stone. A two-storied main edifice occupied the center.

The temple had more character of any structure I had seen before in Mayan photographs or illustrations. Some trees had sprouted taking hold in the plateau court-yard making gapping crevices in the cut stone surface from their roots. At the top of the main edifice a circular stone column about four meters high and one meter thick was sculpted in bold relief, much like the ones we had seen in the cryptic vault. It was made of red stone. This was the menhir that Hornsby had been calling out to me.

“Over here, Jules,” Hornsby called out to me through the howling wind. “We’ve found Yaxkin.”

I saw him standing in the small entrance to the center edifice, protected from the storm’s fury. He had cut away the shrub and vines exposing a lintel over the doorway of a chief with an enormous feathered plum for a headdress, gripping a two-headed snake in one hand and a wand in the other. I made my way across the plateau, fighting the force of the wind and rain by protection from huge stone cisterns that were placed in a crisscross pattern on the temple’s mesa.

Reaching Hornsby, he pulled me inside the circular shaped structure.

“Welcome to the Soul Chamber.” Hornsby proudly proclaimed.

I was astonished at the grand appearance. Its diameter was about three to four meters. The imposing interior was a complicated array of elegant colored glyphs carved in stone blocks. Huge timbers crisscrossed in an upward spiral fashion as if it was the frame of a stairway, having decayed over centuries of time. Water trickled down the circular wall from above, where daylight filtered through, but little rain. We had found a safe refuge from the hurricane.

“Look at this, Jules,” Hornsby said. “Every stone is an emblem glyph, some of which must be PreClassic.”

I looked closely at the wall to see that this was an elaborately designed tower; each stone had been painstakingly sculpted and then placed in a matrix format. It was the finest example of Mayan architecture. Within the walls were four large stone glyphs that represented the four points on the compass. These were just above the height of our heads.

“My god, Jules, some of these glyphs… they look like Caucasian men. And here . . . some have Assyrian features.” Hornsby said as he quickly moved about electrified by his discovery. “Over here . . . these depict African features.”

Then he discovered in vertical rows the glyphs from the Chol Quij, the count of day’s glyphs. Hornsby, oblivious to the ragging hurricane outside, ran to the entrance peering out at the lintel above doorway. The storm whipped at him. I jumped and grabbed his shirt sensing he would be sucked out.

“It’s Quetzalcoatl,” Hornsby cried out, ducking back into the tower. “We must get to the top, to the stele,” Hornsby commanded.

“But the storm,” I protested. I insisted we wait out the hurricane before venturing up the decayed timbers. Looking up toward the ceiling of the tower and hearing the violent wind outside Hornsby thought my advice was practical enough and went about deciphering the glyphs.

The force of the hurricane sounded like a hundred locomotives bearing down on us, swirling wind into the tower, but still the thick stone edifice offered protection.

“Absolute shame we don’t have anything to record these with,” Hornsby said absent-mindedly as he ran his fingers across the relief faces of the glyphs.

I hunched down against the wall, hoping to protect myself from any flying debris that might come crashing down on us. Lightning flashed. Thunder roared. Hornsby gasped.

“James, sit down and wait,” I demanded. He sensed the furious storm outside and took a seat on the wet stone floor.

“Something’s missing here,” Hornsby quipped.
“What?” I inquired.

“Notice the stones here, they are smooth and clean. Rain didn’t wash these off. There were would be residue of dirt left by centuries of vacancy. Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Jules?”

I ran my hand over the surface. No evidence of grime or caked dirt. Even the crevices of the sculpted glyphs were clean. They had a polished texture to it. Each stone was about ten centimeters square with a metallic surface of crystalline specks.

“This looks like platinum or something like it. And here, this one looks like its made of gold, another is jade, and this one is silver, and this one’s mineralogy is crystal,” Hornsby said closely inspecting the wall.

“Maybe it’s designed to keep a high magnetic void?” I hypothesized.

“But this one stone is very strange.”

As the cyclone thrashed the jungle outside, we kept our focus on the discovery of a lifetime. I moved next to Hornsby to take a closer look.

“It has a dense metallic structure but the surface feels like sandpaper.”

“A meteorite?”

“Jules, that’s it,” Hornsby replied in deep thought.

Hornsby speculated that the Nahua or Mayans had quarried meteorite stones from somewhere. Searching the wall for an answer the most likely location dawned on him.

“Zona del Silencio, of course,” Hornsby snapped in the blink of an eye.

It was a place in Northern Mexico, in the Chihuahua Desert that attracted meteorites on a regular basis including misguided missiles fired from America. The local Mexican’s call it the place of “falling pebbles.”

There was an area discovered by a Mexican oil explorer, Harry de la Pena. He plotted an equal sided triangle, three by three by three kilometers, using the static interference on his radio as a means to track the outlying border. It was where the Allende Meteorite landed in 1969.

There are two points in the celestial sky called the celestial equator and the ecliptic equator. The plane of the solar system defines these two great circles in which the two cross each other at two points on the horizon: The vernal equinox or spring and the autumnal equinox or fall. It is the same coordinate system that lies upon the lithographical crust of the earth.

There are these paths across the landscape, magnetic forces that have path shifts, probably caused by cosmic catastrophes such as supernovas hundreds of thousands of light years away.

Indigenous people knew of these magnetic alignments using them to survey the layout of their cities and temples over vast distances. But to the priestly hierarchies consternation and social control, the shifts that came about caused tribal encounters that turn into warfare. This was all about keeping control of the sacred alignments.

“So if these alignments existed, then the plotting of the temples in Mesoamerica was mapped out on a magnetic grid with specific nodal points, such as with the four points of the compass.” The two of us were in utter fascination.

“And the center, the Yaxkin, the Kuxan Suum or road to the heavens,” Hornsby added, “is this Octonun or stone stele above us. It is the Zuhuy tun, the virgin rock.”

Seated next to me, he continued to investigate each of the glyph stones that lined the walls, recognizing that the whole interior was the Tzolk’in or Chol Quij.
Hornsby told me at the crux of the issue is the control part.

“Issue?” I said.

“Before Zodiac astrology there was Omen astrology created by Ptolemy that was defined as perceptions of myth, later disregarded by Sir Isaac Newton. You might say the Mayan’s were expert at this omen phenomenon with their astronomical calculations.”

The science of astronomy and astrology parallel in definition: To find a correspondence between the heavens and earth. In order to keep control of the masses the Mesoamerican priests relied on the charting of the stars to make predictions, such as the appearance of a comet or the solar eclipse, most importantly the appearance of Venus.

To illustrate his point, Hornsby recalled an English astrologer from the Seventeenth Century by the name of Lilly.

A comet appeared on November 21 in the year of 1618 and was seen for twenty-eight days, having moved backwards from nine Scorpio to seven Virgo, as Lilly had recorded in his ephemeris. If a comet appears in Scorpio it indicates civil discord, war and scarcity of provisions and the gruesome intestinal slaughter of victims by rioting subjects.

The declination of the comet corresponded to the fifty-first latitude, which is where the zenith of the comet crossed the local meridian once every twenty-four hours. The comet retrograded into Virgo corresponding to the fact that the kings and queens of England at the time all had Virgo rising in the year 1638, twenty years later.

Lilly surmised that the influence of change that brought about the birth of Great Britain’s Long Parliament in 1640 was germinated with the arrival of this comet. And what’s more, we entered the final four hundred year Baktun cycle in 1618. It was a galactic polarity shift that caused a new consciousness to break through in mankind, becoming more humanitarian in government policy.

“The secret to the mystery… is always the deepest at the gateway of its origin,” I said quoting Hornsby from his lecture. He nodded in a complete agreement.

“When it was discovered that the planetary orbits were fixed, it was assumed that one could accurately predict the future. Modern science is based upon the belief that because of cosmic order, the Darwinian mindset, our future is predetermined because of genetics. Zodiac astrology is based on fixed periods of revolutions or fixed frequencies that cannot explain the increased frequency of time, which the Mayan’s could. Like the Zodiac signs, the Mayan had solar signatures as well, that made up two hundred and sixty different combinations of thirteen numbers and the twenty emblem glyphs.”

To corroborate his theory, Hornsby presented the argument of Nature vs. Nurture as being set to rest by the progression of seven of the thirteen deities ruling the thirteen heavens in Mayan cosmology. The forces of nurture are depicted in sequence.

Pointing to a row of glyphs on the wall, Hornsby explained that a seed is planted during the rule of the First Heaven or god of procreation. This seed receives energy from the light of the god of sunrise in the Third Heaven. The gods of rain and water provide essential water: the Fifth and Seventh Heavens. The Ninth Heaven brings the god of fire that pushes the plant to blossom into a flower the Eleventh Heaven, finally bearing its mature fruit in the Thirteenth Heaven.”

“But there is always something essentially unpredictable in regard to the universe,” I said.

“Unless you have a frequency receiver of some sort to connect to the cosmos,” Hornsby said, “that keeps you in harmonic resonance. And the Mayan’s implicitly knew this.”

“The original archetype,” I replied watching Hornsby inspect the wall glyphs.

“That which runs from the explicit to the common, from the archetype to the symbol . . . just as Pacal Votan, the priest of Palenque claimed.”

“The code of thirteen times twenty,” I said.

“Or the simpler zero through nineteen code,” Hornsby added.

“The universal archetype of spiritual wisdom is stored in the prime number of nineteen – containing all the other numbers.”

We starred about the walls of the tower lined with carved glyphs enlightening our understanding. The effect of our scrutiny lit up Hornsby’s face.

“I think we’ve discovered a replica of the Holy Envelope.” Hornsby said exhilarated.
“What?” I was bewildered. How could the Soul Chamber and Holy Envelope be one of the same?
“The place that Quetzalcoatl was to receive instructions for guidance of his people the Toltec was within the Holy Envelope. The deities put the Holy Envelope in his care, concealing the divinity from human gaze.”

“Like a tabernacle or soul tube,” I said.

“Or Soul Chamber,” Hornsby added. “All three are synonymous for our purpose, except for one thing.”

“And that is?” I stammered.

“The Holy Envelope brings our consciousness in alignment with the earth’s envelope – that is the biosphere and noosphere transition in revealing all that is known.”

The wind howled outside of us. The sound of crashing trees and driving rain roared. Bolts of lightning flashed and thunder clapped. Our voices echoed throughout tower’s chamber as it acted as a sound buffer from the storm raging through the jungle.

“Why wasn’t this Holy Envelope found earlier?”

“Like the Tabernacle, I suspect it was removed from the malevolence of Tezcatlipoca, who tricked Quetzalcoatl to lose his credibility with the Toltecs and then overthrew him sending him away on a long journey. No doubt the Holy Envelope was taken somewhere safe.”

Hornsby related that when the city of Teotihuacan, Ce Actal Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s possible birthplace fell to Tezcatlipoca, those not wanting to be forced to follow Tezcatlipoca fled from fear of being murdered. Teotihuacan has reconstructed archeological evidence of a network of contacts that extended as far away as the jungle lowlands of Honduras and throughout Mesoamerica, so it stands to reason some of the refugees made alliances with neighboring Nahua and Mayan tribes.

The most interesting story is of a semi-mythical city never found called, Tamonchan. The refugees of Teotihuacan gathered there. It’s assumed that Xochicalco is this transitional site, which is between Teotihuacan and Tollan. But Xochicalco doesn’t contain unequivocal evidence.

Quetzalcoatl was reported to have made many trips to the East, where he was in touch with a Great Lodge whose members knew the secret of the Elixir of Life. To travel to the Great Lodge, one would need the Holy Envelope. The legend of these people, as recorded by the Aztecs is that their ancestors came from a land “on the great water” or Aztlan.

“Quetzalcoatl embodied a state of consciousness of the solar universe, embodying a messianic character enduring all to show humankind the highest state of being.” Hornsby said.

“The elixir of life,” I said recalling the Spanish explorer, Ponce de Leon’s quest to find the fountain of youth.

When the Spaniards arrived upon the shores of the Mayan civilization, thousands were being sacrificed at the temples to obtain the necessary nourishment for the Sun -- human hearts and blood. It was believed the Gods sacrificed their own flesh and blood as well. This was a catastrophic misunderstanding from what Quetzalcoatl had originally told the Toltecs.

To attain what Quetzalcoatl envisioned was based on the quality and type of every person’s movement as a critical aspect for attainment to universal consciousness – the climax of self-reflective thought resulted in an exponential change in perception.

Comparable to the Akashic Records, The I Ching and the Book of Changes, the Mayan matrix carried one to the comprehension of the Psi Bank embedded in the Sun – attainable through the Soul Chamber.

The Sun is sustained by humankind’s one rule spiritual conviction. The initiate’s free their heart from conditioned intellectual dominance. This meant the return of the human “sun” or “earth-sun” to the Cosmic Sun. The luminous particles of the human solar consciousness were to bring universal harmony by recognizing One Divine Creative Force.

“A spiritual testing of the global mind to understand that there is one law,” Hornsby added.
In the highland’s of Mexico there is a ancient chronicle called the Anales de Quahtitlan, where Venus is described has having “perils of rays,” shooting the kings or bringing death. It appeared on the day of Quetzalcoatl’s departure to become the planet Venus, a pivotal point in cosmic history that signified both the end and beginning of a world age cycle.

Since then, Quetzalcoatl’s life and death is repeatedly ritualized through Mesoamerican history. To become liberated, the spiritual hero, Quetzalcoatl built a bridge over the river blocking deliverance to show his followers the way to the Great Cosmos or Hunab Ku. He didn’t live for himself; he lived for the salvation of humankind.

No doubt Tezcatlipoca literally implemented the idea of human sacrifice as a means to keep control of his people and erase Quetzalcoatl’s spiritual influence. This was the process of the cyclic change. It was very barbaric and horribly perverted fallout from Quetzalcoatl’s overthrow.

Ironically all the Nahua tribes in Mexico worshiped Tezcatlipoca who mythically held a fiery mirror in which he saw all deeds on earth, passing judgment upon those at the time of their death. Death by sacrifice was the natural ending of a warrior’s life that ensured entrance into paradise. Death had become nothing more than an incident in the continuity between this life and the next.

The storm raged outside. The wind was howling so loudly I covered my ears. We had both crouched down against the wall together.

“You know why the Mexicans have the Feast of All Souls?” he shouted at me face to face with cupped hands about his mouth to act as megaphone.

I shook my head no. “Why?” I yelled back at him.

“Venus represents the return or reincarnation, like the Egyptian Osiris. The earth is like a mummy. The Mexicans hoist a mummy up a pole and then dance around it, because our origin of consciousness must bypass mortal death to become a part of the molecular universe. That is what motivates evolution, our DNA. Our conscious interpretation is but dense concrete.

“The key lays in our dreamtime, which speaks the language of metaphor. It transcends all linguistics and cultural barriers. It guides one’s spirit to make the transition. If not, then we are stuck here on earth . . . waiting to be freed. This is why the earth is like a mummy and the indigenous honor their ancestors. Its karmic insurance of sorts -- to make sure you’ll make it to heaven.”

The hurricane reached a fever pitch. The wind gusting inside the tower started to produce a vibrating tone that gradually increased in frequency. But instead of deafening my hearing, it soothed me. As it grew in intensity, the tone formed a harmonic cord of which I’ve never heard. It was a combination of a bassoon bass and treble pitch mixed with ribbons of a multitude of chorus voices. By the look on Hornsby’s face, I could tell he noticed it was well, looking about the tower’s walls in wonder at it all.

“Can you hear that?” I shouted to him.

“Yes. Absolutely fantastic, isn’t it,” he shouted back to me.

The tone hummed within the walls of the tower, the frequency of which vibrated through my whole body. I felt levity, bathed by its musical pitch.

“It’s a harmonic octave, I believe,” Hornsby said standing up.

I no longer could hear the hurricane’s fury outside, only the tonal pitch circulating about the interior of the tower’s walls as if was I standing inside a musical tuning fork, but this sounded like an ethereal harmonic. I felt a warm soothing sensation running through my blood.

My thoughts were clear and came from the depths of my being. Every cell in my body was alive. My skin tingled as the hair stood up on end. I wanted to rejoice as it made me feel I had been delivered from a dark world. Looking over at Hornsby, I saw him with out stretched arms, his face looking up toward the opening of the tower and crying jubilantly, “Fantastic!”

There was no awareness of the great cataclysm just outside the walls of the edifice. No sense of the danger or fear, just this divine rapturous tone engulfing us like . . . an envelope.

Then in the center of the tower an iridescent light emerged. It grew in a swirling flaming motion, spinning clockwise at a high speed and elongating itself up toward the top of the tower and at the same time toward the bottom. There were yellow sparks flying out of the center that bounced off the walls of the tower in a counterclockwise spiral upwards. I leaned back against the wall, as it expanded to such a size it was directly in front of my face. Like a huge torch, it flamed, but did not burn nor create intense heat. Instead it didn’t seem to emit any temperature at all, not hot or cold.

“Xiuhtecuhtli,” Hornsby called out to me from the other side.

“Lord of Fire, the ancient God, the father and mother of all Gods.”

It took all I could bear to hold on to my wits.

“What was going to happen next?” I thought, feeling as if I was facing my Judgment Day. My body was pressed hard against the tower wall. If this all-encompassing energy wanted to consume us, so be it, but then again no, I didn’t want to die like this.

In my attempts to keep whatever was in store for me from this unnatural act of nature, I thought if I continued to focus on what life meant to me I would survive. I thought about my future with Cassarina, about what I still wanted to accomplish in my life, get married, have children, read more books, write and travel the world. I hadn’t tasted the sweet and bitter of it all. No, I wasn’t ready to depart this earth and begged with all my heart not to be taken, not for my spirit to depart, though it felt it wanted to leave my body so badly at that point.

In the next gasp of breath, I found myself flying into a night sky deep into heaven’s darkness. A slit of brilliant light, a wrinkle or warp in the seam of this darkness that didn’t have a source suddenly appeared to me. I entered, absorbed into its force field that took me further into what seemed deep space. There were billions of particles of twinkling brightness all about me.

As I spun about the whole of this interstellar universe, I realized it was my own molecular structure of my body. I was sustained there for what seemed an eternity. The bright hot stars darted in a dazzling sparkle. Then there was a flood of light for a split second filling me with eternal bliss.

“Can you see it?” Hornsby cried out repeatedly. I couldn’t see him, but sensed him, realizing he was communicating to me telepathically.

In a whirlwind shift, I found myself standing on a jagged stone path buried in an impassable web of prickly bushes and thorny trees growing in a humid jungle swamp, filled with reeds and rushes, wearing only a loin cloth. Monstrous snarling beasts growled, hidden behind the great thick brambles surrounding me, pacing and waiting to see if I would run out of fear: The chance they needed to pounce and devour me. I trembled from the sense of the violent way we suffer through life on this earth. Dark was the blood red sky and foreboding was the flames that licked upon my flesh from the bushes . . . I cursed Hornsby under my breath, thinking I’d been betrayed.

In that moment, an extraordinary sound, faint at first, but growing louder, summoned my attention. A rapturous musical sound, unlike the first one had heard, cut through the dense vile din of my surroundings.

“Uayeb,” I heard a mystical voice say. “Uayeb,” it said again.
I feebly stuttered, “Uayeb” at first. Then, I gathered more strength the more I said it. Repeating it over and over again, the dark bloody sky broke away to a golden beam of light.

“You’ve open the House of the Sun, all is set in motion,” the ethereal voice called out.

A double rainbow appeared across the horizon, transforming the jungle swamp into a lush paradise, as if it had existed all along. The beasts were gone, the fiery bushes extinguished. Was it my own illusion that created the horrific sight? When I felt that all things were turned against me, now everything embraced me, including the innumerable creatures of the earth.

Hornsby appeared, walking along the path toward me. He was adorned in the likeness of a deity, proudly wearing an ornate flowing robe, planting his majestic bare feet, reverently, upon the path and with great splendor brought me this message.

“You have come to a mysterious region, that has remained unknown for so long. So many have tried, but none have crossed the barrier. The evil of the world you have come from, so keeps it this way. Only those who achieve annihilation of the Demon’s enslaving perceptions can enter here, but you cannot stay.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The warning of the Final Day, the message of cyclic transformation, the divine plan.”
“But here is paradise.”

“All things lead to here, but when Aztlan was abandoned, all things turned upon humankind. The Demon was evoked and cast spells upon all created things, turning them into wild beasts and the companions of our ancestors to mortal death. The Demon harms and weakens you, telling you eat all and drink much, to indulge yourself, seek wealth and flaunt your possessions, for all that has ruined you will decimate your entrails in exchange for the Demon’s enslavement.”

Hornsby then turned, with a long sweep of his arm across the landscape before us muttering a sorcerer’s invocation, bearing the light of the key to all supernatural powers.

“Eritris sicut dei.” The living image of Quetzalcoatl appeared like a Morning Star on the eastern horizon.

“Your people call him Jehovah, Christ, Allah, Mohammad, Buddha.”

Turning around to fast the western horizon, Hornsby repeated the same ritual, materializing the fire-breathing Demon. “Eritris sicut dei.”

“Here is the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, Devil, or Xolotl.”

Upon the mention of the Nahua Lucifer, I remembered seeing a powerfully mesmerizing glyph from Monte Alban. The entity had deformed limbs, a feline mouth and captivating pose that signified the genesis of Monte Alban – the tutor to the inner most depth of individual divine Being. There was no question that the heroic struggle against the debase passions of ourselves was in fact a great celestial battle that our Self was submitted to from birth. The victor of all temptations killed them.

“They are all kinship,” the mystical Hornsby said.

“But why are we so sure that one is good and one is bad,” I asked.

“The ultimate meaning has been lost. Each complement the other – helping along our journey?

It is human imagination that created the more vile beasts, giving them permission to exist among them on earth. Humanity has been cursed with regret ever since.”

“How?” I wanted to know, standing there in what could have been the Garden of Eden, enjoying the sense of peace and leisure.

“The One Divine Law is the all-encompassing theme leading toward the inevitability of the cyclic end, as the Ancestor’s have prophesized. Many have construed that a certain religious practice holds the key, the upper hand, if you will, in protecting its devoted followers from the ultimate punishment of an Armageddon occurrence. Such beliefs are built upon the interwoven motifs of centuries old religious symbolism and cloud over the simple truth: the fulfillment of an undeviating law of destiny – a duality of good and bad – the actions of which either cause damage or benefit one’s soul – will be made known on the Final Day of this Great Cycle.

“In this way, as the world enters the final years of the Great Cycle, each individual must remain conscious, not in the Biblical sense of a rapturous salvation, but in the day by day existence of holding their consciousness to see the innumerable ways that divine mercy is being bestowed upon your people. This will carry you across the threshold when the opportunity for the final transforming liberation arrives on the Final Day. Hopefully, your people will not literary take the intuitive cosmic message of an evolving spiritual consciousness to mean that they must kill each other off as a sacrifice to their chosen deity, who conveniently replaced Hunab Ku, in how faithful they are, just as the Mayan sacrificed their own in the final days of their existence.”

The context of “your people” stuck in my mind. Hornsby was speaking as a separate entity. Curious I reached out to touch him, discovering I could pass my hand right through his robe. He turned and smiled affectionately at me.

“You’re not real,” I said.

“Real as can be,” Hornsby said. “We are the Ancestral Archetype.”

At that moment both Hornsby and I collapsed to the floor of the Soul Chamber, dazed. As I regained my senses, I noticed the hurricane had subsided. Sunlight was shining down through the tower, illuminating the emblem glyph walls. The color stones were set in a pattern of a circular matrix, spiraling up toward the top, where at the opening the huge stele I had seen before from outside was mounted.

Hornsby leaped up to his feet surveying the height of the tower.

“Hornsby?” I stammered. “What are you doing?”

I got up, seeing that the ethereal Hornsby had transformed back to his old self.
“You’re dressed different,” I said.

Hornsby was distracted. It dawned on me that he didn’t remember what he was portraying or saying to me a moment ago. Instead, he his attention was diverted elsewhere.

“Space and time have no difference in the universe. They are both forms of ethereal energy. And that is consciousness. The origin of which comes from a galactic core, the Mayans called Hunab Ku the eye of the hurricane. It is the means of losing yourself, your ego.”

He motioned me to give him a boost up to the first cross-timber for him to get a foothold.
“Quick, Jules, now’s our chance to see what’s at the top.”

I laced my fingers together to give him a step. With a grunt I boasted him high enough so he could grab the nearest beam swinging himself up. He moved like a cat, jumping up to the next timber and the next briefly stopping to take a glance at the progression of the hieroglyphics.
“You can’t believe this, Jules. It’s the Tzolk’in.”

“I’m going to take a look outside,” I called out to him walking out onto the sun-drenched courtyard.

“Sounds good to me,” Hornsby replied as he moved up the two-story edifice. “This is profound… there are star clusters that appear to map out celestial constellations. It looks like the Pleiades star cluster and another one on the other side… appears to be Orion.”

When I walked out I was momentarily blinded by the bright sunlight as I immediately looked up at the lintel to confirm what Hornsby claimed as Quetzalcoatl. He was right, though this form seemed to me to be more of an anthropomorphic design. I gazed about the plateau to see that it was littered in debris.

Branches from trees laid about the ruin in disarray, making it more difficult to find a route back to where we had first arrived. But the brilliance of the blue sky above and the sunlight brought forth a lush green tropical color glistening from the rain that belied the fact that we had just survived a hurricane.

The cisterns that I had earlier passed by were filled with clear rainwater. I dipped my cupped hands into one of the cisterns to drink some water. As I stood there sipping the water I noticed a peculiar glow from the corner of my eye. Between the fissures of stone caused by the protruding roots system of a mangrove tree, there appeared to be a dim golden light coming from within the ruin. I rubbed my eyes to get a better look, peering down at my feet. The glare of the sunlight made it difficult to determine if it was just the reflection of water pooled below. I went to kneel down, but Hornsby called out to me.

“Jules, look at me. I made it to the top.”

I turned around to see Hornsby energetically waving his arms at me in absolute delight.
“Evam maya e ma ho. All hail to the harmony of all mind and universe,” he joyous shouted.
“In Lake’ch. I am another yourself,” I yelled back at him, waving my arm.

As Hornsby stood there, waving, a gaseous cloud formed above the stele, spinning in a clockwise direction. It extended some distance upwards toward the clear blue sky, as another vapor cloud formed about the circular edifice, spinning in a counterclockwise spin and fanning out across the courtyard. I ran to the edge of the terrace to avoid it.

At a safe distance I could see the force field of these two bulky cyclonic vortexes formed an hourglass design. Where the two spouts would have touched, they didn’t. Instead, Hornsby was linked directly between their apexes. The vortexes were transparent enough for me to distinguish the presence of a separate inner spherical convolution, like a tri-directional force that created bands or layered dimensions that looked like nested spheres within the body of each vortex. Both the stele and circular tower had become obscured by the vortexes’ vapors.
“James, get out of there,” I shouted.

He didn’t hear me. Hornsby was enraptured by the supernatural event. I saw him extending his arms straight out, his head cocked backwards toward the sky transfixed at the wonder of it. The whirling cyclones caused my own perceptions to be altered.

Everything about us came to a standstill. I could recognize an ethereal energy running through all the foliage of the jungle, caught in the vibration of space shedding the constructs of a third dimension reality. The natural realm of life was revealed, as my vision about me was a virtual world of molecular substances.

All that made any real movement was an expansion and contraction of the atmosphere, producing a musical octave emitted from the density of the two spinning vortexes. And then it happened.

A bolt of lightning shot down from the clear blue sky from above, directly into the upper vortex, penetrating Hornsby’s body and continuing down into the bottom vortex. An iridescent shock wave of light burst out horizontally from where Hornsby had been standing expanding across the temple’s mesa dissipating into the jungle canopy.

In that moment, the history of all eternity effortlessly rushed though my mind. In the next second the coned vortexes vanished and Hornsby was gone. It took me a few seconds to realize what had happened. My head was still swimming from the experience as I rushed toward the tower hoping to find Hornsby inside. Maybe he had fallen down.

But my hopes were dashed when I arrived inside, yelling, “James” and finding nothing but an empty tower. I cried out, “James, for gods sake!”

Running back outside I hoped that he might have been cast off the tower’s top, landing on the temple’s courtyard. I ran about the ancient cisterns, climbing over thick layers of storm debris, anxiously hoping that somewhere he was lying, dazed or unconscious and needed my immediate rescue. But nothing turned up. Not a trace.

In the time that followed, for however long it was, I don’t remember. It just came at the point when I was completely forlorn from the loss of Hornsby that the steel wall of the hurricane slammed into me. We had been in the eye of the storm. I was beset to survive the second onslaught of wind and rain, alone.

Had I wanted to indulge in my anguish, the storm wouldn’t let me as it came charging ahead across the landscape preoccupying me with remaining alive. The wind was so fierce that I was blown off my feet and tumbled backwards on the edge of the temple’s cornice. The rain whipped my face like a thousand stinging bees. It stung so bad I had to keep my head down, momentarily cupping my hands over my mouth to catch my breath.

Gripping a hold onto some shrubs another blast of wind ripped my hands free and I fell backwards on the mounded terraces, landing hard against an exposed stone block gashing my forehead open. Debris flew all about me. The fury of the storm seemed more violent than before.
Shielding my face, I tried to make for some shelter, somewhere down in the jungle because the wind was too fierce for me to climb back up to the plaza to hide in the tower. Disheveled and bleeding I turned to make a treacherous descent from the temple.

The roar of the hurricane tore at the tree canopy bending it like twigs under its tremendous blasts of wind. I continued to tumble and fall for a short time; flinging myself helplessly down what was an ornate stairway centuries ago. With clenched teeth and expelled breath I was conscious of one thing, my dream had come true.