CHAPTER NINE: THE MAIDEN PRIESTESS - CONTINUED

“Brilliant. You’ve experienced Dreamtime,” Hornsby muttered. “I had thought that one of the Lacandones would have come forth with this, not an occidental, especially a member of our expedition.”

“And the mention of Yaxkin,” Cassarina queried. “How is that you knew of this prior to our discovery. Are you making up some kind of fable?”

“I wanted to see if in fact Hornsby, I mean we, would actually find some tangible proof, without planting the idea first.”

“And, I suspect you were concerned about the symbolism of death,” Hornsby interjected.

“Yes, I was scared that to continue, one of us would die,” I said nodding in agreement.

Inspired by my dreamtime occurrence, Hornsby went into one of his philosophical lectures. He explained, emphatically, that there are three hypothesis of life.

First of all that the universe has existed for all eternity.

Second that the antiquity of life had no precedent to follow and thirdly, our present state has evolved by a natural process and will continue to do so as it always has just as the first single cell bacteria mutations occurred over sixty million years ago.

Everything in the mind of humankind is inextricably woven together, whether we accept it or not. Everything is running from the specific to the generality of conscious perceptions; from the archetype to the symbol to the myth. Regardless of metaphoric meanings derived from our dreams, we are an infant civilization in the grand scheme of the multiversity of the cosmos.

As each individual comes to terms with their place in life, the truth of their existence will only be revealed to them in the last split second of their last breath of mortal consciousness.

“So what a glorious thing to meet,” Hornsby said pacing about the campsite. “A goddess who will embrace you with compassion, forgiving you of all your inequities.”

“Easy for you to say,” Cassarina said condescendingly with an obvious change of heart about dream interpretation. She wasn’t enthralled by my dreamtime message and continued to look suspicious when I related my tale about Moise. Cassarina was beginning to think our interpretations were nonsense.

“It is a dangerous precedent to base theory upon myth,” she said. “How much further can this imbecility go?”

But the whole dream spin and encounter with Moise had a dramatic charm for Hornsby. His enthusiasm returned without question of my prophetic vision for a catastrophic outcome and possibly death.

“Have a good heart, Cassarina,” Hornsby cajoled while he got his map to show us what he had been working on since early morning.

His tone of voice was more paternal toward her. Their relationship had been cultivated, I suspected, for some time prior to this expedition. There was no doubt that Cassarina came from affluence or lived off of a substantial inheritance. She never mentioned having parents the whole time we were together.

Regardless, she flaunted a justified privilege to snob me as if her academic endowments made her an elitist in contrast to my impoverished insights. She was a complex woman. On one hand maternally nurturing as a healer, but on the other, if you crossed her intellect, she would deluge you with a tempestuous storm of razor-sharp words.

“Every civilization is enlivened by eccentrics.” Hornsby spouted as he was getting situated with the map on his lap. “Without them, the human race wouldn’t evolve.”
“Your quest, James, is like a narcissistic vice,” Cassarina argued. “You’re caught up in this new age hysteria to find some missing cosmic link between humankind and the omnipotent.”

“You’re right, I’ve forgotten there is a serious person among us,” Hornsby said, thoughtfully drummed his fingers on the worn map that lay in his lap

This only infuriated Cassarina more. Hornsby obviously had tangled with her tirades before and seemed to enjoy pushing her to her limits.

“Garthwaite had the good sense to see through you,” Cassarina retorted. “As for him,” she said pointing in my direction, “he’s as daffy as you are.”

Cassarina was fuming as she turned away from the campfire to start packing up her camping gear. Hornsby had gone too far. He looked dejected and hung his head. This was the worst spectacle I’d seen between them and neither of them was making moves to apologize. Jorge and I went about breaking camp.

Cassarina and Hornsby had an unsettled issue, a deep burning conflict that was yet to come to some equitable resolve. I surmised that our discovery of the possible location of the Soul Chamber, my dreamtime encounter with Moise, and the possibility that there really is a lost temple in the Yucatan jungle made Cassarina more distraught. Perhaps she believed all along that we were not going to find anything of sufficiency.

The expedition served her more for a productive and practical purpose, in which her goal was to further her medical career in jungle medicine, not Mayan mysticism. She hadn’t planned on this turn of events.

And though it was unspoken, I felt that her argument with Hornsby was more out of fear of him losing his life if he pursued this expedition any farther. And for that matter my own. Beneath her objecting veneer I suspected she secretly believed my dream cast a fatal spell upon us. Her worse fear, as had been my own, was that one or all of us would perish if we were to press on.

We returned to Metzabok without a word spoken between us.

CHAPTER NINE: THE MAIDEN PRIESTESS - CONTINUED

There was no doubt that my companions were eyewitnesses to my dreaming. The three of them, seated around the campfire, looked upon me with compassion, endearing with watchful, caring eyes.

“Dreams are human testimony,” Hornsby humbly said.

His existence had become uniquely essential somehow or another to me. He sat there, more keen than a mere professor, a special human trait struck me.

I recalled our argument weeks before about dream interpretation, and hesitated to resume the analytical argument, full of multitudinous doubts. Hornsby looked upon me with indigenous generosity, the kind I saw in the Lacandones. This was the real Hornsby, and I believed at that moment, Cassarina registered that I was catching on.

“Yes, Jules . . . tell us,” Cassarina’s ardor of speech removed me from any suspicion.

I explained the details of my dream, translating it into Spanish for Jorge’s benefit.

“All Mother and the Djanggano Sisters,” Hornsby said after a long silence. He explained to us that he was referring to an Aboriginal pictograph located in Australia.

“Tlazolteotl,” Jorge said.

The two of them looked back at the campfire then to each other as if telepathically knowing what the other was thinking. I looked at them bewildered. Hornsby saw I was perplexed and explained what he and Jorge thought I had encountered during my “dreamtime” as Hornsby referred to it.

Tlazolteotl is the great mother or human fertility. Her mythological story has been traced throughout indigenous cultures, the evidence of which was painted on a rock in Australia by aborigines. Tlazolteotl has been traced back to the remotest antiquity. But more importantly, she is the “eater of impurities.” When one dies, they come before her to confess the greatest of their sins to receive absolution. Nothing can overwhelm her, as she has the power to heal and forgive us.

“In the end, we are all justified sinners,” Hornsby said.

“The dead must tell their darkest tales,” Cassarina added.

“What do you expect, a succession of holy deeds?” Hornsby quipped.

“Fuerza creadora de lo no tejido,” Jorge said flipping over a tortilla in a small frying pan over the campfire.

“Creative force of the universe,” Cassarina translated. “Such a passionate power, the female psyche.”

“Yes, there is an extraordinary sanctity attached to this goddess symbol,” Hornsby said.
“But there is more,” I said in a timid tone of voice.

By virtue of the dream and our incredible discovery the day before, it was futile to withhold my other dreamtime experience. I knew I would be condemning Hornsby and Cassarina to an avoidable catastrophe by not divulging it, and the confirmation of Yaxkin.

As much as our discovery yesterday was extraordinary and motivated me even more to search the depths of the Maya jungles, I still feared the worst if we continued on our expedition. I started to explain at first that no one knows when death will come as one lives into their virgin territory of life moment by moment. We can suspect and look for signs of the inexorably fatal power at work around us, a force of which devastates whole civilizations into ruins in a blink of an eye. And still nature contains an inscrutable spirit that lovingly spares us through the darkest times of our lives. It seemed to me that life was a string of fortunes and misfortunes all of which was there to enjoy.

“The three days that I was gone,” I began, “ wasn’t to inspect the rock art.” I related to Hornsby that Cassarina and I had an argument. Wanting to clear my head and give her some space to cool down as well, I took off into the jungle for what I thought would be a day hike. What happened next was beyond my comprehension, as well as Cassarina’s.

Hornsby and Cassarina were transfixed as I related vividly the dramatic scenes of my dreamtime encounter from beginning to end. By the time I was finished, I felt I was at the end of a long bridge spanning between us. Their expressions were ones of overwhelm, delight, surprised and concern.

Jorge had stopped cooking tortillas. He stood smoking a cigarette. Cassarina looked at me glassy eyed. Most of all, Hornsby was emotionally moved. Scratching his balding head, he finally responded.

“Was this what you were afraid to tell me before?”

I nodded in agreement.

“The whole dream took three days?” Cassarina was perplexed, intrigued and mildly annoyed.

“That’s the other part.”

I went on to describe my encounter with Moise. Hornsby and Cassarina listened intently. Neither of them questioned me when I finished. By then the morning air was warming up from the tropical heat of the sun. The mist had long since evaporated. It was clear to us that my dream, my encounter with Moise and our discovery of the cryptic vault all correlated to the existence of this Soul Chamber that Hornsby was searching for.

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.”