Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Throwback Thursday: Maya Apocalypse W/ Dr. John Hoopes!

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Throwback Thursday: Maya Apocalypse W/ Dr. John Hoopes! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
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• 0:33
  SPEAKER_05: And now, on with the show.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: You must excuse me.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: I've broke my twitter.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: This hasn't been easy, I know.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: That lesson must end you in a good extent on your mind.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm catching on to why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's the first one.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_05: In the early morning hours on December 21st, 2012, something happened.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_05: As I walked in the kitchen to prepare my morning coffee, the house began to violently shake around me.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_05: Dishes came loose from their cabinets and crashed into the hardwood floor.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_05: Suddenly, the sky grew a deep dark red, and car alarms began to echo throughout the neighborhood, signaling that something indeed was terribly wrong.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_05: I ran out into the front yard and saw my neighbors gathered in small groups, shielding their eyes with their hands as they peered into the sky.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_05: I too looked up and instantly realized the end was upon us.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_05: Or at least that would have happened, or something similar to it, if the prophecies surrounding the Maya apocalypse of 2012 were correct.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_05: And since we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of this infamous non-event, we are joined today by an expert in all matters 2012, Dr.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_05: John Hoops.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_05: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa and Drew Venariano Placateca.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: John Hoops is a professor at the University of Kansas.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_05: He has broad training in the archaeology of pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures with a focus on indigenous populations of Southern Central America, between Mesoamerica and the Central Andes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_05: He has built a solid base of empirical scientific evidence and robust theories to help define these as a significant unit of study.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: He has also undertaken extended critiques of both scientific and popular models.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_05: The latter involved significant prejudices and misconceptions about indigenous cultures.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_05: His research is motivated by a strong sense of ethics, justice, and a desire to help people understand the world in detail by expanding knowledge as guided by informed insight.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_05: Welcome, Dr.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_05: John Hoops, to Tales from Ostlantis.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_06: It's really an honor to be here.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_06: This is a fantastic podcast.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_06: I've enjoyed the series, and you're doing a fantastic service for the world.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_05: Oh wow.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_05: I can go back to bed now.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_06: By the way, I I I really liked your your little book on uh critical thinking and logical fallacies.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_06: I I thought that was just a fantastic contribution.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, thank you.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, the The Four Disagreements.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_05: I was very proud of that title when I thought of it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_05: Well, when I thought of that title, I jumped on Google and started Googling it like somebody has to have thought of that before.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_05: And they hadn't, so I jumped on it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_04: Speaking of which, when I was at Barnes and Nobles not too long ago, there was this lady.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_04: I was in the Spanish section, uh, and there was this lady who was specifically looking for the four agreements, and it gave me the idea we need to translate that book into Spanish.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_04: We need to have a Spanish version of the four disagreements.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we do.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: Because I would have said, have you heard of the four disagreements now?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_05: Start proselytizing at the Barnes and Noble.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_05: So we're we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Maya Apocalypse of 2012.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_05: And um we were talking to each other on on Twitter because we're tweeps, as we had mentioned before.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: That's all right.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_05: We've we've been talking on Twitter, and you had brought up that the 10th anniversary was coming up, and that it would be cool to uh sit down and and talk about you know what what happened, like what what was all this about, all of the the history and and and the conspiracy around uh 2012, and you had brought up an interesting point that you thought that um, and I agree with you, that academics uh actually pushed it quite a bit as well, or not pushed it so much as they they were responsible for it spreading just as much as the new age uh charlatans and conspiracy theorists and stuff.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_05: So I was wondering um if you could uh talk about that a little bit.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, uh thank you, and that's exactly right.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_06: Um I've uh published an article on on what I called um um uh unintentional consequences of of 2012 scholarship.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um but uh I actually traced it to where the meme began.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_06: Uh actually there are different dimensions of the meme, um, but I'll I'll read you the exact paragraph that it came from in a publication from 1966 that was written by Michael Koe, uh an esteemed archaeologist at Yale University, uh, and one of the experts on um the Olmec culture and the Maya culture, and in 1966 he published a book called The Maya.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and here's it here is here is the paragraph where it began.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_06: The idea of cyclical creations and destructions is a typical feature of Mesoamerican religions, as it is of Oriental.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_06: The Aztec, for instance, thought the universe had passed through four such ages, and that we were now in the fifth to be destroyed by earthquakes.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_06: The Maya thought along the same lines in terms of eras of great length like the Hindu Khalpus.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_06: There is a suggestion that each of these measured thirteen bhaktons or something less than 5200 years, and that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the 13th.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_06: Thus, following the Thompson correlation, our present universe would have been created in 3113 BC to be annihilated on December 24th, A.D.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_06: 2011, when the great cycle of the long count reaches completion.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_06: So not even 2012, according to the original date wasn't 2012, the original date was uh 2011.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_06: Um actually, even before that, the date was put in the 18th century.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_06: Uh there were other people who looked at it as well.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_06: But um that was sort of that sort of planted the seed.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_06: And what what did it was that the book published in 1966 was the first inexpensive paperback book about Maya civilization.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_06: And in 1966, when hippies and backpackers were heading off to go visit the pyramids in Mexico, this is the book that they picked up.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it sold for I don't know, maybe three bucks or something like that.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but that's what made it go viral.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, you know, Michael Coe, was he referring to the decipherment of Monument 6 when he was talking about all this?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_06: Because no, that that comes much, much later.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_06: Uh what he was referring to were ideas about um sort of the Aztec the Aztec sunstone or the Aztec calendar stone, which actually shows kind of five different um uh episodes or periods of destruction.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and he was referring to beliefs about about the Aztecs and then projecting them on the Mayas, which really was um, you know, he thought that that that that was legitimate, but it it turns out that it really it really wasn't.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, those are two very different civilizations.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_06: They did share certain ideas, but the Aztecs never used the long count.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_06: These these cocktoons and cotunes were not were not a part of their their their calendar keeping.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um by extension is Co.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: also kind of partially responsible for the continued conflation of the Aztec in the Maya, in a sense, since he's the one that kind of got that ball rolling.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_06: To a certain extent.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_06: Uh yeah, he actually um published a book called Mexico that was sort of a companion to the Maya.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and um he he he he believed that there was a lot more similarity between those two cultures.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_06: And in fact, a lot of this came out of his own research.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_06: He was a specialist in the Olmex.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_06: And one of the things that Co.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_06: is known for is is is identifying the Olmex as the cultura madre, the the root culture, the kind of Ur culture of ancient Mesoamerica, and that all cultures were essentially replicating, duplicating, uh, and and and revering those things that have been important for the Olmex.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back after a quick break.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_05: Have you picked up your Mexica calendar for the year 12 Flint?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_05: Or how about a paperback copy of the four disagreements?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_05: Just visit talesfromostlantis.com for all the latest merchandise and show some love for your favorite podcast.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_05: That's TalesFromOstlantis.com for all the latest merchandise.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_05: Now, back to the show.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_05: Which is something we don't really do anymore in Mesoamerican archaeology, right?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_05: I refer to it as a mother culture, more as uh like a sister culture, is what um I was taught.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_04: That's a there's a different culture that predates the Olmec, I'm forgetting the name of it, but I learned it when I was in in school.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_04: Atlanteans.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_06: Well, the thing is we now know that the Mayas were as old as the as as the Olmecs.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_06: Uh we also had you know pre-Olmec cultures in the basin of Mexico.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_06: There were pre-olmec cultures in in Oaxaca and Soconusco and and elsewhere.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_06: In fact, uh my own dissertation was based on the earliest village cultures in Mesoamerica and in Central America and South America, but mostly mostly Central America.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, and those go back to about um 2000 BC.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um a thousand years earlier than the Olmecs were doing this.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_04: Is that around the time that that um maize was being uh domesticated?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_06: Uh no, that was even earlier.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_06: That was earlier, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and um, you know, the the cultivation of maize was a very important part of all of this.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_06: And uh one of the interesting things is the the cycle of maize, which becomes the central part of Olmec religion and later Maya religion, um, has to do with the fact that the uh the length of time uh in southern Mexico uh between planting maize kernels in the ground and harvesting the ripe ears of corn uh is almost exactly the same length of time as human gestation.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_06: Meaning that if you get your wife pregnant just after you've planted your cornfield, you'll be out harvesting it just after the baby's born.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's convenient, right?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, babe, sorry, gotta go.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_04: Sorry, gotta split, gotta go get some work done.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_05: So do we know?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, when did the shift come between uh Coe's initial assertion that it was 2011?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_05: Like how was that shifted specifically to the winter solstice of 2012?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_06: Um it uh it goes through a variety of different iterations, as as you can probably guess.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_06: Um Koe's book comes out in 1966.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and then these things are repeated in the late 60s to early 70s.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_06: And we find uh we find shows like In Search of, this television series that was made to explore ancient astronauts and other mysteries, actually repeats that 2011 uh date.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_06: Um uh there's also uh a book that's called Mexico Mystique, um, that is published by Frank Waters, right?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_06: Frank Waters.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_06: And and Frank Waters in Mexico Mystique, which uh I ironically is is a study that he was commissioned to do.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_06: He actually uh uh receives uh funding, I think, from the Ford Foundation to go to Mexico and research Mesoamerican religion, even though he's not a that's not his main bag.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_06: He's he's he's his previous book was called The Book of the Hopi, uh which finishes with information about Hopi prophecies.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_06: Well, he he he ties the Hopi stuff to Mexican stuff and Maya stuff and then repeats this same date that Michael Coe had had.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but he's doing that around 1975.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it's not until 1983 that um in a new edition, a fourth edition of a book that's called The Ancient Maya, that had originally been bit written by uh Sylvanus Morley uh and was sort of the Bible for understanding the ancient Maya.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_06: In 1983, a revised edition of the book, the fourth edition of it, has a table at the back of the book in which uh Robert Scherer, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, uh calculated out all of the Bakhtun, all of the Katoon endings, and and puts it in a table at the back of the book.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_06: And he used a correlation that was slightly different from Coe's, and he's the first one to publish the December 21st, 2012 date.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_06: And it's the last date in the table.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_06: Now he doesn't say anything about Armageddon or Apocalypse or anything else, but if you're reading through this table and you see this last date is is is uh 1300004 uh three conquin, it's like, oh, why does it end there?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_06: What what happens after that?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_06: Um, so that you know is another major reference, scholarly reference, published by Stanford University Press uh on the Mayas, um, that reifies this this particular day.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_06: And this is Frank Waters, right?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_06: So no, this was uh this was um Bob Scherer's uh revised edition of Sylvanas Morley.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_06: So that's 1983.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_06: So Frank Waters is 75.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and um um uh this uh this Scherer revision is 1983.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_06: Well, 1975 also that that period also sees the emergence of uh Jose Arguez and how does he fit into this conversation?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, Arguez is doing his thing uh beginning in the early 70s.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_06: Um he actually picks up on the work of a of a of a beat poet named Tony Shearer, uh who published a book called Lord of the Dawn in 1971.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_05: Uh goddamn poets, I swear.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_06: Well, and Tony Shearer was a pretty cool guy.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_06: He hung out with a lot of, he hung out with the beats, he was interested in you know, Burroughs and Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac and all of this stuff.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_06: And and he was he was into also uh valuing and and and and uh and explaining um indigenous traditions.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_06: He he lived in Mexico, he he learned how to play the flute, he he was kind of known for going around and and doing poetry and ceremonies and things like that.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_06: He he was he was a a pre-hippie hippie, you know, in that transition from the beats to the hippies.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_06: Uh but Tony Shearer is the one who came up with uh these calculations that were based on his interpretation of the Spanish conquest and the Maya calendar and some other things that happened in the world, including uh the bombing of Hiroshima uh on August 6, 1945.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_06: And in 1971, Tony Shearer publishes this little book uh in which he suggests there are two significant dates that are coming up, uh, one of them in mid-August 1987, uh, which actually Jose Arguez later picks up on for his harmonic convergence.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_06: And then the other one is um is in December 2012.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_06: Um and Arguez basically plagiarizes Shearer's stuff.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_06: He doesn't give him adequate credit credit for it.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_06: He takes it and sort of sort of runs with it.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but Arguez, you know, is is is an interesting character as well.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_06: Um and he's also an academic.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he has a PhD that he got from the University of Chicago.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_06: Um where uh well it's it's it's it's an it's a non-traditional PhD in something that was called art and aesthetics.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_06: It was it was not in the art history program, it was not in the anthropology program, it it was a special, you know, one of these late 1960s experimental PhD programs, a multidisciplinary thing.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_06: Um but uh for his dissertation research, he goes to Paris in 1968, uh where he basically drops a lot of acid.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_06: And and this gives gives him some insights in into into the way the the the the universe works, which you know and there's there's nothing wrong with that.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_06: That's what that's what ancient people did.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_06: They would they would use mushrooms, they would use ayahuasca, they would use whatever, and that gave them visions that they interpreted as how the universe works.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_06: Um and so things that Arkwayus did were were pretty cool.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_06: He comes back to the states and he actually is uh uh teaching at various places, including UC Irvine, where he in 1970 organizes the first uh birthday uh celebration on August on April 22nd, 1970.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_06: Um so he's he's doing some pretty cool things.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_06: He's a he's he's a visionary as a result of his psychedelic experiences.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but he's also a very compelling academic writer.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and in 1975, he publishes a book called The Transformative Vision, in which he basically reviews the biographies of various visionaries.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, it's a really interesting book if you're interested in sort of the birth of counterculture and things like that.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_06: But he also, in the back of the book, gives a series of dates and identifies 2012 as a as a as a date when there was going to be a major spiritual transformation.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_06: And uh sort of beginning in 1975, he begins working with this.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_06: Um what happens is in the early 1980s, around 1982, he meets a uh a fellow traveler, um, uh a guy named Terence McKenna, uh, who you may know about.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he's actually well known in the counterculture for having promoted, uh he actually wrote a book with his brother about how to grow magic mushrooms.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, he promoted the use of DMT and other psychedelics.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he became very popular on uh on the kind of college talk so talk show talk college talk circuit and other types of things like that.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but Terence McKenna had also become preoccupied with this 2012 date, which is something that he had worked out through a series of um through a series of uh computer programs.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_06: And this is independently from what Arguez, totally independently from Arguez.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think Terence McKenna had anything, had any knowledge necessarily of Michael Coe, uh, or even of Frank Waters.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_06: I haven't found any indication that he was reading that stuff, but who knows?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_06: Terence was a read an enormous amount of stuff, he had huge libraries.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_06: I it wouldn't be surprising if he'd to me that he'd known that, but he doesn't refer to it.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_06: He describes this process where he develops this uh this computer program called the Time Wave, um, which is supposed to explain all of history from the beginning to the end.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_06: And he finds these various events that are happening of significance in a way very similar to the way that Tony Shearer does it.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_06: Um he also accounts for the the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and other major world events.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_06: Um but anyway, Terrence and his brother Dennis arrive at this 2012 date independently, and then they meet up with Arguayas uh at a at a conference at the OHI Institute in California, which is sort of a think tank for new age stuff.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_06: And Arguayas tells McKenna Did you know that the Maya calendar has this end date?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_06: And apparently that's the first time Terence McKenna learned about that, and then he begins using.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_06: This uh December 21st, 2012 date, um, along with Arguayas.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and the two of them then pick up a lot of others who who echo that.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_06: Um but but why but why the Maya?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, if if Terence is looking at, he's using a computer program, he's plugging in numbers and he's trying to make sense of major historical events.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_04: Why focus on the Maya?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_04: What's what's the significance of the Maya to to him?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I know Arduyas is more cultural, because if I'm not mistaken, is wasn't he Mexican-American?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_06: Um his father's his father was Mexican, I believe.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_06: Um, I think his father was Mexican and and and his mother was uh was uh um born in the US.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, um but so he had a more of a cultural connection to to the maya in a sense, right?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_06: And that's that's right.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_06: Although his main interest initially was um what what was the Aztecs and also Teotihuacan.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_06: But actually he he describes this revelation he has when he goes to the temple of uh of the feathered serpent in in Teotihuacan.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm trying to make the connection here because I'm I'm I'm not uh you know I don't know this for a fact, but I'm I'm guessing here that he might have been influenced by all the rhetoric going around at the time through the Chicano movement and the reassertion of your indigenous identity and looking back towards the the great cultures of Mexico.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: So that would have been out of way as a sort of frame of reference.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_04: But what about McKenna?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_04: Like, what's how does he get you know plugged into the Maya?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_04: Like what's what's his connection there?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_06: Well, McKenna doesn't really go off on the Maya all that much.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, he he picks up on the date, um, but but McKenna, you know, he he was aware of who the Mayas were, but I I don't identify him as somebody who really talked about the Mayas all that much.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_06: Um Arguez goes back to them over and over again.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Terrence McKenna is mostly he actually developed his computer program from uh something called the Yijing, which is uh uh used for divination.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_06: It's a Chinese thing, uh, where you get these hexagrams and you know 64 different configurations that you can, you know, use um sticks or coins or things like that to sort of see the rhythms of the universe and predict the future or make decisions at least.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_06: And that's what was that's what Terrence was using.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_06: It turns out it turns out that some of the numbers that were used in the Maya calendar resonate quite well with the Yijing.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_06: Um, not necessarily because the Mayas and the Chinese were in in contact, but just because these are good uh sort of uh numerical patterns that you'll come across.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_06: It's Atlanta if you're playing around with numbers.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, exactly.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_06: But some of these things just emerge from the from the numbers themselves.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_06: Um but but but Kicko and Arguez, and then later uh Linda Scheley and David Friedel begin writing about shamanism.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and all of these individuals are they're academics who are who are explaining or trying to explain uh Maya religious systems, um, and they're dropping hints here and there, and then what happens is people pick up on that and run with it.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_05: Well, even um David Stewart, right, and I forget who he was working with, but they had done the um the translation of Monument Six, and their initial translation did have sort of this, you know, it was a prophetic vision.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_05: And then they they later on uh kind of recanted it, and they're like, okay, we got this part wrong, but by then, by then it was too late.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_05: It had already, you know, like the cat was out of the bag.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_05: People were already like, nope, they said it.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_05: There's like no taking it back.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_06: It was people like uh Jeff Stray and John Major Jenkins who just sort of jumped on on this.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_06: Actually, I think it was Jeff Stray uh who had uh who had asked um, no, he got he got a an uh an act another academic named Robert Sittler, who had been writing, who was writing about this 2012 phenomenon.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_06: He got Sittler to ask David Stewart if there had been a monument on which this date had been inscribed.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_06: And it's Sittler uh who then comes back to Stray and says, look, yeah, there's this Tortuguero Monument 6 that has the date on it.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_06: Um but um it doesn't really say very much.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_06: The monument is fragmented and you know it leaves a lot to the interpretation.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it's also just this one monument.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_06: This had been a if this date had been a big deal for the ancient Mayas, you'd find it in a lot more places, which you don't.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_06: Um and in fact, there is not a Maya calendar.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_06: It was more like a divination astrology system that was used by lots of different Maya rulers, and each one of them had sort of quirky aspects to it.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_06: Um, they some of them had the same personality as Mr.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_06: Trump, and that they saw it as all about them.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_06: And and using these numbers, I can show you how it is that I am the divine king and I will be coming back in the future, and you need to revere me because I'm I'm the one.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but they were competing with each other when they were doing that.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_06: Different Maya cities had different uh different guys doing different things.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_05: Well, not only that, but when you look at um Mesoamerican timekeeping in in general, it's cyclical.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_05: So there is no like end point where like this is where everything stops, it's where things reset and just moves on to the next you know, unit of numbers.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_06: That's exactly right.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_06: And the idea that it was going to end uh was introduced by Western scholars.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_06: You know, Michael Koe using the word Armageddon, for example.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, that that immediately and think about context.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_06: This is 1966.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_06: People are worried about the Cold War.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_06: They're they're they're you know, they're doing the duck and cover stuff in schools, they're they're looking at the at the fallout shelter signs all over the place.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_06: So when Michael Coe says Armageddon is coming in 2011, you know, that that that gets people thinking about it.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and and it it it's best understood in this Cold War context.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_06: Um interestingly, it's it's one of these end dates that gets picked up on by the new agers and not by the Christians.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_06: You know, typically it's it's the Christian pastors who are picking up on these end dates and saying, you know, you need to repent because Armageddon's coming.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but it's it's not a Christian thing.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_06: Although as we get towards the end of it, there are some Christian pastors who do pick up on it, like the Billboard guy who tried to tried to get a jump on it by saying it's happening in May of 2011, and then he then that didn't happen, and they're sent a bunch of people over 2011.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_04: They they he encouraged them to give up all their worldly possessions, and some people even committed suicide afterwards, if I'm not mistaken.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, people were doing terrible things.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_06: And you know, I I I it would be interesting if there were scholarship to follow up on that and document just exactly what it was that people were doing.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but yeah, people were selling their houses, people were you know going down into bunkers, uh, and then National Geographic comes up with uh the Doomsday Preppers show, uh, which is their their their number one show in in 2011, is is all of these people who are preparing for the uh for the end of the world.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_06: And and that becomes a cash cow, of course, for people who are selling you know tanks of bottled water and freeze-dried food and yeah.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I actually wanted to touch on things like that on that a little bit, because what we see is this commodification of the end of the world, right?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_05: Of this alleged Armageddon is coming.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_05: And so do we like have you been able to trace it to who was the first individual who like tried to make money off of this?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_05: Because it seems like a bad idea to put a hard expiration date on your drift, right?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_05: So you're basically setting this limit for yourself.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_05: I could make money from here to here, and then I gotta figure out how to explain to all my followers why it didn't happen.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_05: But I've, you know, they're probably thinking, well, I've got time, right?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_05: I I could think about that later.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_05: Right now let's focus on making as much money off of this off of this as possible because you know it was kind of mainstream, like you were saying, uh Nat Geo putting out this TV show.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_05: Then you had uh Roland Emmerich putting out a movie called 2012 with uh who was who's uh starred in that?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_05: That was uh John Cusack, right?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_05: Woody Harrelson.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_05: So it wasn't a small movie, and people are just cashing in on this.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_05: Do you have any idea who might have been the first to really Yeah, I know exactly who it was.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_06: Who's that?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_06: Happens right at the beginning.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_06: Cristóbal Colón.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_06: It begins with Christopher Columbus.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_06: That's right.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_06: When he encounters, when he encounters the the the indigenous people of Mexico, uh when he when he realized they're people living on the mainland, he writes uh a track that's called Libro de las Profecias, uh, in which he sees his discovery of the Americas as the beginning of the end, that that it's something that had been foretold.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_06: And it was him who had sort of confirmed that the events are going to happen the way that they're going to happen.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_06: And, you know, you better get ready because the end of the world is coming.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_06: Well, this sparks all of these Catholic missionaries to come to the Yucatan and to come to Guatemala and to come to all of the Americas, along with the gold diggers, along with the Tony Sauris.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_06: You know, that's sort of the the biggest, the biggest sale ever was the Black Legend.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well, I'm so glad you you said that because that's one thing that we kind of taught, we try to bring it up on this show when we can, but just how there was this whole millenarian world view that the Spaniards were bringing with them, right?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_05: Like they were gonna create the new Jerusalem in the Americas, and they were gonna be the chosen people and bring about the end of the world.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_05: And you had um the Virgin of the Apocalypse being you know flown by Cortez and Christopher Columbus and converting all the people and and you know, casting the Flashkaltecas as as Muslims and all this stuff to try to explain how the end of the world was coming.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_05: So thank you for bringing that up.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I think it's a good thing.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think enough people understand that.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I don't think people get it.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_06: And and and it actually we're still dealing with, obviously, the the legacy of that today.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_06: But something else that it did, this becomes a really important part of it, is that uh Cortes never found as much gold as he was expecting to find.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_06: And neither did Francisco Pizarro and his brothers in in Peru.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_06: They they never, they they always said they were going to find more gold than they actually did.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_06: And the search for El Dorado happens because uh basically the creditors who have lent all of this money to Charles V for the conquest of the Americas, the creditors in in Germany and elsewhere say, you know, are you gonna pay us?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_06: And Charles V says, sorry guys, I I don't have it.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_06: But if you want to go after it, there's this place called El Dorado where you can get some more.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so you go in in search of it.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_06: But Charles V goes basically bankrupt Spain because of all of the money that he borrows.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_06: And the way the reason he's able to borrow so much money is that the story of the gold of the Americas is the story that he takes to the bank.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_06: You know, it's it's he's he's like Donald Trump, you know, he's he's overvaluing his assets in in such a huge way that the Deutsche Bank of the time, and actually many of these were German bankers, that in the early 1500s, it's the German banks that are lending massive amounts of money that not only underwrite the Spanish exploration and conquest of the Americas, but you know what else they do?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_06: They underwrite the Christian armies of Charles V so that he's able to keep the Muslim armies from invading Vienna and Central Europe.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, it was this story of taking it to the bank and getting all of the money that underwrites this, that is probably the reason why we're not Muslims today.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_06: Um, because they were able to build armies and build all their swords and armor and forces and everything that they needed in order to keep Europe Christian.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back after a quick break.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Levantate y ponte olimpial.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: The Latin Minute is your new favorite bilingual comedy podcast where two Latinos living in Southwest Florida serve up some spicy takes on the hottest celebrities, gossip, juicy cheesem, and just a sprinkle of politics.
• 38:16
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• 38:22
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• 38:24
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• 38:30
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• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see you there.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_05: So you had brought up all of these missionaries and priests who would eventually wind up in the Yucatan.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_05: And one of them uh, you know, he writes this dictionary, right?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_05: The dictionary of Motul.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_05: And in it he creates this term hunabku.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_05: And he uses it as a uh missionizing device, basically um uh they call it a Maya reducido, I think, was the technical term.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_05: Taking Maya words, and then you have to build a language of missionization by using Maya terms, right?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_05: But you have Christian concepts that don't exist, obviously, to the Maya.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_05: So you had to create this word kunab ku.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_06: And which literally means the one God.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, convenient.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_05: And they use it to start Christianizing Maya people, and you still see this word pop up, and it's always within the same circles uh of individuals who were promoting the 2012 apocalypse stuff.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_05: You know, you have Arguez that's you know, especially really going all in on this uh Hunab Ku idea.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_05: I think he might even be the first to use the symbol uh as a circle, I believe.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_06: You know the story behind that?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_06: It's a cool story.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_06: It's a cool story, but it's a crazy story.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_04: I want you to tell it though, because I would like for you, if you could, um, explain the difference between the Armageddon uh approach to 2012 versus the New Ager approach to 2012, which is a little bit different.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, and that can lead into the Hunabku.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_06: Well, Armageddon Armageddon is a term that comes out of the book of Revelation.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_06: It's a it's a Christian term, um, and uh it actually derives from Har Magiddo.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_06: There's actually an archaeological site in in northern Israel called Megiddow, uh, which is where this battle is supposed to take place.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_06: Um but um for many people, and actually there are a lot of other dimensions to this, the idea was that Armageddon was going to be this end this battle before the end of the world, and then after Armageddon, uh you have the second coming of Jesus Christ, and and then he raptures everyone, they they they go up to heaven.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um and um that really wasn't as much a part of the um the 2012 thing uh for for the new agers.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_06: What they focused it on, and and there's been kind of a linguistic shift, but some people use the words Armageddon and Apocalypse as if they mean the same thing.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_06: But in fact, apocalypse just means an unveiling, apocalypsis.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_06: It just means showing something new.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_06: It doesn't mean a battle, it doesn't mean a uh a devastating thing.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_06: And so the the 2012 beliefs kind of split into people who believed it was going to be the end of the world and people who believed it was going to be a transformation of consciousness, something would cause us to finally realize that all of these parapsychological phenomena are real, uh, that can we can really teleport, we can really be telepathic, we can really do remote viewing, um, we can levitate, we can use magic, all of these types of things will be proven to be real.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_06: That's ultimately sort of what the what the revelation is.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_04: And it kind of also ties into the whole age of Aquarius uh ideology that new agers were pushing since the 70s, right?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_06: Exactly.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_06: And and the and the Western astrology of the age of Aquarius gets bundled together with this Maya astrology, um, so that it literally becomes the new age of Aquarius.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_06: That's that's where the concept of new age comes from, although it it actually goes back to the to the 1820s, but um, but that's what that's what this new age is, and a new age of uh consciousness and realization.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_06: Um another thing that tends to go along with this, of course, with Arguez and Makinna and things like that, is that it's the use of psychedelics that will reveal the reality of this alternative consciousness.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_06: Um, so it's also a psychedelic revelation.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_06: Um and then, of course, the destruction part gets linked to ideas about the 12th planet, Nibiru, planet X, that was going to smash into the Earth and destroy it.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, that whole Zechariah Sitchin thing.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_06: That's a whole other dimension.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_06: And then people, and actually Roland Emmerich uses in the film the idea about sunspots, that the sun is gonna go haywire, uh, or the Yellowstone volcano is going to explode.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um, or the poles are gonna invert.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_06: Or the big the big one is gonna hit the Sun Andreas Fault, or all of these types of things get bundled into this this mythology.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_06: Mass hysteria.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_06: Right, exactly.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_06: Um but you know, it's it's also to kind of segue into the hunapku thing, uh, Arguayas presents this black and white hunapku symbol as sort of a Maya yin and yang.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um, that it's it's black, it's white, so things things are both good and bad at the same time.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_06: A disaster is also a uh a revelation.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_06: Um, everything contains its opposite, all of these kind of esoteric beliefs are part of that.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but all of this comes out of uh basically an accident.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_06: An accident that happens when a uh a specialist in Aztec uh Aztec archaeology and especially Aztec writing, he's actually just recently published a book on Aztec writing.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_06: His name is Gordon Whitaker.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_06: Um in the uh in in the early 1970s, um, he's a student at Brandeis University.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_06: And because he's interested in Aztec things Aztec, Aztec lore, Aztec art, Aztec religion.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_06: Wait, hold on, just pause.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_06: The Gordon Whitaker, like who just wrote the book on deciphering The Gordon Whitaker, who just wrote the book on deciphering Aztec writing.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_06: Nice.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_06: We're ratchet it back to the early 1970s when he's in college.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_06: Um what he does is he he he finds this design in the Codex Maglia Beggiano, which was discovered in Italy and it's one of the one of the most famous Aztec codices.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, and he takes this design uh that he finds in the book and paints it as a mural on the wall of his dormitory room.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_06: And and he just loves this design.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_06: Um and when he travels to um Oaxaca in I think it's well, I've forgotten exactly what the dates are, 1972 or something like that.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_06: We'll just say 1972.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he takes this design and uh goes to the weavers of Oaxaca and and and want and wants to commission a rug because they make these beautiful woven rugs.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_06: And he says, wouldn't it be cool if they were able to take this design that I painted on my dormitory room uh and and make it into a woven rug?
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_06: So he gives them the design, they say you know, it's gonna take a few months, you know, we'll have it ready for you next year.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_06: Um and then uh he doesn't get funding to go back the following year.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_06: And when he eventually goes back about two or three years later, he finds that not only did they make this design for him, but the weavers thought the design was so cool that they made lots of this design and become one of their favorite designs to make.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_06: And um Jose Arguez visits this same town and sees this design and and and and buys it and and adopts it and then turns it into his logo.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_06: So it's actually a uh it's actually Gordon Whitaker who creates this meme, you know, and and Jose Arguez makes it go viral.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_05: And it's funny because whenever I would argue with people about the origins of this symbol, they would always point to the story that Jose Argüez would tell, where he's like, Well, of course it's a traditional symbol.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_05: I I saw it being woven on these rugs in this village, and that's where I bought mine.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_05: And so it has to be it's obviously legitimate.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_05: Why would these people be, you know, selling rugs?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_05: Don't make stuff for tourists, right?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_06: Well, and they don't get designs from whatever hippies are traveling through and say, you know, make this for me.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, that this is something people don't really appreciate as the way that they should, which is that first with the beats in the 1950s, actually, it starts after the Second World War, when American GIs have traveled all over the place.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_06: And then the ex-GIs and others travel to these places in the 1950s.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, they sort of beat down the path that hippies follow with their backpacks in the 1960s.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_06: But you get this massive syncretism that's taking place from the San Francisco Bay Area to remote islands in the Pacific or rainforests of South America or villages in Guatemala or wherever it happens to be.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_06: And then what happens is people later say, oh man, these people all believe the same thing.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_06: They're all using the same symbols.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_06: Well, yeah, but where'd they get them from?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_06: They get them from these traveling beats and hippies who introduced these ideas to to Tibet, you know, to the Hopi, to wherever it happens to be.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_06: It's not because they had an original ancestral origin in all of these places.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_06: It's because rural syncretism has has spread these ideas all over the place.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_05: And you see this a lot.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um every now and then I'll see somebody uh post a photo online of some place in the southwest or some part of the United States that has a Nahuatl name.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_05: And they'll be like, this is proof that our ancestors traveled up here and named these places.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_05: Why else would they have a Nahuat name?
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_05: You know, why would this mountain be called Mount Teocali or whatever?
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_05: And then it's like you're saying, if you just go back a couple of steps, excuse me, what usually happens is you get these soldiers who had fought in the Mexican-American War, are now leading the surveys of the newly acquired land.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_05: So they fought in Mexico, they were exposed to the the the Teocalis, and they were exposed to all of these, you know, monumental architecture and stuff.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_05: And so then these these same guys, like 1849, 1850s, they're now out uh leading surveys of the southwestern United States, and they're seeing a mountain, and they're like, oh, that mountain kind of looks like an Aztec temple.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna call it Mount Teocali because that's you know what I learned when I was down there, and this is what it reminds me of.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_05: And to, you know, a T, every single time I see somebody present this as evidence, I'm like, well, scratch a little bit deeper below that surface because it's almost always a soldier who fought in the Mexican-American War who came up with those names.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and um, people don't want to hear that.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_06: No, they don't.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_06: Well, you know, religious historian, people who specialize in in religious studies have a term for this.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_06: It's it's called the pizza effect.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and what the pizza effect refers to is the fact that um the pizza was not invented in Italy.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_06: Uh the pizza was invented in Connecticut.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_06: Um, you know, they're what?
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_06: Pizzas were invented in Connecticut.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_06: They were a way for Italian immigrant workers to grab a quick lunch, is that they would stop off and and and and they would make this, you know, they'd make this crust thing and they'd put some tomato sauce on it and some mozzarella, and and that was a quick lunch for Italian workers in Connecticut.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_06: However, when tourists began going to Italy and saying, Wow, we'd really like to find some authentic pizza here, um, Italian restaurateur said, Oh, we have the authentic pizza, we have the first pizza restaurant that ever existed.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_06: Let us make you this Italian pizza.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but because it's a cuisine that appeared in Connecticut, and then it becomes something of value that people can reproduce someplace else.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and actually the term pizza effect is generally was originally coined not only on the story of the pizza, but it was used to explain uh Hindu gurus um from Southern California who go back to India and get this big following, and then they come back to California and say, Look, all of these people in India are are are following me because I'm an off I'm an authentic guru.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and it's sort of is this this this uh invention, and actually I love this phrase, invention of sacred tradition.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_06: It it you know that's kind of a contradictory phrase.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_06: But you think of a sacred tradition as being something, man, that's old, that's been around for thousands of years.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_06: But no, invention uh traditions get invented, and sacred traditions get invented all the time, and the four agreements is this example.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_05: Um you see this with the the singing bulls, right?
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_05: The uh that's not a part of you know what do they call them, the Himalayan or whatever the tradition that it supposedly comes from, or of the Tibetan, yes, the Tibetan singing bulls.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_05: And what happened there was somebody just thought that they were cool and um was using them, and then the Tibetans were like, Oh yeah, those are cool.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_05: And so then they kind of adopted them, right?
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_05: And then now they get passed off as like this is an ancient Yeah.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_06: There are there are a lot of other examples.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_06: Uh belly dancing.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_06: Very recent.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_06: Belly dancing was actually invented in Hollywood, it's not something that came from the Middle East.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and and so belly dancers learn these belly dancing traditions and take it back to other places.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but there's so many, so many other examples of those kinds of things.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you were gonna talk about the four agreements, not the four disagreements, but the four agreements.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_06: Well, I was the four agreements, but of course the four agreements that that follows on Carlos Castaneda, uh, who perpetrates one of the biggest hoaxes in age history by inventing uh Don Juan Matus uh and sort of plagiarizing his fellow graduate students.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_06: This has been pretty well documented, plagiarizing his fellow graduate students and and and creating this uh this character that he claimed really existed and taught him all of these things when in fact all of it was uh was fabricated.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and we know that because in his in his books, some of his books he actually gives kind of dates when he talked to Don Juan Matus.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_06: And somebody went to the library at UCLA and checked the library records, and it turns out that on many of the days at Castaneda, Castaneda, he took off the Inye, Castaneda um was uh claiming that he was with Don Juan Matus, he was actually in the in the library at UCLA play rising sources on Eastern philosophy.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_05: He was with him in spirit.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we need to do a show on him because this story is just completely absurd and fascinating at the same time.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_04: And then especially towards the end, like a lot of the people that stuck with him, all these women that ended up disappearing in the desert.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's a pretty tragic story.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, pretty tragic.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_06: But it's also one, you know, going to sit back to something Curly said, the reason why the whole Castaneda thing happened, and I always say Castaneda because he he never used the NYA, and I think that that sort of represents who he was going for.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but um his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, was published by the University of California Press.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_06: And they made a shitload of money from selling it.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_06: Uh if it if it hadn't been a commercial success, no one would ever have heard of him.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_06: Um but but but that's what happened.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_06: And it and it just happened at the right time in the right place.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_06: There were there were a lot of a lot of people in California who were who were who wanted to read that stuff.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_04: So he was just basically capitalizing on on the entire idea of people reconnecting with indigenous traditions and the hippies and connecting it with the Maya and prophecy and all this stuff.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_04: So you just kind of sort of went along with that griff that that he felt like these people are doing it, I could too.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_06: Right, right.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_06: And and and the weird thing is that that's also a pizza effect deal.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_06: A lot of people don't realize this, but the the the the the fringe and the love beads and the headbands and the long hair and all of that stuff that we associate with American hypopies in the 1960s, that came from Germany.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_06: It it came Yeah, it came from Germany.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_06: It it it came from a movement that began in the in the 1940s or earlier, uh, and actually goes back to the uh the novels of a guy named Karl May, uh, who in the late 19th century wrote these uh German novels that were set in the American West.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and they featured native native heroes and and and and native lore.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and they were so popular in Germany that the Germans began dressing like Native Americans.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_06: They would they would make teepees and they would go out into the countryside, and there was a whole back to nature thing.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_06: The first hippies in California are German immigrants.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_04: Wow, I've never heard of this before.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_04: I always assume that the hippies were sort of like the the next, like you were saying earlier, the next generation that follows the beat generation because even between the beats and the hippies, there was this kind of antagonism that was taking place.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_04: The beats didn't really care much for the hippies because they felt like they were just uh a bunch of uh wannabe beats in effect, but they were kind of watering down what it meant to be a beat, and so they call them hippies.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_04: Right, yeah, and so and so my assumption had always been that they were just kind of like a more sort of watered down version of the beats that had that was doing more drugs than the beats had done.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_04: But you're saying that that they're they're actually the origin of the hippie is from Germany, yeah well, yeah.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_05: I mean that's why they love Volkswagens.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_05: The connection was always there, it was always white in the wide open, and that's why they love those damn little uh VW buses.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_06: It actually comes out of something uh called the Vanderfogel movement or the wandering bird movement, uh, which is the idea that to be truly free, you would leave the city and go out into the countryside and and be free like a bird.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_06: Um and it had to do with it was a it was a real back to nature movement, uh, which actually you know influenced Adolf Hitler.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_06: You know, he was a vegetarian, he was he was very much into this Lebensraum.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_06: In fact, the the the justification for the Nazi invasion of all of their neighboring countries was this idea of getting living room, more more room for people to live out in nature.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_06: And that's why you had to get rid of the Jews and and and everybody else is to create more space so that people could live out in nature.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_06: And it and it was this nature uh fetishization in some ways that that becomes the core of what happens in terms of the the 60s movement in in the US.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_06: And a lot of people don't really understand that, but it yeah, it's true.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_05: In fact, well, what I'm getting from all this is do not trust hippies.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_05: God damn.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_05: Well genocidal machinations of the hippies.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_06: And and as you go, as you guys know, the the the relationship between the hippies and the chicanos was not always the best.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_06: Well although there was a lot of appropriation that went on, of course.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_05: Well, there's one individual um who ran in these same circles uh of of thought of Arguez and also influenced the Chicano movement to a very large extent, to an extent that I don't think a lot of people realize, and that is Domingo Martinez Paredes, who really, you know, because we were talking about the Hunapku thing, and he was really this one of the guys that um people point to as you know, this guy really, really pushed that a lot, and he wrote a book about it.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_05: Um I forget the the subtitle to it.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_05: There you go.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and he was, I mean, when you look at him on you know, on the surface level, he seems super legit, right?
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_05: Because he's Yucateco, he speaks his language, he's clearly very indigenous, he taught at Unam.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_05: But he also ran uh with you know, the circles that he ran with or that he was associated with were notoriously ultranationalistic, pseudo pseudoscientific, pseudo-historical historical.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_05: And this guy winds up writing this piece about how the Maya knew about atomic energy and and and the atom, and and it winds up getting translated into English and spreads like wildfire through Chicano communities at the time.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_06: Um Yeah, there's actually a uh there's a short essay that he writes that appears in an anthology called Aslan, uh, which winds up being on the reading list of of most Chicano studies programs.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_04: Well, Luis Valdez really took to his uh writings.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, uh Luis Valdez's play Movimento Serpentino is based basically on the teachings of Paredes.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_04: And and he, because he was um part of that emerging Teatro Campesino movement, the the kind of the reincorporation of the carpas for the movimento to spread awareness of the movement of the cause, that message gets adopted by other artists and other people who are looking to tap into this idea of reconnecting with your indigenous roots.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_04: And so, you know, early on the Chicano movement, uh all those re-in um uh movements to re-indigenize yourselves can be traced directly to Paredes through the MCRCA.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, and they have they have some deep roots also.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_06: Another dimension to what uh Martinez Paredes was doing is that through Freemasonry, through his membership in a Masonic Lodge, he was also connecting with newspaper editors and bankers and lawyers and doctors.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, the the Freemasons was was like a fraternity for the elites, uh, where they could get together and they could basically the way I've always described Freemasonry is it's it was an excuse for wealthy Christian men to study Kabbalah and Jewish mysteries without actually having to talk to any Jews.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_06: So there's a lot of Jewish esoteric that makes its way in through Freemasonry, especially this preoccupation with Solomon's temple and Solomon's seal and all of these other kind of esoteric things.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um and it's it's pretty complicated as well.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_06: In fact, um, you know, Mexican Freemasonry, uh, Guatemalan Freemasonry, and actually, probably the most one of the most prominent Guatemalan Freemasons was uh Miguel Angel Asturias, uh, who wrote Hombres de Maíz, very, very influential uh Guatemalan novelist.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but he was he was an avid Freemason.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and I think these Freemasons of Latin America would get together at conventions and communicate with each other.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but Latin American Freemasonry actually grows out of French Freemasonry, whereas Freemasonry in the United States really comes out of Scottish Freemasonry.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_06: So there's there are a couple of interesting um flows that that happen there, but it's through Freemasonry and also something called Rosicrucianism, the Rosicrucians, that become ways for the educated elite, but not necessarily the academic elite, to plug into what they felt were international movements that helped them to know what was really happening um in Europe and in Asia and in other places.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_06: It was it was it was an international business fraternity.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_04: So would it be could it be described as obscurantist uh uh enlightenment to a degree?
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_06: Um I'm not sure what you mean by obscurantist.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_06: It definitely wasn't an attempt at enlightenment, that's for sure.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_06: But what do you mean by obscurantist?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_04: Well, in the sense that they're looking at things that are are sort of obscure and occult and not necessarily out in the public view or necessarily accepted in the mainstream in a to a degree.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_06: Very much so.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, the word I use for that is esoteric.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um but another another term that you often hear is gnostico.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_04: We were the gnosticos.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_05: Oh yeah.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_05: We used to have some gnosticos show up to our Nahuat study groups uh back in uh in Fort Worth, Texas.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_05: So shout out to the Gnosticos if you're listening.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_05: Hope you're all doing well.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, the Gnosticos, I remember dealing with the Gnosticos when I was uh I was giving some tours in in Mexico a long time back.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_06: I took a group from the university down to visit some some Maya ruins in the Yucatan, and we had to wait for the Gnosticos who were doing their rituals up on the up on the end.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_06: And the and the and the local tour guides would complain and they would say, si, son these noos sacan la ropa, walking around naked in the ruins and and harassing the tourists.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_06: Um but uh you know another manifestation of these gnosticos uh is that um the formal name for for some of them is the 13 moon movement, um uh Trece Lunas, or uh which which is comes out of Arguayas's uh calendar movement.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_06: And they are still active.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_06: The dream spell is that's the dream spell.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_06: That's the dream spell and the 13 moon thing.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um and uh you know Hunbat's men gets involved with this stuff.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_06: Crystal skulls, and the crystal skulls become a part of it.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_06: You have the crystal skull, all of that.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_06: And actually, Hunbat's men is it something I've been trying to find out.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_06: Maybe maybe you guys can can trace this.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_06: I think Hunbat's men gets his ideas directly from uh Martinez Paredes because Hunbat's men has some has some Freemason Masonry stuff and some references to Hunbat's men and his stuff.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_06: And then, of course, as you know, it's the this phrase inlack etch.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_06: Uh that that that's introduced by by Martinez Paredes.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_05: Well, um, and popularized by Luis Valdés, right?
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_05: And he's because he has that poem.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_05: And you know what?
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_05: It's like you had referred to the the four agreements earlier.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, the poem is nice.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_05: You know, you were the other me.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_05: When I harm myself, you know, when I harm you, I harm myself.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_05: Like these are very um common sense, very nice, you know, things.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_05: Tonic golden rule things, yeah.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, yeah, but the problem is is when they attribute like sort of antiquity, antiquity to them.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_05: Like these were taught by some unnamed elder in a jungle somewhere, and we've been passing them down for generations.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_05: Instead of just saying, like, I met this guy and he taught me this thing, and I thought it was really cool.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_05: But that's not sexy, right?
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_05: It's hard to make money off of that, so you have to sex it.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_04: But it it also gives off the impression that you're not legitimate.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_04: And a lot, that's the mistake.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_04: We've talked about this before.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_04: The mistake that a lot of our people do is to try to bring this sort of air of legitimacy to the things that they say, that they preach, that they espouse.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_04: They want to sort of make this claim of antiquity that it's uh from that the tradition that they learned is something that traces back generations through this unbroken chain of elders, etc., etc.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_04: And they they have no proof of it.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_04: It's just they heard it from someone who told them a thing and they just made all these assumptions most of the time, and and half of the time, they're just trying to make the claim so that people can believe and follow them.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_06: Well, and I think it's very damaging because basically the philosophical ideas are often very good philosophical ideas.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_06: They're they're good for people, they're good for society, they're good for the planet.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but you can you can embrace the philosophy without accepting the magic.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_06: You can you can embrace the philosophy without accepting the bogus history and archaeology.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_06: You know, it it you don't it doesn't have to all come together.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_06: You know, there's some really good Christians, there's some really good Christians who don't necessarily believe in the in the magical parts of core Christian doctrine.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and and it's it's kind of like that.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_06: It it but not everybody is like that.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_06: Some people are very, very happy with just having a superficial knowledge, and you know, please don't tell me anything more.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_06: I don't want to go any farther than that.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_06: This is working for me right now.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_06: And and if I go any deeper, then you're gonna make me question my beliefs.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_06: And I don't want to question my beliefs, so so I'm not going to go there.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_05: And we see this a lot specifically with Domingo Martinez Paredes, because he is up.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, if you look at a lot of Chicano studies programs right now, a lot of them are using uh quote-unquote teachings of Domingo Martinez Paredes in their curriculum, and it's being passed off as like the well, this is this ancient Maya, like Ruben was saying, unbroken chain.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_05: We could trace it to this man who learned it from his.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_05: But in reality, because you brought up French Freemasonry, a lot of the stuff that he's of his alleged teachings are coming straight from guys like Augustus Leplonjon, who was a French Freemason, occultist, you know.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_05: An archaeologist at at for his time, right?
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_06: He discovered the Well, for his time, I don't think archaeologists own him anymore.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_05: No, no.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_05: But I mean, you know, at at this time, the formative years of archaeology when it was first really becoming what it was, when it was a free for all, yeah.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_05: Basically.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, didn't Try to steal a Chuck Bul at one point.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, all of that's true.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_06: But you know, in in defense of Le Planchon, and this may sound really strange coming from me because I think he was a total crackpot, but in defense of Le Planjon, his main argument was look at all of this amazing stuff in Mexico.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_06: Look at all these incredible ruins and sculptures and writing, and no one's paying any attention to it.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_06: You know, you're paying attention to the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_06: Why aren't you paying attention to this?
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_06: Now he thought people should pay attention to it because he believed that Freemasonry had actually begun in the Yucatan and not in Egypt as the Freemasons were claimed, the French Freemasons claimed, uh, or in Jerusalem, as the Scottish Freemasons like to claim.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_06: He said that Freemasonry originated in in Mexico, and that was his main shift.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_06: And then it went to Atlantis that went from went from Mexico to Atlantis to Egypt.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_04: But a wrench, a wrench in that in that defense of Le Planjan is that he was saying, yes, look at all this stuff we can plunder as well.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's kind of a double-edged story.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_06: Which of course he did.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_06: And you know, he took it to New York where he he did he a lot of it was in what a building was called the Crystal Palace, uh, which was um this big pavilion in New York where people could see all kinds of interesting, and it burned down, and a lot of the stuff that he collected was lost in that fire uh because he had brought it out.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but there's a there's a uh an excellent book, and I'm not forgetting the name of the author at this moment, it's slipping out of my mind, called Romancing the Maya.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_06: Um what is his name?
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_06: I know it.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_06: I gotta look it up.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_06: I'm I I feel embarrassed that I've forgotten his name.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_06: But and he makes the argument that it was up until the Mexican Revolution that people living in the United States assumed that Mexico was going to be part of Manifest Destiny and that all of these ruins and all of these sites and all of these places were going to be as much a part of the United States as California was.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_05: So you get, and I and I don't want to seem like I'm hammering on Domingo Martinez Paredes, but so this guy he uh he winds up influencing all of these uh you know social movements in Mexico.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_05: He comes from a group called the MCRCA, and he influences guys like Unbatzmen, um, who teaches that the Maya did yoga and acupuncture.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_06: And he also promotes uh he also promotes a fake codex, which is which is worth looking into.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_05: Oh yeah.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_05: Umbatsmen or uh Unbatzman because they both promote a fake codex.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_05: Uh maybe he got it from Paredes.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_05: They shared it.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_05: They shared the same fake codex.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_05: Uh and I can't remember the name of the fake codex that Porua.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_05: The Codex Porua.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_05: That's the Porua, yeah.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_05: Is is that also the one that Unbatzmin promotes?
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, I I just know it from Umbatzmin.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_06: I didn't know that Martinez didn't.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_05: That's something we just learned.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_05: He got it from Martinez Parez.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_05: Um so that's actually the the book that we were talking about earlier when you asked me the the book that I the Christina Yeah, she sent me the scan.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_05: Because I've been after a copy of it for such a long time because it's such an obvious fake.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_05: Like nobody can look at the Codex Porua and be like, oh, this is a legitimate Maya Codex.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, my favorite illustration from it is is the guy with the big dick next to the woman who's whatever.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_06: Not to be indelegate there, but that's what it shows.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_05: And and he's like holding uh what looks like a space laser, right?
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_05: Like a ray gun.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_05: And he has like gems in his penis.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_05: Aliens.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_05: And there's like another image in there of uh of a it's it might supposed to be a temple, but it looks like a birthday cake.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_05: And ah man, it's so bad.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_05: It is such a horrible.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_05: I did not know that Unbat's men was also promoting the the Codex book.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_06: Oh yeah, sure.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_06: It's it's it's in his it's in his book.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_06: He actually reproduces an illustration of it in his in his uh oh man.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_06: Oh man, what's that book called?
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_04: Complete fraud.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_04: And people follow these guys.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_04: People follow these guys.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_06: Well, and Hunbat's men's son is, I think, still uh promoting this stuff.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_06: I think he's picked up where his dad left off and is um is still carrying forward with it.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_05: Um this this is like a final point that I want to sort of get into is um because I don't want to take up too much of your time.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um you know, we're pointing out all of this stuff, all this fake, these bizarre ideas, conspiracist thinking.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_05: When I bring this stuff up to people, a lot of times the pushback I get is is like, well, what's the harm?
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_05: Right?
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_05: If people want to believe this stuff, it's not hurting anybody.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_05: But I would argue that it is, that it's uh a lot of it's racist, a lot of it is you know, just this distortion of history to begin with, that's harmful in my opinion.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_04: But it's also hurting our credibility as a people.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_04: Those of us that are reconnecting with our uh, you know, indigenous spirituality, our culture, our roots, and and we have to, you know, swim through this sea of nonsense, and then people are just like, see, look at that.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_06: Well, a lot of it was frankly white supremacist as well.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_06: When people imagined the ancient Mayas, they weren't imagining the people that they saw today, they were imagining an ancient superior white people.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, that that that's that's what Le Plan Jean had in his mind.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_06: And then in terms of harm, uh something something that uh that is worth thinking about is that um you know, as this 2012 thing was developing, people were people were taking their own lives.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_06: There were some people who committed suicide, people sold their houses, people did all kinds of things.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_06: Um Jared Lee Lofner, um who is uh the one who shot the uh Arizona Congressman um in um in 2011, I think it was, maybe beginning of 2012, he was a 2012.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_06: He had been posting on above top secret about the end of the world.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, and that was very much a part of his his thinking.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and then something that I posted as a a question on Twitter, because I have not been able to find the answer.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_06: I I just read in today's news that Alex Jones began talking about uh how the Sandy Hook Massacre, Sandy Hook, Sandy Hook uh tragedy, where all these children and teachers were killed, uh, he began saying that it was fake within just hours of its happening, right the same day.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it happened on December 14, 2012, exactly one week before December 21st, 2012.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_06: And Adam Lanza, who is the 20-year-old shooter who did all of that horrible destruction, was in just the right demographic to be believing conspiracy theories, to be surfing the web and reading all of these web pages about fake stuff, to be watching videos on YouTube of which there were hundreds about how the end of the world was coming.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_06: And it kind of raised in my mind the question of, you know, was that a factor in his thinking?
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_06: Um did did did he do what he did because he thought the world was going to end, because he was believing all of this conspiracy theory nonsense?
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_04: That couldn't be a possibility.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_06: Unfortunately, we cannot answer that question because all of the all of the the Alex Jones stuff and everything else basically put up such a huge wall of shit around Sandy Hook, um, that it's very difficult to get what the real story was.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_05: Well, even just recently, uh is like a week ago, you had this guy in Michigan, um, the the QAnon dad, they're calling him, right.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_05: Killed his wife and shot his daughter, killed their dog, and all because of this conspiracy, because he had this mindset where he was believing, you know, these outlandish conspiracies.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_05: And whenever you have conspiracies like this, people who are prone to believe this stuff, I've never met anybody who's like, well, I only believe in this, right?
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_05: They they tend to believe in it all or a lot of it.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_05: So they're always drawing from pseudo history, pseudo-archaeology, and it's always got like this weird ultra-nationalist undertones to it, and then they start thinking about conspiracies and end of the world and alien disclosure.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_05: And and so I think it is harmful.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's extremely harmful.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_06: The QAnon shaman, the guy with the buffalo horns and the and and the fur hat painted in red, white, and blue.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um, he was into all of this stuff.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_06: He he he he would make videos and put them on YouTube about Atlantis and about UFOs and about all of this stuff.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Stephanie Halmhofer, uh, who's uh another Twitter friend of ours, is a graduate student in Canada, she wrote a wonderful essay that's called Um Pseudo-archaeology at the Capitol, in which she gives the background to how various archaeology-linked conspiracy theories were part of the thinking of some of the people who were involved in the insurrection on January 6th, uh, 2021.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_06: Um these are not harmless things.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_06: Conspiracy theory hurts people.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and and it should not be a surprise that lies hurt people.
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_06: The truth is always better, the truth is always deeper.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_06: And basically, you know, with with these things that we're talking about, if you follow the truth far enough, you will discover what the lies are.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and and that can be, you know, for for someone who's a genuine spiritual seeker, discovering that what you believe are lies can be can be a devastating personal experience.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_06: Hopefully people can deal with it in a mature way.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_06: But sometimes people people become convinced that that the lies are truth and that there's a conspiracy to say that they're lies, and then that can convert into a uh frustration and anger at those people who they think are um hiding the real truth, which is actually not the truth, but but a lie.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_06: And it's in that anger, it's in that, it's in that reaction that we can get violence and that we can get things like what happened in Michigan or what happened in Arizona, or maybe what happened at Sandy Hook.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_06: I I really can't say.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but um, but but these are these are serious, dangerous things.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um we get pushback a lot on the show, people asking us, like, why are you always pointing this stuff out?
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_05: Like, why can't you just let people believe what they want to believe?
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm always like, Well, I think I I mean, one, because it's dangerous, and two, I don't know, just I have uh like I have an obligation, a moral, ethical, whatever you want to call it, obligation to confront and counteract what I see are destructive things, especially when it comes to like my own people's histories, right?
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_05: Like I I feel this responsibility to always I don't know if you know what do you think, Ruben, when people tell us about it.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I mean, it kind of reminds me of a conversation we had not too long ago with a mutual friend of ours, and uh the same kind of sentiment came up.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_04: Why do we do this?
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh one of the arguments that has been levied against us is that we're providing ammo to people who might want to discredit us as a people, as as indigenous peoples to to the Americas, because that that that's part of the conversation that we're having as well through um the shows that we that we're doing here.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_04: It's not we're we're just we're not just exposing the pseudo history and the pseudoscience, but we're also sort of planting a flag and saying we're also indigenous, just like other people are indigenous to this place.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_04: And so we get accused of providing sort of ammo that that sort of countervails that argument.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_04: And we say, no, in fact, what we're doing is we're providing people with a tool to be able to defend themselves whenever they encounter someone who might point to these things that they might not be aware of, to say, ah, well, you know, then how come if you're really indigenous or if you're if you're really following the traditional um traditional ways, how come you know this thing that you're doing originates over here in this thing?
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're not aware of it, how can you defend yourself?
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_04: And so part of what we would try to do is we try to say, no, it's better to understand the facts, the truth as they are, so that you can understand not only where they come from, but also when when this comes up, you can you can have a uh uh a conversation with someone and explain to them, look, this we do this because we are uh um recovering our traditional ways that were disconnected to us as a people, as Curly was saying.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's kind of like part of the obligation that we have as Chicanos who are rooted in our traditional cultures, as we're saying, we have a history here, and there's no need to embellish it with nonsense and to make stuff up and to create uh alternative histories to put it in a certain way, right?
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_04: We have valid histories that that date for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that we can sort of trace back and connect and say we are the people that we are today because of those histories that came and the people that came before us.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's why we do this stuff, you know?
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_04: And and so it's important that we be honest with ourselves and and be honest with others.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and and like you were saying, the truth is is is like medicine, right?
• 1:23:12
  SPEAKER_04: Is that's one of the things that we say on this show is that it's a medicine.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_04: But before we get to the truth of the medicine, I don't know if Curly has any more questions, but I wanted to ask you, John, uh, before we go, uh since this is the 10th uh year anniversary of uh the 2012 um sort of uh hysteria.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's one way of looking at it.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_04: Do you have any um sort of reflections on on this date, 10 years?
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, sure.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_06: Um the 10th anniversary is not super important.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_06: Uh a base 10 mathematics system is a western system.
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_06: The Maya system was big decimal based on based on 20, not 10.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_06: So it's the 20th anniversary that will matter.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_04: There you go.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_04: Well, wait, I thought we were base six, the Maya.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I heard recently is a six fingers.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_06: But uh something that's worth thinking about, and I this is one of the reasons why I was interested in the whole 2020 thing to begin with, is that often the most intense uh and elaborate sacred traditions are invented a generation or two after the events that took place.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_06: And it's very important to be mindful of the fact that the Gospels and the letters of Paul and most of the New Testament was written a whole generation, in some cases a hundred years after the crucifixion.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, it's much easier to reinvent a story after events have passed and people don't remember.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_06: Um, that makes the creation of a fake history, um, and I don't mean to offend anybody with that, but it it is something to consider.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_06: It does make it easier to edit out those things that you don't want, to get rid of those Gnostic gospels and not include this in the canon and not tell that part of the story.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and the real story is actually much more complex and generally often much more satisfying and much more meaningful when you sort of go outside of the official history and and and find these other bits and pieces of it.
• 1:25:22
  SPEAKER_06: And so I always thought, hopefully, that my my own scholarship and writings on the whole 2012 movement would become sort of the the future Gnostic documents that people go back to and say, Oh, there's this guy, hoops, he's look at his stuff.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_06: You know, he tells another story, it's a little bit different, but you know, we can go down this rabbit hole.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you have to create your own codex, you have to make your own codex like Paretas did.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_06: Well, people are making codexes now.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_06: The Maya people are learning how to write their hieroglyphic writing again.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_06: They're they're writing their own stories in their own language with their own writing system.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_06: Um tradition is not old or dead or anything.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_06: Tradition is happening right now, you know.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_06: Tradition is happening as we speak.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_06: Um, tradition is also never pure.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, there's no such thing as a pure tradition.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_06: So it's gonna be syncretistic.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_06: You know, we're gonna see a combination of manga and maya.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_04: That's already happening, actually.
• 1:26:19
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's how it works.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_05: One thing that concerns me though, you were talking about how it's easier to change history after everybody's forgotten.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_05: What I'm seeing more and more, though, especially with the MAGA stuff and Trump, is he's doing it like almost day by day, right?
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_05: He could say something one day and then the next day be like, nah, I didn't say that.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_05: That's not how it happened.
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_05: And his followers just buy into it 100%.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_06: It's uh a little disturbing.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_06: Yesterday he said when the FBI came to Mar-a-Lago, what they were really looking for was Hillary Clinton's missing emails.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I guess John Hoops.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_05: It's been a pleasure having you on the show.
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you for coming on.
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_05: Uh it's been a great conversation.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_05: I've enjoyed it.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_05: Hopefully, the listeners have enjoyed it.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_05: If they haven't, you could send all of your uh hate mail to tlakatecat at well.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_06: It may be the 10th anniversary of the the the the Maya apocalypse on December 21st, uh, 2022.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but it's actually 20 years since I first started seriously looking into this.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_06: And and that's that's another story.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_06: I I went out to the Burning Man Festival in Air in Nevada.
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_06: Just recently.
• 1:27:48
  SPEAKER_06: No, in 2002, 20 years ago.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_06: I went that's where that seed was planted when you went out to the city.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_06: That's where I realized, oh shit, these people believe this.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_06: These people really think this is gonna be happening.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_06: Um, because what happened was you guys may remember Y2K.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_06: Everybody thought the planes were gonna fall out of the sky and the banks were gonna stop functioning when Y2K happened.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_06: Well, when Y2K didn't happen, the counterculture said it wasn't Y2K.
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_06: It was Maya thing.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_06: And and so, you know, right right after 2000, and actually it percolates after 9-11, sadly, um, but 2001, 2002, that's when this thing really begins picking up.
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_06: And um that's that's when I got interested.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_06: I said, look, there's some juice in this thing.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_06: There's an there are enough pieces here to put together a really compelling mythology.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and if I had been like Jose Argüey, maybe I would have made my own codex or done something with that.
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_06: But I decided, no, I'm just gonna be an observer and document this thing and see see where it goes.
• 1:28:52
  SPEAKER_06: Um missed your chance.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_06: But ironically, yeah, I missed my I missed my chance, but I kept thinking, I kept thinking, you know, that this is gonna be really pretty spectacular.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_06: Because what happened is Jose Arguayas gets sick and dies in March of 2011 after having spent most of his life pushing this thing, he doesn't make it to the end of the day.
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and you know, I kept thinking, if he makes it, then sure, he's gonna be, you know, a a superstar when when this happens, but but no, that that that didn't happen.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_06: Um so uh and then of course the Sandy Hook tragedy.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_06: Um and actually I was in here here's a story for you.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_06: Um I'll I'll include this, and I don't I know you guys may edit some of this down at some point, but this is a true story.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_06: I was in Helsinki, Finland on December 14, 2012, where Michael Koe and I had been invited to be featured speakers at the European Maya conference in 2012 so that we could speak about 2012.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_06: And I was sitting next to Co when he got a message on his cell phone about the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, um, and and the Sandy Hook children who had died.
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_06: And he looked at me and told me what happened, and we looked each other in the eye, and I know that we were both thinking exactly the same thing, which is that oh my god, we knew something terrible was going to happen.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_06: Here it is.
• 1:30:20
  SPEAKER_06: Um again, I haven't been able to make that connection, but it's always stuck in my mind.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_06: I I'll always remember that moment sitting there with the guy who created the meme uh a week before the event, um, and then uh having this having this realization that these things do could could reverberate or could reverberate in in the real world.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_06: Damn.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_06: Um that's a heavy story.
• 1:30:44
  SPEAKER_06: That's that's a heavy that is a heavy story.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_06: Here's here's a lighter, a lighter finish to it.
• 1:30:49
  SPEAKER_05: And I was gonna make a joke about you missing your chance to be hoops bots men.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_06: Well, that's very true.
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_06: A lighter story is that is that uh is is where I actually was on December 21st, 2012.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_06: Um, Curly began his story by talking about the morning of December 21st, 2012.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_06: Uh well, I got up before dawn that morning.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_06: And I went into a cenote at Chichenitsa, where I was able to see Kunbat's men and a big group of his followers and some other New Age dignitaries in the cenote Ikkil at Chichenitsa, beginning a pre-dawn ceremony to commemorate the transformation of consciousness.
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_06: The new age.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_06: Having watched that, I went to Chichin, where I was able to see and talk to a number of Aztec dancers who had showed up for the occasion to perform in their costumes.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_06: And among the things that were interesting that they told me is that December 21st, 2012 was still not as big as the Equinox thing that happens in March.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_06: In spite of all of the buildup, the vendors make a lot more money on the equinox than they did on 2012, on December 21st, 2012.
• 1:32:11
  SPEAKER_06: Because it falls during spring break, of course.
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_04: Are you sure they were Aztec dancers or not and not Maya dancers?
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_06: Well, they uh I I I'm I'm pretty sure they've come from come from Mexico City.
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_06: The guys I was talking to were uh I don't know specifically what group it is, but I'll send you a photo.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_06: I got some pictures.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_06: I took some pictures.
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_06: We're gonna know everybody in the photo.
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_06: There's some other some other lot have lots and lots of other stories because I worked on this for so long.
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but uh there were issues, there were problems um with um information that should not have been uh made available to people who had not been initiated.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_06: Uh there was work that was coming from uh from from healers in the Yucatan that they had shared with an anthropologist in confidence for his doctoral dissertation that gets taken out of context and amplified.
• 1:33:03
  SPEAKER_06: Um people are very unhappy with with how some of this knowledge was was being used.
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_06: As you said, they it was uh it was it was misappropriated and used in ways that were really ultimately harmful to people.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um and uh something I haven't researched, but I I really think it's worth looking into is how it is that Maya communities were affected by 2012 and what has been what has happened since then.
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_06: Um I really think that the total 2012 thing is what generated a lot of interest that's now resulting in this Maya train that's being built in the Yucatan.
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_04: You know, people really think there's a direct connection to the 2012 sort of uh hype to to the Maya train.
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_06: I I I I would not be surprised if there was because these things take many, many years to conceive of and to finance.
• 1:33:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and it was a huge amount of interest.
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_06: It really was a bubble in interest in things ancient Maya and also things ancient Mexican, and also uh it was a bubble in the metaphysics industry.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_06: You know, people were doing tours and they were selling books.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um, you know, one of the people I work with wrote wrote a uh wrote an article called called uh 2012 by 2012, and he had he had documented 2,012 books that had all mentioned or talked about the 2012 thing in one way or another.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_06: It was a big, it was a big economic bubble.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_06: And I really think that 10 years later, that economic bubble planted the seeds for a lot of Maya tourism projects uh that are happening now.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_06: And what people know that they're gonna hook into, it's very, very smart.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_06: But nostalgia is is a really powerful tool.
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_06: And there are kids who remember something about the Mayas in 2012 who are going to become adults with disposable income, uh, who are going to be interested in in reliving their their their fantasies.
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, but you know what else is going to do it?
• 1:35:02
  SPEAKER_06: This is an interesting note to end on.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_06: Um, you know where the Maya are going to feature or Mayas are going to feature prominently uh before 2012?
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_06: Black Panther Wakanda Forever.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_06: It comes out on November 11.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_06: And actually, this is another another date, just as 1221-12 was the December 21st, 2012 date.
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_06: Wakanda Forever is coming out on 111122.
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_06: I'm sure that they planned that.
• 1:35:37
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but the but but the but the film features a lost Maya civilization um that lives under the water.
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_05: Well, and it's and it's it's um a blend, right?
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_05: Because uh Empire magazine, the cover that just came out to the new Empire magazine is the cast of Wakanda Forever, and so it has Tenochuerta as Namor, but he's wearing a copili or the headdress of Tepe Yolot, which is a Mexica uh deity.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_05: So again with the conflation.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so they're just blending stuff together, and I have a very Michael Co.
• 1:36:15
  SPEAKER_05: I have a very strong suspicion that if they try to say tepeyolot in this movie, they're gonna get it totally wrong.
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_05: Tepe a lottol, um I hope I'm wrong, but um time will tell, right?
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, uh, you know, we've been talking about the truth.
• 1:36:34
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and remember, truth is like medicine, it doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.com and clicking support the podcast.
• 1:37:40
  SPEAKER_05: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
• 1:37:46
  SPEAKER_05: Until next time, Timo Itate.