The Gold Collection

Episode 2 of The Starstuff Stories

From The Sky

Only the sky alone is there; the face of the earth is not clear.

Only the sea alone is pooled under all the sky;

there is nothing whatever gathered together.

It is at rest; not a single thing stirs.

It is held back; kept at rest under the sky.

Mayan creation myth

Between blue-green waters on a thin strip of white sand that divides the world in two, a meeting:

A medieval Spanish Captain confronts the Cacique (Ka-thee-ke), the spiritual and political leader of the local people. The latter, archaeological records suggest, appeared god-like, otherworldly, and magical.

Gold clung to his nose and mouth, it hung from his ears in webs of fine fillagree...

...was draped around his neck in the form of tiny animals, and...

..covering his breast was a large, hammered gold plate.

Selection of adornments - nose, ears, pendant and "crocodile-god" breastplate - likely to have been worn by a "Cacique of Darién" at the time. MET (2002)

In Darién, on the Isthmus of Panamá, the Spaniard asked the “Indian”, as seems to have been the Spanish custom - as Columbus had done on Hispañola -, where he had come by his rich adornments.

Gesturing towards the heavens, the magnificent Cacique of Darién replied “From the sky”.

The Spanish conquistadors have not been shown to be overly understanding of Mesoamerican customs or beliefs. Gold, in the New World, was an expression of the divine power of sacred beings of extraterrestrial realms - it was rain from the sun, the skin of gods (or the excrement of others) - but for the Captain, who was most probably the third in line to an inheritance of barren lands and a meaningless title back in Spain, gold was a means of paying his men and his debts, and a means to acquire land, bodies and industry in this New World...

“From the sky”, insisted the Cacique, again. Whereupon the Captain, impatient now, employed more efficient means of extracting from the Cacique the whereabouts of the (very terrestrial) gold deposits of Panamá.

A captain such as this would have arrived in Panamá around the year 1500. Vasco De Balboa, born in Bierzo, North-west Spain, explored the region in that same year. Balboa was the first European to look out over the Pacific ocean from America, confused perhaps, wondering why the landmass had come to an abrupt end; wondering if his people were, as Columbus's calculations had indicated, on the east coast of India...

Maya, Part I: Landfall on Yucatan

Gonzalo Guerrero was a Spanish explorer. Sailing from Caribbean islands into the Mexican Gulf in 1511, on the high seas a furious storm enveloped his ship. Mountainous waves of a dark churning hurricane fell upon them and almost all were lost but for a handful who, on a hastily built raft, clung on - onward to… who could say?

But more about that later, because the story of Yucatán begins both before and after Guerrero’s ill-fated expedition…

In the 1990s, a team of scientists in a lab in California was observing from above - from satellite imagery - the same deep blue bowl of sea between the Caribbean and central America where centuries earlier, Guerrero and his crew had been thrown from their ship.

These 20th century researchers were also motivated by a rare metal: not gold, but iridium. A decade earlier, in 1980, father and son Luis and Walter Alvarez had shown that all around the world large quantities of iridium are present on a thin, 66 million year-old layer of the earth’s crust. Where had it come from?

From the sky, the Alvarez team suggested, not unlike the Cacique of Darién.

But this heavenly gift fell from the sky with the force of 10 billion world war two-era nuclear bombs and led to the mass extinction event that brought about the end of the dinosaurs.

And the California team of the 1990s concluded that this iridium-rich mega-catastrophe made landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula, just off the coast of the Mexican town of Chicxulub Pueblo, which Gonzalo Guerrero may well have caught a glimpse of as the storm that had smashed his ship lifted and he and his beleaguered crewmen - what was left of them - treading water, saw the misty green Mayan coast for the first time.

The sailors, meanwhile, made landfall a little further along the coast near Uaymil, a coastal settlement in Campeche, in the Mayan lowlands: the thumb-like protuberance bulging out into the Atlantic. For Guerrero and his half-drowned comrades, after days at sea - first under storm then beneath a cruel Caribbean sun - the white sands and lush palm forests of Yucatan withheld the unfortunate truth that the worst was far from over.

Frogs, vultures, snakes... and the blue-green

…Only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night.

Only the Maker, Modeler alone,

Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers,

Begetters are in the water, a glittering light.

They are there, they are enclosed in quetzal feathers, in blue-green ...

Mayan creation myth

Gold floats down to earth as gods shed their skin over ancient Nubia; and when the rains fall from the life-giving sun, they fall as gold into the river beds of Mesoamerica.

Long before Europeans set foot on these lands, those sacred drops of Sun, and flakes of God, were collected and cast into representations of beings with whom we share the terrestrial plane.

"Panning Gold" Woodcut from La historia general y natural de las Indias, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Seville, 1535,

Some of these beings are only temporary inhabitants of this realm, visiting briefly, only on occasion.

Nehebkau the snake, who once emerged from the underworld, is ancient and eternal. At first an evil deity, over the course of generations he took the place of Ra and now shepherds the Sun from one scorched horizon to the other, across the blue, blinding Egyptian sky.

And around the Mesoamerican heavens for thousands of years, a serpent has guided the celestial bodies and has guarded their realm: Feathered Serpent of the Aztec city-states, and K'uk'ulkan, Plumed Serpent of the Mayans - primordial creator gods with blue-green feathers like jade. In ritual the serpent is a conduit for Kings communicating between earthly and spiritual planes.

Aztec feathed serpent

Plumed serpent facial ornaments, Mayan

The frog Tláloc, in his sacred mountain, Cerro Tláloc in Aztec Mexico, and the frog Chaac in Yucatán hold power over storms and rains.

Heqet, another frog-like deity, once a year is embodied in the flooding of the Nile, inundating the plains and the delta, wherefrom the crocodile Sobek emerges to protect those who would be consumed by the waters. As the floods subside they leave a fertile silt from the Ethiopian highlands which gives life to orchards and gardens.

The Mayan Vulture King is terrible, but is the natural order; is fire and rain; is the cycle of the crops; is death and rebirth; he watches over bloodletting and human sacrifice...

... while the Egyptian vulture is Nekhbet, protector of Upper Egypt, who stretches her wings over the golden death mask of Tutankhamun.

Earflares with Condors (Andean Vultures)

Tutankhamun's Nekhbet Headress,

Maya, Part II: The Mouth of the Well

Huge sinkholes pock-mark the Yucatán peninsula like a honeycomb. They are called Cenotes (SEE - nowts), a word derived from their Mayan name: tz’ono'ot, meaning "pit with water". The Cenotes were, in fact, evidence used by the California scientists: they are scars, fractures in the land giving way to a watery abyss, and there are clusters of them along a massive crater wall that was left by that great impact 66 million years ago.

In the Cenotes, the Mayans found their most reliable source of fresh water, but the Cenotes had another use…

Gonzalo Guerrero and his broken, exhausted crewmen finally stumbled onto the beach, legs buckling, unaccustomed to the dry land below.

Were they immediately set upon by the Mayans? Or was it later; hours, days even, as - parched and half-starved - the shipwrecked Spaniards searched for their first mouthful of fresh water since departing from Jamaica? Did their catholic God - a stranger too in these lands of jaguar devils and vulture kings - mercifully shepherd them to a fresh-water well, a tz’ono'ot, where they might drink, wash, even sleep?

We only know that they were found, and if their god had indeed accompanied them into the new world, he had little help to offer. “Stripping, binding, and trampling”, “lengthy torture” was one fate that awaited captives here, as depicted on the sculptures of great Mayan architecture. “Blood and gore were the rule, not the exception, among the city states of the lowlands”, and the lowlands was precisely where the sailors had had the misfortune to land.

Some of these poor, god-fearing catholic men may have come to a yet grimmer end: thrown over the sinkhole’s ridge, down its rocky edge into the endless black reflection of the night sky - the waters of the cavern - where Chaac the frog awaited them in its deep mouth, a gateway to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld.

But two of the shipwrecked Spaniards were spared and taken as slaves. Their stories will conclude this meandering Starstuff-tale of heavens, hells, and fearful golden deities.

From the earth

So there were three of them,

as Hearth of Sky, who came to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent

when the dawn of life was conceived…

Mayan creation myth

The Yaxche is the sacred Maya Ceiba tree whose great roots twist down into the underworld, into Xibalba; whose trunk and branches are the heart of the world; whose flowers brought forth humanity.

Jade Ear Flares: "In Maya belief, ...This shape (a central point surrounded by four additional points) is called a quincunx. The center place was represented by the color yax ("green-blue"), the color of jade, and often took the shape of a great tree, with its roots in the Underworld and branches in the heavens. The center, or axis mundi, was viewed as a place of movement, transition, birth, and transformation, a portal between worlds."

Up the Ceiba tree and into the heavens climbs the sun each day.

But what is a day? A day is a number in a finite cycle of gods.

Each day has its number and each number has its god. When his or her number is called, the corresponding god reemerges from slumber and gives rise to the day. And the day is subject to that god’s character. There are lucky days and unlucky days, wondrous days and terrible days.

Time, then, is a circle - a ring - and what we experience as the present, as today, is in fact just a manifestation of an awakened god.

Today’s number - today’s god - this point on the circle - will come again, and with that knowledge we may understand the past and the present, and prepare for their return.

And in Egypt in the 1800s, as if their numbers were being called, long-forgotten gods began to climb out of the sands of time. As if in accordance with Mayan cosmology, the faces and characters of these gods imbued each passing, newly dawning day during the Egyptian Revival...

Amun, ram-headed, and his crown of two ostrich feathers - the ostrich feather of truth and justice, symbol of Ma'at. The rearing cobra is Uraeus - of royalty, of protection - representing the goddess Wadjet;

Brooch by Carlo Guiliano, Naples or London c. 1865-1895

A Cartier brooch (1920s)...

...with strong feminine symbolism: Hathor the cow and lioness Sekhmet

Brooch by Marcus & Co, New York c.1900

Sekhmet - strength - is the warrior daughter of Ra, the sun sits above her lioness head;

Horned Hathor, the cow, the mother, divine milk-giving queen;

Nekhbet the vulture, or the winged sun, soaring above and watching over us;

and the healing falcon head of Horus

Castellani, Naples, c.1860

Theodore B. Starr, New York, c.1900

Bow harp and Horus-head: healing, peace

The Myth of the Lost Sailors

For almost a decade a Spaniard by the name of Jeronimo de Aguilar lived with the Mayans as a slave. When he was rescued he was unrecognisable. His Spanish was broken, his stomach refused Spanish food, he went naked about camp and squatted when addressed by superiors. But Aguilar swore to them that although on the outside he seemed "Indian", he remained pure on the inside: catholic, a true Spaniard, celibate and observing of the holy calendar despite his many years among the “infidels”.

And Aguilar came to his rescuer, to Hernán Cortés, with information about another lost mariner who, like him, had survived a great storm which had shipwrecked his crew almost ten years earlier, in 1511. Just like Aguilar, this second crewman had survived a horrific confrontation with the Mayans, but remained in the hands and service of the infidels; lost in the New World was Aguilar’s last living crew mate: Gonzalo Guerrero.

Cortés began in the east (right) and made a stop on the island Cozumel, where he meets Aguilar.

They cross the Yucatan peninsula, passing by where Guerrero is rumoured to be, into Aztec lands, finally to Tenochtitlan (blue line ends)

In the years to come, Cortés would muster an army of a hundred thousand, would raid homes and sack sacred cities; would turn neighbouring peoples against one another;

would - it is said - by night, escape from King Moctezuma’s gilded, muralled halls, chased out of the lake city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, and across its causeways on Lake Texcoco, laden with all the gold and silver he and his men could carry...

PAINTINGS of TENOCHTITLAN

below, "La Noche Triste": the Spanish fleeing the city

(AI generatated)

...Out of Tenochtitlan, across the Lake Texcoco causeways, and to the holds of the great Spanish fleet, which, buckling under the spoils (now melted gold bullion) would sail back across Columbus’s West Indian Spice Route from the Caribbean to the Azores, and home to the Kingdom of Castile. Cortés would bring a civilisation that had outlasted the Romans to its knees…

But first, to do so, he would need trusted men who knew the land, its people, and their languages. Aguilar was one such person.

Gonzalo Guerrero was another.

So Cortés sent men to rescue the lost mariners, but when Aguilar came rushing, Guerrero left them waiting; when Aguilar joined the campaign against the Aztecs, Guerrero refused the call. Years later in letters sent to his countrymen, Guerrero wrote of his painted hands and his tattooed body and face. While Aguilar assured his comrades that he had remained celibate, Guerrero wrote to them of his duty to his “wife, and three beautiful children” - perhaps the first mixed-race American family.

And after the surrender of the Aztecs in Mexico, the Spanish armies faltered in their conquest of Mayan Yucatán, so the conquistadors spread tales of Guerrero’s treason: he was still out there, aware of Spanish strategies, he was teaching the Indians to build trenches and showing them how to defend themselves, leading the Mayan resistance to victories over those who would have them cleansed and baptised...

Gonzalo Guerrero, his wife Zazil Há, and their children; monument in Chetumal, Yucatán Peninsula

...and Cortés himself cursed the traitor Guerrero who, in his last stand, brought “A fleet of fifty canoes to aid the natives … and who was killed …nude, his body decorated, who wore Indian dress....”

Colonialism was a startup¹: Black Gold and The Ouroboros of Decolonisation

Columbus had hoped to find black pepper. This much is undeniable. Pimienta de Jamaica (Jamaican allspice), Pimentón (paprika) - spices found on Columbus’s voyages - are names derived from ‘pimienta negra’, the Spanish word for black pepper.

It was a marketing ploy. The Portuguese had a monopoly on black pepper because the pope had given them the western hemisphere, including the trade routes to (east) India.

For centuries, this spice had been among the most desirable commodities in Europe. This "black gold" coated the dishes served at royal dinning tables, was once demanded as ransom from besieged Romans by the invading army of Alaric, King of the Visigoths, and, according to one economist, was responsible for European population (and thus economic) growth coming out of the middle ages due its supposed aphrodisiac effects.

Columbus miscalculated - thought he had got to India from the west (hence west indies).

Where was the precious pepper!?

Were the conquistadors then, merely indebted entrepreneurs who, having taken and lost a hefty gamble - stranded in a strange and threatening new world - then resorted to whatever means necessary to survive and make the most of it? Or, were they brutal and religious ideologues possessed by the sacred mission of their Holy Roman Emperor?

Interesting though it may be to try to get into the heads of these men (both those motivations existed simultaneously most likely) to what extent does the question even matter? The Aztec people were destroyed, and the Mayans almost destroyed: their languages have been all but lost, the Popuh Vol - source of the creation myths cited throughout this text - exists only in its post-columbian form, which impedes our study and knowledge of Mayan religiosity. Only recently have schools in Mexico begun to teach indigenous languages: there was a "Spanish-only education policy enforced during the 20th century"). Gold and silver pieces - artworks, artefacts and religious treasures - returned from America as bullion to finance the Catholic Kings’ military campaigns in Europe.

What happened during the Spanish conquest can be described as epistemicide: the destruction of a people's knowledge system, culture and tradition. Through epistemicide the coloniser renders the colonised people world-less, culture-less, displaced in their own land, exiled from their history and their sense of belonging in the world: their universe, their cosmos, is destroyed.

The legend of the dissident Gonzalo Guerrero is, to me, miraculous because it shows us that there have always been eyes critical of domination. In a very Mayan way, the eyes of the present are the same eyes of the past, re-emerging and emerging again on the ouroboros of decolonisation.

1. "Colonialism was a Startup" - A reference to the wonderful artist Somnath Bhatt