Contemplating Bolon Yokte’ K’uh

Cycles Of History - Unraveling Time’s Thread

For as long as humanity has rendered ordered accounts of key events, putative cycles of history have garnered close attention from scholars and mystics alike. The Maya were only one of many civilizations who conceptualized time as Ouroboros, a symbolic serpent consuming its tail, a temporal round whose end forges a new beginning in its own likeness. Thus, time’s mysterious thread was seen knotted into a ring; dynamics of the past were, when viewed judiciously, held to foreshadow affairs to come. Among Near Eastern peoples, Ibn Khaldun proclaimed the same doctrine in aristocratic courts of 14th Century Egypt, just as the venerable Oswald Spengler explicated it in fine detail to masses of literate Westerners as the last century opened. Many of us at Lucky Six Farms believe cycles of history can either clarify or obfuscate the times we live in, depending upon whether their templates are employed with insight or ignorance.

Cycles Of History - Baktun Endings And Beginnings

Because of the considerable accomplishments of Maya society, especially in the areas of mathematical notation and astronomy, our popular media have focused unusual attention on the publication date of today’s blog: December 21, 2012. For on this day, the circa 5125-year Baktun 13 concludes, drawing the preceding Fourth World to a close with the investiture of Bolon Yokte’ K’uh, God of Nine Strides. He is a deity closely associated with conflict, monopolistic trade, and the ancient Central American Underworld, an astral realm peopled with every species of demonic spirit imaginable. Clearly, both those who see this date as an apocalyptic end of the world and those viewing it as simply a listless, mechanical turnover of an arbitrarily protracted calendar labor in equal error. Neither the Maya of old nor any intelligent person living today would share such extreme and ludicrously unrealistic perspectives. What, then, is the authentic significance of today’s great cyclic transition?

Cycles Of History - The God Of Nine Strides

We do not have to look far to see the frightening manifestations of Bolon Yokte’ K’uh: turn on any televised news report or read an Internet journal documenting current events worldwide. Neither esoteric ceremony nor vision quest is needed to contemplate his terrifying countenance. Indeed, his investiture is unprecedentedly grand; never before have such sophisticated instruments of exploitation, surveillance, and coercion been coordinated and fine-tuned to cover the entire populated globe. But, as the Maya well understood, the human spirit remains ever independent and unconquerable. Though the Underworld’s minions may reign among us for a time, their tenure is as surprisingly brief as it is stark. Such is the Way of Nature and the spiritual Path of humankind. That it is always darkest before the dawn is the primary message of cyclic history. We hope our organic products may provide a little light against the suffocating embrace of Bolon Yokte’ K’uh’s stygian night, bringing sources of blessed illumination that, although humble, will serve those whose faith, compassion, and energy are bound to carry us through this long, challenging sunrise.

By Alan Beck

 

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