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The Barnes Review
A JOURNAL OF POLITICALLY INCORRECT HISTORY
JULY/AUGUST 2019 ❖ VOLUME XXV ❖ NUMBER 4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TULUM: MAYAN CITY OF HIGH TECH
BY MARC ROLAND
Possibly inspired by “white gods” from across the Atlantic, the Mayans are famous for astronomy and calendars. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the achievements of this advanced culture.
A DOG’S TALE OF PRE-COLUMBIAN VOYAGES TO THE AMERICAS
BY MARC ROLAND
Is it possible the old Romans knew much more than we think about the Earth, including the existence of North and South America? Amazingly, it appears they and others did.
BANISHED ROMANOV DUKE TURNS DESERT TO PARADISE
BY MICHAEL WALSH
Although he fell from grace with his imperial family, Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich Romanov was still able to do incredible things, bringing the benefits of Western civilization to the backward Central Asians.
THE LIES OF WORLD WAR II
BY DR. PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Many decades after WWII wound down, the court historians remain mired in the propaganda of the victors. Woe to anyone who gets in their way. Popular conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts—who has certainly loaded his literary barrels with heavy ammunition in recent years—lets the court historians have it in this devastating salvo.
PASTOR MARTIN NIEMÖLLER: HIS UNCENSORED STORY
BY JOHN WEAR, J.D.
A submariner and later a pacifist, best remembered for his famous quote, Martin Niemöller has been praised and criticized by pro-Germans and anti-Germans alike. A man of the cloth, Niemöller was extremely critical of both Adolf Hitler and the postwar Allied occupation of Germany. What are we to make, in the final analysis, of this rather complex man?
HUMILIATION IN KOREA: WHY THE U.S. LOST THE WAR
BY DR. MATTHEW RAPHAEL JOHNSON
Thousands of Americans, and hundreds of Turks, were casualties in this forgotten battle against China in an all-but-forgotten war. And for what? We lost the battle, and we didn’t win the war. And now U.S. warmongers want another war with China?
THE ORIGINAL RAINBOW COALITION
BY PASTOR EDWARD DEVRIES
Today when someone mentions the words “rainbow coalition,” chances are good that what comes to mind is the “gay community” or the National Rainbow Coalition and its black “civil rights” ally called PUSH—People United to Save (or, later, Serve) Humanity, both headed by Jesse Jackson. But in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, there was a now largely ignored Chicago coalition called the Rainbow Coalition of a quite different stripe.
THE YAMNAYA PEOPLE AND THE ANCIENT HOMELAND OF THE ARYANS: AN EXCERPT FROM RISE OF THE ARYANS
The homeland of the Indo-Europeans remains hotly debated. Some people believe the Indo-Aryan language came from Anatolia. The author, however, argues it came from the steppe country of the Pontic and Caspian area where once dwelt the horse-taming Yamnaya. Recent DNA evidence may back up his
claim. (A sample chapter from TBR’s new book Rise of the Aryans by Patrick Chouinard.)
THE FATE OF FEMALE CAPTIVES CAPTURED BY THE AMERINDIANS
BY THOMAS GOODRICH
Being taken prisoner by the tribal redskins was no picnic. Starting with the torture, mutilation and even murder of your loved ones as you were forced to watch. If you survived at all you were repeatedly physically abused, then forced into hard labor as a slave. For many white women, a more bearable alternative
was death itself.
ALSO INSIDE:
From the Editor—2
TBR Editorial—3
Cortez stops the sacrifices—11
The Roman “dog mosaic”—15
Roman artifacts in America—17
Niemöller’s Moabit Prison—45
History You May Have Missed—48
Fred Hampton’s murder—63
Who are the Yamnaya?—66
The Kurgan hypothesis—67
Heroic Hannah Dunstin—74
Letters to the Editor—76-78
Personal From the Editor
BIG NEWS ON SEVERAL FRONTS . . .
Setting the historical record straight is not the easiest business to be in these days. Every time we turn around, something is happening that directly affects our ability to get our message out. Most recently, the largest Internet video sharing site YouTube—with literally billions of views of videos from all kinds of filmmakers every year—has announced that it will be removing all items that espouse “white supremacy,” white nationalism, alternative views on the holocaust, Sept. 11 “conspiracy” theories and any other videos the YouTube censors (due to pressure from high-powered lobby groups) determine may be “offensive.” There is even talk of banning any discussion of the activities of billionaire slash-and-burn speculator George Soros because he happens to be Jewish. Nowadays, of course, people are actually being paid to be offended by whatever their employers determine is in vogue to be offended by. What the future holds, we have no idea, but we are sure that things will get worse before they get better as far as free speech is concerned.
But, with all the bad news, there is always good news. For one thing, TBR is in its 25th year of publishing. That in itself is an amazing success story and shows that there are thousands of people out there who are starved for real history. But we must have more subscribers. Please use the form on page 80 to send a gift subscription to a friend or family member. The cost of a one-year domestic gift subscription has been slashed to just $28. This offer is for U.S. gift subscriptions only. If you want an even more affordable deal, consider sending an electronic gift subscription. Presented in PDF format, TBR’s electronic edition looks just like the print issue, but can be read on your computer. The gift subscription cost of this is just $18 for one year, as we don’t have to pay for printing and mailing the magazine.
And more good news: TBR continues to publish its own books, and this provides some much-needed revenue to fund the print magazine. In the past year or so we’ve published The Jewish Mafia, Understanding Anti-Semitism, History of Anti-Semitism, The Rise of the Aryans, Israel’s Billions, The Soviet Experiment and Satan in Hollywood: Anti-Christian Propaganda in Film. Today we are announcing the publication of yet another book from Hervé Ryssen every TBR subscriber should get a copy of—Psychoanalysis of Judaism. This is a fascinating book of 461 pages that I know you will find immensely insightful. Sure to be quickly banned on the Internet, this English edition of Psychoanalysis of Judaism is only available from THE BARNES REVIEW.
And, finally, even more good news. TBR is moving to a new office location. All mail will now be sent to P.O. Box 550, White Plains, MD 20695. The TBR Post Office box in Washington is now closed and mail will be returned to you. Mail directed to our former Upper Marlboro, Maryland address will we forwarded to our new White Plains fulfillment address for one year. So please make a note of it. The new digs will save us $1,000 a month, giving us some additional funds to dedicate to our publishing efforts. Our thanks must also go to the staff of AFP newspaper, with whom we have just signed a contract to act as our fulfillment agent.
—PAUL ANGEL, Executive Editor
Ancient Tulum Mayan Capital of High Technology
and Ancient White Leadership
By Marc Roland
Pre-Spanish Mexico’s most physically alluring location stands atop a 45-foot cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Yucatan, about 85 miles south of Cancun. Although the site continues to attract tourists from around the world, few are aware of its singular mysteries, past and present. Set between a dark green jungle forest and the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, Tulum shines under Middle America’s sun like a crystal in its 36-acre archeological zone of limestone temples and pyramids.
An early classic stele—a short, inscribed column now in the British Museum—originally at Tulum has an engraved date of A.D. 564, but the site was renovated or even possibly rebuilt in post-classic style about 600 years later, before its abandonment in the 16th century. Tulum’s earliest origins are more speculative than definitely known, if only because a very small percentage of the archeological zone has been investigated. Discoveries waiting to be revealed by more extensive excavations are certain to radically alter present understanding of the city, including its real chronology. Unlike virtually all other Mayan ceremonial centers, Tulum is enclosed by a six-foot-high rampart, 2,625 feet long and 21 feet thick.
Despite these impressive dimensions and their regularly spaced watchtowers, it did not serve military purposes, but was more likely meant to define the precinct as a sacred metropolis, while standing as an effective buffer against intrusion by vast populations of alligators that infest the abutting jungle. The wall’s original black, indigo and crimson colors have been scoured away during the last five centuries of erosional winds, rendering all buildings there bone white. “Tulum” is generally misunderstood to signify this “wall,” because the name means “that which goes around,” a term Mayan astronomers used to define not an enclosure, but the apparent movement of the pole star around the zenith center-point of the night sky.1
The resulting pattern is in the form of a swastika, the Maya symbol for heaven’s supreme starlight, just as the same design was identified by the ancient Greeks with Apollo, divine personification of the Sun, and the titan Prometheus, who gifted fire technology to mankind. Throughout the world, among many various cultures, the hooked cross signified sacred, usually celestial light, and the good fortune it brings. Was this very early global association the result of independent invention or the enduring legacy of seafaring civilizers, who influenced other peoples with whom they came into contact during their oceanic travels in the ancient past? The latter alternative is suggested by the oral traditions of the Mayas themselves.
Tulum was among their earliest cities, as indicated by its first name: Zama, “City of the Dawn,” after Itzamna, the Itza Mayas’ chief culture hero. Itzamna arrived on the shores of Yucatan during the deep past following the destruction of his kingdom “across the Sunrise Sea.”2
He and his wife Ixchel— literally, the “White Lady”— were depicted in temple art scooting across the surface of the ocean on the torrent of a great flood. They were said to have brought the arts and sciences from their lost homeland, and were credited with creating civilization anew in prehistoric Mexico. The name Zama also appears in Zonzama, a Bronze Age citadel on the Canary Island of Lanzarote, off the north African shores of Morocco. Among the gifts of high technology Itzamna allegedly presented to Mexico’s native people was the construction of paved roads, known as sacbes, leading directly from his coastal temples to the shore. Coba and Uxmal (pronounced “Ooshmahl,” meaning “Thrice Built”) are, respectively, 27 and 160 miles northwest of Tulum, with Chichen Itza 90 miles away to the north. Coba probably featured more residents than any other Mayan urban center; from it spread 50 sacbes, one of them 62 miles long.
The area is sparsely inhabited today. Unfortunately, few of the area’s estimated 6,500 structures have been cleared of jungle overgrowth. Along with the monumental artifacts recovered from Coba was a stone cylinder weighing five tons. The undecorated object may have been used as a roller for leveling the sacred roads, which were constructed with stones to a height of three to six feet, then covered with white mortar. Although conventional scholars believe the Mayas knew neither wheeled transport nor draft animals, consensus opinion is contradicted by contemporary terracotta toys or models depicting animal figures, each with four functioning wheels.
Mayan road building, advanced astronomy and mathematics are generally recognized, but far less well appreciated were their engineering achievements in public works projects. Around A.D. 700, thousands of workers from Pa’ Chan, or “Broken Sky,” an ancient Mayan city known today as Yaxchilan, “Green Stones,” constructed “the longest bridge in the world until 1377,” when Italians built a fortified stone bridge with a span of 72 meters (236 feet) over the Adda River at Trezzo, Italy, as elucidated by James A. O’Kon, a registered professional engineer. He tells how the Late Classic project was “a long-span, rope-cable suspension bridge across the Usumacinta River.
The rope-cable support system was supported from tall, composite stone and cast-in-place concrete bridge towers and anchored by stone mechanisms at the north and south abutments. … The center of the north bridge pier is 63 meters (207 feet) … from the center of the south bridge pier.” At its highest point, the bridge was “approximately 22 meters (72 feet) above the riverbank at low water level.”3 Yaxchilan’s suspension bridge held the record as the longest span on Earth for 677 years, partly because Mayan engineers had by then developed structural mechanics for multistory buildings—such as their 212-foot-tall Tikal Temple IV, in Guatemala, built during the same period—that were not exceeded in height until Chicago completed the world’s first skyscraper, in 1885. Nor was technological achievement missing at Tulum.
Dubbed El Castillo (the Castle) by early 16th-century Spaniards, the site’s largest structure is a square building with a monumental flight of broad steps leading up to its twin-pillar entrance. The interior of the building is a single, large chamber, at the center of which is an immense pit. Scorch marks on the ceiling show that prodigious fires burned inside El Castillo, identifying it as an ornate lighthouse whose flame could have been seen from far out at sea. This structure, too, gives lie to Establishment archeologists, who insist the Maya, while admittedly great astronomers and pyramid builders, were inept sailors, who only coasted close to shore in primitive canoes during daylight hours.
But the Castillo was clearly made for oceangoing ships manned by bold voyagers navigating far out at sea long after nightfall. Even in Tulum’s final phases of cultural florescence, during the 13th century A.D., its lighthouse was the brightest beacon in the world.4 At the opposite of ancient high technology spanning the Usumacinta River was Meso-american dental care. Maya dentists treated tooth cavities with iron fillings, as described in the July 26, 1929 issue of Science magazine: “Two teeth containing circular holes filled with iron pyrites were found by the Marshall Field Expedition to Honduras.”
Both are still on display at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Mayan dentists were self-evidently knowledgeable about tooth anatomy, because they knew how to drill into teeth without contacting the pulp inside. Applied science from the monumental to the miniscule levels of high technology comprised an inheritance from the fair-skinned founding father of the Mayas and their cultural descendants, the Aztecs. As such, when European ships appeared for the first time off the Mexican coast in 1519, thousands of ceremoniously dressed Indians crowded the beaches to welcome them with loud music and shouts of joy. Some swam out just to touch the bows of the great Spanish galleys.
After the conquistadors set foot on shore among an almost hysterical jubilation, they were presented with gifts of rare feathers and a helmet-full of gold dust. An entire empire, unbidden, prostrated itself before the strangers, as they passed through a capital rivaling in size and splendor any European city of the time. Finally, they stood before the Aztec emperor himself. His ministers had welcomed the perplexed Spaniards “home,” and it was up to Moctezuma to explain.
“For a long time have we been informed by the writings of our ancestors,” he told them, “that neither myself nor any of those who inhabit this land are natives to it, but rather strangers who have come to it from foreign parts. We likewise know that from those parts our nation was led by a certain lord to whom all were subject, and who then went back to his native land, where he remained so long delaying his return that at his coming those whom he had left behind had married the women of the land, and had many children by them, and had built themselves cities in which they lived, so that they would in no wise return to their own land, or acknowledge him as lord, upon which he left them.”
And, in addition, “we have always believed that among his descendants one would surely come to subject this land and us as rightful vassals. Now, seeing the regions from which you say you come, which is from where the Sun rises, and the news you tell us of this great king and ruler who sent you hither, we believe and hold it certain that he is our natural lord.”5 It must have been all very complicated for the Spanish visitors, but they did not pause long to consider the mythic implications of their timely arrival. Within two years after Hernan Cortez dropped anchor off Veracruz, Moctezuma was dead, his people enslaved, their empire dissolved, and illusions dispelled by some of the most bloodstained acts of ingratitude in all history.
The unfortunate Indians had mistaken the bearded Spaniards for the bearded Quetzalcoatl, who had promised to return someday. The future was now, but Cortez was not the Feathered Serpent. He exerted a dominant influence on all Meso-american cultures, sometimes separated from the Aztecs by many centuries and great distances. For tens of thousands of years, the Indian populations of Middle America settled in huddled, scattered villages, where they made crude pottery and a few simple tools, while scratching out a subsistence agriculture one step removed from their hunter-gatherer forefathers. Then, before 1500 B.C., a literate, dynamically full-blown civilization suddenly erupted into existence at Veracruz, ironically, the same location Cortez and his band of gold-greedy adventurers landed after 1500 A.D.
The Mayas’ Kukulcan was either a variant or predecessor of Itzamna. It is nevertheless astonishing that his legend underwent only local, minor inflections and variations among peoples of widely diverse cultures over at least 3,000 years, an observation suggesting that all the societies which preserved his story had indeed been visited by a beneficent traveler from over the Sunrise Sea. Along with his fellow visitors—poets, artists, doctors, priests, astronomers, architects and sculptors—he introduced the benefits of civilization. He was remembered by the Indians as a tall man with long, yellow hair and beard and light eyes. He was dressed in a flowing robe of white designed with red crosses, either a bunch of flowers or a sickle in his hand. The sickle was also the symbol of the ancient Old World Kronos, a titan associated with the Atlantic Ocean.
The Feathered Serpent sought to suppress human sacrifice among indigenous Americans, but his failure led to difficulties with the native priests. They were joined by some of his own followers, who turned against him, so he sailed away before they could do him violence. The Feathered Serpent’s departure was widely mourned. However, as he stepped aboard his raft of serpents (a reed-boat with its sinuous hull?), he promised that either he himself or his descendants would come back someday to rule the land. The people were to preserve it in safekeeping until that return. He then floated away over the same sea that brought him to Mexico, toward his island kingdom, the White Island, Aztlan.
One of the few poems to have survived the fires of religious fanaticism that consumed the great body of Meso-american literature is The Prophet, perhaps the most graphic description of the Feathered Serpent: “See, exceedingly long is his beard. Yellow as straw is his beard.”6
The culture hero’s portrait in stone appears at Chichen Itza’s ziggurat-like Mayan Temple of Kukulcan, ornamented with several sculpted heads displaying pointed beards and non- Indian facial features. The Aztecs, in fact, referred to Cortez and his men individually as Calion, an honorific title alluding to one of Meso-america’s flood heroes, and ultimately derived, it would seem, from the Greek deluge figure Deucalion. The closest physical resemblance to the Feathered Serpent in Egypt may have been Wadjet. As the protector of the Lower Nile, she was among the most ancient of deities, apparently known even before dynastic times. Sometimes, Wadjet was represented in the form of a winged cobra—a feathered serpent. As such, she was the standard device on each pharaoh’s crown, an emblem that epitomized his supreme spiritual and temporal power. Seeing the Wadjet prominently worn on the headgear of a visiting culture bearer, the Indians may have named him after his impressive badge of authority.
An early Egyptian deity was Amen, portrayed in temple art as a bearded man wearing a headdress of double plumes alternating with red and green or red and blue feathers— another vision that suggests the Feathered Serpent. Ahmen was a title of the highest honor the Mayas bestowed on their doctors, sorcerers, astronomers and the most distinguished members of their intellectual classes. Ahmen means, “He who knows.” Recorded testimony of the Mayan priests, set down in the reports of the crown historian, Father Sahagun, quoted them as saying, “They (the Mayas’ ancestors) came from across the water and landed near Veracruz, the wise men who had all the writings, the books, the paintings.”7
Following the same Canary Island Current, Cortez, too, arrived off Veracruz. The Mayas called Veracruz “Panco, where those who crossed the water arrived.” 8
They knew the Feathered Serpent as Kukulcan, “the Master of Breath,” precisely the same title used by the Creek, Chortan and Seminole Indians of North America to describe their founding father: Esaugetuh Emissee.9
His predecessor or avatar, Itzamna, was installed as the chief Mayan god, inventor of “sacred writing” (hieroglyphs), and astronomy-astrology. He was the founder of Mayapan and Chichen Itza, where 12 high priests, their bodies dyed deep blue, like Keltic druids, met annually. These were the Ah-Kin, or diviners (from kinya, “to divine”). Itzamna gave his name to a Mayan people, the Itzas, referred to as Ah-Auab, or “foreigners to the land,” whose name meant, literally, “white men.”10
Among their other titles were “lords,” “true men,” or Halach-Unicob, “the lineage of the Land” and sometimes “the great men,” or “the priest-rulers.” They are portrayed on the 27th stele at Yaxchilan—where they were undoubtedly the construction engineers of that city’s great bridge—on the 11th stele at Piedras Negras, and at the Temple of Warriors, at Chichen Itza, as bearded, with long, thin noses, and a European cast of facial features. The Halach-Unicob were said to have come from Tutulxiu, the “Land of Abundance,” or “the Bountiful,” far across the sea “where the Sun rises.” The Feathered Serpent was commonly shown in Meso-american art emerging from between the jaws of a monstrous snake, precisely the same image repeated by Greek vase painters when they depicted Pelasgus, leader of the pre-Hellenic Pelasgians, or “Sea People,” who brought civilization to the Peloponnesus after the Great Flood. A stone relief at Chichen Itza also portrayed the Feathered Serpent as a bearded man with non-Indian physiognomy holding up the sky. As the first Spanish chroniclers reported, “Some of the old people of Yucatan say that they have heard from their ancestors that this land was occupied by a race of people who came from the east, and who God had delivered by opening 12 paths through the sea.”11
Similarly, the Toltecs claimed that Xelhua, a white-skinned giant, led their forefathers to Cholula. The native Indians were and are a dark-skinned, beardless, smallish people with the epicanthic fold (“slanted” eyes) and zygomatic arches (high cheekbones) of their Mongoloid ancestors, who crossed over the frozen Bering Strait from Asia 15,000 years ago. In contrast, most skeletal remains of individuals belonging to the Pillis, the Mayan ruling class, show that they were markedly taller than the masses of laboring peasants, known as the Mayeques. According to the Mayas, the Pillis had been created separately from the Mayeques. During the late 16th century, Mexican traveler Gaspar Antonio Chimosa in his Historical Recollections reported that “the natives say that those who built the said edifices (at Itzmal) were men of greater stature than those of this time.”12 When Cortez met Moctezuma II face to face, he remarked on the Aztec emperor’s facial hair, relatively fair complexion and tall stature, none of which were reflected in the physical appearance of his subjects.13 Andres de Avendane y Loyola, a Spanish trader in the early 17th century, described the pitifully few surviving Itzas—another Mayan ruling elite—who had been neither exterminated nor assimilated by the European conquerors, as “well featured and, like mestizos, nearly all of a light complexion and of very perfect stature and natural gifts.”14
A similar description was provided by Juan de Villagntierre, who personally participated in the subjugation of Mexico during the mid-1500s. Even today, isolated Indian groups in southeastern Yucatan and northern Belize (former British Honduras), where many of the aristocratic Pillis or Itzas took refuge after the conquest, show a frequency of light skin color that is remarkable, since evidence of intermarriage with modern Europeans in these remote areas is lacking. Such racial anomalies must be a genetic remnant carried over from the old ruling-class strain. The Maya city of Mutul was founded by Zacmutul, whose name means, literally, “White Man.”15
A fresco from Chichen Itza’s Temple of the Warriors depicts nobles with light, yellow faces, while supplicating prisoners are shown as dark brown. A vase from Quirigua, at the St. Louis Art Museum, features the bust of a man with a red beard, blue eyes, creamy complexion, a bull neck and otherwise thoroughly non-Indian characteristics. These examples are by no means unique. Harvard’s Earnest Hooten, who published his in-depth examination of Canary Island skeletal remains, pointed out the “Armenioid racial type” recurrent among the Maya elite.16
Seconding Hooten’s observation was anthropologist M. Wells Jakeman, who described the Itzas’ orthognathic faces and narrow, high-bridged noses as typically Armenioid-Caucasian. Their receding foreheads, full, curved lips and firm chins deepened this impression, he wrote in his important The Origin and History of the Mayas.17
Their physical anthropology was underscored by Mayan itself, which, alone of the more than 700 native languages of Middle America, shows marked similarities to Indo-European speech in its shared use of monosyllables and homophones—words pronounced like one another, but having different meanings, such as “two” and “too.” More to the point, Mayan was agglutinative, in that it employed prefixes and suffixes for declension (the inflection of nouns), as opposed to inflectional languages, where changes are internal. Even arch-skeptics of cross-cultural interaction in antiquity, such as the well-known author L. Sprague de Camp, admit that Mayan resembles the Ural-Altaic or Finno-Ugric languages spoken in western Turkey.18
These linguistic parallels with Caucasian speech simultaneously support the Maya elite’s Caucasoid identity and suggest that their speech was Armenian-like (Ural-Altaic). It was therefore related, perhaps closely, to the Etruscan and Trojan languages, both Finno-Ugric. Over the course of time, Mayan resemblances to its Caucasian roots broke down considerably in the details, so that surviving cognates (words which show a parent relationship between two or more languages) are less frequent, but the few that may still be found are revealing. For example, the Mayan word for “master builder,” or “skilled craftsman,” is menyah; menyan is a Trojan term and it means a “race of builders,” or “measurers,” “city surveyors.”19
Other examples appear among some important Mesoamerican place names, such as a comparison of Armenian cities known as late as Classical times and Mayan ceremonial centers demonstrates: Armenian Cities Mayan Cities Colima Cholima Colua Cholula Zalissa Xalisco Zuivan Zuivana. A middle class, the Macehual, grew from elements of both the Pilli aristocrats and Mayeque proletariat. A few Mayeques were allowed into the ruling class by demonstrating extraordinary individual abilities, such as the capture of four or more of the enemy. In time, this upward mobility began to swamp the nobility. The Mayeques had an inveterate addiction to human sacrifice, a practice relied on with increasing frequency by the diluted Pillis to terrorize the native masses into submission.
Even so, as late as the conquest, the old Feathered Serpent blood had not entirely died out, as physical descriptions of Moctezuma indicate. Himself aware of the racial disparities between his own subject people and the Spaniards, the emperor deliberately chose a taller, fair-skinned, fair-bearded member from his royal entourage as his personal envoy to Cortez. Controversy still surrounds the disappearance of previous Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly those of the Mayas. But it seems probable that the gap between the aloof, all-powerful Pillis and the lowly, laboring Mayeques narrowed through intermarriage by way of ambitious middle- class commoners, the Machuals.
The aristocrats had preserved as their legacy the arts and sciences handed down to them by their likely European Old World ancestors. Inevitably, this diminished and the decrepit elite shrank to so small a size it could no longer effectively exert its absolute authority over the broad masses of native peoples. They simply deserted the feebly administrated ceremonial cities and melted back into the pre-literate jungle survival they had known for tens of thousands of years before the coming of all the various Feathered Serpents.
Translations of the Mayan stele relate that their civilization finally collapsed amid incessant warfare between rival city-states. Remnants of the aristocracy moved on to restart high culture elsewhere throughout Middle America, although they never surpassed Mayan achievements in the subsequent Mixtec, Toltec and, finally, Aztec states. By the time Cortez set foot on the east coast of Moctezuma’s empire, Meso-american civilization was again turning on its cycle of decline.
Before the close of the 16th century, the generations of elite survivors, descendants of ancient Old World culture-bearers, had all but died out. In 1511, 10 years before the invasion led by Hernan Cortez and his Conquistadors, seven Spanish survivors of a shipwreck off Jamaica drifted in their lifeboat to Tulum. They were captured by the Indians, who tortured all but five of the castaways to death, extracting their hearts and cannibalizing their bodies. Only Gonzalo Guerrero and Jeronimo de Aguilar somehow convinced the natives to spare them.
De Aguilar was taken as a slave to the island of Cozumel, where he was eventually liberated by Cortez. But his fellow survivor underwent a more profound, inner transformation, becoming a full-fledged tribal member, who rose high enough in the tribe to marry the chief’s own daughter. Guerrero utterly discarded his European identity and assumed the role of a war leader. He staged effective hit-and-run raids against the Spaniards, until his eventual capture and execution as “a traitor not only to his fellow man, but to his race.”20
Even so, his story lends some consideration to possibilities of other fair-skinned arrivals on Mexico’s Atlantic coast long before Gonzalo Guerrero was cast ashore. Fate alone determined whether they or he would be welcomed as a god, sacrificed as a demon or enlisted as a war hero. He gave his name to a kind of unconventional fighting that has persisted to this day and is still associated with every insurgent in the style he pioneered—guerrilla warfare.
ENDNOTES:
1 Nuttall, Zelia. The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations. Cambridge, MA. Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, 1901.
2 Kearsley, Graeme Ronald. Mayan Genesis. UK: Yelsraek Publishing, 2001.
3 O’Kon, James. The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology. NJ: Weiser, 2012.
4 Kearsley, op. cit.
5 Cortés, Hernán. Five Letters, 1519- 1526. NY: W.W. Norton Co., 1928.
6 Nuttall, op. cit.
7 Prescott, William. History of the Conquest of Mexico. NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960.
8. Ibid.
9 Burland, Cottie. North American Indian Mythology. London: Hamlyn Publishing Group, Ltd., 1968.
10 Miller, Mary Ellen and Taube, Karl. An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.
11 Nuttall, op. cit.
12 Coe, Michael D. The Maya. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015.
13 Prescott, op. cit.
14 Ibid.
15 Kearsley, op. cit.
16 Hooton, Earnest Albert. Twilight of Man. NY: G.P. Putnam, 1939.
17 Jakeman, M. Wells. The Origin and History of the Mayas. MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010.
18 De Camp, L. Sprague. Lost Continents. NY: Gnome Press, 1954.
19 Bryce, Trevor. The Trojans & Their Neighbours. London: Routledge, 2005.
20 Prescott, op. cit. An illustration of the pale-skinned Mayan god Itzamna created for a codex during the Classic period.
MARC ROLAND is a self-educated expert on WWII and ancient European cultures but is equally at home writing on American history and prehistory. He is also a book and music reviewer for the PzG, Inc. (www.pzg.biz) and other politically incorrect publishers and CD producers. Roland has written dozens of articles for TBR. To review them, access the yearly author/subject index found in the back of each year’s November/December issue of TBR.
