Cosmos According to Plato and Pakal
Tim Hazell
"I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man, with little enough for himself to live on, than king of all dead men that have done with life, and expose to mortal and immortal eyes the hateful chambers of decay that fill the gods themselves with horror."- Homer, The Odyssey
Modern biologists and physiologists have established the duality and interrelationship of mind-body. Our minds are capable of steering us towards sensations that become irresistible compulsions when triggers prove too strong. Previous cultures and traditions separate human existence into planes of mental and physical activity. Materialism argues that human processes are subject to analysis and can be documented as ethics of pleasure, pain, hunger and other autonomic functions. This swing to the other extreme, proposes that the body is a machine and our perceptions of internal and external phenomena are serial transformations of life awareness to be evaluated and documented. We have interpreted the universe around us through mind-body duality and clinical material organization. This has defined the march with science and reason or quantum leap of our accumulated knowledge and sensuous involvement with mysteries as we extended ourselves into limitless space.
Myths and motifs link the birth of cosmos to pairing of a mortal and deity. Through this union humans achieved a kind of middle ground between terra and the constellations. Preoccupations with travel to celestial bodies and the power to elude gravity surface time and time again. The story of hapless Icarus tells of his bold flight and demise as the sun melted feathers and wax and he plummeted into the sea. It also points out the folly of aspiring to challenge the omnipotence of the gods. In “The Republic” Plato expresses his need to reevaluate and prune works of philosophers and poets. Representations of deities grieving with words like, “A misery me, the unhappy mother of the best of men,” (Illiad) were considered improper for development of character and moral judgement. Plato envisioned a universe before creation in disorder. Balance and harmony expressed with mathematics gave primaeval chaos beauty and symmetrical or classical proportion. Fire and earth were conceived, and reason demanded that air and water provide the counterpoint. Heavenly bodies evolved to serve the purpose of recording time which did not exist for the eternal being but generated spontaneously with the appearance of the world. Stars were fixed in the heavens. Planets were perfect spheres like the pristine circles of their journeys around the earth. A fundamental harmonic interval occurred when all eight known circuits and their respective planets, the sun and moon finished together and returned to a constellation they had occupied before. This fulfilled the complete number of Time and started the entire process again.
The Maya among Mesoamerican cultures developed their intricate mathematical and calendrical systems to express more than the 260-unit code of the Tzolkin permutation table and 360-unit “calendar.” Astronomer-priests such as Pakal Votan (AD 603-683 ) who ruled glittering Palenque during its renaissance were diviners of harmony. His tomb beneath the Temple of Inscriptions is aligned with the Sun. Temples and ceremonial plazas in Mayan cities were positioned according to the compass points, movements of the planets and celestial bodies. Observatories, shadow casting devices, forked sticks and trained eyes permitted the Maya to calculate the distance to the moon and path of Venus with astonishing accuracy. They venerated the Milky Way and dubbed it the “World Tree” representing it by the majestic flowering Ceiba. Clouds of stars that form our galaxy were seen as foliage in the tree of life from which all creatures emanated. Special attention was given to Sagittarius. Major components included the Kawak Monster, a giant head with sacrificial bowl containing a flint blade and the glyph representing death. The brilliant galactic core was referred to as Hunab Ku. Unlike the cosmology of Plato and the Greeks that defined the spin of the planets, sun and moon as having one direction, Mayan descriptions of the Hunab Ku refer to the circuit of the galactic core as a complex pulsation. The movement is forwards and backwards, spin and counter spin. Concepts of a cycle that opens a current from which all things issue and closes as they return are universal themes in Mesoamerican astronomy, beliefs about creation and destruction that begin and end the world.
Today we use descriptions such as the celestial nose when defining anatomy, linking it with the universe as a symbol of an inquiring mind. Plato divided cosmos into two regions symbolizing the world of being and of becoming. The former was essence, a perfect distillation of ideas. The latter represented the material world, which by Greek ethical definitions was an illusion. Mayan astronomical metaphors were intended to predict the future and linked to the activities of gods who played out the events of each Genesis as galaxies and universes spun and counter spun. They were able to articulate sky mechanics with simple tools thirteen numbers and twenty symbols that peer from stelae and vine covered monuments to confound us with their cryptic forms. Hidden within the dark centers of advanced civilizations that retreat from us with accelerating speed are many parallel developments. The body and mind electric operate in dynamic tension that fuels our need to seek answers to questions among galaxies from which we came and carry in our cells and genetic blueprints.