The Cross and the Tree
Palenque is a wild place. The more famous Chichen Itza has been called a city park with pyramids, but the Mayan site Palenque remains wild, barely keeping the forest at bay. I can only imagine Christian soldiers and monks, hot and hungry and wounded, and beyond hope of ever seeing home, finding majestic crosses emblazoned on the strange abandoned buildings. It was a sure sign that, even here, God is present and has touched this place.
We now understand these elaborate crosses to be star maps, called Wakah-Chan, the ‘World Tree’ of the Milky Way, crossed by the ecliptic, the plane of our solar orbit dotted with zodiac constellations. The Mayan word for Milky Way is Sak Bih, or ‘White Road,’ an image so similar it could be a translation. Within the Mayan Cosmovision, the World Tree of the Milky Way is the given path to travel from this world to the next. The Mayan word for death was och bih, or ‘he entered the road.’ The World Tree is a concept Christians trying to square Mayan cosmology with their own theology would recognize as their own tree, called the ‘True Cross.’
In addition to the Milky Way and the World Tree, Wakah-Chan is ‘Raised-up Sky’, the cosmic house erected at the time of creation by First Father, the father of the Popol Vuh’s Hero-Twins resurrected from under the Witz Mountain to oversee the creation of the cosmos on the last zero date, August 13, 3114. The World Tree Wakah-Chan is the central axis, or ridge pole, of the house ‘Raised-up Sky’.
The Mexican caste war in the Yukatan began in the Mayan town of Chan Santa Cruz in 1847. The name means ‘small holy cross.’ The town was named for a small cross that made prophesies through Mayan shaman, called the ‘Talking Cross of Santa Cruz.’ Talking crosses were carried into battle, and sometimes soldiers taken prisoner were forced to negotiate with them. After the war, the descendents of the town called themselves Cruzob, the crosses, and painted their own ‘talking crosses’ green like a tree. Yukatan crosses are still called yax che, or green tree. This is also the local name of the ceiba, the sacred tree that represents the World Tree among the Maya. North Americans call the tree kapok, and it has been the salvation of many gringos as it provides the kapok that makes life jackets float.
On the last zero date First Father raised up the sky. The next zero date is December 12, 2012. On that day the cosmos will sit at the exact center of the Wakah-Chan, the center of the cross, as the plane of the ecliptic, with the sun at its center, aligns itself with Sak Bih, and the very center of the Milky Way galaxy.