The Mayan Prophecies
Unlocking the Secrets of a Lost Civilization
by Adrian Gilbert & Maurice M. Cotterell
(337 pages, hb, $24.95)
Element Books, Rockport, 1995
ISBN 1-85230-692-0
A deliciously revealing book that gives some interesting explanations for why the present
world ends on 22 December 2012. Interestingly, I heard Richard Hoagland speak about this
date. (This is not mentioned in the book.) He said that there is reason to believe that
our reckoning of the date is off by 15 years and that the ending comes next year. He did
not gives details, other than to remark that the fast-approaching comet (or whatever it
is) is due next summer at about the same time.
Chapter Titles
PROLOGUE
1 The Mysterious Maya
2 Mayan Concepts of Time
3 A New Solar Astrology
4 Maurice Cotterell in Mexico
5 Land of the Rattlesnake
6 The New Fire, the Chacmools, and the Skull of Doom
7 Transatlantic Traditions
8 The Olmecs and Atlantis
9 The Sun, its Energy and Influences
10 The Atlantean Cataclysm
NOTES
APPENDICES
1 Astrogenetics
2a Astrogenetics and the Twelve Astrological Types
2b A Scientific Rationalization of Astrology
3 Solar Radiation and Hormone Production in Humans
4 The Sunspot Cycle
5 The Decline of the Maya
6 Catastrophe and Destruction
7 Maya Numbers and Counting Systems
8 The Amazing Lid of Palenque
Selected Excerpts
Prologue (pp. ix-xiii)
On the morning of 12 September 1993 I was sitting in the kitchen of my colleague, Robert
Bauval, discussing final changes to our forthcoming book The Orion Mystery. We had
been working closely together on this project for nearly a year and had just attended a
conference with all of our publishers' sales staff. Elated by the reception we had
received and yet exhausted by lack of sleep, we were doing our best to unwind over the
Sunday papers. As I flicked through one or other of them, my eye was almost immediately
caught by an article written by a Michael Robotham. Over pictures of a crumbling palace, a
pyramid and a horrifying sculpture of a bat god 'HE HAS SOLVED A CENTURIES-OLD MYSTERY'
was written in capitals. Below the palace and above another picture, this one showing a
man like Indiana Jones emerging from the jungle and holding a stone slab towards the
camera, was a banner headline: 'THE MAN WHO BROKE THE CODE OF MAYA CARVING'. By now not a
little intrigued as to what this was all about, I pulled up a chair and settled down to
read the article.
It turned out that the palace and pyramid shown in the pictures are located in a remote
area of southwest Mexico at a place called Palenque. This was one of a number of cities
built by the Maya, a highly gifted people yet one whose civilization suddenly collapsed at
some time in the 9th century AD. Though their descendants continue to farm the hills
further to the north, Palenque and their other low-lying cities were abandoned to the
jungle, to be lost under a canopy of fast-growing climbers and trees. The man in the
picture, the one who had apparently broken the 'Maya code', was a certain Maurice
Cotterell and the stone slab he was holding out in front of him was a replica of a tomb
lid found in the pyramid. I had heard before of this mysterious slab, the so-called 'Lid
of Palenque', mainly connected with theories of gods from outer space. I was therefore
somewhat surprised to discover that Cotterell was not putting forward any such wild
speculations. His decoding of the lid seemed to be based on a much more scientific
approach, analysing the lid in terms of Mayan mythology and certain ideas concerned with
solar cycles. In the article he put forward a plausible case for why he thought the Mayan
civilization had suddenly collapsed. This is something that is still a mystery, and his
ideas seemed to be breaking new ground.
Reading the article I realized how little I knew about the Maya or indeed any of the
pre-conquest civilizations of America. Like many other people I had, of course, seen
documentaries concerning such mysteries as the Nazca lines of Peru but I did not have an
overall picture of the succession of civilizations in Central America in the same way that
I had for, say, Europe, Egypt or Mesopotamia. I had also not realized just how
sophisticated the pyramids and temples of Mexico are. Having been to Egypt and visited the
Great Pyramid, I tended to think of pyramids as either very large, geometrically simple
buildings or collapsed rubble heaps. The pyramids of Mexico were different, more like
Babylonian ziggurats or even Chinese pagodas than Egyptian pyramids. Yet like those of
Egypt they were connected with a cult of the dead, and it now also seemed that they had
some sort of symbolic significance linking them with a sky religion. This last connection
I found particularly intriguing. Robert Bauval and I were on the point of publishing The
Orion Mystery, presenting a new stellar theory for Egyptian pyramids. I was now keen
to know if this man Cotterell could find similar connections with the Mexican pyramids.
The newspaper article didn't go as far as to say this, but before putting down the paper I
made a mental note to took into the matter when I had more time.
It was some months later, in May 1994, that I found myself driving down to Cornwall to
meet Maurice Cotterell face to face for the first time. The Orion Mystery had been
published the previous February accompanied by a BBC documentary entitled The Great
Pyramid-Gateway to the Stars featuring Robert Bauval and myself . Overnight the book
had become a bestseller, in spite of strong opposition from some senior Egyptologists who
were dismayed that we had effectively bypassed the slow-lane of academia. I had all but
forgotten about the Lid of Palenque in the excitement surrounding both the launch of the
book and the making of the documentary, when a mutual acquaintance showed me a digest of
Cotterell's work. I was amazed at how wide-ranging and original his work was; he seemed to
have researched not only Mexico and the Maya but many other subjects as well. I now had
his telephone number and I decided to call him up. He was reluctant to say very much over
the phone, but we arranged that I should come down for the weekend and spend as much time
as needed to quietly go through this vast corpus of work. After driving down some narrow,
winding, tree-lined lanes and passing through a narrow gate at rightangles to the steeply
gradiented approach, I found myself standing before a quaint 18th-century farmhouse
overlooking the River Tamar. I didn't have to knock, for Cotterell had heard my approach
and opened the gate. It simply remained for us to introduce ourselves and to go inside for
a cup of tea.
Maurice Cotterell is about 40 years old, though he looks somewhat younger. Lightly built
and quick in speech and movements, his temperament is clearly mercurial. Clasping our cups
of tea in our hands we immediately went upstairs to his office and, with the aid of a
whiteboard and felt-tip pens, he set about explaining his theories to me. For some six
hours he talked non-stop, occasionally rolling out a computer printout of a graph or
demonstrating a point using a child's spinning top as a three-dimensional model. Yet as
the hours rolled by it seemed like no time at all, so interesting and so novel were the
facts he was presenting. Like a viewer engrossed in a movie plot, I wanted to hear more
and yet was impatient to get to the end. At times our conversation would become deeply
technical and I would be scratching my head trying to remember what I had learnt 25 years
before concerning partial differentiation and wave mechanics. At other times we would be
playing with acetatecopiesof the Lid of Palenque, laying them one on top of the other to
produce bizarre images of gods and dragons. His work had two sides to it-the one rational
and ,scientific', the other intuitive and 'artistic'-yet the two blended together and had
definite points of reference one to the other. The patterns revealed on the acetates were
not without their own logic and neither was the science without its own strange beauty.
The two aspects of his work were like the faces of a coin or the hemispheres of the brain;
they were two, yet one and the same. Even though they appeared different, at the centre of
both series of studies was the same overwhelming and somewhat frightening subject:
humanity's total dependence on sun cycles. The subject is overwhelming in the sense that
just as one cannot look directly into the sun without going blind, so the more one studies
the subject of solar cycles the more one realizes how blind we are on planet Earth to the
realities governing our existence. It is frightening simply because of our ignorance.
My head spinning like a top, we emerged from his office to eat the very fine supper of
local salmon prepared by his wife Ann. Over wine and dessert we confirmed what we had
already decided, that we would write a book together making these ideas available to as
wide an audience as possible. Having co-authored The Orion Mystery I was well aware
of how difficult it is to get a proper airing for radically different ideas that challenge
the scientific orthodoxies of archaeology. It is all too easy for a professor to use his
authority to silence all academic debate over theories with which he disagrees. I was
therefore not surprised to hear that Cotterell, like Bauval with whom I had also worked,
had run into a brick wall of opposition with the academic world. His ideas on sunspot
cycles alone deserved proper attention, yet responsible academic journals refused to
publish his articles largely, one suspects, because he isn't an acknowledged 'expert' in
their narrow sense. Yet, looked at in a different way, as the originator of these theories
and the only person who as far as we know has studied the subject in this way, he is the
world expert. Who, one asks, is the scientist? Is it the professor with strings of letters
after his name who actually does nothing but sit behind his desk, or the outsider who
actually comes up with original ideas?
Cotterell's ideas are radical and they are bound to be controversial. Yet they have a
coherency of their own. His studies of the Lid of Palenque and sunspot cycles point to the
need for a radical rethink not just about the history of Central America but our own
possible fate. Today there is much fear over the thinning of the ozone layer, global
warming, pollution, overpopulation and the exhausting of resources. But underneath this
fear there is still a strong current of belief in the ability of modern civilization to
ride the storm and overcome any temporary setbacks. Even those who believe such faith is
unfounded and that we should do all we can to get back to a simpler lifestyle without the
trappings of technological society have a view of humanity as somehow selfdetermined and
self-determining. All our utopias presume that it is at least theoretically possible for
humanity to live peacefully and in harmony with the planet-even if in practice we don't.
Yet what if this is a fallacy? What if there are cosmic factors over which we do not have
even a possibility of control? What if the rise and fall of civilization itself is
governed, as Cotterell suggests, by the sun? Should we scoff, bury our heads in the sand
or try to understand more about these influences?
The Maya were in possession of a complex and extremely accurate calendar. We are now able
to decode at least some of their hieroglyphs, many of which turn out to be dates. What was
of the greatest concern to the Maya was the sun and their belief in an apocalyptic future
for humanity. It is easy to dismiss their concerns as simple superstitions but what if (as
Cotterell's work would seem to suggest) they knew more about this subject than we do? We
owe it both to ourselves and our children to do the best we can to resurrect this
knowledge. At least then we may be prepared for global changes even if we cannot control
them. This surely must be the responsible attitude of all true scientists, and I for
one-though I take no credit for Maurice Cotterell's discoveries-want to know. We can but
trust that you, the reader, feel the same way.
pp. 68-70
The Breaking of the Code
Back in England, Cotterell got down to the business of unravelling the mystery of the
Maya. Closeting himself away, he immersed himself in the books he had brought back from
Mexico, all the time looking for clues to the central enigmas of the Lid and the Mayan
sacred number 1,366,560. Before he could go any further with this research, he had to get
to grips with the Mayan calendar - or rather calendars, for they had more than one. As we
have seen, the simplest of these was also used by the Aztecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs and
others. It was based on the interaction of two cycles: a 'vague year' of 365 days and a
'sacred year' of 260 days. The use of the 260-day tzolkin is of very great
antiquity. It seems to go back to at least the time of the Olmecs and is still used for
magical purposes by some of the more remote Maya tribes right up to the present day.
Although its origins are obscure, it was clear to Cotterell that it was highly significant
over and above any magical connotations that individual day names might carry, for the
number 260 divided exactly into both his own number of 1,366,040 and the Mayan
super-number of 1,366,560 days, the first 5254 times and the second 5256. This seemed
significant. More importantly, while working at Cranfield Cotterell had made a vital
discovery. In analysing the way that the sun's polar and equatorial magnetic fields
interacted, he discovered that they came close together every 260 days. This seemed to
bear out his suspicion that the Mayan numbering system was connected with solar magnetic
cycles.
Cotterell was especially intrigued to learn how the Maya and others wove together their
two cycles to the extent that each day was given two names, one based on its position in
the tzolkin and the other stemming from the 365-day vague year, the combination
relating to the Aztec Century: a period of either 52 vague years or 73 260-day counts, as
appropriate.
For Cotterell this figure of 260 was later to become the vital key in breaking the code of
the Mayan numbering system. Whereas other scholars had made the breakthrough that enabled
the dates in Mayan inscriptions to be translated into dates in our own calendar, he felt
there was still no satisfactory explanation why the Maya used cycles of 144,000, 7,200,
360 and 20 days duration. Furthermore, he reasoned, why would the Maya omit the important
time period of 260 days from their inscriptions? And why did they, as he had discovered,
attach such importance to the number 9? Cotterell now decided to insert
the'missing'260-day figure into the cycle sequence. He then multiplied each cycle by 9,
added the totals together, and arrived at a remarkable result-the Mayan magic number,
which was virtually identical to his own sunspot figure of 1,366,040.
144,000 x 9 = 1,296,000
....7,200 x 9 = .....64,800
.......360 x 9 = .......3,240
.......260 x 9 = .......2,340
.........20 x 9 = ..........180
...........Total = 1,366,560
Cotterell felt that he had hit the jackpot, for it now seemed to him that the cycles of
the Mayan numbering system were used to draw attention to the importance of the
1,366,560-day cycle. Moreover, he believed that his theories about the sun's magnetic
behaviour provided him with a unique understanding of the astronomical importance of the
260-day cycle, without which the Mayan numerical code could not have been broken.
Related Web Sites
The Mayan Prophecies Home Page
Mayan Sound and Acoustics