Ep 616 - The Four Heavens (feat. David Stuart)

28:50We're talking about the area that's now northern Guatemala, southern part of Yucatan. We can tell that there are a lot of these great cities that are starting up. Some of them are being abandoned. There's all these cycles of rises and falls. But there's this era around 200, 300 AD when these dynasties kind of start up and they're often connected with each other. They're often rivals with each other. And we can start to read names of kings. We can start to read some narratives about what they're doing. One of the big, big episodes of Maya history that we know about now today was in the late 300s, in 378.

29:38There was this war. It was a conquest of this really amazing city in Guatemala we know of today as Tikal, a major site. In fact, Tikal is the rebel moon base in the first Star Wars movie. George Lucas filmed the scene of the Millennium Falcon taking off from the jungle. I don't know if anyone remembers that scene with the pyramids. That's crazy. I know Tikal. Yavin 4, I think it is in Star Wars, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is Tikal. So he filmed it there. Anyway, fun fact. In 378, the king of Tikal was conquered by these outsiders who were coming all the way from central Mexico. They were coming from a place called Teotihuacan, which is up near Mexico City.

30:30and they had had a long relationship clearly uh there there's this long distance intermarriages and stuff but there came a point where something happened where they had to take this guy down and so they go hundreds of miles into Guatemala to conquer him and that sets off this whole other thing so that history really picks up let's say in the fourth century then we have a lot of detailed records after that for about four or five hundred years of um just we have thousands of texts we can read about hundreds of different actors and and and players in this drama with a lot of different kingdoms and it does become like game of thrones like i said where you where you have alliances being forged those alliances often are being uh turned around and and their uh turncoats and their wars in between cousins and so forth.

31:26So it becomes this really dynamic world that, you know, again, 30, 40 years ago, we couldn't talk about any of this. That's what's exciting. And now we can match up the places that we're reading about with the actual sites that, you know, we are exploring the jungle. So that's also really cool. We can match up the name of this ancient place to this site oh so yeah you know exactly where it was and

31:54Shane Gillis:it wasn't like i don't know if this is because of that but that was i was kind of struck by how a lot of the history comes from just it was like written on the walls of buildings yeah yeah like the buildings themselves held pretty much the history which is yeah a lot a lot of official stuff just like you know we do in a way right we we have monuments and in our parks and so forth with some official historical records. But yeah, I mean, we have, they wrote a lot, right? They wrote a lot and carved it on stone. Otherwise, we'd be up a creek, right? Because it doesn't preserve in the jungle. They wrote on pottery, ceramics.

32:32So we have a lot of that stuff. We don't have anything written on paper from that era. Yeah. Because it's not going to preserve.

32:38Shane Gillis:Yeah, true. The stuff we have, the books we have, which is amazing, Those are much later, right? The Spanish actually collected those. Okay. So, yeah, we're lucky to have what we have is the way I look at it. And they, so were they like a, that was the one thing I was trying to figure out too. Were they like a transient, like they would build these giant like, you know, cities basically. And then they would just like abandon them. Is there any idea why they would do that? Was it like a famine thing or they just would do that? Well, this is a huge question. And this is the thing that I think a lot of people think about when you think about the ancient Maya is this idea of collapse.

33:17And I often get this question like, well, what happened to them? Because, you know, didn't they disappear? And that's a common narrative out there that the Maya, ancient Maya just disappeared, which is kind of problematic because the Maya are still around. So as a people, they didn't disappear. But what did disappear is that around 900, 800 to 900 AD, a lot of their cities, some of them really large with tens of thousands of people, they collapsed. We call this the Maya collapse. This is a question that we as archaeologists and academics have been struggling with for a long time. What happened?

34:02so Tikal okay the the Star Wars moon base place that's a good example huge city 80 ,000 people maybe even 100 ,000 people who are living there something like that in the general area between about 800 and a thousand you're going from a vibrant city to nobody really living there and it gets to be overgrown with jungle and then explorers find it in the 1800s what happened so this is this this idea of a lost city this is really where it comes from it comes from the yeah maya you know explorers in the 1800s um and i mean talk about romantic exploration you know hacking your way through the jungle very indiana jones yeah and here's a hundred foot high pyramid that no one has explored before i mean that that's the reality of early days of my archaeology so this fed into this question what happened it fed into a lot of crazy ideas about maybe what happened um that they disappeared well they did disappear from those places yeah they moved on so one of the things i'm writing about in the book is you know what factors went into this um i think there were tipping points it had to do with climate for sure because we have records of drought we know that um water was hard to come by in these places it still is yeah uh so so you can understand how these tipping points might come up um but big populations basically couldn't sustain themselves in some of these places and i think also the political system kind of fell apart they were we can also track in the records you know the last hundred years of of this era was there was so much warfare uh and and you know there had always been conflict and and you know like any like medieval history but you see it ramping up uh and in the last few decades there it's just incessant warfare and i think the system just breaks down yeah yeah so um i think the maya had a lot of agency in deciding what to do the people and i think they just voted with their feet and decided to just let's go off to do other things true yeah and so this is the one of the things that i really want to try to do in my my narrative about this is that it wasn't like some external thing that came you know ufos with beams taking people away it's that the maya um were going through a crisis and they had to make some very very hard decisions no doubt to do something about their dire situation in many

36:50Shane Gillis:places and they decided to leave have you seen the hieroglyph of a guy who's like looks like he's in a rocket ship looking up though that was the only thing i remember from ancient aliens they would They show that a hundred times. Oh, yeah. They keep showing that. Dude, he's in a rocket ship. He took off. Right. So this is the famous or infamous image of a Maya rocket. That is actually a lid of a coffin. Oh. Of a sarcophagus of a great ruler whose name was Kinichana Pacal. And he ruled a place that we know today as Palenque. Beautiful, beautiful site in Mexico. and yeah when they found his tomb in the 1950s you know this beautiful coffin with this carving

37:36um there were there was kind of a interesting situation after they found it of course nobody could read the hieroglyphs right in the 50s or 60s there were all these texts around the coffin it wasn't until the 70s that we could sort of read the name maybe in the 80s and 90s we could read actually what it was saying it was talking about this great king his birth date his death date all of his ancestors uh kind of waiting for him in the afterlife and all this stuff the scene on the top is of kinishana pakal the king he he's he is kind of taking off in a way right but what he's doing is he's raising as the sun in the east he's being resurrected and he's not in a rocket.

38:22He's just emerging out of the earth, out of the kind of this maw, this cave, rising up as the sun into the sky. And it's a really elaborate imagery, but that's in essence what it is. That's really cool. Not a rocket ship, but he's going in the sky anyway.

38:41Shane Gillis:Yeah, I remember just, that must have, you know, I was watching that as like a perpetually stoned young boy, Something being like, I knew it. This is awesome. It must have been driving you nuts to watch TV and be like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this right now? I know. Yeah, it does drive me nuts because, you know, well, here's the thing, right? Those narratives, and it's not long before Ancient Aliens, long before that show, right? There were movies, Eric Von Donnegan and his book, you know, Chariots of the Gods. Yeah. Talking about all this stuff in the 70s. that was at a time when no one could come up with a counter narrative right so that takes hold um it fills a void right to explain this stuff yeah and now we can explain it so this is the conundrum that i'm facing is you know we do understand it culturally historically but it is hard for us to fight against you know ancient aliens which is on tv almost every night yeah or or whatever right that that's what people the people who are curious about this stuff genuinely curious don't have a whole lot to go to to understand it and they may come up with um a show like ancient aliens and that's like oh okay that must be the consensus view or something like that right yeah not knowing that any archaeologist thinks that's bs yeah um we're just not very good at communicating with the public to be honest you know what we do know yeah and and um i'll be the first one to say that academics are terrible at communicating some of the realities we think are you know that are out there in terms of history in cultures so i mean this book i i hope is a a small um effort to you know tell what's really going on to to explain some of what we think we know that's pretty so in terms of like the you know being an archaeologist and like kind of like the um i guess like the day-to-day like i just like you ever have people because it is you know you're out there you're digging like do you have people who like break stuff all the time and like how do you deal that must be that That must be like really tough, like really high stakes of like a.

41:05Shane Gillis:Yeah. Yeah. It's so archaeology is. Well, it is a lot of fun. You're out in the in the boonies, often living in a camp with a bunch of people for months at a time. That's what I was doing in my younger days, at least, you know, in in in remote places. And it is a little crazy. I mean, you're studying this ancient stuff, but you're also kind of isolated. And, you know, I just remember living in the jungle before there was any internet or anything like that. You know, you kind of go bananas. Yeah, yeah. But also, yeah, when you're digging, not necessarily a big pyramid or something. Let's just say you're digging an ancient house.

41:54And it might be a pile of rocks. It's a couple of feet high, you know, platform in the jungle. There's pottery everywhere. There's a lot of stones, you know, wall stones. It's boring, maybe. Even for a specialist, it can be kind of boring. You don't find cool things every day. Maybe once in a while there's something. And usually, in my experience, the coolest stuff is discovered when there's like two days left. Really? season and you're like oh shit what do we do like a tomb you know royal tomb or something yeah this is typical right because you know after you dig deep deep in a lot of time passes then you find the cool stuff um so it can be stressful that way if you find something special there's a lot of bureaucracy involved yeah you have to let people know what you found in the government yeah and you made it you mean you'd get guards down to protect it i was wondering about the theft because

42:53Shane Gillis:I imagine it's like you guys have a pretty decent sized crew digging. You know what I mean? So I would imagine, you know, if I was just there digging, I wasn't an archaeologist, I would definitely snag like an old mugger. Like, you know, you'd want to, right? Well, I know for a fact that stuff does get taken by the laborers we sometimes have or, you know, back in the old day, archaeologists were notorious themselves for stealing stuff, you know, in a way that probably at the time maybe didn't seem unethical. But, you know, 100 years ago, archaeologists working in Mexico, you know, you'd go to their archives and you'd actually find artifacts that they brought out.

43:32You know, you wouldn't do that today.

43:33Shane Gillis:No, yeah. But what's the penalty? You just get like lose your license? Like how do you? Well, yeah. Nowadays, it's as a professional archaeologist, you all artifacts have to be cataloged. you have to report them to if you're working in a foreign foreign country of course you have to report everything you you have and that you found um but you know there are uh there there's a dark side to all of this too which is like the art market in the market and looting ancient sites and that's what we're often fighting against sometimes directly you know looters in the in the field i've come across gangs of looters in northern guatemala who were tunneling into pyramids looking for tombs yeah that's my next question what do you do for i guess you just said you get security around the site because i'd be kind of like nervous i was out in the woods yeah i'm doing guatemala and i'm digging precious artifacts i would assume someone's going to be like yeah let me get that yeah yeah no tunnel underneath the yeah well this is what we do too as archaeologists we have to tunnel into if the building is large enough um and stable enough that that's the best way to understand its history is to actually start digging a tunnel it's like you're mining yeah you know into a pyramid and and the looters do the same thing uh so the irony of a lot of this too is that the guys that that archaeologists have trained to dig when we go home they don't have a lot to do necessarily and they're like hey let's go we know how to dig these things now yeah and they go to town and and so uh this actually is what happened a lot in the 70s and 80s like there isn't an ancient maya building in northern guatemala that doesn't have a trench right through it mostly by looting yeah and it's really sad um But a lot of the stuff you see in museums today in the States, fantastic Maya pottery or whatever, a lot of that's not dug by archaeologists, but found by looters, sold on the art market, collected by either museums or private collectors.

45:47I understand that because it's beautiful stuff. If I had the money and wasn't an archaeologist, I would understand. I'd love to have a Maya chocolate vase in my living room. Yeah. So there's there's that constant struggle, right? There aren't enough archaeologists to go around. And there are a lot of people who are really interested in digging this stuff up who maybe aren't scientists. and and you know what's interesting is that all of this kind of becomes this big mix it becomes this way of of of accessing the ancient past it may not always be through archaeology but i'll tell you the stuff in museums now that maybe doesn't have any context to it or we don't know where it's from exactly sometimes those objects have stories to tell that we can read or we can figure out we can reconstruct it and and so that's part of it too right i do a lot of work in museums instead of uh digging in the dirt because uh and there's still not enough of us doing this kind of research frankly so uh it's overwhelming yeah so you're saying there's a just like a ton

47:01Shane Gillis:of stuff that's been found and it's just the matter of taking the time to decipher right figure it out yeah yeah we we have thousands of it's like having a bookcase or a library of thousands of books and there may be i don't know 10 or 15 of us who can read them dang and you know we have jobs and other things we're doing yeah yeah so yeah it there's a lot of work still to be done to figure this stuff out so in terms of like you know um do you guys have a good sense of like what the Mayans, I guess, like philosophy, the religious worldview was and, you know, where, where were they at and how, how do they compare to like Aztecs or is there, is there like big differences or similar?

47:45Yeah, great question. So we do know a lot about Maya philosophy and, and religion. I think it's hard to distinguish those things. Yeah. And it is a lot like the Aztecs because they're all part of the same kind of Mesoamerican world, which is sort of like, you know, think of Greece and Rome or the Mediterranean world, where a lot of those myths and religious ideas are kind of the same, but maybe with different flavors. Same idea. One of the things that excites me, and I'm thinking of my next book, actually, a little bit, is one about this, about Maya religion and philosophy. Because as much as we can read about kings and wars and dynasties, we can also read about their gods and about their outlook on the world and their cosmology.

48:38And the Maya of today have a lot of the same ideas about, you know, the way the sun moves around the sky and how that creates this kind of overall structure of the universe. And that structure is reflected in a lot of other things. there's this really elegant cosmology to these folks and it's not just in mesoamerica i think a lot of it is indigenous american about the structure of the world and they were observing their world just like scientists do like they didn't have the tools of modern science but they were smart and they could see how the world was working the patterns of the seasons and of time and of agriculture and this sort of cadence of the world around them, that's what created their philosophy.

49:33It's rooted in, literally, rooted in kind of the earth and the sky. And not to get too abstract about it, this is stuff that really I find fascinating because it's like an archetype. It's like one of these things that a lot of cultures share. even beyond the Americas. I mean, if you go to traditional societies in China or philosophy there in Asia, in Africa, you see a lot of the same ideas about cosmology and structure. I don't know, we've kind of forgotten some of this stuff in our world. But I don't know, if you're a farmer in a traditional society and you're relying on the seasons and you're relying on how the sun works and how it moves in the rain, I mean, that creates a template that's kind of universal in the human experience, I think.

50:35And so I'm kind of interested. I don't know a ton about outside Mesoamerica, but I'm really interested in kind of probing those deeper ideas. Not that people were sharing those ideas, but I think they're old. I think they're just really fundamental about existing on the earth, and we can tap into it some.

50:58Shane Gillis:That's pretty cool. From just the little bit I read about the Cortez and the Aztecs, there was this idea with the Aztecs that if they didn't complete the sacrifices, like that blood, the blood was like some universal life force that they would display to appease the gods, and if they didn't, the skies would literally crash down. There was a balance held by all this stuff, that if they didn't do the rituals, it would just look like the sun would fall out of the sky, just everything would fall apart. Yeah, yeah. But this is part of a bigger idea of renewal. It's all about renewing the world. And sometimes it involved the offering of one's own blood in bloodletting or sacrifice.

51:39It could also involve lots of different transactions with the forces of nature to ensure renewal. So if you step back a bit and look at the bigger picture, there is a philosophy behind it, right? Which is that humans have a responsibility to renew things. I think that's very powerful. You know, we don't do that in our world necessarily, right? We kind of do the opposite of that. But in this pre-industrial whatever world, you know, they were they saw that you know there were problems with climate sometimes there were years of drought and so forth not everything was stable every year right so this is where that idea comes from the Aztecs took it to a certain level in their ideology that's different maybe from other cultures but the underlying idea there is that humans have to do certain things we can call that ritual they didn't have a word for this as ritual they just saw it as the work they had to do yeah to ensure that yeah the sun would come up again after the 52 year cycle or that you know it would be as strong as it once was or that the rains would come um i've been part of ceremonies as a kid i was a part of ceremony as a kid in in coba in this little maya village now it's a bigger town the rains that weren't coming one year that we were there my dad's project and the the the village was in crisis because without that rain there was you couldn't even hunt the animals because they weren't around anymore and and people could not grow their corn so the the local priest decided to have a rain ceremony and this was completely genuine this was not some kind of tourist thing for us this was for the village and and we had they constructed an altar in the plaza of the ancient ruins i mean talk about atmospheric i mean it was wild and uh it was an all-night ceremony to renew rain and it's called the chachak which means to summon chak the rain deity who's a deity we see in the ancient art by the way and uh is one of the uh i was young i was nine years old the the the the shaman called a chemen a doer he needed kids to be part of the ceremony so he asked me to be one of the kids that would um rotate around uh every like an hour here an hour there there were a lot of us to sit under this table makeshift table it was his altar and it was a four-sided model of the universe with the four world directions and i was one of the four kids that sat under the table facing in the world directions to call the rain god and i had to sit there for an hour in the middle of the night going what what what how old are you I was nine.

54:55Shane Gillis:Whoa. I was a frog. Yeah. That's awesome. And I was calling the ring god. And we were all sitting around going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And, you know, there's fermented drinks going around. And it's just wild. You know, no women were allowed. It was just men and the boys.

55:13And, I mean, I was a kid from North Carolina. And I was all of a sudden, you know, kind of in this thing. Yeah. And my dad was, you know, taking pictures and being the anthropologist. And I was just sort of going there. What am I doing? But that experience for me was, it really, really brought home in retrospect to this idea that, you know, we have to do things to renew the world. And all religions do this, right? A Catholic mass is kind of a renewal ceremony, right? Yeah. All sorts of ceremonies are renewals of the cosmos. And they're doing it their way, right? And they do it in these weird ways that we think are, well, they are kind of nuts.

55:59I mean, sometimes these, you know, the human sacrifices that the Aztecs were doing was a kind of renewal because the life force is the blood of these people. And the cosmos needs its life force. There are a lot of complicated ideas behind all of these things. Yeah. But in a nutshell, it is about renewal. That's pretty.

56:24Shane Gillis:So what's like the pantheon, like the mind pantheon looking like? Do you have a good sense of like all the different gods like they do? Yeah, well, they existed in what we would call maybe an animate universe. In that, you know, we know that we're living beings and plants are living beings and animals. but they also saw an animation in mountains in the earth in the sky um anything that the sun that moves around you know it has animation it's it has agency in a way right so and when we're talking about gods we're talking about in many ways these kind of natural forces um and and so they gave names to these the rain deity right who is still venerated um yeah he's he's one of the most important right because he's a storm he's he's like a storm cloud chak that's exactly what they call him when there's a storm cloud coming in yucatan oh i remember this as a kid they would say here comes chak yeah he's coming he's coming right And he's come in with his machete to break the clouds to bring the rain.

57:40And in ancient times, it was an axe, a stone axe. But these ideas don't die. They're still there. And it's easy to say it's like mythology and stuff like that, but this is part of their lives. And I think they had all of these deities and so-called gods and forces in their world. Some of them are ancestors. Some of them are forces of nature. Some of them are combinations of all of these things, right? So it gets to be very, very complicated very quickly. But yeah, they were, you know, like a lot of other cultures, they just saw this kind of animation in the universe around them. That's pretty.

58:29Shane Gillis:And I know they were notorious. The calendar is the big one. Yeah, time was animate. Time was a living thing. Yeah, that was kind of cool. You always hear about the Mayan calendar, but in the book, you were talking a little bit about how they seemed almost like pretty hellbent on like really nailing down all those little kind of swirling gears of time. and how it all fit together. And that was pretty neat. And that was one of the reasons it was, I guess, easier to decipher because they had such a good, strong calendar system that you were able to see the date. Aren't we lucky that they wrote everything down according to the very day when things happened, right?

59:03So I've actually had these conversations with people who study Egyptian history or even Greek history. Like there's a lot we know about that, but they may not know the exact day when Tutankhamen died. They might know the year more or less within a couple of years. We know because of the Maya calendar and the way they mesh with our calendar, the very day when Kinnichana of Palenque died and was resurrected. We know when the War of 378 happened. Atikal, that was on January the 16th. We know when all sorts of things happened. you know to the very day and it's that's really unusual anytime in ancient history no matter where you are in the world so we're really lucky we have that for the maya um they were so interested in their cosmos and in the patterns of time and everything that they they wrote that down with precision so yeah it's great for us how many days was the mayan year was it 360 or well they had our year too i mean they had 365 days what they had that they had um uh a notion uh well this is cool there we have a base 10 counting system right they had a base 20 counting system how's that because we count our fingers but they also counted toes didn't even think of toes so i've been doing

1:00:35Shane Gillis:math with my six-year-old daughter i'm gonna bust my toes out now so so once you get that idea of fingers and toes. Okay, base 20. So they have an accounting system that's 20, instead of 10, 100 ,000, right? It goes 20, 400, 8 ,000. And so I mentioned this because they understood time to be 365 days, like we do, even with the leap days in there. But they also had this idea of 360 days. because 20 will go into that. They liked that. And they were like, okay, we'll use that as sort of a basic idea of a year in this calendar that they developed. And it doesn't track with real time, but they used it, and they used it to create this massive calendar, the scale of which dwarfs our cosmology in terms of the Big Bang.

1:01:36Like the dates they were writing sometimes in mythology go back, you know, billions and billions and billions of years. So that's another kind of cool topic.

1:01:47Shane Gillis:Well, so their mythology has dates. Yeah, yeah. They're talking about gods doing things way before our Big Bang. Yeah, yeah. It's really crazy when you think about it. What is their like Genesis myth? Do they have like a standard Genesis myth or is it just kind of? Yeah, they do. In fact, this is something I've been working on in the last few months. I haven't even published on this really. But I think there's one essential myth about the raising of the earth out of primordial sea, you know, which sounds like a lot of myths in the world, right? And it's this stone that is the surface of the earth.

1:02:25and uh there are four uh guys who kind of hold up this big table like stone and create the world um that's recorded in in some ancient myths i've been working on um the uh it's interesting because maya kings talk about renewal when they were marking their calendar festivities they would have to recreate that myth by raising stones. These are the monuments we sometimes see at Maya sites today, or the stones that are symbols of that. And there's another myth that's about kind of a hearth that is created in primordial time, three stones that get set in a triangle, and uh that's called the first hearth place and that seems to be a really essential event in the creation of of kind of the order of everything right so we have these here's the struggle right now among us uh who are studying this stuff is we have these little episodes of myth and mythology i'm trying to create more of a narrative out of them all like what's the real story how do they all connect right how does the stones over here connect to those stones over there anyway, I'm really optimistic that in the next several years, we're going to be able to talk about Maya mythology, ancient Maya mythology in a way that we talk about Egyptian or even Greek or Roman mythology in terms of this stuff, right?

1:03:55So it's exciting.

1:03:57Shane Gillis:That's pretty cool. Yeah. Well, nice. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, man. And yeah, if anyone wants the book, it is The Four Heavens by David Stewart. Good job. Thank you, Matt. If I might say so myself. It was great to talk. Good job figuring out what this stuff means. I couldn't do it. There's more to do, too. It's great fun. Thank you. Well, man, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Watch new episodes of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Spotify. Do it.

1:04:24Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees? Turn the temperature down with Blinds.com and get up to 50 % off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the Memorial Day mega sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you. Free samples, real design experts, and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 50 % off site-wide and huge savings on doorbusters right now during the Memorial Day mega sale at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply.