West Panel from
TheTemple of the Inscriptions

West Panel
Click below for the glyphs of the East and Central Panels.

East Panel
Central Panel

Notes on the West Panel

The group that I was with were much sharper than I. They were:
Frederik Hoppe
Louise I. Paradis
Joel Skidmore and myself.

Louise quickly numbered the back of the page and I cut and pasted into a long strip the glyphs she had numbered. The group got busy cutting the strip into smaller related sections, deciphering the dates and the "event" sequences. They worked very hard on the placement of the glyph strips. No one even looked my way; they were engrossed in the process.

Nevertheless, there was a lot of information forthcoming on this panel. The three gods, GI, GII, and GIII were very prominent at the beginning and the end of the inscription. These particular gods, I had previously determined as the most important symbols of the Maya culture: the Three Hearth Stones. Each of the glyphic descriptions for these gods found on a Quirigua monument and has a description of a city or polity included with each glyphic representation.

With triangulation between the correct constellations (not found in Orion's belt since the nebula located there can barely be seen to the naked eye), it probably can be determined which cities on earth had emerged as the political power. Since one of the polities described is the water throne, one must choose Tenochtitlán/Teotihuacán as one of those polities. It may not be true, I don't know.

In between time, Stanley Guenter and Marc Zender who were in the advanced class of the Palenque inscriptions, had previously worked through many of the glyphs on a phonetic basis. They had already translated two phrases on the Temple of the Inscriptions West Panel as:
God 1, took the Heart of the God of Death and threw it into the Ocean Sea. (P9, O10, P10, O11 and P11)

and a second lengthy "sentence" which I have paraphrased as:
"they arrived with their gods, later more people arrived with other gods. These gods were then eaten by the first gods. (N through P)

The second phrase is a bit hard to accommodate within our concepts of right and wrong. Gods eating gods would indicate a form of sacred cannibalism. And, in turn, this would justify our "knowledge" of the Aztec and Maya worlds and the reports of human sacrifice. Yet we have no "proofs" except through church records that such activities actually occurred, the concept of human sacrifice has taken hold and has become the "bible" of Meso-American history.

I posit that when gods "eat gods" the actual concept to be considered would be that the new (or old) gods replaced the old (or new) gods while they absorbed some of the attributes of the conquered gods. This is a common occurance, even as Christianity "absorbed" the Greek gods. One can still find remnants of Greek attributes in the modern religion.

Therefore, if this phrase is symbolic of a conquering government whose power-base was the gods in the heavens, it would make perfect sense. This would explain the symbols found on the image of the child Chan Balam: the serpent leg and K'awil fire brand in the forehead of the mask.

These particular symbols seem to be related to the Guerrero cave drawing. The Quetzalcoatl-K'awil-firebird is probably based upon a government which conquered the older more established serpent-earth-god based ruling class. Government monuments would state such things. These statements would not be mythological. It would not even be particularly any more sacred than our own monetary system that state clearly: "In God We Trust." And most important, it may explain the arrival of Quetzalcoatl, the blazing fire god of Tenochtitlán and Teotihuacán.

As it is, the demise of the Death God is actually confirmed within the Madrid Codex. It is a simple series showing the relationship between the Red Macaw attacking a woman with a split head (identified in the glyphs over her head as the Moon) and the next part of panel a showing the Hummingbird attacking his throat, the end of panel a shows the Death God as a mummy bundle with his head upside down, a universal americanism indicating a dead person.

This would be the myth of Coatlique and Huitzilopochtli. Is he the original GI of the Gods? Coatlique, we know is the lake system in the Altiplano that on clear nights would reflect the moon to the extent that it blocked out the stars. So we have the reflector of the moon as the White (Moon) Lady of the mountain who lives (reflected in Lake Tenochtitlan). She split her head (the mountain) when she was attacked by the Red Macaw and it became two horns or two partially attached mountains, one: Popocatepetl and the other, Iztaccihuatl. The Red macaw was NOT the sun. Instead it was a flaming element that fell into the lake which created the Humming Bird of the South, Huitzilopochtli. The Madrid Codex is a picture history of the astronomy of Mexico and worth looking into.

Back