The Journey North

When I was preparing my presentation about the Nasca Lines for the University of Calgary presentation, I realized that there were two long radish-like images with three lobes on the top of the greenery, on the Nasca plain, that there, was separated by a huge empty space.

I had seen this long radish-like image image somewhere else. Where? A search was futile. I had so many scanned copies of the Mixtec and Maya codices that I could not find it. As I laid out a zodiac through the web site NightSkies, I found that a serpent was in a place similar to the radish-like configurations I had seen on the Nasca drawings.

However, I had to go to the dentist. The Nasca paper had to wait a bit. In telling the dentist about my newest sky project, he made the comment that he and his wife had gone to New Zealand and on the way back his wife had commented that the constellation Orion was upside down. “Why?” I asked. “Well, because the constellations we see are actually upside down south of the Equator.”

As it was, Ophiuchus, the constellation that bisect the two “radish-like” images are seen and accepted as right side up in Peru. . . because it is directly on the equator and has a star on the top that becomes the hat of Ophiuchus AND probably also a star at the bottom that can act as a roof or a pointed hat for the Peruvian view of this constellation. So that both Orion and Ophiuchus can be considered to be the same form rightside up or upside down. Radishes, cabbages and other vegetables, south of the Equator are huge. Not the tiny commercially grown vegetables that we have in the states. So the placement of a radish image is justifiable.

I read a description of Ophiuchus in Richard Allen’s Star Names and found that it was sometimes called the blind god. So I went searching for the blind god in the Maya codices. That was easier than searching for radishes. Usually, the blind god wore a blindfold over its eyes. And since, this was a constellation, I was aware that the jaguar image was used to indicate the night time skies.

Bingo! I found the blind god in the mouth of a huge jaguar, but not with a blindfold, only with sightless eyes. And on its ear was a three lobed radish-like plant used as an earbob.

Whoa! That might well indicate that the Peruvians and the Maya were in astronomy school together. Was Nasca the “triangulation from the sky to the earth” practice area for the school? I wrote up the presentation along those lines, collected the pictures for it and put it on my web site after the presentation was over. I called it “The Radish.” Then I forgot about it.

Then the Bodley page 26 popped up. I had acquired books from John Pohl’s Bodley Codex class, and started to browse through it during my lunch. Hm.m.m, John mentions a year sign (the A/O) that had acquired the shape of a serpent for decorative purposes only. I got the page off my CD, blew it up in Photoshop and started to fill in the missing segments of the images. It is easier for me to “understand” what I am looking at, if I draw out the details . . . even if I do not draw the whole image, I get a better view of what is there that way.

I had finished the top line and was about to close the program when suddenly I “saw” the upside down star viewer the astronomers used. Oh. . . and the footprint path was white. That either meant “death” or “snow” Now where would the Maya find snow? And why was the viewer upside down? The dentist! The constellation was upside down for the northern viewers south of the Equator!

Another tidbit of information made itself known. In Oaxaca, there is a carved radish festival every Christmas season. The radish image and Christmas would only be important if the “radish” image was associated with a god or with a star formation. In Oaxaca, Orion was the Christmas star formation at this time, but, in Peru during the same season, Ophiuchus with his two serpent figures (where the radish-forms were on the plain) was the Peruvian constellation. This constellation appears in the Sping time north of the Equator and was called the Summer Triangle. No wonder nothing in Maya astronomy seems to work out correctly.

Checking my older notes, I found that Oaxaca to the Yucatan had the transmission of metallurgy from Peru. They were using it for a long time. If this were true, then the codex was not about John Doe and Mary Smith getting married, but instead it was of their rulership in another land. Their son was an astronomer in that land and he traveled over the snow to the northern mountain government located at Coatepec, the Serpent Mountain, home of Huitzilopochtli near Mexico City. The codex is telling us about the history of Peruvian astronomers who consulted with other countries, including Mexico.

It is probably that the Peruvians had to erase Ophiuchus from the plains and instead of the serpents, placed the “radish-like” forms because they had their own radish festival in honor of this constellation. A festival that was probably wiped out eventually by the Inquisition as well.