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

Support the D. A. W. G. Z. @ patreon.com/MSsecretpod Support David by reading his Books!!!! Go See Matt Live @ mattmccusker.com/dates Go See Shane Live @ shanemgillis.com Go See Lemaire Lee Live @ https://lemairelee.fun/ Go See Shawn Gardini Live if you want @ https://www.shawngardini.com/live yello. Surprise!! Got a bonus ep for you today. The reg will be out on Friday. Matt took to the podes to chat with David Stuart for a little bonus action. David is a Archeologist, Author, Professor, Mayanist, and most importantly a D. A. W. G. Check out some of his books where ever you get your books from. Please enjoy. God Bless. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Wow, wow, Wes.

• 0:02Matt McCusker?

  All right, we're live. David Stewart, thank you for coming, man.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:06Matt McCusker?

  I'm pumped, man. I've never met an archaeologist before.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's a fun job, I gotta say.

• 0:11Matt McCusker?

  Do you like it?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Playing the dirt. Absolutely. I love it. I, when I was a kid, I decided that was what I wanted to do, you know, and, and luck, I'm really lucky because I can do it as a, you know, grown up.

• 0:23Matt McCusker?

  Well, your parents are both archaeologists, too.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, my, my dad and my mom were, were both archaeologists and worked for National Geographic, the magazine, you know, back in the heyday of all of that. So, you know, they took us on trips, me and my, my brothers and sister. Um, you know, that's how I got exposed to this stuff was like going to, you know, Mexico and Guatemala, you know, back in the seventies, getting, getting exposed to these fantastic ruins before they were turned into big tourist sites.

• 0:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Sometimes, right? And I just caught the bug. I mean, I just wanted to know more about it and, and seeing what my dad was doing, what my mom was doing. I just wanted to keep on with that. So.

• 1:05Matt McCusker?

  Nice. Yeah. I mean, we, uh, by the way, too, we have, we have Val with us here today. Josh couldn't make it. Josh is actually getting, I believe, a colonoscopy. So.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Very important. Yeah.

• 1:16Matt McCusker?

  Someone's doing, someone's doing some excavating in, uh, in his butt right now. He's asleep right now and someone's looking for secrets in his butt, deciphering the texts. That's pretty cool though, man. So like, you know, and, and from reading your book, by the way, the Four Heavens, I have it right here, history, a new history, a new history of the HMI, not the old, not the BS from before.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. But from reading your book, it was like back, I guess, when your dad was doing it, it was kind of amazing. I didn't realize how much of, you know, their history was completely unknown and lost. And I guess there was like little bits and pieces. That kind of struck me about how people were just like, even the people who lived there were just like, I don't know. Like no one really knew.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  And this is still kind of the case in terms of people's awareness, right? So I think it's fair to say it's new in in terms of not being out there in the public arena. And certainly in in Mexico, you know, there are plenty of Maya people around today, but they don't have much of a sense of their own history.

• 2:18Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  And and that I find that really sad and something that needs to be fixed and corrected. So there's a Spanish edition coming out, you know, and I I hope word gets out about this stuff and it gets into the schools and everything, but you're right.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  When when my dad was, you know, an archaeologist and and working in Maya ruins. When I was a kid, there was no history, you know? So we've we've been through this amazing time in the last 50 years where we've kind of gone from zero to 100 in terms of knowing the names of kings and knowing the dynasties and how they all, you know, the kind of Game of Thrones history of all these different kingdoms. And it's the oldest history anywhere in the Americas, which is pretty mind boggling.

• 3:06Matt McCusker?

  And that's that's also crazy because like, you know, you you always see stuff and like, I don't know, I always hear things on like TV and YouTube where it's like some claim they go back to like 60 million, you know, something like crazy. Because I mean, I must have really chapped your ass watching Ancient Aliens back in the day. Did you like that show?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  You know, I've been asked to be on that show several times.

• 3:26Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  And

• 3:27Matt McCusker?

  You wouldn't play ball about the outer space travel or what was the problem?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Well, the thing is, I I know from experience that, well, I should say, I that show to me is just nonsense.

• 3:37Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  The the real human story of these places and and the monuments is, I think, the real story that that's just as compelling. But yeah, I mean, I I was invited to be on a few of those shows. And what what I realized from a long time ago is that when you get interviewed for a show like that as an as an expert, quote unquote.

• 4:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Of course, you have no control over how they're going to edit it or how they're going to display what you say or chop you up or whatever.

• 4:08Matt McCusker?

  It sucks, actually. You spend your whole life trying to be incredible.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I've actually had friends and colleagues who, you know, say, yeah, I'll do that. Sure. You know, and I kind of get that, right? You want to you want to be out there and talk, but then they just kind of, you know, manipulate whatever you're going to say, you know, for their for their narrative, right? But yeah, I mean, as, as, as someone who studies the Maya and has been around the people, has been around these amazing sites in, in Mexico and Guatemala and Belize, you know, the, the, the whole ancient aliens narrative, it's coming from another place. It's coming from our, you know, kind of background in trying to struggle how to explain these places. That's an old struggle that goes back hundreds of years, actually. But the thing is now we have the history. This is what people don't realize.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  We, we, we have the names of the people who built these monuments. And they're not aliens. They're, they're people.

• 5:02Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  And they're doing the same stuff we do and they have the same concerns we do.

• 5:06Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that was kind of cool because it really goes, from what you guys have found, it goes almost back, well, I guess further back or about the same as like, as we know about ancient Greece, like it goes like, what did you say, like 200 AD?

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the, the written history we have goes back to about, not quite as far as ancient, you know, classical Greece, but let's say to about 300, 200 AD.

• 5:28Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  It's pretty far back.

• 5:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  I mean, that's 1,200 years before Columbus. And the archaeology goes back further than that in terms of seeing what people are doing on the ground and, you know, tracking how they develop over time. So we, we hit the story kind of midstream in terms of being able to read about what they're writing about, um, what's preserved. And, and that's where we have to kind of fill in the blanks in terms of, you know, stuff they didn't write about, you know, maybe they didn't write about their, their economic situation and they didn't write about, you know, what was going on in their world beyond just the, the, the, the aristocrats. They were the ones who were writing, right?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  And the ones who were literate. So it's what we have. I think it's super exciting, but it's not the whole picture.

• 6:16Matt McCusker?

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• 6:55Speaker 02

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• 6:59Matt McCusker?

  Nice.

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• 7:00Matt McCusker?

  I love Quince. I'll be, I'll be honest. They sent me the stuff and I, their boxers, they use like cot, like regular materials, not a lot of polyesters, natural fibers. I'm a, I'm a big fan.

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• 7:36Matt McCusker?

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• 8:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:09Matt McCusker?

  Who burnt all the books.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 8:11Matt McCusker?

  I mean, did you ever just like sit at night and like just kind of cur, like, did you ever really get mad at that guy? Cause he kind of did like ruin the whole thing.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  He, he ruined a lot. Yeah. So, so this guy, he was a Franciscan friar who later became the bishop of Yucatan. Back in the 16th century. And he, um,

• 8:30Speaker 00

  You know, he's vilified because he burnt a lot of the Maya books and smashed their, you know, what do you call it, the idols and so forth. And he caused a lot of damage. In a way, he was doing his job at the time.

• 8:45Matt McCusker?

  True.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  That's what they were there for. We've lost a lot of culture and a lot of history, indigenous culture because of that. But there's one thing I will say about Landa. He was, in a way, a curious figure. He was curious about the stuff he was trying to stamp out.

• 9:09Matt McCusker?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Which sounds a little weird, but he wrote this book that is basically a compilation of facts about the world of the Maya before the Spanish ever arrived.

• 9:21Matt McCusker?

  I have that book in my house. I just like happened. I didn't, you know, it was funny when I was reading your book. I'm like, oh, I have that. I read like a little bit of it.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:28Matt McCusker?

  And yeah, he does kind of, does strike you as he was like recounting whatever history he had.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was talking to people and he was getting, these are unique accounts that we have. And without his book, this manuscript that was just found randomly back in the 1800s, you know, in a library in Spain, without Landa's book, we'd be really up a creek in terms of understanding the Maya. So I have to give him some credit despite the fact that he did a lot of damage at the time, like most Spanish priests of that era. It was this kind of give and take. I mean, they were trying to stamp out the idolatry, the non-Catholic rituals they were seeing. But they were, they were almost like anthropologists of their time. They were, they were writing down stuff that otherwise would just be lost.

• 10:17Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. And what was like the, was, I remember I read about Cortez and the Aztecs and there was like the ritual human sacrifice. Was that the Mayans, was that kind of like?

• 10:26Speaker 00

  They did some of that, sure. Maybe not on the scale of the Aztecs, or at least on the scale of what the Spanish talk about for the Aztecs. Some of that's exaggerated.

• 10:34Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I've heard that.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  But, but sacrifice was real. It was part of their, in Mesoamerica in general, we, we study that, we acknowledge it. One of the things about sacrifice that's hard for us to think about is that And here I'm kind of thinking about examples that I have come across in my own research. You know, for the Maya, for example, there were ritual, like executions of war captives. And that's kind of cross-cultural. I mean, we call that sacrifice.

• 11:09Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  But it's like a Roman gladiator, you know, arena.

• 11:13Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Or, you know, which is very like performative and very ritualized. But it's a way of kind of dealing with your enemies and your captives in this kind of, this way of going about executing them, right?

• 11:26Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I mean, that's like pretty, I would say that's pretty common. I mean, even the Spanish were like cutting people's heads off and hanging them on sticks. I think the cannibalism thing is what gets people kind of, if they were, I don't know if they were munching. But if you're also just munching warriors.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  I think there was some of that in Ancient Miss America.

• 11:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  And the Americas, it's in a lot of places in the world.

• 11:49Matt McCusker?

  I don't hold it against them. I mean, it was a long time ago.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it is hard to wrap our heads around in some ways, but the indigenous people in the 1600s and 1500s were also recounting their own background and their own histories, and they sometimes talked about that.

• 12:09Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Or drew pictures of it. And some scholars today dismiss it as exaggeration. I think it actually did happen.

• 12:18Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, even when they, because I, you know, like when Cortez got there, he was, he hit the Yucatan first. So I think, didn't he interact with the Mayans or some offshoot?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  That's right. Long before the Aztecs, he got to the Yucatan, right?

• 12:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and a lot of, a lot of the, there was two other expeditions that got pretty much thwarted, the Spaniards before him, right?

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, that era is so interesting. You know, these crazy expeditions, these guys who would just head off into the, into the horizon, not knowing where they were going.

• 12:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  And, and the early expeditions, you know, they hit the coast of Yucatan and they didn't know where they were. Or they didn't expect to see mainland right there. And the Maya are there and yeah, they have these battles, the the Spanish more often than not get trounced.

• 13:02Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  They have to head back to Cuba and and then try again and then they go back and try again. And eventually Cortez.

• 13:09Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Gets his group together.

• 13:11Matt McCusker?

  Finally does it. Yeah, that was that was the one thing you always hear about Cortez where the, you know, popular consensus people say is like, oh, he just like showed up and he tricked the guy and they handed it over to him. And I was like, no, it was a pretty long, kind of like gruesome, protracted battle for like, I mean, it was like years.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Years. Yeah. I mean, the whole story of that, of Cortez's adventure. I, you know, I'm still waiting for the big Hollywood epic movie of this.

• 13:39Matt McCusker?

  I.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Because it's one of the greatest stories in all of history.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  It has a lot of painful parts to it for sure. It has a lot of drama, but you can read firsthand accounts of it, too.

• 13:51Matt McCusker?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  That not only Cortez wrote, but one of his soldiers wrote this amazing firsthand book of his memoirs of that encounter. And it's like a science fiction novel.

• 14:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like these guys landing on another planet. And and they have to go through this process and it's long, like you say. It took years for Cortez to arrive on the shore of Mexico. And then to overthrow the Aztec Empire.

• 14:21Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Um, not a lot of years. It was kind of a short time in, in, you know, two, two and a half years.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  But but even after that, it took a while to kind of solidify their their presence there and to establish, you know, New Spain is what they called it. So that that story is one of not just the Spanish coming in and beating people over the heads. Cortez had to. You know, there were just a few hundred guys at most. They had to make alliances with people, the Aztec, who hated the Aztecs. That's how he was successful.

• 14:57Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  You know, the, the, there was this city state called Claschala. It's now a beautiful town in Mexico, not far from Mexico City, but that was the center of a kingdom. Cortez passed through it, actually warred with them. Eventually, they realized, hey, they could together fight the Mexica, the Aztecs, you know, the of Tenochtitlan. And so that's a whole drama. That's whole, that's part of this story, right? And, and yeah, I just find it amazing. I, I always, you know, go back and read excerpts of that story just because it's, it's, it reads like a novel. It's like high drama.

• 15:33Matt McCusker?

  It's, it's really is kind of amazing, especially with the, um, who was the, I think Aguilar was the guy who got like stranded out there. Father Aguilar got like stranded and like lived among them, spoke the language and like happened, you know, he was a slave for like six years.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:49Matt McCusker?

  And then just stumbled upon, that's like the most, that's the one story I'm like surprised no one's ever done.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Well, right, this is another movie that someone has to make. In fact, I think there are scripts that have been.

• 15:59Matt McCusker?

  That's cool.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Bandied about in Hollywood for a while about, about that story and the Cortez. But the Aguilar story, yeah. So Cortez, when he first arrives on the coast of Yucatan,

• 16:14Speaker 00

  the, the Maya that, that they are in contact with realize, wait a minute, we've seen one of these weirdos before. Who, who was like floating in a boat.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And, and the Maya realized, oh, there's this slave who's one of these bearded, you know, white guys. Who speaks the same language, right? And so they, they get him, they bring him in and, and communicate. And, and it turns out it was the shipwrecked Spanish sailor who by that time was fluent in speaking Maya. And eventually he links up with Cortez. Cortez now has someone who can communicate for him.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Without that, Cortez would not have been able to go very far. But the other part of this, it's an amazing story. Eventually, they link up with another Maya kingdom, you know, and interact with them. And this is where Malinche comes from. This is the woman who eventually becomes Cortez's mistress.

• 17:21Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, he strangles his life. He strangles his life for.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Right, she's a princess. She speaks Maya and she speaks the language of the Aztecs.

• 17:27Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  So between those two, Aguilar and between the Spanish sailor and Malinche, they can actually converse. And Cortez is a master manipulator, right? That comes across in all these stories. And he's talking to the Aztec emperors and, you know, through these two. And they're actually having conversations. So it's just amazing to me that that all came together.

• 17:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  You know, and it was just by chance in some ways. But, but again, that's part of how extraordinary this story is.

• 18:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and I thought in your book, that was, you know, the part of it I never even thought about was like, and I thought it was pretty cool that you documented was like, the effort it took to decipher those like Mayan symbols and texts. And I still don't understand that you're saying like, because you get, they're like hieroglyphs. They're phonetic, but also they like, that was something I was like, trying to wrap my head around, where they have like sounds, almost like a consonant. But then it's also just like a pictogram where it's like, this is the thing. And they're, I don't know, that was like throwing me off. I don't know how you guys did that.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a little confusing. And so this is my, my specialty. This is what I work on more than anything else is, is decoding Maya hieroglyphs.

• 18:44Matt McCusker?

  So you literally like can look at this and that's like.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  That's my drawing, yeah.

• 18:48Matt McCusker?

  You know what this means?

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:50Matt McCusker?

  Get the hell out of here, dude. That's crazy.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  And it's beautiful stuff, right? I mean visually, it's really.

• 18:56Matt McCusker?

  It's really cool.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Cool looking. And that, actually, this is one of the things that drew me in as a kid. Because my dad, I remember asking my dad, you know, he was finding in, in like the, in the seventies when we were, you know, working in this Maya site called Chobah, which is near Tulum. I remember he, he, a couple of times, he found new carved tablets.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  And they had hieroglyphs on them. And I would say, Dad, what, what is this? You know, what, what does this say? And he's like, no, I don't know. Nobody can read them. And that, you know, caught me. I was like, that's interesting. And, and so, you know, I was really intrigued. They, they looked like cartoons. They looked like. I was a bored nine year old. Also, like, I was like,

• 19:44Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Hey, I just, you know, I just started drawing them and copying them out of books that my dad had. Just been kind of interested in what they were. It was like, instead of Pokemon cards, it was my hieroglyphs, you know, for me. Something like that. So, um, you know, it, that's what caught me. And, and, and I got kind of obsessed with them and, and was asking people that my dad knew. You know, and they were like, well, we can't read these. So it turned out that, you know, I was seeing some new patterns that other people hadn't seen. There were other people who I got to know who were also kind of on the cutting edge of stuff. And, and by the eighties, nineties,

• 20:27Speaker 00

  there were a handful of us who were these young. Some people called us the young Turks. You know, we were these up and coming guys who, who were, knew that we were on to something and we knew we were making inroads. And so that was a heady time. I was so lucky to time my entry into this world that way. And, and my dad was sort of like,

• 20:53Speaker 00

  he wasn't involved. He wasn't pushing me into any of this. It was just my own kind of interest. And, and he was like, hey, that's great what you're doing. And I think he was a little weirded out at times that we were deciphering things right and left all of a sudden, you know, the words for names of kings and the word for chocolate.

• 21:09Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  You know, which is written all over the vases, you know.

• 21:12Matt McCusker?

  They didn't know avocado was a Mayan term either. That kind of threw me for a loop.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well avocado is, we borrowed that word from

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Nahwat, which is the language of the Aztecs.

• 21:23Matt McCusker?

  Oh, okay. That's what it was, it was Aztec. That's, it was pretty insane.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So a lot of these words for foods, cacao is a Maya word. So that's written in hieroglyphs. And to go back to your question though, Matt, about the, the sounds and the pictures. Yeah, they're, they're elaborate looking, but when you. When you cut to the chase, they're spelling words and they're writing them as sounds. So you can, the visuals distract you. You know, it's like Egyptian too in that way, right? We see pictures of, you know, human figures and birds and stuff, stuff like that in Egyptian, but they're also phonetic. There's just, you have to know the language to read it. So, you know, we really perfected our ability to read the language behind the hieroglyphs.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  And it's a language we can connect to the language that's spoken today in that area. And by, by the mid nineties, I would say, we could read maybe eighty or ninety percent of Maya texts.

• 22:25Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy, especially when you, the one thing, if I have this right, was like, you can have different symbols, similar symbols, but different for the same sound, which I was like, dude, that's.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, well, it gets crazy because, and this is what I helped kind of work out, was just how ridiculously complex the visuals are compared to the actual system. So you can, if they wanted to write the word cacao, okay, for that's for chocolate, cocoa, they will write that with sounds. Ka, ka, wa, three hieroglyphs. Now, this is a great example because as it turns out, you can write the sound ka one of a couple of ways with two different kind of pictures.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  One of them is a fish and the other one is this thing, it looks like a little comb, hair comb, but it's actually the fin of a fish. So it's the same sign, but anyway, it's, they write it as a fish and the fish is like, what does that have to do with chocolate? Well, it's because the fish is the sound kai, word, the word for fish is kai, right? So that's where they get the ka sound. So ka, ka, wa, they're, they're distracting you writing the word, using the picture of a fish, but that's just how they do it. And so if you, if you sweep through, get past all the. Artistic, uh, sort of bells and whistles.

• 23:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  There's a lot of them. You get down to the words and, and that's, that took a long time to figure out.

• 24:05Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I was, you know, I was shocked, you know, that, I mean, I obviously it makes sense, but there was the, so was there like a definitive kind of like, um, like deciphering codex that kind of like made everything like the Rosetta Stones like that big?

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the, the folks in Egypt had it easy compared to us in some way. So we didn't have a Rosetta Stone.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  And, and that was of course, the key in the 1800s for reading Egyptian. We had some help. One of the things that helped us was going back to Bishop Londa. In his book, he had, and this is pretty funny, he had a, um, what he called the, the alphabet of, of, of the, uh, of the Maya people, right? And it's like A, B, C, D, E. And, and it's crazy because they didn't have an alphabet.

• 24:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Londa didn't get that. He didn't understand. He was like, well, if they're writing, they must have an alphabet, right? What, what London didn't realize is that he was writing down Maya glyphs for the sounds.

• 25:14Matt McCusker?

  That makes sense.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Of the, of the letters as they're pronounced in Spanish.

• 25:17Matt McCusker?

  Got you.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  So A, B, C, D, right?

• 25:24Matt McCusker?

  It's funny.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Those are syllables, right?

• 25:25Matt McCusker?

  Isn't Spanish like a notoriously phonetic language itself? I remember in Spanish class, they're like, however you look at this, this is how you pronounce it pretty much for the most part.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  The phonetics of it are pretty straightforward, you know, as an alphabetic thing, you know, it's, it's, the vowels are all pretty consistent and stuff.

• 25:39Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  So Londa was, was clearly flummoxed trying to describe, he called it actually this cumbersome writing that the, the people have here in Yucatan and he couldn't get it. What he didn't realize was the, the guy he was working with, the Maya guy who was writing down all this stuff for him. They were just talking past each other. They had no idea what each other was asking or providing.

• 26:03Matt McCusker?

  I saw that in your book. At one point, at one point, the guy literally just said, I'm tired. I don't want to do it.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  He writes down, this is hilarious, right? He writes down in the manuscript, uh, which means I don't want to do this anymore.

• 26:16Matt McCusker?

  That's really funny, actually.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz they're just like, he's gonna, he's gonna come out here.

• 26:19Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. This episode is brought to you by PrizePicks. The regular season's done and the NBA playoffs are here. Time to get in on the action with PrizePicks, a preferred partner of the NBA.

• 26:30Speaker 02

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• 26:31Matt McCusker?

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• 26:52Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 26:54Matt McCusker?

  More info can be found on the PrizePicks promos board. PrizePicks, a preferred partner of the NBA.

• 27:00Speaker 03

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• 27:53Speaker 04

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• 28:01Speaker 02

  What you got? What you got? Me?

• 28:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Who, me?

• 28:04Matt McCusker?

  Stinking Lincoln.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  I got, yeah, just the stinking Lincoln. July 17th, please come to Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. It's the most important moment of my life.

• 28:12Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that'll be fucking nasty.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  And if it doesn't go well, I'm gonna leave this earth.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get pyro underneath the stage and I'm gonna tell them, go ahead.

• 28:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Send it.

• 28:24Matt McCusker?

  Flame me.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  I'm out.

• 28:29Matt McCusker?

  Guys, I picked up some comedy club dates all summer long. We're gonna be having fun together. I'll be 6'5", June 5th and 6th. I'll be at the Summit City Comedy Club, Fort Wayne, Indiana. And that is, that's in just a few weeks.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  I ran into a buzzsaw over there.

• 28:42Matt McCusker?

  Did you really?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:43Matt McCusker?

  What did you, what happened? Just an absolute buzzsaw.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Negative experience. People were just hammered. It's a fun club.

• 28:48Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that'll be, I'll be there in the dog days of the summer. Levity Live, Huntsville, Alabama, the Stardome Comedy Club, Birmingham. I'm excited for that. And Spokane Comedy Club, Spokane, Washington. Also, it's not up yet, but I have a bunch of more dates, so check them out on mcmcluska.com.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Goodbye.

• 29:06Matt McCusker?

  So what's the earliest in terms of like, cause you know, that was kinda cool, reading about how they figured out how to kinda transcribe everything. What was like the earliest story they have that you guys can look back on that has some like narrative arc or?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the earliest story of history that we can tap into is, is really the beginning of these many dynasties. We'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.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  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. There was this war.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  It was a conquest of this really amazing city in Guatemala we know of today as Tikal. 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. That's crazy. Pyramids. Tikal. Yavin IV, I think it is in Star Wars. 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.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  They were coming from a place called Teotihuacan, which is up near Mexico City. And they had had a long relationship, clearly. 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 500 years of.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  We have thousands of texts we can read about hundreds of different actors and players in this drama with a lot of different kingdoms. And it does become like Game of Thrones, like I said, where you have alliances being forged. Those alliances often are being turned around and their turncoats and their wars in between cousins and so forth. So 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, the places that we're reading about with the actual sites that, you know, we are exploring

• 32:24Speaker 00

  the jungle. So, uh, that's also really cool. We can match up the name of this ancient place to this site.

• 32:33Matt McCusker?

  Oh, so you actually, yeah, you know exactly where it was. And 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.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:43Matt McCusker?

  So you think the buildings themselves held pretty much the history, which is pretty crazy.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  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're, we, we have, they wrote a lot, right? They wrote a lot and carved it on stone. Otherwise, we'd be up a creek.

• 33:05Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Right? Because it doesn't, it doesn't preserve in the jungle.

• 33:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  They, they wrote on pottery, ceramics. So we have a lot of that stuff. We don't have anything written on paper from that era.

• 33:17Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Cause it's not, it's not gonna preserve.

• 33:19Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, true.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  We, the, the stuff we have, the books we have, which is amazing, uh, those are much later, right? So the Spanish actually collected those.

• 33:28Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  So yeah, we are, we, we're lucky to have what we have is the way I look at it.

• 33:34Matt McCusker?

  And, and they, so were they like a, uh, 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? Do you, is there any idea why they would do that? Was like a famine thing or they just would do that?

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Well, this is a huge question. And this is the thing that I think a lot of people, um, think about when, when you think about the ancient Maya is this idea of collapse. And I often get this question like, well, what happened to them? Cause you know, didn't they disappear? And, and that, 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.

• 34:14Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  As a people, they didn't disappear. But what did disappear? Is that around nine hundred, eight hundred to nine hundred A.D.?

• 34:24Speaker 00

  A lot of their cities, some of them really large with tens of thousands of people.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  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? So Tikal, okay, the Star Wars moon base place. That's a good example. Huge city, 80,000 people, maybe even 100,000 people who were living there. Something like that in the general area. Between about 800 and 1,000. 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 idea of a lost city. This is really where it comes from.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  It comes from the Maya explorers in the 1800s.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  I mean, talk about romantic exploration, hacking your way through the jungle, very Indiana Jones.

• 35:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  And here is a 100 foot high pyramid that no one has explored before. I mean, that's the reality of early days of Maya archaeology. So this fed into this question. What happened? It fed into a lot of crazy ideas about maybe what happened.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  That they disappeared. Well, they did disappear from those places, but they moved on. So one of the things I'm writing about in the book is, you know, what factors went into this?

• 35:59Speaker 00

  I think there were tipping points. It had to do with climate for sure, because we have records of drought. We know that water was hard to come by in these places. It still is.

• 36:11Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  So you can understand how these tipping points might come up. 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 this era was, there was so much warfare. And, you know, there had always been conflict and, you know, like any, like medieval history. But you see it ramping up. And in the last few decades there, it's just incessant warfare. And I think the system just breaks down.

• 36:51Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so 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

• 37:01Matt McCusker?

  Just left.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  go off to do other things.

• 37:03Matt McCusker?

  True, yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  And so this is 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 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 places, and they decided to leave.

• 37:33Matt McCusker?

  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 show that a hundred times.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, they keep showing that.

• 37:43Matt McCusker?

  Dude, he's in a rocket ship. He took off.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Right, so this is the famous or infamous image of a Maya rocket. That is actually a lid of a coffin.

• 37:54Matt McCusker?

  Oh.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Of a sarcophagus of a great ruler whose name was Quinichana 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. There were, there was kind of an 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.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  It was talking about this great king, his birth date, his death date, all of his ancestors. Kind of waiting for him in the afterlife and all this stuff. The scene on the top. Is of Khenyshana Pakal, the king. 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, and he's not in a rocket. He'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.

• 39:17Matt McCusker?

  That's really cool.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Not a rocket ship, but he's going in the sky anyway.

• 39:22Matt McCusker?

  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?

• 39:36Speaker 00

  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 Donigan in his book, you know, Treats of the Gods. Talking about all this stuff in the seventies. That was at a time when no one could come up with a counter narrative, right? So that takes hold.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  It fills a void, right? To explain this stuff.

• 40:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:27Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Or whatever, right? 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 a show like Ancient Aliens and that's like, oh, okay, that must be the consensus view or something like that, right?

• 40:49Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Not knowing that. Any archaeologist thinks that's BS.

• 40:54Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  We're just not very good at communicating with the public, to be honest.

• 41:00Matt McCusker?

  Thanks, Seth.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  You know, what we do know.

• 41:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  And, and 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 and cultures. So, I mean, this book, I, I, I hope is a, a, a small effort to, you know, tell what's really going on, to, to explain some of what we think we know.

• 41:26Matt McCusker?

  That's pretty, so in terms of like, you know, being an archaeologist and like, kind of like the,

• 41:32Matt McCusker?

  I guess, like the day to day.

• 41:35Matt McCusker?

  Like, I, I just like, do 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 must be like really tough. Like, really high stakes of like a, you know?

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it, 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, you, you're, you're, 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 a little banana.

• 42:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  But, but also, um, yeah, there, there, when you're digging,

• 42:31Speaker 00

  not necessarily a big pyramid or something, let's just say you're digging a ancient house. And it might be a pile of rocks. It's a couple of feet high, you know, a 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.

• 42:53Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:06Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Season. And they're like, oh shit, what do we do? Like a tomb, you know, a royal tomb or something.

• 43:11Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  This is typical, right? Cause you know, after you dig deep, a lot of time passes, then you find the cool stuff. So it can be stressful that way. If you find something special, there's a lot of bureaucracy involved.

• 43:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  You have to let people know what you found in the government.

• 43:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, they try to take it.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  And you mean, you'd get guards down to protect it.

• 43:33Matt McCusker?

  I was wondering about the theft, cause I imagine it's like you guys have a pretty decent sized crew digging. You know what I mean?

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:39Matt McCusker?

  So I would imagine, you know, if I was just there digging, I wasn't an archaeologist, I would definitely snag like an old mug. Like I, you know, you'd want to, right?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  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, a hundred years ago, archaeologists working in Mexico, you know, you'd go to their archives and you'd actually find artifacts that they brought out. You know, you wouldn't do that today.

• 44:15Matt McCusker?

  No, yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  But.

• 44:16Matt McCusker?

  What's the penalty? You just get like, lose your like license? Like, how do you?

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, nowadays, it's, as a professional archaeologist, you, all artifacts have to be catalogued. 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.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  But, you know, there are.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  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 field. I've come across gangs of looters in northern Guatemala who are tunneling into pyramids, looking for tombs.

• 45:02Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's my next question. What do you do for, I guess you just said you get security around the site. Cause I'd be kind of like nervous. I was out in the woods.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:09Matt McCusker?

  Journal in Guatemala and I'm digging precious artifacts. I would assume someone's gonna be like, yeah, let me get that.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:15Matt McCusker?

  And they'll tunnel underneath it.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this is what we do too, as archaeologists. We have to tunnel into, if the building is large enough and stable enough, that's the best way to understand its history is to actually start digging a tunnel. It's like you're mining.

• 45:31Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  You know, into a pyramid. And the looters do the same thing. So the irony of a lot of this too, is that the guys that archaeologists have trained to dig, when we go home, they don't have a lot to do necessarily. And they're like, hey, we know how to dig these things now.

• 45:53Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  And they go to town. And so this actually is what happened a lot in the seventies and eighties. Like, there isn't an ancient Maya building in northern Guatemala that doesn't have a trench right through it, mostly by looting.

• 46:07Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  And it's really sad. 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. I understand that because it's beautiful stuff. I mean, if I had the money and wasn't an archaeologist, I would, I understand, you know, I'd love to have a Maya chocolate vase in my living room.

• 46:37Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  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,

• 47:21Speaker 00

  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 digging in the dirt. Because, and there's still not enough of us doing this kind of research, frankly, so it's overwhelming.

• 47:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, so you're saying there's just like a ton of stuff that's been found and it's just the matter of taking the time to decipher.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Right, right. 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.

• 47:59Matt McCusker?

  Damn.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  And, you know, we have jobs and other things we're doing.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  So, yeah, it, it, there's a lot of work still to be done to figure this stuff out.

• 48:09Matt McCusker?

  So, in terms of like, you know, um, did you guys have a good sense of like what the Mayans, I guess, like philosophy, their 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?

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  So, we do know a lot about Maya philosophy and, and religion. I think it's hard to distinguish those things.

• 48:36Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  And it is a lot like the Aztecs because they're all part of the same kind of Meso-American 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.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  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. And the Maya of today have a lot of those 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 a Miss America. I think a lot of it is indigenous American

• 49:48Speaker 00

  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. It'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, you know, it's like one of these things that a lot of cultures share,

• 50:33Speaker 00

  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 that, 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, on, you know, how the sun works and how it moves. And the rain, I mean, that, that creates a template that's kind of universal.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  In, in, in, in the human experience, I think. And so I'm kind of interested, I don't know a ton about outside of America, but I'm really interested in, 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, about existing on the, on the earth and, and we can tap into it some.

• 51:40Matt McCusker?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah. I, uh, from, from just like the little bit I read about the Cortez and the Aztecs, there was this idea with the Aztecs that like, if they didn't complete the sacrifices, like that blood, the blood was like some universal life force that they would like, you know, display to appease the gods. And if they didn't, the skies like would literally crash down and like, there was like 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. It was just, everything would fall apart.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But this, this is part of a bigger idea of, of renewal. It's all about renewing the world. And sometimes it involved the offering of one's own blood in bloodletting or sacrifice. It 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, there is a philosophy behind it, right? Which is that, um, uh, humans have a responsibility to renew things. I think that's very powerful. You know, we, we don't do that in our world necessarily, right? We kind of do the opposite of that.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  But, but I, in this pre-industrial, whatever world, you know, they, they were, they, they saw that,

• 52:58Speaker 00

  you know, there, there were problems with climate. Sometimes there were years of drought and so forth, you know? Not everything was stable every year, right? So this is where that idea comes from.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  The, the Aztecs took it to a certain level, uh, in their ideology that, that's different maybe from other cultures. But the underlying idea there is that.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  That humans have to do certain things, we can call that ritual.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  They didn't have a word for this as ritual, they just saw it as the work they had to do.

• 53:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  To ensure that, yeah, the sun would come up again after the fifty-two year cycle. Or that, you know, it would be as strong as it once was, or that the rains would come.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  I've been part of ceremonies as a kid, I was a part of a ceremony as a kid in Koba, in this little Maya village. Now it's a bigger town.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  The rains still weren't coming one year, that we were there, my dad's project. And 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 people could not grow their corn.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  So 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 we had, they constructed an altar in the plaza of the ancient ruins. I mean, talk about atmospheric, I mean, it was wild. And it was an all-night ceremony to renew rain. And it's called the cha-chaq, which means to summon Chak, the rain deity.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  Who's a deity we see in the ancient art, by the way. And as one of the, I was young, I was nine years old. The shaman, called a chaman, a doer, he needed kids to be part of the ceremony. So he asked me to be one of the kids that would rotate around, 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.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  And I had to sit there for an hour in the middle of the night going

• 55:35Matt McCusker?

  How old were you?

• 55:36Speaker 00

  I was nine.

• 55:37Matt McCusker?

  Whoa.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  I was a frog.

• 55:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  And I was calling the ring guard and we were all sitting around going

• 55:44Speaker 00

  and you know, there's, there's fermented drinks going around and it's just wild, you know, no women were allowed. It was just men and the boys. And, um, I mean, I was a kid from North Carolina and I was all of a sudden, you know, kind of in this thing.

• 55:59Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  And my dad was, you know, taking pictures and, uh, being the anthropologist and I was just sort of going there.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  But I thought experience for me was, it really, really brought home in retrospect to this idea that you, you know, we have to do things to renew the world. And all religions do this, right? That, that, in a Catholic mass is kind of a renewal ceremony, right?

• 56:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  All sorts of ceremonies are, are renewals of the cosmos and, and, 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. I mean, sometimes these, you know, the, the human sacrifices that the Aztecs were doing, um, was a kind of renewal to, because the life force is the blood of these people and, and the cosmos needs its life force. Um, there are a lot of complicated ideas behind all of these things.

• 57:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  But in a nutshell, it is about renewal.

• 57:05Matt McCusker?

  That's pretty. So what's, what's like the pantheon, like the Mayan pantheon looking like? Do they, do you have a good sense of like all the different gods like they do?

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, they, they had a, so they, they existed in, 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.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Anything that, that the sun that moves around, you know, it has animation. It, it's, it has agency in a way, right? So.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  And when we're talking about gods, we're talking about in many ways, these kind of natural forces.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  And, and so they gave names to these, the rain deity, right?

• 57:55Speaker 00

  Who is still venerated. 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, when there's a storm cloud coming in Yucatan. Oh, I remember this as a kid, they would say, Hakutale Chak. Here comes Chak.

• 58:14Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, he's coming.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  He's coming, right? And he's coming with his machete to break the clouds to bring the rain. And in ancient times, it was an axe.

• 58:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Stone axe, but.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  These ideas don't die, right? They're, they're still there. And it's, it's easy to say it's like mythology and stuff like that, but, but this is part of their lives, you know? And, and I think. They, they had all of these deities and, 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.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, they were, you know, like a lot of other cultures, they just saw this kind of animation in the universe around them.

• 59:10Matt McCusker?

  That's pretty, and, and they're, I know they were notorious, the calendar is the big one.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, time, time was animate, time was a living thing.

• 59:17Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that was kind of cool. Cause I, you always hear about the Mayan calendar, but in the book, the, you were talking a little bit about how they're, they seemed almost like, pretty hell-bent on like really nailing down all those little kind of swirling gears of time and how it all fit together. And it's pretty, that was pretty neat. And that was one of the reasons it was, I guess, easier to decipher is they had such a good, a strong calendar system that you're able to see the date.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Aren't we lucky that they wrote everything down according to the very day when things happened, right? So I, I've actually had these conversations with.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  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 Tutankhamun died. I mean, 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 Kenyatta of Palenque died and was resurrected. You know, we know when the War of 378 happened, Tikal, 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

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  we're really lucky we have that for the Maya. 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.

• 1:00:49Matt McCusker?

  How many days was the Mayan year? Was it 360 or?

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Well, they had our year too. I mean, they had 365 days.

• 1:00:55Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  They had that. They had a notion, well, this is cool. There, we have a base 10 counting system, right? They had a base 20 counting system.

• 1:01:09Matt McCusker?

  How's that, how's that?

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Cause, cause we count our fingers, but they also counted toes.

• 1:01:15Matt McCusker?

  Didn't even think of toes. So, I've been doing math with my six-year-old daughter. I'm gonna bust my toes out now.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  So, so once you get that idea of fingers and toes, okay, base 20. So they, they have a counting system that's 20, instead of 10, 100,000, right? It goes 248,000.

• 1:01:32Matt McCusker?

  Whoa.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  And so, I mentioned this because they, 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, a basic idea of a year in, in this calendar that they developed. And it, 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, you know, in terms of the Big Bang.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Like, 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, but.

• 1:02:29Matt McCusker?

  Well, so their mythology has dates and.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, they're talking about gods doing things way before our Big Bang.

• 1:02:36Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  It's really crazy when you think about it.

• 1:02:39Matt McCusker?

  What is their like Genesis myth? Like, do they have like a standard Genesis myth? Or is it just kind of?

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  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. And there are four guys who kind of hold up this big table like stone and create the world. That's recorded in some ancient myths I've been working on. The, it's interesting because Maya kings talked about renewal.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  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 that's called the first hearth place. And that seems to be a really essential event in the creation of kind of the order of everything, right? So. We have these, here's the struggle right now among us who are studying this stuff is

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  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, 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? So it's, it's exciting.

• 1:04:38Matt McCusker?

  That is pretty cool.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Matt McCusker?

  Well, nice. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, man. And, uh, yeah, if anyone wants the book, it is The Four Heavens by David Stewart. Good job.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Thank you, Matt.

• 1:04:47Matt McCusker?

  If I may say so myself.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  It was great to talk.

• 1:04:48Matt McCusker?

  Good job getting, uh, figuring out what this stuff means. I, I couldn't do it.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  There's more to do, too. It's great fun. Thank you.

• 1:04:54Matt McCusker?

  Well, man, thank you so much.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Appreciate it.

• 1:04:56Matt McCusker?

  Watch new episodes of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Spotify.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Do it.

• 1:05:07Speaker 06

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