The Maya in Colorado

Denver, Colorado

Recently, I visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s exhibit entitled “Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed.” The millennia-old artifacts reminded me of the deep connections between the ancient inhabitants of the Four Corners Region, whom the anthropologists call the Desert Archaic People, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico.

At the exhibit, one piece that particularly seized my attention was a reproduction of the Dresden Codex and its chart of the cycles of Venus. There – in inks of red, blue, and black – were Mayan numbers made from lines and dots, like I Ching hexagrams, and the mysterious glyphs with their squat faces and elaborate curves.

This Venus chart resulted from the Mayan obsession with time.

As Miguel León-Portilla states in Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya (Beacon Press, 1973): “As no other people in history, the Maya perceived and lived the mysteries posed by a universe whose deepest substratum is time…. To harmonize with that reality was the most precious aim in life” (112). Thus the mathematically brilliant Maya invented the number zero, developed a calendar more accurate than any other for a thousand years, and predicted the motions of the sun, moon, Venus, and Mars with breathtaking precision across the many centuries.

As a coda to León-Portilla’s book, anthropologist Alfonso Villa Rojas writes how time remains a central aspect of Mayan spirituality, and he describes a cave in Chiapas dedicated to Itzananchqu, the great reptilian deity whose body forms the earth and who gave birth to the sun. He provides an illustration of Itzananchqu based on a carving above the cave – a two headed serpent with a sinuous body decorated by tufts of feathers. The two heads, as with the Roman god Janus, suggest that Itzananchqu encompasses both the past and the future.

This figure of Itzananchqu connects the Maya with the Utah desert in a most intriguing way.

Black Dragon Wash

Just west of Green River, Utah, there stands one of the region’s most fascinating canyons. Black Dragon Wash cuts a tight, winding path through the San Rafael Swell – a jagged uplift of sandstone and shale 125 kilometers long that looks like something straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. In Black Dragon Wash, beneath high, white sandstone cliffs, there are pictographs created by the Desert Archaic People, who flourished from 5500 B.C.E to 100 C.E.

Painted in red, pale blue, and white on the canyon’s lowest strata, rust-red Wingate sandstone, these millennia-old pictographs depict mummy-shaped shaman, sheaves of grain, and wild game. One panel consists of a series of parallel dots, a simple precursor of the elaborate Mayan calendars to come.

The most mysterious of these pictographs is the Black Dragon – a dark red figure shaped like a two-headed brontosaurus. No one really knows what this figure is meant to represent, though many specialists and non-specialists have made guesses.

Now I will add mine: to me, this figure bears a remarkable resemblance to the Mayan carving of Itzananchqu. The two figures have the same sinuous silhouette, the same two heads, the same appendages. They both even appear on a high cliff wall. All that’s missing from the Black Dragon are the fine details of eyes and glyphs. Perhaps the Archaic Black Dragon is an early manifestation of the Mayan serpent-deity, and this canyon was her abode, just as the cave below the Mayan figure is said to be the home of Itzananchqu.

And this is not the only Archaic pictograph to antedate a major Mesoamerican mythological figure. More are found in Barrier Canyon, which cuts its way through the San Rafael Desert a mere 50 miles from Black Dragon Wash.

James D. Farmer proposes in “Goggle Eyes and Crested Serpents of Barrier Canyon,” published in The Road to Aztlan (Los Angeles Museum of Art, 2001), that this canyon’s Archaic pictographs of round-eyed shaman and horned serpents are identical to the Olmec gods Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. Since these Olmec gods of rain and resurrection first appear in 1500 B.C.E., Farmer argues that the Barrier Canyon images are just as old, and that they two regions developed the worship of these gods in parallel.

Barrier Canyon Shamanic Pictographs

However, some scholars have made an even more daring assertion.

Because Archaic pictographs could go back nearly 8000 years, Barrier Canyon may well be the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, as well as their rituals. The late anthropologist Barry Michrina once described Barrier Canyon to me as “the homeland of Quetzalcoatl, the origin place of the Mesoamerican gods.”

And after finding the illustration of Itzananchqu and discovering its incredible likeness to the Black Dragon of the San Rafael Reef, I have added the great serpent mother of the earth and sun to the pantheon of Mesoamerican gods who I believe were born in the mythological heartland of the American Southwest.