WHITECROW BORDERLAND
Changing the Past. (
So, native Americans have
the ability to change the past. We have
not always known that. In fact, that
knowledge is a rather recent discovery.
We found out how to do it in 1999.
We have only done so once, as far as I know, because changing the past
can provoke radical alterations in the fabric of social and cultural
reality. The one change we have made so
far was done under tightly controlled circumstances that would create verifiable
results (hopefully) without causing any substantial disruptions in the
structural reality of historical fact as it has come down to us in the present
moment. We need to approach such things
very carefully, of course, since the wrong choice of change in an event in the
past would alter the nature of the present moment beyond redemption or
correction. There would likely be no way
to fix, or restore, the present moment to what it had been before the change
was instituted. Also true is the fact
that no one in the present moment would even know that the past had been
changed because the “new” present moment would be the result of the altered
past event and what followed from it.
The “old” or previous historical string would never have occurred in the
first place; hence, no one would have knowledge of its existence. The altered present moment would be the only
one that came into existence after the changed event was fabricated.
This will require careful illustration and meticulous
explanation to bring it into focus. What
native Americans have learned in the course of
traveling time is that the people who lived in the past still exist. They are still there. To me, because I am constituted of flesh and
bone, because I have material presence in time, the people of the past are
spirit. They do not have material
presence as far as I am able to determine.
They are not physical beings. To
themselves; however, locked in the specific limits of their own temporal
duration, as each and everyone of them are, they remain physically active
beings. When they travel time, they do
so only in spirit, not in body. When I
travel time, I do so only in spirit, not ever in body. If they come “forward” to my time—as my
spirit-guide does—he comes as spirit, not as physical flesh. When I go “back” to his time or to any other
time, I travel back as spirit, not ever as flesh and bone. The only restriction placed on me, because I
have not died yet, is that I cannot go “forward” into the future. The future must become past to those living
in it before anyone’s spirit can enter it from the past. I actually know very little about traveling
into the future because native American belief systems
are mostly focused on the past, on the ancestral past. The point here: if I want to change the past,
I can do that because the people who lived then are still there doing again
what they did before they died. They are
still physically active in the temporal durations of their own lives, just as I
will be after I die. If I want one of them
to do, or not do, something, and can convince him/her to alter his/her action,
then the past will be changed. How much
or how little effect the changed action will produce in terms of subsequent
event structures, how much or how little history will be altered, depends on
how significant this or that changed event is to what happens next.
How do I know this is possible? As I indicted at the beginning, my
spirit-guide and I have already done this once.
When I fully realized that the past still existed, the idea of changing
it surfaced in my mind. I was intrigued
by the possibility but had no plan about what to change. We talked about it for a few years. Ultimately, I came to insist on
verification. He was less interested in
that but agreed to find an event in the past that could be changed in a way
that would produce verifiable results. I
probably would not have been able to do this without his help. At the time, I was not very accomplished at
negotiating the spirit-road. I had
little or no credibility with the people in the past who were in a position to
alter the elements of the past that would produce verifiable results. He could do that. I was also tentative in my commitment to
accepting the terms of the belief system itself. My acceptance of my spirit-guide’s existence
and presence in my life wavered, flickered, went on and off, from
day-to-day. I am, after all, as much
European as I am native American. When the plot to change the past was hatched,
I was not sure my perceptions were anything more than delusions. I needed verification to dispel the notion
that I was merely insane. He knew that,
of course, and was growing increasingly impatient with my periodic abandonment
of his project, his “bridge” building between this world and the spirit
world. I threatened again and again to
resign, so to speak, to quit doing what he wanted and needed me to do. I was giving up years of my life. I forced him to do what I wanted. That is too strong. Spirits cannot be forced to do anything. They can become convinced of the benefit, the
value, the necessity of possible courses of action and can agree to pursue
them. They cannot be forced or compelled
or coerced into any action.
The events that altered the past took place between
my spirit-guide and me in the Spring and Summer of
1989. I had been working since the mid-1970’s on finding a sequence of eclipse occurrences that
exactly matched the structure the Classic Period Mayas transcribed in the Dresden Codex eclipse table. As I gathered data year-by-year for the
eclipse sequence as it actually occurred, I worked toward finding a single
eclipse (lunar or solar) that set the base-day of the table (12 Lamat 1 Muan) in a place where
every subsequent eclipse of one kind or the other fell in place at the exact
intervals Maya astronomers wrote in the Dresden
sequence. The sequence is approximately
34 years long (11,960 days exactly) and specifies 69 sequential eclipses before
reaching another 12 Lamat to begin the cycle
again. I found the proper eclipse
(lunar) in the early Spring of 1989 but did not fully verify its
appropriateness as the base-day event of the table until August because it took
that long to write out every calendar day-name in order from the beginning to a
point deep enough into the sequence to prove that the contemporary eclipses
were identical to the Dresden
structure. My spirit-guide recognized
the validity of the sequence and informed me that our work to reconnect the
ancient Maya calendrical sequence to the present
moment was finished, that the “bridge” between this world and the spirit world
was re-established.
I could have accepted his word I suppose. I did not.
I started talking about verification.
I insisted. I was not going to
relent. The plan had already started to
work its way into my conscious awareness.
I had noticed something in the sequence that he may not have seen. In the Dresden
Codex, there are ten “pictures” that interrupt the sequence at certain
points along the structure. The last one
confirms the termination of the cycle and signifies the beginning point of the
next sequence of 11,960 days. The table
is a circle, of course, as are all native American
perceptions and expressions of time.
Circles begin where they end and end where they begin. The other nine “pictures” in the text are
accompanied by intervals between eclipses that are equal to 148 days in
length. All other periods between
eclipses are 177 or 178 days long. Reasons
why this structure is necessary are too complex to get into here but anyone who
cares can find a full description of this in “A Dresden Codex Eclipse Sequence: Projections for the Years
1970—1992,” Latin American Antiquity,
4(1), 1993, pp. 74—93, which I wrote and published to keep this knowledge
locked down in Eurocentric consciousness.
The Spaniards tried to destroy and eradicate this knowledge in the 16th
Century—that will not be allowed to happen again.
To the point: one of the 148-day intervals did not
match the sequence because the actual interval between the two lunar eclipses
separated by it was only 147-days long.
In the peer-reviewed paper in Latin
American Antiquity, I argue that the interval is an anomaly because it
cannot be explained by any known fact of solar and lunar motion
whatsoever. No one objected to that characterization
when the paper was reviewed and one reason the paper was accepted for
publication rested on the fact that the sequence I found had to be the one the
Mayas observed because they could not have anticipated or predicted an anomaly
between two future eclipses unless they had seen the same anomaly themselves
when they transcribed the Dresden
table. What no one knew at the time, of
course, including me, was that the Mayas never witnessed an eclipse interval of
147-days between any of the eclipses they recorded in the table. I know this because I found the ancient
sequence in 1996 and there is no such anomaly anywhere in it. It did not happen in the past; it did not happen
anywhere between 200 A.D. and 900 A.D., when the Mayas observed and recorded
the
Before 1989, everyone who saw the
A little data for those who demand facts; with the
ancient sequence first, the modern sequence following:
1979311 (Julian Day Number)
1/22/707 AD (European equivalent)
8 Caban 5 Yaxkin (Maya Day Name—also inscribed on Stela
D in Quirigua)
Position #18
1979460 (Julian Day Number)
6/20/707 AD (European equivalent)
1 Cimi 14 Kankin (Maya Day Name)
Position #19
2445688 (Julian Day Number)
9 Etz’nab 6 Yaxkin (Maya Day Name)
Position #18
2445835 (Julian Day Number)
13 Chicchan 13 Kankin (Maya Day Name)
Position #19
As I “watched” these events occur, as I recorded them
in my own present moment, my spirit-guide saw what I saw. He communicated the results back in time to the
actual people who were writing the eclipse sequence in the 8th
Century—perhaps at Quirigua where 8 Caban 5 Yaxkin was inscribed on Stela D—and they adopted the 147-day interval between
positions 18 and 19 in the text to reflect, not what they witnessed themselves
in 707 AD, but what I saw in 1983 AD.
The first historical string of the