WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Kill Columbus. (12/22/2004)

The plan, then, is for the people of Hispaniola to kill Columbus and all of his men before they reach landfall in 1492. As always, native Americans are planning to viciously attack innocent white settlers, people who are far from their familiar paths and occupations only seeking a better way of life for themselves and for their families back home. Assuming that such a plan could be hatched backward from the 21^st Century, why would the native people of the island even consider executing such a barbaric act? What argument could be made that would convince even a few of them to ambush the Spaniards on those three tiny ships? Most native Americans, prior to their initial experiences with Europeans, were inclined to welcome strangers into their midst. That was simply part of pre-Columbian culture. Killing strangers, without warning and beyond any significant cause, would have violated basic concepts of native belief systems. Under ordinary circumstances it would be extremely difficult to convince 15^th Century Hispaniolans to pursue such a course.

When Columbus appeared the first time, of course, no one on the island had any way to comprehend what the actual consequences of his arrival would mean to the people who allowed him to come ashore. When he appeared the second time, fifty-two years later, the people of the island were in the spirit world. Estimates suggest that 50,000 natives occupied Hispaniola in 1492. After just twenty years, credible evidence tells us that not a single inhabitant of the island remained alive. Columbus was forced to import native Americans from surrounding islands to populate the ranks of his slave-labor force on the island. Those who were not worked to death in his gold mines died as a result of the infectious diseases that Europeans spread among the native people of the Americas. By Columbus’s third arrival at the island, in 1596 (1492 + 52 + 52), the cultures of Mexico and central America had been destroyed. By the time he came the fourth time, in 1648, the native cultures of north America east of the Mississippi River had disappeared.

By the time his ninth arrival occurred in 1908 (1492 + 8 X 52), as few as 500,000 native Americans were still living in north America. Median estimates of the total number of native deaths directly associated with European causes suggest that 200 million people perished. So, how would anyone go about convincing the people of Hispaniola to kill Columbus instead of welcoming him ashore? A more obvious question here, of course, is how would anyone go about convincing them to not kill Columbus? There may be no way to prevent it, in fact. But what does any of this mean? Why even talk about such a bizarre subject? There are two questions here. Firstly, why talk about temporal intervals from 1492 toward the present moment in terms of 52 years? Secondly, what actual effects would flow naturally from the failure of Columbus to return to Europe with the news that he had “discovered” a previously unknown land mass that separated Europe from China in the “western Hemisphere”?

The Maya date (8 Caban 5 Yaxkin) which marks the day of a lunar eclipse in 707 AD, as recorded in the Dresden Codex, and which was carved on Stela D in Quirigua, for instance, belongs to a sequence of day-names in the Maya calendar that requires exactly 18,980 days (52 X 365) to be counted. Each day in the sequence always occurs in exactly the same order and each one occurs only one time during the count of the total number of days in the cycle. If the cycle of days is thought of as one complete circle, and several such cycles are stacked on top of each other with the days perfectly aligned from one cycle to the next, which is exactly the way the Mayas used the sequence, a single straight line could be drawn from the first 8 Caban 5 Yaxkin to the final 8 Caban 5 Yaxkin in the stack of cycles. That line in actual fact and practice was always present in the way Maya astronomers thought about their calendrical sequence and stretched from the beginning to the end of time. The Maya did not actually think of time as having either a beginning or an end—time was unending and had no beginning. When my spirit-guide said “bridge,” he was referring to the straight line that connected every day-name in the circle to every other day-name, both before and after any given one, that had the same name. Hence, the “bridge” between this world and the spirit world, from the present moment to the past (or future), was the straight line that connected one 52-year cycle to the previous one (in the past) or to the next one (in the future) according to the day-name the line connected.

The significance of the Maya day-name structure, the reason my spirit-guide wanted me to help him reconstruct the “bridge,” if you will, concerns the fact that each occurrence of every day-name in the sequence exactly matches each previous and subsequent occurrence of that day in the cycle. In other words, every 8 Caban 5 Yaxkin is not just similar to previous and subsequent days with the same name; it is identical to each of them in every way conceivable. If you were to ask, for instance, 416 years from now what I was doing on Christmas Day, 2004 (4 Chuen 4 Zip in Maya terms), the answer would revolve around the fact of my trying to explain how the people of Hispaniola were going to kill Columbus the next time he showed up on their shoreline. The fact is that I will be doing exactly that in the spirit world when you ask the question in 2420 AD. This is true because I will still be here doing exactly that then. Or not. The possibility does certainly exist that someone in the future will travel back to my present moment and convince me that I should not say any of this to anyone because it will cause harm to countless human beings between now and 2420 AD. How do I fix it? Hit the delete button and erase it. From the moment I hit that button this ceases to exist historically and not a single person in the future will ever be aware of its existence in the past. Columbus also has a delete button.

The problem, prior to the moment the “bridge” was back in place, was finding a sensible way to tell the people of Hispanoila when to expect Columbus’s return to their island. He only returns once in every 52 years. He only comes on one specific day out of every 18,980 days. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that Columbus cannot be allowed to make any physical contact with anyone in the western Hemisphere. This is true because of the infectious diseases he and his crew carried with them. Columbus must be met offshore, before he sees Hispaniola, before he is close enough to infect anyone. The people cannot wait until they actually see the ships. They must know when before he is close enough to any land mass to spread his disease. Also true is the fact that everyone knows when Columbus came the first time—October 10, 1492. Unfortunately that date, because it is European, is completely useless to anyone on Hispaniola. We had to know the date in the Maya sequence in order to communicate anything useful to the natives of the island prior to the day Columbus’s delete button becomes available.

What ought to be obvious to anyone reading this is that the date in question is known to everyone of native descent in the Americas. We know exactly when Columbus first appeared and when he will return in each subsequence recounting of the days in the Maya calendar. That day-name is called 5 Ik 0 Ceh. Its next occurrence will be in 2012 AD, approximately 7.5 years from now. What happens on that day is entirely in the hands of the people of Hispaniola because they are the only ones who live on the island in the past. What effect Columbus’s death might have on the historical reality of the present moment is probably impossible to say with any certainty. The new story, of course, will be that he and his crew sailed toward the west, fell off the edge of the world, and never returned to Europe. How that might affect subsequent voyages of “discovery” cannot be anticipated with anything like a certain knowledge. One can probably assume that eventually other attempts to reach China by sailing west from Europe will occur. When they happen, where they originate, where they end up, are all problems that face us in the “future” of the altered past as it unfolds after the erasure of Columbus. What we do, as a people intent on protecting ourselves from European induced destruction, is essentially unknown to me. That is the great danger we face in considering the alteration I am describing. If we only change the past a little by eliminating Columbus, if the destruction of European disease is not cut off, we may end up in a worse place than the one we are in now. That is a real concern of course. What is certain seems to be that a significant number of people who now exist in the western Hemisphere will disappear from history along with Columbus and his men. Perhaps all people of European descent will vanish from the second string of time established by Columbus’s death and the second 2004 will be purely native American without any Europeans here at all. That is the ideal.

For anyone who believes I am targeting the “other” with this scheme of mine, the fact is that I will not exist in the second string of time either. If Columbus’s “discovery” of Hispaniola is in any way directly responsible for the arrival of my German (father’s side) and English-Irish (mother’s side) grandparents in the western Hemisphere, then I am as much gone as anyone else is or will be. I don’t mind disappearing from history, if doing so will alter the fate of 200 million native people, I embrace that hope without hesitation; however, if the change produces only a delay of the inevitable destruction of native culture, I will not be here a second time to hatch the plot of killing Columbus or any other explorer who takes the existence of the Hemisphere back to Europe. That result is not a sure thing either. If the catastrophe begins a hundred or fifty years later, rather than when it actually did, then it is possible that more, not less, of the philosophy that has drawn me here will survive the destructive force of Eurocentric intervention. Perhaps the second time around will make it easier to get where I am. The people who kill Columbus will know how and why they did it. That will make them more determined to preserve the knowledge that led to the first alteration. That knowledge will become part of the second sting and that knowledge will certainly be preserved.

A parting thought: that this idea reached a fully conscious articulation in my mind this year is not a coincidence, not a happenstance. My first encounter with my spirit-guide, the “man” who brought me here, occurred in 1960. That year marked the ninth occasion of Columbus’s arrival at Hispaniola. Something happened this past year, in June actually, that is rather directly involved in the development of the Maya calendrical sequence itself. That sequence marks the time of the “bridge” that connects one thing in the past to another thing in the present. There was a Venus transit in June. Those are rare events. The Maya tracked them with their calendar. Venus, in fact, among the visible planets, may be the most compelling cause of the 52-year cycle. There is a Venus table in the Dresden Codex that exactly counts that planet’s motion relative to the sun and moon through the cycle of the day-name sequence. Venus transits always occur in pairs when they happen at all. The next one, the one paired with the 2004 event, will occur in 2012 AD, a little more or less than 7.5 years from now. A fatal error Europeans have always made about native conceptualizations of time is the belief that it somehow involves an elaborate system of bogus astrology. The Maya calendar is not about astrology. The calendar is an elaborate expression of the harmonic interaction between and among the celestial objects that produce and define every human being’s perception of time. It defines the relationship between the past and the present. The Maya did not create the “bridge” that connects this world to the spirit world; they only made it visible.