This issue is dedicated to the memory of Richard J. “Josh” Reynolds III, who passed from this plane earlier this year. Josh, a gentleman and a scholar in the truest sense of those words, was a great patron of borderland scientists. He was BSRF’s first Life Member and supported us in many ways, such as upgrading equipment and printing output. He also quietly aided many researchers in the alternative science fields. Josh never wanted any publicity for what he was doing; he did it for purely altruistic reasons, to enhance the quality of information available to inquiring minds. Josh was an honestly humble man of great insight and awareness, whose loss is great. This article, The Fifth Sun, was written by Aymon de Sales, Josh’s oldest and closest friend. Aymon says that this experience they shared those many years ago was instrumental in shaping Josh into the person he was. It is an amazing excursion into the borderlands…
THE FIFTH SUN
Aymon de Roussy de Sales
THE Sun, a hot golden disc in the sky, unintelligible, unknowable, and, yet, thirty-three years ago it sent a message into my heart. It transfigured me and made me a wanderer on this Earth.
How did it all come about? The years passed quickly, the psychedelic revolution, the need to push the world into a new consciousness. It was down there in Mexico – the Indian continent that lay dark, submerged, and away from white man’s power. Maybe I’d been reading too much Kerouac, his Dharma Bums about drifting between Los Angeles, Mexico, and New York, a sacred triangle, poets seeking a Bodhisattva vision. I mean, could such things exist? And they were all down in that funky place Mexico, and things in New York were really boring, early 1961 nothing happening there except liquor and stale jazz, and so I’d split the scene, the nowhere scene as they say. It was all because this old friend of mine, Josh Reynolds had come up from North Carolina and started talking to me about legends, legends of Mu and Atlantis and about live legends down in Mexico. There in Oaxaca an old witch lived alone in the mountains, a soothsayer, an oracle for the vanished Indian nation. She spoke of pathways of the mind, a way to see things which we hadn’t dreamed about, and with this knowledge you could experience mysteries. It gave you a power, this way of seeing, a sort of psychic power. Far out! Like a bugle across an [2] empty hill, it was a call I couldn’t resist. This old Marie of the mountain had known Aldous Huxley. It was she who turned him on to the sacred mushrooms. She was the keeper of legends, and later on she would send word through the grapevine to Harvard to warn Professor Timothy Leary to lay off, that evil spells come to those who play with the doors of perception. Josh and I rapping about magic and Indians, there in 1961 when you could turn everything upside down and look into a mirror. Josh was a big, young man with a round cherub face that was old and young at the same time. He was given to going out of his head, but without any drugs. I asked him once how that felt? And he told me it was very high. He always knew it was coming on, because he began to see things, but he couldn’t control it. The last time it happened to him, he was walking on a New York street, and he began to see those faint crystals fall. At first they were small, but they got larger and larger, crystal snowflakes out of the sky — red! until there was a blizzard of them, and he couldn’t see anything else. He was turning a comer on 62nd Street and Lexington Avenue, making his way through the silent red crystals falling all around him. The last thing he remembered was a tropical fish store, two white fish side by side, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a straight jacket. I liked Josh because he could see things we couldn’t see. I mean, I believe those crystal flakes are falling all the time – cosmic rays, man, but we have such bad eyes we don’t see them.
The knowledge of the Sun came to me those thirty-three years ago when I found myself in Mexico City. I was introduced to a poet called Philip Lamantia. He had these enormous dark liquid eyes like a deer, and they burned with an intense fire. He was a mystic, and upon meeting him I became involved with increasing rapidity in a strange set of circumstances. They had begun in New York City with Josh and a meeting in the Gurdjieff Institute, a bar called Malachay’s where we hung out, a beautiful woman called Helen DuFresne who liked to parachute out of aeroplanes, and Conrad Rooks, the filmmaker of Chappagua. He was down in Mexico, in Acapulco with Princess Zena Rachevsky taking psilocybin underwater and looking for androgynes in the ocean. He had invited Josh and Helen to join him for the experience. By different paths, it all came to being in Mexico City, three days before Easter Sunday. One of the more outstanding of these circumstances was a large vine covered house I went to. It had been a church hundreds of years ago, and was in an old section of the city. Josh, Helen, Philip and I had been talking all night about the connections with past ages, and how knowledge had been suppressed and even forgotten. Philip had brought us to the church because the “group” was into powerful magic, The people in it and the place itself had a heavy, pregnant atmosphere. The house was entered on the outside by a stone stairway. At the top of the stairs there was a massive wooden door with ancient seals carved in it. This door opened to cavernous rooms, and in one of the rooms several “Beats” were sitting around, their faces dulled by shooting smack. Large wax candles burned on the stone steps, leading into the room where they were. From other passageways came the musty smell of trapped air and incense.
One of the “Beats” was a black with GI fatigues who watched impassively as a pregnant girl with long blonde stringy hair sat on a three legged stool, moaning with labor pains. She wore a faded dirty smock, and her bare feet clutched the bar of the stool as the spasms of pain went through her. The others sat about listlessly with their heads bowed. She seemed to be cut out of space, and no one paid any attention. The vaulted ceilings of the rooms were high. Smoke from the incense and cigarettes curled there, and fanned a cloud that seemed to hold a presence in its ever-changing shape — it was strange and eerie and where we stood on the stone floor was roughly chalked a design of pentacles. The group that sat around was young. There were about twenty or twenty-five people, and they spoke in subdued voices, as if they were in fear of being overheard.
The oppressiveness of the atmosphere was not surprising, for afterwards I discovered that the people there had been attempting by mental conjuring to call on God. They felt that another reality existed on this earth, which they could enter into and communicate with. Easter Sunday was approaching, and they thought that was an auspicious time to attempt a magical act with God. Helen, Josh, Philip and I talked to a mysterious American man in his mid-thirties. He jokingly called himself the “Inspector of Space.” He was of a medium height with a small pointed face. He had a strange haunted look that was not pleasant. He had been looking for a chemical substance to “teleport” the mind. In fact he was hiding out in this church because a month earlier his underground factory had exploded, killing a Mexican worker. He said the American government was involved in psychic warfare programs, but he wouldn’t elaborate, and the reason they were trying to communicate with God was because these “Beats” felt the end of the world was near. Beings from the stars were using humans for energy. World Wars I and II had been a continuous war, a dramatic catharsis of the mind brought on by little understood events in Tibet and Turkestan. A third event, “a Covering of Wings,” would bring on a deep conflict in the fixture. These “Beats,” motivated by the apocalyptic images of Hitler and Hiroshima, were trying to exorcise the church, for it was involved in manipulating human destiny in a negative way.
The black GI joined in the conversation. He talked about impulses of the forebrain with its limited power, but what interested him was the sleeping beauty underneath the brain, which lay coiled like a snake. He spoke of hallucinogens that stirred this snake, and enabled him to see a fantastic reality.
“There’s a sacred dimension all around us,” he said, “but you can’t enter without the sacred substances that the ancient Aztecs used.”
Philip became excited by these prospects of dimensions and began waving his hands in an animated fashion. Philip, he was so out there, hugging trees and looking for visions.
“The waking of the Kundalini, when you wake it you have the knowledge of the ancients!” he cried.
I wanted to leave this church. I tried to get Helen to come with me, but she shook her head. She was with Josh. She wore this pale lipstick. It was the color of peach. I wanted to kiss those lips, feed the dark hunger in them. She had these smoldering eyes that flashed one message, “Take me out of my mind!” Back at Malachay’s bar in New York City, I remembered how she’d come in late at night, and wait there at the bar for me to go home.
“Give me a shooter!” she used to call out in a husky voice. The same smoldering eyes looking at me, asking me to jump with her into the hunger, but I was a long way from those nights in Manhattan, like a time warp away. The rest of the people in the church were slumped over against the wall, they did not take part in our conversation but were listening to other voices. The Beat Generation that had gone looking for beauty but only found trash in Americas. Kerouac’s On the Road had been a lot rougher ride than he ever wrote about.
Philip was saying, “The outcome has been predicted in the form of Huitzilopochtli, the Fifth Sun.
“It is known that this appears after four others have come and gone, and that this is itself destined to be superseded by another. It was all written down in their sacred manuscripts, the painted texts, that is why the Catholic priests burned them. They told of things that made the Christians fainthearted. There are various indications that the Fifth Sun is the creator of a great and indestructible work, and this work is the freeing of the human brain from duality.”
Duality, man, that was my whole life! Always split into two, trying to create while trying to work in the nowhere system of the West . . . Moon city always on my back. There had to be something better than what was happening. The grey fifties were still with us, trim green lawns and square dances, but this church was definitely giving me the creeps. I took a drag on a joint the size of a Cuban cigar that was being passed along, the weed going into me, clearing the head of old habits, Josh and Philip into conversations of Crucifixion and Rasputin…
“Did you know they knew each other?” asked Philip. “They met in some monastery in Southeast Russia, Gurdjieff and Rasputin.”
The sweet smoke was in my lungs – ahh so good. You had to let go of everything, that was the way – let go! Helen was sitting in front of me, who I loved so much six months ago. Six months is a lifetime these days. The long black hair on her shoulders, I remember when I met her in my apartment on Second Avenue in Manhattan, the noise of the trucks woke you in the night. But I couldn’t take her back now, she was Josh’s girl – in his southern gentleman way he had asked me if he could ask her out, I mean most friends would just take her from you, and I said, “OK,” I was exhausted from trying to keep up with her, anyway. She was connected to some lethal source of energy – and here we sat listening to stories of the land of Mu in a crumbling church. I had to get out of there! The blonde pregnant girl was moaning, rocking back and forth on the high chair. The black dude putting a long needle in his and sucking in his breath. African witness to some new reincarnation. Can you really contact God?
There were two figures sitting inside the chalk marks chanting – and the candlelight was brighter. Holy mother! run for it, before they open the gates — they might not get God, but they might get something else!
I ran for it, lickety split passed the oak door with the ancient seals and down the stone staircase to the outside! The lamps threw their light down the street in great spokes as I ran. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t care. I just wanted to put as much distance between the church and myself as I could. After several blocks of running, I began to tire and I slowed to a walk. It was then I realized how afraid I was. The sweat on my face wasn’t just from running. I couldn’t come to grips with my imagination. I had to clear my head of what had happened in the last forty-eight hours. What was taking place? I thought of my life as I walked.
Since childhood I had strange and terrifying dreams. These dreams were of earthquakes and titanic upheavals that would affect the entire world. It was more than a dream, it was a knowing, and it produced a fantastic feeling of euphoria as I remembered these things, so much raced through my mind. It was like a snake shedding layers of skin, this remembering. The meaning of my name, my childhood dreams, the strange ancestral connection with the famous Saint Francois de Sales who lived in the 16th century. These thoughts held no unity on one level of understanding but on higher levels they became clear. It was as if you had a puzzle before you, with hundreds of disconnected but somehow interconnected pieces, and in a flash these pieces came together. In an intuitive instant you saw the puzzle as a whole, then, afterwards each piece, a dream, a name, a strange occurrence took on meaning.
I was high on these realizations – they came over me wave after wave. I could hardly walk because of this feeling of exhilaration, and these emotions grew stronger with each passing minute. Inner possibilities were awakened in my mind. I was now walking on one of Mexico City’s broad thoroughfares with huge shade trees. I remembered Philip had said the Mixtecs believed they were descended from trees. There was so much to know, to find out – my brain raced.
I knew it was connected with the 360 degrees in a circle. A circle was much more than just a drawing, it was a whole mode of power – of thought power. With each minute of experience this new insight increased in power. I was hooked in some mysterious way, and that six hours was its duration. Somehow it had begun with the church. I did not understand any of it, though I felt enormous changes within me. All I knew was, it was happening incredibly fast, that my whole being as I walked was undergoing a mutation. Josh and Philip had spoken about the appearances of mutants, that it was something that was taking place all over the world, people were being born that were totally different in feeling and perception. They were far stronger mentally than their parents . . . but what was I meant to do?
I asked for a sign, a sign from where these forces came. I felt a magnet inside draw me on, but I needed a voice to confirm the connection. Before I got an answer, I had to choose between light and darkness, whether I would use this energy for my own purpose or for others, the most simple choice but one that would cause a thousand different things to happen. Suddenly I saw the image of Saint Francois. He seemed to be directing me from some vast distance, yet he was at the same time very near. There was only one choice, that of light. It seemed no matter what we did, all of us were drawn together for its purpose here in Mexico City.
My whole family had been connected with the Church and been in the Crusades. There in the Middle East near Jerusalem we rode in armor against the Arabs. I needed a sign to know what all the connections were about. The image of Saint Francois had made me feel elated. I felt as if the veins of my body extended back into time. As these complex emotions welled up in me, I found myself passing a movie theater. The motion picture was over and streams of people were descending this enormous stairway. I had the idea that the cinema was a new temple – and if I climbed the stairs into this temple I would find out what to do. Immediately, I went up the stairs against the crowd coming down. They were all dressed in white pants and sombreros and the women wore shawls. A great sea of nameless people pushed against me as I made my way up to the top. Several looked at me as I pushed against them, my face obviously agitated.
Through the large glass doors I went. I wanted a sign and there it was, forty feet across and twelve feet high – covering the whole wall of the cinema entrance, an enormous mural of a youth swimming down from space, his hair streaming backward with the solar winds, his eyes looking down at the planet Earth and in his gaze there was a power that comes from watching a place for centuries. He was bringing a knowledge with him from the stars – and on this Earth, rising like sacred totems from the continent of the Americas were these figures of Indian shamans rising up to greet this youth swimming down from the stars. The image transfixed me, I felt my mind expand. The message was this! I had to get to a place and communicate with the sky! That was where the message lay, in the stars. It did not come from out of our heads. It wasn’t from this planet. I was overwhelmed by the novelty of this thought. I ran out of the theater and down the stairs from the silver screen temple. I had received a message painted there by an artist whose name I would never know. The old wise men of Mexico believed the way to communicate with the Gods was through art, through flower and song. I had to get back to my hotel and figure out what to do! I grabbed a taxi and gave him an address in this city I’d never been in, but whose streets were leading me to a destination outside of time.
When I got to my hotel room I felt possessed of an incredible energy. I knew with certainty that forces beyond myself were directing me, the constant connections, the meeting with Philip Lamantia, the mysterious church, the sign of the boy swimming from space, the synchronicity of these events was producing a pattern.
In the room of the hotel, I tried to find a key to this pattern. I felt in me a tremendous power. I had no other word to describe the intense feeling in my body. There had to be an answer. I lay down on my bed to think. I looked out the window at Mexico City, and gradually my eyes caught the light of the star Venus, shining through the window of my room. It had a strange and compelling [5] beauty to it. I do not know what made me do it, but I got up from the bed and turned out the lights of the room. I lay back down and began to stare at the star. This incredible energy was still in me — it was almost as if electricity was going out of my body. As a child I used to do a trick with my eyes and look at things out of focus. I found myself doing this, as I looked up at the star. I began aligning the starlight into the center of an imaginary triangle. At the same time my breathing altered and became deep. It was involuntary. It was something I just did without knowing why – almost as if I was being willed to do it, and the thought struck me, like a piece of fire in my brain, “I wanted to be there, there in the vast reaches of space, to let go! To go to Venus.”
When I had used my eyes this way before, I had had a feeling of coming into myself; but this time I knew I had to reverse the “feeling” and try to go out of myself. It was a feeling similar to being in a trance but more subtle, and I began making myself do it. I willed it. I focused on the starlight of Venus – and suddenly a larger circle formed around the star inside the imaginary triangle, and further as I watched a square formed around the triangle: the energy in my mind began to expand, and I felt myself beginning to move away – out of my body. The strangest thing was that it wasn’t surprising. It felt almost natural – like something I had known how to do all my life. Then I felt the sensation of movement stronger. I was out of the room, and then out of the hotel and with great speed I was above Mexico City, the lights of the streets below me. I was going out to the stars, and all the time this movement was getting faster and faster.
It was fantastic! I could look back at myself lying on the bed, I could see the room, I could see the city – all at the same time. There was no sense of cold or heat, and I felt as if I were leaving my body forever. I became frightened. What if I became suspended between one world and the next, and yet existing in neither? The idea terrified me. I had to get back to the one world I knew. With some effort I found the mechanism to will my brain down below and halt the rush of myself outward, and then I began willing myself back to my body, but it was a tremendous effort to do it. It took all my energy to get me back inside the hotel room. The whole experience was beyond belief. I lay on the narrow hotel bed, exhausted by this “out of body experience.” I knew now there were other levels of consciousness, and that through them I could travel distances beyond my wildest dreams, but still I had no answer to what was causing these experiences, or what I was meant to do. The state of my nervous system was at a terrific pitch. I was aware of things a hundredfold of what I would be normally. All the thoughts I had in my mind at this time would take up a book. As I lay on the bed, I continued to concentrate on what these mysterious events were leading to.
As I lay on the bed, I continued to concentrate on what I was meant to do. This place where modern Mexico stood, with its noise and grime and traffic, had been a great center of learning and of the arts. The men who had come here before the barbaric conquest of the Spanish studied the origins of flower and song. They understood the movement of stars in a living way, and they perfected the art of symbolism. These things we no longer hold dear. The emphasis of Western society has been on the perfection of ego and power. The Indians along with most of the ancient wise people were adept at the inward expansive movement of the mind. Somehow we have lost that sense, and advanced into a world of dementia, an instant reality where nothing means anything. We have become the living dead on a neon road where the only information comes from outside – and yet there were these other avenues which lay at our fingertips. The knowledge that Fray Diego de Landa destroyed was still there. If we could dig beneath the garbage of our schooling, we could find the same sacred hymns that the ancients sang at sunset.
Gradually I became aware, as I asked the question of what it all meant, of the mirror in front of the bed in the hotel room. I realized without knowing it I had been looking at it for some time.
I became absorbed in it. There was something in the glass, a substance beneath the surface. Slowly shapes were taking form in the glass, and they weren’t a reflection of any object in the room. I strained with my new consciousness to understand this phenomenon. Suddenly, three heads appeared in the mirror. They were just there. They did not materialize slowly, the heads were etched clearly in the glass. Their eyes were closed as if in contemplation, their foreheads were bowed, but I could not see their mouths. They were there on the other side of the glass. I had no doubt about it. I could feel a living vibration coming off their bowed heads. They seemed to be sitting in some kind of auditorium. They were heads of men, and they were of an age that is more than any man on Earth, they were very old, centuries old. Their skin was taut over their bones, brown and had a sunbaked quality to it. Behind them, the only glimpse I had of their mysterious world was a vague pattern-like mosaic tile. It was bluish and bluish-white and had a sterile shine to it and stretched beyond them until it was lost from sight. Their heads remained bowed slightly, the electric feeling in me became intense as I watched them. These mysterious beings in another dimension seemed equal in importance as they communicated through the mirror, though I had the impression the middle figure was more powerful than the others. I could not make out the expressions of their faces. Their mouths remained totally obscure, but there was this communication from them, a kind of subtle energy that came through the glass. It was hard for me to concentrate on it, and I sweated profusely from the exertion. It was like trying to make out the almost invisible design of a spider’s web. They held my mind for brief seconds so I could absorb their thoughts. Their foreheads glistened peculiarly as they did this. It seemed their skin was almost metallic in these moments. I was made part of their awareness, a kind of mosaic pattern. It was on a level higher than anything on a human plane. I was given the idea that they desired to “win the battle” on Earth, and to join in this battle would make a difference to what happened to me after life as I knew it. In the briefest possible way I’m trying to write down these extremely complicated impressions which flooded into me.
The image in the mirror became disturbed by the appearance of a fourth head. I could but vaguely make it out, and it hung to the right of the other three. It was distinctly different in personality. The other three became silent and ceased transmitting messages. I tried to see him, the fourth one. An inkling of fear crept into my mind, but I could not make him out. He was there, and it would be hard to say more. The message transmitted through the mirror was very clear. We were to go to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan tomorrow, and I knew if we did this the extraordinary series of events we were involved with would come to a climax. [6] It would be made clear why we travelled to Mexico.
The heads faded, and in their place was a huge room covered in the same blue and bluish-white tile I had seen before. It could’ve been an open terrace, but it was so alien I could not be sure. A huge statue stood alone in this room (or was it a statue?). I looked down on it from the right side. The statue was on a throne and was carved, sitting in very much the same attitude as an Egyptian sculpture. The expression the statue conveyed was of unrelenting will. He appeared to be made of a metallic substance. His form had a dullish shine, and at times as I watched him, I could not be certain that he wasn’t alive. I looked a long time at the statue in the room that seemed to be part of eternity. I knew I had a glimpse into another world, and I knew I had been given a fantastic knowledge. The image faded, and the mirror became an ordinary frame of glass in which I was reflected. I looked around the room to see what could have reflected the blue tile and the heads. There was nothing. The walls were cream-colored and the furniture was brown. The bed was soaked in sweat from the exertion of seeing into the mirror. I had to tell the others about going to the Pyramid, and I knew exactly where I would find them, though I had no idea how Mexico City was laid out. I got up and left the hotel. The neon sign outside was glowing blue as I got into a taxi and directed the driver to go through the unfamiliar city until I said stop. I had no knowledge of the streets or where they led to, I only knew by some peculiar wavelength in my brain where I had to go. It was like I was looking out the top of my head. I directed the taxi through a maze of streets – passed the movie temple where I had seen the fantastic mural, and at a corner of a large thorough fare I halted the taxi. I knew I was close. I ran from the taxi, across the street and down a few blocks. There, as I had foreseen, were the three friends walking: Helen, Josh, and Philip. They couldn’t believe I was there! After their shock I told them of what had happened, and the ancient heads in the mirror that talked to me, that we were to go to the Pyramid tomorrow on Easter Sunday. It was agreed we would go the next day before sunset.
It was Easter Sunday 1961 – and we were driving to the Pyramid of the Sun. We were on the trail of vision seekers, of truth, of beauty! We were rushing to it in a Cadillac, in high gear. Blam! Right into the Sun.
The Toltec Pyramids even in their ruins were extremely impressive. Great blocks of hand-cut stone rising to the sky and oriented in a marvelous way so that the last rays of the Sun struck their very tops. They were engineering feats which cannot be duplicated to this day.
Those ghost streets of the pueblos marching by as we sped down the dusty road to Teotihuacan, scattering chickens, pigs, small children, all of them running for their lives, nothing was stopping us now! We were leaving all that frustration of veins and brains behind. We were heading out to sunsets, to voices in the wind, we were going to knock on those Indian doors that Cortez had scorned – not even seen – all he was after was gold and jewels. The Mafia couldn’t hold a candle to those old Catholics. Mark of Zorro! We were going to travel at the speed of light and see what those Pyramids were about.
As we drove Philip was out of his head, his deer eyes popping, and he was rapping, rapping, saying this was it! For years he’d been going to go to those Pyramids, trying to find out the key to Indian voices, and now he knew this was the time, the equinox, the signs were all pointing there.
“Man, can’t you see them! The cosmic language descending! We must go to the temple of Quetzalcoatl at sunset!” It was the blessing of a visionary poet. And we were speeding down the road, dressed and showered for the occasion. By a mysterious means which I didn’t want to question, Helen had brought with her an Indian outfit from Canada, and this was what she had on in the Cadillac as we high-balled it down the road. She looked like an Indian princess, the black hair, the bright beaded clothes. Philip had on a silver crucifix, white shirt and jeans, his crewcut head making him look like a Zen monk. Josh was in baggy pants and city shoes. He was remarkably cool and collected, conserving his energies for when we hit the star blizzard light . . . I can’t remember anything we said on the way, nothing explicit, I was too excited, waiting for a destiny that was told to me by faces in a mirror. Philip talking a mile a minute. The energy that guy had was amazing, supernatural. He told us about mandalas, crystal skulls in tombs which no instrument could make, and the hemispheres in the skull were distinctly divided, and it had a jaw that moved! And the Gurdjieff Institute. In the fifties members had been up on the Pyramid of the Sun, and they’d freaked out and jumped off and gone into monasteries . . . heavy as they say, and the road to the ancient city was empty, four o’clock in the afternoon and emptiness, couldn’t understand it, didn’t help the nerves. Easter Sunday a lot of people should be out celebrating, but there was no one.
The black Cadillac slid on down the road to the past, seventy miles an hour to the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, and who was he? Well, that’s the thing, never heard of him until this moment. He was a famous man, a superstar, in fact his soul lit up Venus! Dig that for being turned on! But before he shuffled off to live in the sky, he did all in his power to teach men divine wisdom, and this city we were heading toward was where he held his classes, built the whole complex to teach men to go into inner space, to become enlightened, zap into higher levels, and he lived there a number of years before he was tricked by black magicians who got him drunk and laid, and he lost his powers. Afterwards, he took his favorite people, dwarfs, hunchbacks, and other weird types to the celestial ocean where he built a big bonfire, and threw himself into it and became the Morning Star. Of course, you can’t believe everything you hear, especially after a thousand years, but there was a grain of truth in there somewhere, we were sure of it.
In the late afternoon Sun, we passed the last Indian town outside of Teotihuacan, and the wooden houses were shuttered and nobody was out. It was like driving on the Day of the Dead. There was this empty parking lot next to the ruins, and we drove in and stopped. When we got out of the car, the silence was as deafening as a cannon shot. We looked around at the immense ruins, a deserted city that once housed over a hundred thousand people. When Cortez first saw it he was envious, for it was more beautiful than anything in Spain. It was now only a gravelly plateau with the wind whistling through stone ruins.
The power of the great triangular building came over you, the Pyramid of the Sun which stood out in the distance, its stone stairway going up to the sky, a design whose magnificence hit you in the eye. The other buildings were stripped bare of their decorations, but there was still an essence to them. There was no [7] way for us to measure these ruins laid out to forgotten stars. Our minds are accustomed to the utility of buildings built for the edification of Dracula and his bottomless consumer thirst.
It was breathtaking, and the panorama of what must have been was almost visible. There in the last hours of the afternoon, Easter Sunday, and the spirits were our guides. We walked the ancient streets, the gravel of torn tombs crunching beneath our steps. Overhead the white clouds cast peculiar shadows as we made our way to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. They moved very fast across the pale gold light of the Sun. A perceptible change in atmosphere occurred, and everything seemed to age more than when we first stepped out of the car.
“This is the City of the Gods!” Philip was hissing. “Here their voices will be heard, their ghosts still walk! This was the greatest of all religious centers in America. Its power extends to the poles!”
His words were sucked into the vast silence, the Sun and wind above us, playing with our minds. I felt already their tremendous energy in the stones. The unknown architects that had built these halls, plazas, avenues, had looked at the stars and received a message. These buildings were locked into a wisdom that was timeless. These forgotten men had minds that measured Time differently than we know how. They had reached the limitless, and that was the thing about the place, it was as limitless as the sky, even in ruins it had this indescribable substance. I felt my soul poised for a journey that many had taken there in those days before the Conquest.
“This city is a map of the sky and Earth, dimensional intervention has taken place here?” Philip gestured excitedly to the large pyramid-shaped building which rose before us, covered with grinning malevolent heads of Plumed Serpents – “This represents the Earth energies rising!” he cried. “And there!” he pointed up the broad avenue, the white and dark stones shone with a lava hardness in the gold afternoon, marching like shot arrows to the enormous structure that was the Pyramid of the Sun. “At the end of the Street of the Dead are the heavens! The seers and wise men studied there the events of the sky and Earth! Here in these very buildings! They learned mysteries of the Universe which we have only dimly guessed at. They could call down energy from the sky and mutate! Feel these stones! The energies are still in them!” Philip danced about excitedly. I touched the stone heads of the plumed serpents with my fingers, frozen Kundalini images – bits of blue and white paint could be seen around their eyes. We were in the court of Quetzalcoatl. He who turned himself into the Morning Star. Farout! All the way from the neon energy of New York across the hot breath of Texas to here… Centuries slipping beneath rubber wheels to retrace steps of Buddha missionaries – and there was no doubt they had come to this prehistoric land. Philip was rapping, his Zen head bobbing up and down at the fright faces of Tlaloc, the Rain God.
Josh moved his foot on a huge slab of cut rock that was in the earth – North Carolina farm boy looking at the soil, wise hillbilly eyes testing the energies. “Back home in my library I got a book made by these Spanish chroniclers. They spoke of two wells here, one had crystal blue waters so deep and dark that even the stars’ reflections were lost in it, and the other had dark red waters, the color of blood, and the Spanish were frightened of the wells and refused to go near. The Indians said it was proof the Gods came here. That’s why this place was sacred. The Spanish found many such signs here which were not of this world.”
“Man! They must have known so much! Look at this place – think of the feathered priests walking here, singing their songs to the Sun and Moon.”
I was so excited, finally here in burial grounds where knowledge existed. That was the thing! I could never feel anything in tin city streets, everything back there paved with tar, everybody drinking and popping pills to blot out their brain, but here it was so different, and you could feel it.
“They used to burn copal by the ton, huge braziers of stone, the smell cascading into the brain, the Street of the Dead lit by thousands of torches. Wow! Think of it – what a hallucination,” Philip excited, looking around.
“Helen, what do you think of it?” Josh asked.
Helen shook her head. She seemed speechless there in the ruins, she wore this green lipstick for the occasion, she seemed so much part of the setting, she seemed to fit into it, the Indian princess returned.
“They have that smell in the churches, that smell of copal . . . I smelled it in the city last night. It makes me think of my mother praying,” she said.
“The Indians haven’t gone out of here,” Josh gave a dark laugh. “Their blood is in the soil, they still worship here, you can bet your bottom dollar. We see the bones, but they see something else.”
“Gods waiting underground,” I said.
“Let’s look for them,” Helen spoke softly, her green lips smiling, trying to make a joke. The faded light pressing in, the weird, wired air hung around our heads.
We tried to see down into the well, the red and blue waters, birthplace of opposites. The stone was partly removed from the hole, but we couldn’t see anything. The Spanish had destroyed the magical symbols along with the terrible slaughter of the Indians. [8] We could almost feel the ghosts calling out of the well as we looked.
The clouds kept bursting over the huge, round mountains that rose in the distance behind the Pyramids as we inspected their temple of crystal dreams, this ancient screen gem where the movie was projected inside the head. Here, where the great religion of Quetzalcoatl was from, which didn’t exist outside the heart of the Indians, which existed now only in broken flute songs. I kept walking around, and I kept feeling myself being lifted up, getting a tingling sensation in the back of my head – and the silence was something else, the silence was so deep, so vast, so profound, that it spoke to you, and it was not my imagination, for even Philip’s voice began to falter and edge off its machine gun speed.
“What did they do here?” Helen asked.
“DOOOO!” Philip cried. “They meditated in walled-in light sources. The Tiger and the Eagle Knights lived here! Mystic beings from Venus seeking to control the Earth’s poles. They were into mica mirrors, emerald dreams, reincarnations! Look at that Pyramid built to connect the Sun! Inspiration! All of it!”
We faced the Pyramid of the Sun, riveted by his words. “But beware! Five hundred years ago that Pyramid ran with blood, hearts tossed on sorcerers’ altars. The black magicians descending from the north, the spiderwoman’s men turning this crystal view upside down. This place has layers of karma – beware of being caught in this cat’s cradle!” And he leaned out testing the wind, looking at the Pyramids, the great deer eyes searching.
Their voices distracted me.
I walked ahead of them. I wanted to be alone in that silence, to listen. My mind was amazingly clear. I can’t explain the clarity, something of a child’s mind it was, I was moved by other things than thought powers, everything was very distinct, very sharp. I walked between rows of plumed serpents, their tongues hanging out like exhausted dogs, and I saw this tree at the end of the avenue. It was an ash tree with pale silver, green leaves growing out of the side of Quetzalcoatl’s temple. This tree had a great significance to me, a live prop in this arid movie set, breathing oxygen where ghosts walked. Beyond the tree, the avenue opened out into a huge rectangular plaza, which was enclosed by bare platforms where statues or houses had once been. The wind rustled the leaves of the tree. They sounded like dry Chinese bells, a beautiful sound caught by the leaves from the wind which blew from underground, the bone whistle of Quetzalcoatl as he journeyed with the dead. I wanted to taste the leaves. What was real and not real? The fantasy of the past and the present were merging in this timeless Indian city. I reached out and took several leaves and chewed them as I walked out to the open plaza. I was coming up from Earth.
The old thoughts were not in my head any more, the thoughts of food, of getting money, of getting laid, were not there. For the first time in my life I began to feel I knew what I was doing – and it was strange, for all I was doing was listening to the wind. The plaza was like being in the middle of a gigantic football field, and there was an echo in that field as if the crowds were still in the bleachers. In front of me, and rising out of the earth with power was the brooding silence of the Pyramid of the Sun. The wind talking to me, telling me things, wind and leaves, they were cooking in my brain. The brain clear, cloudless, receptive — fantastic high! I was walking on air. I was listening to the elements, and it came over me that this was wonderful, I had never felt anything like it in my life – this was the way to be – unity with something higher than myself. I found myself scrambling up one of the great stone platforms.
“Philip! You got to come up here!” I felt the excitement surging in me. I was breathing it, taking in great gulps of air, listening to the wind. I raised my arms, almost without knowing it, a prayer to guidance, to the Quetzalcoatl star. The others hurried up, and the four of us stood there on the ancient altar, and the Pyramid of the Sun, huge, electric. Wham! In front of us.
“We got to go up there before the Sun goes down,” I said.
“We haven’t much time,” were Philip’s only words.
Quickly we walked the Street of the Dead. Before the cowboys had shot the Indians out, how many had walked this same street? The drums, the horns, the couch shells wailing as those seekers of the sun passed, their bodies naked, covered in soot, Sadhus of the West, carrying with them the discovery of America. Reverence for those ancient soul brothers, for we know not that we repeat ourselves age upon age, the mathematical snake, the grey bus driver taking us on the long ride, and you never know how you’re going to get off.
On the bottom of the stairs reaching to the sky, the bottom of a vast five-sided hieroglyph, a script of stone made for the union with the Sun. It crossed my mind that like the mirror in the room, the Pyramid was a mirror of another reality.
We began to climb; and as my feet went up the perpendicular steps, I felt the peculiar power of the Pyramid take hold of me, a magnetic embrace, the vastness stretching up before the eye – who had thought up such an incredible Sun glyph? The wind sung to me, fleshless skull I was no longer in. The wind which had blown on these stones for a thousand years. Quetzalcoatl architect, I’m going to follow your footsteps, see this vast plan, this space where you set your heart . . . and I knew, as I began to reach the top, the Sun’s rays slanting across the horizon, that something fantastic would happen to all of us on this day.
And it was strange as we ascended the Pyramid, we found that you could climb easier if you stood erect than if you clambered [9] hand over knees, and in doing this you altered your breathing. The brown land dropped away, and the horizon of the Earth became outlined. Helen was behind me on the stairs, on the fifth platform of the Pyramid. It was some climb, climbing a stone ladder with hundreds of steps. There were six platforms or levels to the Pyramid, and each level according to Philip represented a stage of Earth’s consciousness. Earth’s consciousness! His words were like speed in my brain, climbing through the ages of the Earth. What theater! The Indians didn’t fool around. There had been a seventh platform, but it had been wooden and had been burned by the Spanish Conquistadors.
I went onto the top. I couldn’t wait to get there. The top! My heart jumping, what a panorama! Looking from the stone pinnacle at the great Sun ball hanging over the Indian landscape, I was elated. I could feel the electricity going into my shoes. I kicked them off, barefoot, dancing. Josh and Philip arrived, puffing and grinning, gleeful, ready to talk to gods. They were turning to look out, when a cry came from Helen, who had remained below. We looked down to see her tearing rocks away with her hands from the Pyramid.
“Come see! Come see!” she cried. “There’s a hole in the Pyramid!”
We joined her with a whoop! We clawed at the stones. It was like trying to look into some cyclopean eye and with great effort we made the hole she formed bigger, enough to see through. It led down to some kind of shaft. The Pyramid wasn’t completely solid! We inhaled air which rushed up, fantastic air out of a stone zeppelin, musty, aged stuff, mummified air, but we couldn’t see anything, just utter darkness. We wondered what it all meant, a significant sign for sure, opening up a pyramid!
“Hey! The sun is going!” I cried, and we rushed back up the stairs.
On top of the Pyramid we circled like birds circling a star. We tried to get the right wavelengths, the right messages. Philip looked at the rectangular depression where the old wooden structure had been.
“What had it been used for anyway?” he rasped. “It was the seventh plain . . . it was connected to the chakras . . . a magnetic ark you sat in where you left your body behind, and your soul sailed into the heavens . . . ” he paced nervously about.
“And there are rooms underneath this stone temple, rooms inlaid with mica mirrors! a material,” Philip confided, “that their priests used to trace cosmic rays.” Philip rapping the knowledge of voids and bud bombs out, a reservoir of information which couldn’t be used by pocket calculators. He commanded we sit at the four different corners of the Pyramid. Helen and I faced the Sun, Josh and Philip sat behind us. Human statues posted on the mirror of the Pyramid, staring out at the growing shadows, the Sun rolling along the distant mountains.
“Hey! This is blood!” Josh’s voice in the stillness, and indeed where we sat the stones were spotted with blood, the indelible remains of sacrifices that had been performed here which no amount of time could wash away, for the blood and the stone had become one. But, now, the Sun was moving down the mountains faster, the rays striking out, illuminating the Pyramid, the silence deepening, pregnant.
“It is beginning,” said Philip gravely.
And I knew that all of us would receive knowledge, a knowledge outside ourselves. I tried to make Helen tell me what possessed her to dig the hole, but she was silent and could only shrug her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she said, and her eyes looked somewhere deep within her. Her beautiful face gazed down at the mounds which dotted the brown landscape. I knew something would happen with that hole, it was a premonition – the last rays of the Sun would strike it and something would happen.
The Sun was low in the west, an enormous ball filling an amphitheater with light. It was like being on a huge ship crossing the rim of the Earth. I crossed my legs and looked down at the forgotten city, at the world of the Indian from their greatest temple. I knew so little about them except what Philip had told me. Thin plumes of smoke rose in the clear air from their tires in the small village below. I recalled how silent it was as we drove through the town outside Teotihuacan, and no one was to be seen in the streets. Philip said they were secretive and were afraid of the great serpents that haunted Teotihuacan.
As the four of us sat staring out at the four corners of the world, I felt through my body a power flowing on the Pyramid, as water flowing over stones, emanating from the Sun, touching us, calling us to swim in its wondrous energy. There was nothing in me I wanted to hold onto. I felt again the tenuous threads of the mysterious beyond which I wanted to touch, flowers on a star screen, the blue canopy deepening, the rays of the Sun shining out with a light unlike any I had known before, pale-yellow and beautifully clear as if the rays had passed through a crystal. The Sun burned my eyes. I was aware only of the Sun. The wind suddenly rushed against my face, a cold blast as the Earth slowly turned toward the night, riding the prow of a ship outward bound! I had to be near the Sun! It was my only thought. It was calling me, calling us! felt a beautiful ecstasy come over me. I tore off my shirt and cried out to the Sun. The rays streamed down, I looked into the Sun, my eyes staring at the flaming circle, willing them to see and not be turned away by the light . . . and I did see! The Sun moving ever so perceptively, the molten mass of its surface moving, changing. This power that was in me, that came from the Sun, made my eyes see differently. I perceived strange configurations in the Sun, and at their sight I felt a joyousness rise in my body. I would touch the Sun, touch it with my mind. There was such energy in me, and the light streamed on and on, an endless energy streamed out to the world, an endless flame. I opened my mouth for I wanted to eat this flame, be part of it, for I knew the flame would give me incredible strength to make out the mysterious signs on the Sun. With my eyes I drew this unwavering streaming flame down to me. Slowly, slowly it came from the Sun and with its descent a torrent of images and knowledge entered my heart, a funnel of sunlight.
I saw the legends of the Earth stretch out before me, and the fixture and the past were one, and I knew that a strange change would take place in our time. With all my heart I willed the light to be in me, and then I felt it touch my tongue, burn warm my tongue tip like molten butterflies and glow my being.
I ate of the sunlight for eternity and no time and a sudden knowledge flashed through me, that there was a Sun behind the [10] Sun, another entirely different aspect of this burning light and along with this, instantaneously, I knew, that within myself lay another “I”, that within this skin was a truer self — not bound by time or the mechanics of living, and the wondrousness and the greatness of this overwhelmed me. I was infused with a love no words can describe. I had a knowledge from the Sun and time stood still, and in this space there was no sense of physical things, just oneness, and when I looked out again from my body, the Sun was nearly lost behind the mountains. Gradually I became aware of my surroundings in the dimming light. The last rays fell on where the four of us sat, they came out of the sky like huge paths of light. Two things instantly happened: from the hole I saw a whitish wisp like a vapor escape. In the twinkling of an eye it lost itself in the coming darkness, but its shape, what I glimpsed of it, was like a gnarled hand. The Pyramid had opened! The second thing was a scream. The scream was Philip’s (though he claimed later he never knew he made it), but Josh and Helen saw “something” like smoke come out of his mouth and disappear into the gloom of the Mexican evening.
We stood in the twilight trying to piece the mysterious events together, but the events we experienced were so beyond our comprehension we couldn’t come to grips with them. We were delirious, speaking in snatches of things we had seen, walking around in circles . . . not understanding or even hearing each other. It was almost like we were children having to learn to walk again on this earth.
“Fantastic! Fantastic!” Philip was saying, his huge eyes shining with a vivid light, in fact all our eyes were bright, electric. I couldn’t look into Philip’s eyes without feeling a zap in my spine. We couldn’t look into each other’s eyes, that was one of the strangest things there on top. We were injected with a weird, unworldly energy — loons hooting and hollering after the Sun had gone.
“What had we let out of the Pyramid?” I kept asking, but no one could reply.
“There was this smoke that went into the air . . . ” Helen kept saying, “and it came out of Philip’s mouth at the same time.”
“There’s things in this Pyramid no one has seen for a thousand years. These magicians were into galactic intercourse. Who knows what went into the world?” Philip moving about, looking up at the sky he had left.
“I didn’t think such things could happen,” Helen was shaking her head in disbelief, looking down at the Pyramid stairs descending into the growing night. The valley of the Pyramid was in shadow. The Sun had fallen beneath the horizon, but there were tinges of gold light in the clouds above us and patches of incredible blue light.
“Lay down! Lay down!” I cried, and we all did. We looked up and the sky and the clouds swirled around above us.
“It’s the Smoking Mirror!” Philip said, and we looked up into it, and again I began to feel this energy come through me, the clouds formed above the Pyramid in strange shapes, there was a palpable sensation of “something” about to appear – but Helen stood up suddenly, and the spell was broken.
“I don’t like this,” she said, brushing her Indian dress off. “It’s too spooky.”
But I knew what she meant, there was a God connected to the Smoking Mirror, Tezcatlipoca. He was the God of divine seeing but also of failure and ruin, a person was reborn at his appearance.
We sat and talked about him, and Philip knew about his animal symbols, the tiger underground, and as we talked Helen noticed a tiny, red berry or seed growing in a crack of the stone in the depression made by the destroyed wooden platform. We could make out the postholes that had supported the structure. This berry was the only thing alive growing up there, and it seemed a miracle it could grow at all in such barren surroundings. Helen picked the berry, and she stood in the twilight, framed against the darkening sky, and asked each of us to try it.
“Watch out! Watch out! Miasmic delicacies!” Philip cried. I saw Josh taking a taste, he made a wry face, then she stood before me, a slight wind blowing at her hair, the Indian dress with the beads, it didn’t seem I was standing in this century. She had this knowing smile on her face, a knowing out of sight smile, and I took the berry from her uplifted palm, and put it in my mouth. A little red berry, a small sphere, a pyramid apple! and it was unlike anything I’d ever tasted before or since. It was both bitter and sweet, and yet neither. I took the seed out of my mouth, and next Philip tasted it.
“It’s bitter!” He exclaimed.
Helen grew extremely excited. She wanted all of us to eat a portion of it.
“You’ve got to!” she said. She had it cupped in her hand against the wind. A wind had come up suddenly though the sky was clear. The bright star Venus rose on the horizon.
“Goddess of Venus! Goddess of Venus!” Philip circling, smiling, his deer eyes gazing at the Pyramid stones, even in the faint light of stars you could still see the darker blood stains in the stone.
“It’s important. You must eat it,” she urged.
Josh and Philip refused, and Helen and I stood facing each other, the wind blowing. She had come into that bar Malachay’s because it was open late at night, and she could never rest at night, the hunger inside her looking for action. She pinched the shell in half with her teeth, a pale milky substance was inside, a celestial wafer. We ate a half a piece each, but a divided half blew away from her palm. Before the wind took it, Helen and I had stared at it in disbelief for inside the half still in her hand was a palish outline, and it looked for all the world like a tiny replica of a human embryo. The half we ate had part of the substance. I remember how triumphant Helen’s face looked at that moment, as if she had unearthed an elixir beyond measure . . . and we couldn’t really handle this latest event, and we began to laugh hysterically . . . and Josh and Philip turned around from where they were looking from the top of the Pyramid and asked what was wrong?
And we said nothing was wrong, but that something was there – inside the seed, but we couldn’t explain it. It was like we had eaten a forbidden fruit.
“We’ll experience a night of musical laughter, the eye of zebras, bodies ascending on mountains of flame,” Philip hissing, looking out over the edge of the vanished dusk.
“Man! I feel blown out!” I said.
We stood there against the sky, looking out, feeling the wind. I wondered what it was going to do to us, the seed, a cosmic food [11] to keep going, a pyramid food, blam into the veins! Waking up dead bodies praying in dead churches. It was hallucinatory, crazy, off these walls seven thousand feet off the ground – but very necessary.
Then out of nowhere, out of the horizontal shadows of the city, children appeared, and it gave us an uneasy feeling, for the Indians were notoriously afraid of the Pyramid, and here were Indian children at the top and night only a few minutes away. We hadn’t heard their approach, and the strange thing was that they didn’t seem out of breath, climbing those stone steps, hundreds of them, to reach the top. They were extremely handsome children, with dark eyes and the wide solemn Indian faces. They were five in all, four boys and a girl, and they spoke English, unworldly children heralding the new energy, a coyote call from the Sun spots. The oldest one didn’t seem more than eight, but they had an air of intelligence that was beyond their age. They had very clear eyes, and they had no fear of us. They seemed to know we would be there — yet, it was impossible to see anyone on the top of the Pyramid from the bottom when it was dark.
“What do they want?” Josh asked, keeping his distance.
They smiled and pulled from beneath their white immaculate clothes relics of the past. The first thing they offered were obsidian knives, the same as the Aztecs used to cut out the hearts of their victims, for the Aztecs believed “the reality lives in the heart” and it is necessary to force the heart to set it free. I marveled at the peculiar luster of the volcanic stone, almost the shine of metal. They were cold in the palm of my hand, and we shook our heads and refused to buy these surgeon’s scalpels – the knives were startling and disconcerting after the vision of the Sun, a pull back to man’s dark domain. They pressed us with other objects, smiling they gave us wordless “yeses” to all our inquiries. These other objects were stone Toltec dolls, made of oven-baked clay. They had weird laughing faces.
“How much? How much?” Josh reaching in his pocket, but the children shook their heads and pressed them into our hands – free gifts!
“It’s for you,” they said, almost laughing with the whimsy of it. They showed us a large ring made of baked clay, the inside of the ring was well worn. It was a Quetzalcoatl ring, and I took it from them and gave it to Helen. The wind came up again, the children stood briefly with us in their white clothes. Josh gave them some silver coins, all he had in his pocket, and they disappeared. None of us afterwards could remember seeing them leaving.
“What strange children,” Helen kept repeating. She walked about the top of the Pyramid, nervous and agitated, her black hair blew in the wind, long strands of black hair masking her face. It deepened the sense of being in another world. The Sun as the Aztecs knew it was now fully transformed as the Fifth Sun and in its passage underground, symbolized by the prowling tiger, it would remain in that shape until it reaches the place from which it rises again into the heavens.
The stars were out, they lit the sky in a fantastic profusion, and we felt the chill of the night. We descended the first flight of stairs to the fifth level, the level of the present Earth according to Philip.
“The tin door has opened, the sky is peeling off our skin, men must follow sleeping women. Where is Saint Dracula?” Philip was gesticulating, dancing spasmodically on the stone ladder – right out of the earth we were – and night was upon us, and Helen grew extremely uneasy. She felt the spirits like a true Indian maiden, and could not sit still and watch the stars come over the dead city. She kept pacing to and fro, and finally she said she had to leave. Josh elected to take her down, night had made it difficult to see the steep stairs, and we watched him, a Southern gentleman, guiding his lady down into the gloom. There in the cool of the Mexican night, the image of Rhett Butler, escaping future cities burning with Indians riding on smoke horses. Philip and I stood on the wide platform and looked across into the quiet of Teotihuacan, and we could see where a great pointed shadow rose, the Pyramid of the Moon.
“What the hell does that hold?” Philip asked.
Neither of us knew what time passed. The stars came out in their full array, twinkling in the warm night air. We sat talking and staring at the Moon Pyramid. The great silence of the ruins of Teotihuacan seemed to crawl up the Pyramid and touch our feet. Philip and I talked of what happened, the red seed, the Sun releasing the entombed spirit. Philip felt it had unknown portents for the future, and we discussed the “changes” that were coming. The aftermath of the atomic bomb had left the world in a state of shock, but, now, the consciousness of man was quickening. The “thoughts” that had come to us on the Pyramid were hard to put into words, for they were more like impressions made on the mind. The clearest expression of these “thoughts” from the sky was that everything on Earth, values, ideas, and concepts were to undergo a drastic change, and this change was going to accelerate with the years. One of the most important of these was there had to be a basic alteration in the attitude of men and women toward each other. They would be more of an equal nature, gone would be the idea of a woman just as a wife . . . and I had this knowledge of the beginnings – that the Garden of Eden was a signature for a fall from a higher level of communication, and the trick was to get back to the Garden as one – and the Garden was inside ourselves, it was not some mythological place outside – and maybe, it was that simple, through intense passion you could experience the universe. The human body was a map to higher orders. Male and [12] female bodies entwined making love were the meeting of opposites. Humans were pieces of the Sun, and if they could get in touch with the Sun, they could use this passion as an avenue back to communication.
Philip did not feel this knowledge, but he agreed that forces from inside the human race would cut across vast multitudes and cause the history of human behavior to change, and this would not come without conflict. That man if he looked inward would be creative, but if he continued to look outward, he would be destructive. We both knew and felt that great physical upheavals of the Earth would coincide with this, but the violence of these upheavals would depend on how much men resisted cosmic change. It was fantastic, but for a brief moment looking into the Sun I received as did Philip the knowledge that man in willing change in himself brings about an awareness of the rhythms of the Earth, for it too is not at rest. What happens to him will be reflected in the Earth – for energy follows thought.
“Out there lies so much forgotten knowledge, they left messages all over this country, the birthplace of the Plumed Serpent,” Philip was excitedly walking on the broad space of the Pyramid which was the fourth level.
“We know that humans have reached out and transcended this world! This is what this Pyramid is about! A launching pad that takes your mind to the stars and contact!”
“The power that is inside us! Don’t you feel it?” I asked.
“Yes, the power,” he gave a mirthless laugh. Philip who carried the message of the “Beat Generation” was getting another message from the Shamans that existed when men could see around the Earth, when they got knowledge from the stars.
“These people were connected to Tibet, to the rituals of the Bon-Po. They carried with them the voice of the crystal mountain. This pyramid was conceived in one man’s mind – think of that man! The greatness that must have been his!”
“It’s scary,” I said.
We were out there, beyond my wildest dreams, everything I had ever known about in my life faded into insignificance, my ego of getting ahead, of making a mark on life had turned to dust. We were connected to the Sun, a living, breathing, talking Sun this Pyramid enabled us to touch it.
Philip broke upon my thoughts – “Everything they did here is a footprint. They penetrated mysteries which we are just beginning to be aware of.” Philip waved his hand to the Pyramid of the Moon.
“It made those Popes shit in their pants. This reality which the Indian knew of! I experienced it when I sat up there, on the top! the connections of the universe!” Philip’s voice trailed 0ff – “The Egyptians understood the real meaning of it. It can’t be covered in this garbage we call living! The heart has to be set free, then there is vision. But we have only the dimmest ideas of what that concept means. They purified the air around them! and what do we do? We drop the ‘A’ bomb, man!” Philip gesticulated at the night around us.
“We are doomed! We are Christian heretics, man! Moloch has captured our souls for we are his servants!”
We looked across the dark shadows of the valley before us. Not so many centuries past other men had stood here with the call of conch shells singing out to Gods that waited in fires on top of this Pyramid. The mushroom cloud was the symbol of the “blossoming war.” I could almost see the ancient priests holding in their hands great wooden staffs with magic emblems carved on them, their solemn faces turned to the sky.
“Do you realize how the Aztecs initiated their Knights of the Tiger and Eagle?” Philip’s voice carried out into the darkness, and I began to have a gnawing doubt of being where we were. “They knighted them in a ceremony whose roots were 60,000 years ago. For seventy days they did breathing exercises and fasted all the time to get the impurities out of their bodies. They communicated with no one, for in the silence they heard certain voices. They were smeared with a special substance which made them high, and they painted themselves and made signs of the spirit. They thought of themselves as living pieces of light from the Sun entombed beneath the Earth. They stayed in the sacred place until a divine spark in their minds came to them, and, then they climbed to the top of this Pyramid!”
As I listened to Philip, I believed a lot of what he said, and it was strange for I had not read much about ancient people and their migrations, but the eating of the sunlight had made me see things. There were connections with Druids, Egyptians and the American Indians. There had been mysterious guides that led people to different fertile places of the Earth . . . and civilizations had begun, but even then the knowledge they contained was old, and always it seemed to come from the stars.
I leaned back against the walls of the Pyramid, where once myriad skulls were hung. The Indian said this world was a dream, in the passage of existence. “On this Pyramid, these men were given secret doctrines of life.” Philip became silent and looked up at the canopy of stars.
“The Plumed Serpent is the symbol of rebirth. It must begin [13] again. I know it! You felt that, didn’t you?” his deer eyes shone with the excitement of his experience.
“You screamed, and there was this stuff that came out of your mouth. It was like smoke,” I replied.
Philip shook his head, but he didn’t seem upset by the fact that something came out of him.
“Whatever it was,” he shrugged, “I don’t recall doing anything. I saw a mist, a claw-shaped mist come out of the Pyramid where Helen dislodged the stones. I had sky power, power poured into me. The winds of the sky blowing across the world, changes! Fantastic changes are going to happen on this Earth!” he hissed. “Mark my words!” His eyes, the incredible deer eyes shining in the darkness. We had both gotten up and were staring out – again I looked in the direction where the Moon temple stood, hoping to see the Moon begin to rise over it. I thought of Josh and Philip’s conversation about Gurdjieff and his studies of the Moon, that the Moon feeds upon the vibrations of the living. Members of the Gurdjieff Society had come to this Pyramid in the Fifties. Mysterious things took place, but no one had recorded it. It was rumored that one person had died of a heart attack because of the experience, several of them afterwards had entered the Catholic Church, and others had dropped out of sight.
Philip moved along the edge. “Galileo did not observe the Moon until 1609 with a primitive telescope. It gives you some idea of how far advanced these people were, and hundreds of years later we still do not dare understand what they were about. Listen to this place!” He leaned his thin body out, listening to the silence of the pyramid.
I walked to the east face of the Pyramid. My feet crunched on the pebbles of the terrace, all was dark, and below lay the buried city with its secrets. From the Sun temple you could see a huge shadow form of the Pyramid of the Moon. It squatted there, a foreboding shape. Starshine was the only light, and I strained my senses to picture how it had been long ago, four hundred years ago. The Spanish soldiers who had been dragged to the top and had their hearts cut out. I could almost picture it. I looked up the massive stone face of the Sun Temple, a light wind blew, and I felt specks of dust sting my skin The stars hung giant diamonds over our heads. What was there in this ancient place that had called to us, that had brought us to Mexico through a series of coincidences? What had come out of this huge five-sided structure pointed to the Sun? Philip and I stood on the stone platform and felt the energy go through our bodies.
Below I distinctly heard a rustling, as if leaves were blowing along the jagged walls, I tried to see through the gloom – was it the children coming back again? But I could see nothing except the stones of the Pyramid stuck deep in the blackness. There was almost a solid, touchable quality to the darkness that surrounded us, and the stars were sewn into it. It was like another world rising around us, and the noise from below continued fitfully. It was impossible to tell whether it was a person or an animal. The Indians believed strange animals haunted these ruins. They said there was a large dog-like beast that guarded the huge sanctuary and attacked people who trespassed. They spoke too of animals that came from the netherworld, huge serpents that glided forth from the broken buildings on the full moon. I retraced my footsteps, a fear had come over me. Philip remained staring out at the Moon building, listening for any awakening of its secret chambers.
“Did you hear that?” I wanted to verify it was only I who heard the rustling of leaves, but before he could reply, a sharper sound came from directly above us, a flapping sound like a great bird caught among the stones. I jumped away and heard Philip let out a hoarse cry.
“What was that?”
The rustling and scraping sound continued, growing louder and unnerving us more. It slithered down the face of the Pyramid toward us, but there was enough starlight to see, and suddenly I made out a winged object.
“It’s a kite!” Philip exclaimed, and so it was, a kite stranded in the middle of nowhere. It had been blown against the Pyramid of the Sun, yellow with a long paper tail, an ordinary kite made of two strips of wood. Neither of us could explain it – it seemed to be a warning. It did not seem accidental that this object had flown against the Pyramid at night. Who would fly a kite at this time? We continued to sit there, but we felt vulnerable and disturbed.
Philip walking around seemed to catch at thoughts better left unsaid. He spoke of the blood spilled on the Pyramid, that it carried with it a kind of electricity and a chill came into my heart.
“We shouldn’t talk of such things in this place, it gives me the creeps.” I could see the blood of thousands of victims running down the stone stairs. The night became darker, then, below, we heard feet running – was it the children again?
I walked around to the east side and looked down. I felt fear inside . . . the walls fell away to the shadows below, the running feet [14] had stopped. In the starlight the material that made up the Sun Pyramid sparkled and took on an unworldly quality. I cannot describe the disquiet it gave me to look out – everything was still and desolate, as if the world I knew had vanished.
‘Let’s go down,” I urged. “We have been up here long enough, and there’s no sign of the Moon rising.”
“You’re right,” agreed Philip. His deer eyes searched the darkness nervously, he too seemed to sense the change that had taken place.
We walked around to the west face, the noise of the gravel beneath our shoes echoed eerily about us, and we began to descend the broad, steep stairs.
As we made our way down Philip exclaimed, “Look! Do you see how they inserted white guide stones on the sides. They show up very well in this faint light.”
“Yes,” and I looked closer to the stairs. “And you can make out where they drilled holes. They must have put wooden staffs for torches in them. This place was lit up at night. How beautiful it must have been, the priests coming up these stairs in their colorful headdresses and masks. They moved up the stairs to the sound of drums and flutes. It must have been out of this world!”
In the night I had this image of them moving by me – an invisible line of priests – Sadhus with ashes on their bodies. Their voices droning like bees, connecting to the Sun behind the Sun.
“And the number of sacred steps in each level must mean something, as the Toltecs believed the Earth evolved through various Suns.” Philip abruptly stopped, his thin face etched electrically in the night.
“We must count them! Each step corresponds to a day in the year. Let us go back up. We will begin counting from here.” He spoke excitedly. We were standing on the last step to the terrace of the third level. I looked out again at the valley, I kept checking it for I felt the changes taking place, but I couldn’t explain what these changes were. The Indian who had created the symbol of the Plumed Serpent, an incredible glyph lassoed out of lime. The snake that was in our spines that could be awakened. These people had insights, knowledge of dinosaurs. They knew the beginning of men.
Philip exclaimed, “We have to count these stairs. They hold the key to everything!” He motioned to me, and we began to climb back up. We were both excited because we felt we were onto something that would explain the workings of the Pyramid. We had almost reached the fifth level where we had been sitting before Helen had felt a chill and wanted to leave. We were standing on the one hundredth step since we started counting. We had stopped to catch our breath – when suddenly, without warning, a weird sound, a sound from hell issued from above us. The sound was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was a hollow, insect sound, a cricket chirping underground, and it had an amazing force to it. It soaked your body with its vibrations. It came from somewhere above, and the two of us were frozen by its force. We stared up the stairs of the Pyramid. We could see the topmost platform immense and solid above us. The stars made it glow in a grey-green light . . . and, then, we saw something — I remember my whole body went cold at the sight of it. In the stone shadows, above where we had been, stood a figure. He was unmistakable. He was wearing some sort of cowl. He was of medium size, and [15] I had the fleeting impression he was a Mongol, but no ordinary being, he was a powerful spirit transported from some other world to guard the stairs to the top. I understood the terrible chirping sound was his voice. It passed into the very center of my being. An incredible fear came over us, it was not an ordinary fear, but a fear that entered into one’s very soul, like a knife into the marrow of bones. I tried to move, but it was as if we had come against an invisible wall. The very atmosphere of the night changed with the onslaught of his sound. He was the guardian of the Pyramid of the Fifth Sun, that was certain. He stood directly above us, masked by the deeper shadows of the jagged stones of the Pyramid. He had on a brownish-rust colored hood which obscured his face. We were numbed by the knowledge that he could be there making this unearthly sound. His voice became more and more agitated and rapid with each passing second, and my fear increased because we sensed he was lashing himself into an uncontrollable fury. His mouth was an “O”, a hole inside a faceless apparition from which this evil chirping noise came. We fell back, stunned by the intensity of the sound coming from the figure on the Pyramid. I tried to reason how he could possibly be there, but all thought was wiped out by the power of his unending insect voice.
I ran down the steep stone stairs with Philip, not caring whether I misjudged them and fell or not, anything to get away from the thing guarding the steps above. He was a magician transformed by a ceremony in another time, he guarded this sacred place as his ancestors had done long ago. The rattles of the shamans were never stilled, they waited through the emptiness brought by white men.
We ran down the stone stairs, the white flagstones showing like hounds’ teeth in the starlight. We didn’t halt to catch our breath until the third level.
“Wait! Wait, Philip!” I said. “It cannot be!” The Sun was still in my head. It was hard to conceive that things had turned around. “We must be imagining things.”
“You saw that figure!” replied Philip, his eyes wide with fright. “I don’t know, that kite made us jumpy – a lot’s happened to us up here…”
“But what could that sound be? It is impossible to imagine it. I’ve never heard anything like it – and I don’t want to hear it again!” cried Philip.
But I wasn’t to be easily dissuaded, “You said yourself there were animals here, a strange type of armadillo that only lives among these ruins.”
“Yes,” Philip ran his hand over his crew-cut hair, hesitating. “I’ve heard too there is a kind of dog that lives around these Pyramids, a descendant from those Aztec dogs that can jump like cats.” His forehead glistened with sweat though the night was cool.
“Yes, yes, you are probably right The stories of the Gurdjieff people coming here, and the men that have been found dead at the bottom of the Pyramid, have unnerved me.” Philip gestured downward, the land lay pale and washed out under the starry sky.
“That doesn’t make me feel too good,” I said, and we laughed. It seemed to break the ice of our fear. We stood a moment getting our breath.
“Come on, we will go back,” I said. I had to see what it was that blocked our path I could not believe it had happened. We began climbing the steps upward.
“Yes,” Philip’s voice trailed behind me, “We will brave the Gods!” The night sparkled over our heads. I had always felt an affinity for the night, the stars drew my imagination. They held so many secrets.
“Count the steps, we must count the steps, they contain a clue,” Philip’s voice urged.
Together we climbed back along the black face of the Pyramid. Philip’s voice counting the steps carried in the stillness. It was hard for anyone climbing the Pyramid to see the level above as the steps rise at such a steep angle, but as the rim of the fourth level appeared, and we were again at the hundredth step – instantaneously my eyes saw the outline of a hooded figure. This time there was no mistaking the presence. From above the terrible harsh chittering sound came down upon us, like a sword cleaved into our minds. Even though we had expected it, the terror was so sudden and overwhelming we were knocked out by it. With its demonic call it made our brains dance like dice. The figure stood against the stone outline of the Pyramid, its hooded face darker than the rest of the shadows. The cricket chirping sound rose to a fever pitch, and I had a premonition that the being was going to sweep down on us and engulf us in his rust robes.
We fled down the Toltec stairs, falling and slipping as we ran. The only thought was to get away. The underground chirping rose and reached out from whatever hell it came from, and followed us down into the darkness. I could not imagine such fear, it possessed me, and the stones beneath my feet seemed to bend and expand outward, as if the physical solidity of the Pyramid itself was dissolving. Faces old and evil clawed at my mind, I found myself no longer on the steps but on one of the wide terraces. Howl had gotten there I couldn’t recall. The grey wall of the Pyramid slid down below me – how were we to escape this madness?
I saw scores of dried skulls sticking on stones looking out, their sightless eyes feasting on energy in the night. My mind seemed to be taken over by an inner howling wind. Indian spirits from black depths of tombs moved across the ash stones. Our feet had echoed down that dusty temple of the Sun and woken the guardians of its inner chambers. Philip suddenly reached out and grabbed me.
“You are going to fall off the edge!” he cried.
If it had not been for Philip, I would’ve stepped off the Pyramid like the Gurdjieff members before us. I had no idea where I was – but it was not in this time! Before I stepped back, I glimpsed the skulls below had feathers and pendants stuck in their bone tops, which waved in a wind I couldn’t feel.
“Hold hands! We must hold hands!” Philip’s voice tore through my dream, and I felt him hold my arm hard in his grip, but it was no use. In the next instant we were separated like sailors reeling on the deck of a ship. The sky above had gone black. There were no stars, they had disappeared and tumbled out of sight. I tried to see the valley of Teotihuacan, but with the stars gone it was impossible, There was nothing but an impenetrable blackness – it almost had a feeling of mass to it. A magnetic horror exuded from the core of the Pyramid and drove itself into our minds. A night descended on us which was awesome and not of this Earth. Hopelessly Philip and I struggled to stay together. He would call [16] my name and tell me to hold onto his hand. “Hold on for your life!” he would cry. But the powers of the dark Pyramid drove us apart. He against the sharp skull stones of the wall, I to the Pyramid edge where a misstep meant a fall to certain death. Time ceased to have meaning, and through a fog of fear I heard Philip yell –
“You’re stepping off the Pyramid!”
I looked down an abyss, only a patch of grey gravelly stone held me between the edge and space. I had to get of this structure. I knew I would die if I did not – with every passing minute I became less able to think. The Aztec Gods were there in the night, malevolent beings whose force I felt was trying to enter my body and that of Philip’s. The two of us were drenched in sweat, and we stumbled down to another level. I remember little of this time. I was losing consciousness. I no longer knew whether I stood on a pyramid or some other realm. There was this feeling of being pressed down into the Pyramid. When I looked out to see where the sky was, there was no mark of Earth to guide me. It was as if the walls of the Pyramid had somehow shut us in, and we were inside the place! Suddenly, I heard Philip make this inhuman scream. The darkness seemed to dispel, and I had the dim sensation I was standing next to a gigantic stone phallus, skyscraper tall, pointing upward to heaven glowing a circular red, and around the platform on which the phallus stood was a world of blackness which waited like a pool in a deep well. It was filled with a malignant life force. I was stunned to find myself in such an alien place, and I was being drawn into it. Where had this world come from? I struggled with my frightened mind to see what Philip was screaming about. I turned from the mysterious apparition of the huge pointed stone, and saw across the whole side of the Pyramid a vast burning white-black light. It blazed in a huge electric arc. The speed of its energy hissed against the stone face of the Pyramid. It was a light not from this world. It was alive with energy, and it had a strobe light quality to it. Thousands of points of light shot out from the arc, needles of black and white dancing light – and the arc was huge, the blazing stream of dark, white light reached up into the sky. It was absolutely incredible and you could not look into it, it was dangerous. It would burn you, and I threw my hands in front of my face to protect myself from being burnt – but the fire, it was from another dimension. A baptism of pyramid fire! Philip held up his silver cross, muttering incoherent words, and his fingers were scorched by the light needles. He cried out, and we crouched in the dust of the stones, covering ourselves as best we could, bathed in the mysterious light that shot out from the Pyramid – whiter than a thunderbolt. I crawled around on my hands and knees, out of my head with terror. With an eerie sharpness the light began to fade – it made a sizzling sound with a final tongue of fire, and then went out.
I saw Philip was flung against the side of the Pyramid, his arms strangely pinioned against the wall as if he was being whirled around on a ferris wheel. I saw him double up and slide down the wall in the dying light of the arc. At the same time a terrible force began to push me into the Pyramid dust I could not struggle against it. I could hardly breathe. The light had disappeared, and the impenetrable darkness had descended on us again. My thoughts were burnt out. I felt myself slipping down to the black waters of a well. Again I found I had been pushed to the edge of the Pyramid I tried to see the ground below. In this hellish realm, I could see nothing, just a greyish nothing. If I didn’t get off, I would be dead like the others they had found in the morning. I spat, hoping to hear by the sound of my spit the distance I was from the bottom of this nightmare. It didn’t matter any more what was happening. I pushed myself off, and as I fell I felt the enormous weight lift off me, and to my surprise I found we had been only five or six feet off the ground. I called to Philip and he too jumped. We were off the Pyramid! We were free – we had escaped the guardians of another world! Picking ourselves up, we ran from the Pyramid.
The black Cadillac was waiting a few hundred feet away. Josh and Helen were in it, and as we ran up to its idling engine I saw Josh had a forty-five gun in his hand. Quickly we got in, Josh wasted no time in starting the car down the road. They too had seen ghostly figures moving along the stairway of the Pyramid.
“They had capes on and carried torches, but they had no flesh, no flesh!” Helen was frightened, urging the car on with her voice. “Green magnetic lights flickering on the top. We have to get out of here if we are to save ourselves!”
Philip and I were in the back seat exhausted. He still clutched the silver cross in his lingers. Josh pressed the pedal down, and we roared out of there at eighty miles an hour.
“We’ve been witness to a vast cosmic plan. The living dead are around us. We’re going to live this night forever!” Philip’s voice was rapping. “We woke up the place!” I laughed – the relief was exhilarating.
“But a lot of heavy shit is going to come down,” said Philip, looking out the back window at the darkness. The black bulk of the Pyramid loomed over the whole valley, and I saw flames shoot out and disappear into the moonless sky.
Josh and Helen and I went into hiding in a hotel in Mexico City, from the forces of Moloch. Philip called us from his house telling us that the sunsets were full of flames and portents. His calls came along with frantic calls from Conrad Rooks down in Acapulco, who was trying to find out what was happening. He was there with his wife, Princess Zena Rachevsky. His mind was scrambled from taking mescaline underwater.
The circumstances of getting out of Mexico City I can still recall vividly. I had been walking aimlessly in the streets of Mexico, trying to make sense of the pyramid experience of the day before. Total strangers would come up to me and ask about the pyramid – in English! It was one of the most freaky times of my life. I finally couldn’t take it any more. I jumped into a taxi to take me back to the hotel. The driver, an Indian with dark intense eyes, turned around. He looked at me with a sense of intrigue and said, “There is to be a celebration on top of the pyramid tonight, an unusual event,” he emphasized. “You want to go there?”
I remember the fear stabbing me, and not believing this was happening to me. I got out of the taxi in the middle of the street and ran. I spent many years hiding from the life force that appeared out of the Pyramid and the knowledge that the evolution of the Fifth Sun was accelerating.