Maya Oracle

Glyphman

I just found this forum, and expect to be visiting these Oracle threads a bit more than the Tarot.
So wanted to stop by and say hi here as well as the Newbie introduction thread. Was not sure if I should post here or the Oracle Studies thread.
My recent interest in ancient Maya, and our ancient Motherland of MU, and the Lemurians brought me more focused in ancient symbology, especially the connections between the two civilizations.
The Symbology, the Glyphs, sanctums, Underworlds, and Otherworlds !! I am starting to find myself creating an Oracle around these two themes, but more towards the Maya, and their glyphs. After all, the Oracle cards are comprised of a symbolic system who's sacred function is to permit communication between humankind and the Gods, ancestors, and other supernatural beings. This is also the center of the belief system of the ancient Maya, Human plane of Existance, the living sky, the Otherworld, the Maw of the Underworld, the world of experience manifested within two complimentry dimensions, and so on....... My desire to go to the source of the Maya glyphs found me looking at the symbols of the ancient Lemurians, hundreds of thousand of years old. Very cool stuff........
Finding this forum is part of my journey towards putting together an Oracle around the Maya/Lemuria glyphs and symbols. I have started two seperate journals. One more specific to the meanings and design of each card, and the second defines the Oracle, the theme, and histories of the symbols of these two ancient civilizations.
Not ready yet for the graphics work.........still too much reading and writing to do.... having a hard time putting it all together someplace between 30 and perhaps as many as 50 cards???
It is really fun for me because I get to learn the histories/symbologies, and then try and put it together so that I might use those same symbols for my own growth through an Oracle...........make sense??

Very interested in hearing any ideas, and hearing from others going through something similar.............any ideas/imput ??

Peace all...........
 

zorya

hi glyphman :)

welcome to the forum.

are you familiar with the 'mayan oracle' by ariel spilsbury and michael bryner?
here are some images, which also link to a review
http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/mayan-oracle/

and here is a short review i did of it. i thought you might be interested in the number of cards and how they are based on the mayan calendar.
http://www.timelessspirit.com/MAY04/review7.shtml

it is still one of my most used decks, primarily because it assumes we are more than our earthbound selves and deals with communication and connection with other dimensions.

i look forward to seeing your cards.
 

Glyphman

Maya Oracle and shamanism

Hello Zorya,

Yes, as a matter a fact that has been the only deck that I have found so far related to the Maya either as an Oracle or Tarot card.

What I did not understand is why the theme around the Maya calendar.......

Perhaps you may understand where I am coming from. After visiting your website I noticed you remarked:

"Shamanism is a broad term spanning many cultures and centuries. Simply put; a shaman is a healer. She/he is able to journey between realities. The interesting thing is that across these cultures and times, symbols and methods remain similar if not identical."

For myself the journey of creating an oracle around the ancient Maya/Lemurian glyphs, and symbols is specificly important because of the fact that "across these cultures and times, symbols and methods remain similar if not identical".

This is the key to understanding and applying ancient symbols for instance to an Oracle.

I truly believe that sorta like the history kept through time within the dolphins, or memory crystals like the Lemurian Seed Crystals said to hold all information from the beginning of creation.

I believe that these ancient symbols are imbeded within all of us in a similar way. So when I took a look at the few cards that the website displayed, I don't see that. What I see is the Maya symbols/glyphs altered through dreams and meditation of the creators of the deck.

Don't get me wrong. Gosh.......ya got to respect the work involved with it. It is a beautifull deck. I would be inerested to read directly from thier book.

I just have a hard time with that. My hope is that through my journey of adapting specific images/glyphs that it will be much more powerfull a tool that hopefully will make the best conduit between the Gods, ancestors and other supernatural beings, whom still reside within the Maya's "Otherworld", which is just as real today for us as it was for them a couple thousand years ago.

My idea of a Maya Oracle is somewhat similar to that of the "inner sanctums" used by the Maya. A place or tool in this case ( the oracle cards ), connecting the human plane of existance with that of the Otherworld by way of specific symbols.

Hopefully, an oracle designed in this way will better point me in directions where I will find my answers when consulting it.

I like your website and book marked it to check out closer a bit later.

Thanks for the info.

Peace...........
 

HudsonGray

Glyphman

Jaguar's Son

Hi HudsonGray,

I had not seen this particular vase scene. There is a glyph called "the Spearthrower-shield" indicating that the Great-Jaguar-Paw was Curl-Snout's father, and Smoking-Frog's brother.
I am not sure if I am on the same page as you are. I noticed that the link you provided referenced a "jaguars baby"......

Anyway, Linda Schele and David Freidel' A Forest of Kings shows a spearthrower glyph related to Great-Jaguar-Paw, Curl-Snout, and Smoking-Frog.
I am not sure if one of these two brothers are the Jaguar-baby on the vase you showed me.
Here are some pictures of the Spearthrower glyphs. Perhaps they will be of use in the design of your World card.

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c325/glyphman/100_0263.jpg

I am new to Tarot, so as a newbie bear with me, ok? I read the meaning of the World card from the Aeclectic card meanings link. I am not sure that I see the connection.

Again, please forgive me for not getting it. But for fun and future reference, could you please elaborate on how you will be applying the spearthrower twards the meaning of the World card?

I am interested in gathering peoples interpritations when they assign pictures, images, etc,....... when creating cards. I am excited about this because I hope to be able to try this myself with my own Oracle theme.

Hey thanks for the response and information, and thanks also for the contact information you provided in the "deck creating" thread. I emailed him and am anxious to hear from him.

Take care........
 

HudsonGray

Hiya Glyphman,

I've got my card listed here: http://17coyotes.livejournal.com/?skip=20 Go down to January 17th, 2005 for the posting, it's got the myth & URL connections to some of what I found online. Basically the myth talks about passages to the next level (forward moving, no returning to the old level), which to me was perfect for the world card since it moves you on to the next phase and you start over again.

I've been blogging the cards as I develop them, trying to span history, cultures, media & a whole lot of other things, all mixed together into one deck. No art posted there, unfortunately, that's still in progress.

I don't think the Jaguar's Son/Jaguar's Baby is connected to the ones you've listed. The corn god, death god and rain god were involved in shoving him down the hole to move him into his next phase as the God of Night (his God of Day form was a macaw I believe). He's present in adult and child form--it gets confusing sorta, but it made sense to the Mayans. I did find the main section of the myth written online, and the pottery pictures, which will be recreated as a mural on an archeological dig on my card. I'm not sure if I can fit the entire section in, I'd LIKE to include Water Lily Jaguar too, but he's way off to the right on the mural. I'll have to explain the myth in the booklet for the deck too, so people understand why it's there. Probably 99.9% of the population has no clue about any Mayan, Aztec, Olmec, Toltec or Incan myths.
 

Glyphman

HudsonGray said:
I don't think the Jaguar's Son/Jaguar's Baby is connected to the ones you've listed. The corn god, death god and rain god were involved in shoving him down the hole to move him into his next phase as the God of Night (his God of Day form was a macaw I believe). He's present in adult and child form--it gets confusing sorta, but it made sense to the Mayans. I did find the main section of the myth written online, and the pottery pictures, which will be recreated as a mural on an archeological dig on my card.
Click to expand...

Could you please post for me the link regarding that written mythology? I am always interested in learning something new regarding the ancient Maya.

When I reference my Maya reading material (mostly Linda Schele and David Freidel), can not find anything about this particular angle on the jaguar. So I am very curious about it.

Some of my first reading was about the temple of Cerros. It was reading about this first temple that got me hooked, and been hooked ever since. The huge masks in the center of each of the four panels of this first temple at Cerros derive their meaning from the complex imagery that surrounds them. The lower masks are snarling jaguars emerging totem-pole fashion from the heads of long-snouted creatures whose lower faces merge with the pyramid. These jaguars are marked with the four-petaled glyphs denoting the sun (kin), identifying these beings as the Jaguar Sun God. Together, these sun masks display both linear time in the duration of time through the day and year and cyclical time in the return of the cycle to it's beginning point over and over again: and it is significant that this path encircles the stairway along which the king must travel on his ritual journeys by way of the inner sanctum of the temple. The jaguar masks do make a special statement about kingship.
It is known that for the Maya, the Sun Jaguar represented more than a celestial body. In Classical theology, Yax-Balam, the younger of the Ancestral Hero Twins, is symbolized by the sun. The older brother Hun-Ahau, in turn, was similarly linked to the Planet Venus.

Waterlily's have numerous meanings throughout ancient Maya.. There are the waterlily, Waterlily Jaguar, Waterlily-Jaguar (king of Copan), Waterlily Monster, and the Waterlily People who were the Ah Nab (Nobles). So important was the swamp and river-edge agriculture to the Maya state that the kings adopted waterlilies as a primary metaphor of royal power, hence the "Waterlily People."

It is so very interesting to me. I think it is great you have chosen it as part of the theme for your deck. I am reading on a daily basis, trying to understand it the best I can. Your right, it can be confusing. But man oh man is it awsome history. I am slowly puting together thoughts for my Maya Oracle. I am just having a blast. I can see your very excited as well.

Great stuff HudsonGray!!
 

HudsonGray

There's a university site that put a textbook up online over here:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cach...orms.pdf+Mayan+story+of+the+jaguar+baby&hl=en

If you scroll down to page 10 there's a chunk in there about the Jaguar's son. Their main site has a huge amount of stuff on it, so it's a lot to winnow through and some of it is very dry reading, I only saved this URL because it's something I could use. Unfortunately none of the pictures show up.

The hard part, in regards to Central American history, is separating out the Mayan from the Aztec and Inca (and others) art.... I think Aztec has more online than any of the other types right now. I was even able to locate sites that posted scans of the four surviving codex that the Spanish didn't end up burning. That was really something. It took most of an afternoon, but I did find it all online. Not that I used any of it, I was just satisfying curiosity.

Just doing searches for "Jaguar, myth and central American history" didn't help much, I got all sorts of modern tales mixed in--stuff obviously taken from Uncle Remus and his B'rer Rabbit stories (disappointing!). The others never had dates attributed to them, so I suspected those as well. But if you keep to the university sites, they have the best info, I've found.

Have you located a transcribed copy of the Popul Vuh? It's supposed to be out in book form now, and describes in depth some of the myths.
 

Glyphman

Jaguar Baby

Hello again HudsonGray

I finally found the story as you describe in a book called Forest of Kings by Linda Schele and David Freidel. I won't type the whole text out here, but is the same as you wrote with the exception of the Gods pushing him down the hole. In my mind, I am thinking that the hole may be referencing the base of the Worldtree through the Maw and on into the Underworld.
The Popul Vuh is a must to have, and have no excuse as to why I have not already picked it up. I am excited about getting it. And yes will have it soon.

Hey take it easy Hudson. Be talking to you again...............
 
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