"As I looked at the computer screen, everything clicked. Gemini had to be the copulating peccaries and Orion the turtle. The three stars on its back in the cartouche at Bonampak' were placed in the exact position of Orion's belt. But more important, the Maize God [First Father] was reborn from the cracked carapace of a turtle, and we had a text that said that the first image of the turtle was seen at the Creation. The two anthropomorphic figures between the peccaries and the turtle had to be the personifications of Saturn and Mars. And we already knew many examples of other planets, such as Venus and Jupiter, that were represented by anthropomorphic figures. We seemed to have two more here.
 Not until much later did it hit me that August 6, the date of the zenith passage at Bonampak', was only seven days before the Creation day of August 13. Matt Looper provided the confirmation by calling my attention to a picture from the Madrid Codex, another of the four Maya books. It shows a turtle with a triangle of stones on its back.
 The turtle in the codex is shown suspended from cords tying it to the skyband because Orion hangs below the ecliptic. Clearly Orion was the turtle from which the Maize God rose in his resurrection.
 The Milky Way above the turtle had to be the Maize God appearing in his tree form as he does on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross at Palenque. The image of the first turtle really is in the sky. The identification of Gemini as copulating peccaries made sense in another curious way. For years we have seen pots that have these odd modeled peccary heads as their feet. All of these pots have the sea painted or drawn on their bottoms and an extraordinary one in the Dallas Museum of Arts shows the sun god paddling a canoe across this sea.
 I realized that his must be the sun riding the ecliptic across the Peccaries of Gemini." (Maya Cosmos) |