Читать книгу Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky - David Bowles - Страница 14
ОглавлениеFollow me now into the dim beginnings of the Fourth Age. The cataclysm is over, the conflagration has snuffed itself to ash, and the sea-ringed world is dark but for the light of the stars and a faint smear of perpetual dawn on the eastern horizon.
It is an epoch of gods, great and small, who strive to restore the shattered earth.
Some bend their knee to the cosmic order, to the competing wills of Feathered Serpent and Hurricane, carrying out their appointed tasks without a word of complaint.
Others choose to forge a different path.
A few become heroes.
Two in particular survive down the years in some form or another throughout southern Mexico: bright paint in crumbling friezes, curling lines on rotting pages, stone statues in which their young profiles are captured forever, rebellious and brave.
Two brothers. Twins.
They are depicted again and again with distinctive headbands, one dark, the other sewn from a jaguar’s pelt. We often find them with their father, a god of maize.
The millennia have effaced their names from most Mayan tongues. Archeologists, crafting a code to categorize forgotten deities, call the father God E. His sons are God CH and God S.
But in the highlands of Guatemala, despite all odds, the K’iche’ Maya preserved these ancestral stories, even after the glyphs of mighty empires had fallen into disuse. With letters learned from Spanish priests, they transcribed those ancient words in their native tongue.
The Popol Vuh, they called this sacred scripture. The Book of the People.
Come closer, friends. Let me open that tome, let me find the right page, and I will tell you of the wondrous deeds of the Hero Twins: Xbalanque and Hunahpu, as the K’iche’ name them, playful and courageous young men who mocked death itself.
Then let us weave strands of Aztec lore into this epic to explore the short but unforgettable age that ended—as peoples across the globe affirm—with the greatest flood our world has ever seen.
