Yucatan Quotes

A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna–including all the famous outsized dinosaurs.

Cuba in particular kept American presidents awake at night, as it would again in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The island sits just off Florida, giving it access to and potential control of the Florida Straits and the Yucatan Channel in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exit and entry route for the port of New Orleans.

It is important to mention that the Maya believed, along with the Gnostics, that the center of the galaxy was a place of great spiritual significance. The greatest expression of divinity for the Maya living in the Yucatán peninsula was Hunab Ku (the highest authority). Hunab Ku lives in the center of the galaxy. Hunab Ku is represented by the spiral. This spiral form can be found throughout Mesoamerica.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

The Maya did not emerge from the lost tribes of Israel or Atlantis. Instead, based on overwhelming evidence from linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology, ancestors of all New World people, including the Maya, migrated from Asia as nomadic hunters and gatherers. The debate surrounds the timing of their arrival in the Yucatan region and whether the migration across the Bering Strait occurred at about 12,000 BCE, 40,000 BCE or even earlier. Scholars continue to debate whether the Maya made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming villages in the lowland areas they occupied or if it spread into the lowlands from elsewhere.

The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.

Scientific works and entire libraries were set to torch kindled by the insane religious fanatics. We have already mentioned the Bishop of Yucatan, who burned the entire native literature of the Maya in the 1560's, and Bishop Theophilus, who destroyed much of the remnants of the Library of Alexandria (391). The Christian Roman emperor Valens ordered the burning of non-Christian books in 373. In 1109, the crusaders captured Tripoli, and after the usual orgy of butchery typifying the crusades (through this one did not yet include the murderous Teutonic Knights), they burned over 100,000 books of Muslim learning. In 1204, the fourth crusade captured Constantinople and sacked it with horrors unparalleled even in the bloody age of the crusades; the classical works that had survived until then were put to the torch by crusaders in what is generally considered the biggest single loss to classical literature. In the early 15th century, Cardinal Ximenes (Jimenez), who succeeded Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor and was directly responsible for the cruel deaths of 2,500 persons, had a haul of 24,000 books burned at Granada.

I knew nothing of her story. I had not heard that the ceremony was to take place till late in the evening before, and I had made up my mind that she was old and ugly; but she was not, nor was she faded and worn with sorrow, the picture of a broken heart; nor yet a young and beautiful enthusiast; she was not more than twenty-three, and had one of those good faces which, without setting men wild by their beauty, bear the impress of a nature well qualified for the performance of all duties belonging to daughter, and wife, and mother, speaking the kindliness and warmth of a woman's heart. It was pale, and she seemed conscious of the important step and the solemn vows she was taking, and to have no pangs; and yet who can read what is passing in the human breast?

The entire pre-Columbian literature of Mexico, a vast library of tens of thousands of codices, was carefully and systematically destroyed by the priests and friars who followed in the wake of the conquistadors. In November 1530, for example, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, who had shortly before been apointed 'Protector of the Indians' by the Spanish crown, proceeded to 'protect' his flock by burning at the stake a Mexican aristocrat, the lord of the city of Texcoco, whom he accused of having worshipped the rain god. In the city's marketplace Zumárraga 'had a pyramid formed of the documents of Aztec history, knowledge and literature, their paintings, manuscripts, and hieroglyphic writings, all of which he committed to the flames while the natives cried and prayed.' More than 30 years later, the holocaust of documents was still under way. In July 1562, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in the Yucatan), Bishop Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings, and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He boasted of destroying countless 'idols' and 'altars,' all of which he described as 'works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity.' Noting that the Maya 'used certain characters or letters, which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences' he informs us: 'We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously and which gave them great pain.

Yucatan" - that word means: "I do not understand you". (page 390 Lacune)

Though divided on much, most (if not all) Mormon archaeologists agree on one thing: The real Cumorah, if there ever was one, definitely was not located where Joseph Smith claimed he discovered the gold plates. If the Book of Mormon events took place anywhere, it could only have been in the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America. That is where Mormon archaeological activity has been centered for years. Yet The Brethren continue to sponsor the annual pageant in Palmyra that draws huge crowds to the misnamed hill with its monument and huge lettering along the hill's entire side identifying it as "Cumorah.

If Joseph Smith was a true Prophet, why did he mistakenly identify the wrong hill outside Palmyra, New York, as Cumorah? And how did the gold plates get there when they were buried by Moroni (if this was a real event) in the Yucatan? Mormonism stands or falls with Joseph Smith, and we need no further evidence than Cumorah that he was an impostor and that The Brethren are the modern brokers of his pitiful fraud. Strangely enough, the obvious fact that the Book of Mormon is a fraudulent document seldom causes those who know this to leave the Church. Even Professor Green has said: I find that nothing in so-called Book of Mormon archaeology materially affects my religious commitment one way or the other, and I do not see that archaeological myths so common in our proselytizing program enhance the process of true conversion....

Jessica also supplied chopped fruits and vegetables to the lounge of lizards in the garden. She’d read that amusing expression on YucatanLiving.com. A group of lizards was called a lounge. So, she supposed, a group of lizards hanging around could be thought of as a lounge of lizards lounging in a lizard lounge. Oh-kay then, she really was spending way too much time by herself. Tormenta Isla Book #3 of Isla Mujeres Mystery series.

After 1325, a new power, the Aztecs, appeared in northern Mexico, and the political center of Mexico shifted away from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, directly under downtown Mexico City. The system of pathways across Mexico reoriented to serve this new center. Because the Aztecs had unified Mexico in the 1400s, much of their domain—but not the Yucatan Peninsula—fell into the Spaniards’ laps after their capital was conquered and Montezuma was killed.

Columbus on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, left the Southern coast of Cuba, and sailing in a South-westerly direction reached Guanaja, an island now called Bonacca, one of a group thirty miles distant from Honduras, and the shores of the western continent. From this island he sailed southward as far as Panama, and thence returned to Cuba on his way to Spain, after passing six months on the Northern coasts of Panama. In 1506 two of Columbus’ companions, De Solis and Pinzon, were again in the Gulf of Honduras, and examined the coast westward as far as the Gulf of Dulce, still looking for a passage to the Indian Ocean. Hence they sailed northward, and discovered a great part of Yucatan, though that country was not then explored, nor was any landing made. The first actual exploration was made by Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, who landed on the Island Las Mugeres. Here he found stone towers, and chapels thatched with straw, in which were arranged in order several idols resembling women—whence the name which the Island received. The Spaniards were astonished to see, for the first time in the new world, stone edifices of architectural beauty, and also to perceive the dress of the natives, who wore shirts and cloaks of white and colored cotton, with head-dresses of

The Aztecs called the homeland across the ocean Tlillan Tlapallan, “Black Land Red Land.”59 Today, most scholars consider this land to be either purely mythical or perhaps a reference to the Yucatan. What has been missed is that there actually was a land of this name and it lay where they said it did, to the east across the Atlantic. The ancient Egyptians knew their own country as Kemet Deshret, “the Black Land and the Red Land.”60 Like the name of Quetzalcóatl’s distant homeland, this consists of two words meaning “black land” and “red land,” even occurring in the same order.

SWEET POTATO BISQUE WITH CRABMEAT GRAPEFRUIT ICE IN A SWEET TORTILLA CRISP LAMB SEARED IN ANCHO CHILI PASTE ON POLENTA TWO CHUTNEYS: PEAR & MINT ASPARAGUS FLAN AMERICAN GOAT CHEESE, EAST & WEST, WITH RED-WINE BISCUITS AVOCADO KEY LIME PIE PINON TORTA DE CIELO & CHOCOLATE MOCHA SHERBET She'd invented the cake just for tonight; the sherbet came from Julia Child, a remarkably simple confection made with sour cream. Torta de cielo was a traditional wedding cake from the Yucatan, slim and sublime, light but chewy, where pulverized almonds stood in for flour. This time, instead of almonds, Greenie used the fat, velvety pignoli she ordered from an importer on Grand Street, mincing them by hand to keep them from turning to paste. She did not know whether you could tell the best Italian pine nuts from those grown in New Mexico, but, she caught herself thinking, and not without a touch of spite, she might soon find out.

It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.

It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.

It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.

To show how wide-spread was the custom of human sacrifices, we may quote the list of nations adopting it, as given in the work Indo-Aryans, by Rajendralala Mitra. This includes the "Phœnicians, Carthaginians, Druids, Scythians, Greeks, Trojans, Romans, Cyclops, Lamiæ, Sestrygons, Syrens, Cretans, Cyprians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Jews, Aztecs, Khonds, Toltecs, Tezcaucans, Sucas, Peruvians, Africans, Mongols, Dyaks, Chinese, Japanese, Ashantis, Yucatans, Hindus." He adds--"The Persians were, perhaps, the only nation of ancient times that did not indulge in human sacrifices.

Despite these occasional lumps, the life became infectious and he came up with an even grander scheme: to walk around the world, an 113,000-mile journey, with 30,000 of them on foot. He set out from California in 1936 and walked for months, down through Mexico, where he met Mayans in the Yucatan, then onto Belize, where he met some Caribs.

when the Spanish arrived in the 1580s, along the Caribbean coast, a Franciscan priest and his secretary Antonio de Ciudad Real asked some Indians, "What's the name of this place? How did it get its name?" In response, the Indians said uic athan, which means, “what do you say” or “what do you speak?” In other words, the Maya didn't understand them. Ciudad Real wrote, "The Spaniard ordered it set down to be called Yucatan.

In speaking of “culture” we have reference to conventional understandings… meanings attached to acts and objects… conventional, and therefore cultural, in so far as they have become typical for the members of that society by reason of intercommunication among the members. A culture is, then, an abstraction.