12-Tijax: A tool in the right hands (4 October 2019)

Born 12-Tijax:  Georges Moustaki, Annie Lennox, Louis Armstrong, Lou Reed, Shania Twain, Daddy G (Massive Attack), Rudyard Kipling, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michael Flatley, Martin Scorsese, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jacques Chirac, Lincoln’s assassination

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat” – Rudyard Kipling (12-Tijax) The Ballad of East and West (1889)

Statistically significant

When gathering Tzolkin birthday dates for celebrities and people I know, I came across an inordinate number of prominent and admirable people born today, 12-Tijax.

I’ve recorded no less than 24 people born 12-Tijax. The most famous ones are listed above, out of which 5 are well known musicians.

But what really stands out for me personally is that 6 people born 12-Tijax are within my immediate family and good friends. The woman I married was born in 1976 on 12-Tijax. When we began sharing music we love, she introduced me to her favorite female artist – Shania Twain (12-Tijax).

I have two 1st degree cousins, living in Canada and Australia, who were born 12-Tijax.

The high school teacher biology who disqualified me from getting my diploma was born on that day. She did the right thing, by the way.

I live in a small town of less than 1000 residents. Including my wife, I found a staggering FIVE people born 12-Tijax.

Considering the fact that the Tzolkin calendar has 260 unique combinations, it astounded me to arrive at this finding.

Why am I surrounded by this specific nawal?

1-Kej trecena concluding

Tijax types are known to be good with their hands. They have a genius and crazy kind of dexterity in their fingers that enables the determined among them to be legendary guitarists, craftsman, and surgeons.

Another reference to the hand can be found in the current trecena (1-Kej). Some systems define Kej (or Manik) as the Hand that heals.

The power the human hand has as a tool of remedy, relief, and vitality. When the right tool is in the right hands.

Kej stands for perpetual travels out in the wild, unknown parts and less-trodden paths of the land. The spirit of the four-legged animals is embodied on this plane to pace the earth within neighboring woods and well beyond them. When a stag (another word for Kej) is not going anywhere he is probably too busy protecting his community and offspring diligently.

However, being a stag, you can never know when he’ll disappear, maybe not ever to return. Then you realize that his young bucks have grown up already, and the pack guard is being relieved by new recruits. It was good timing after all. The aging stag is now off on a new pilgrimage, reliving his days of youth and hormones.

In Hinduism, this is known as being a Varna Prasta – a forest dweller.

His spirit dwells still around his old breeding and child-rearing grounds. Sons and daughters tune into the frequency left behind by their ancestors, and learn the way of their kind by resonance.

6-Aj: Staff of Tradition (20 August 2019)

Born 6-Aj: Andy García, Meat Loaf, Beck, John McEnroe, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Graham Hancock

“One of the reasons I’m a musician is because music isn’t divisive. It’s a medium where you don’t have to abide by divisions. ” – Beck (6-Aj) Boston Phoenix

Holographic Harmony

As Beck told a Boston Phoenix reported 20 years ago, music isn’t divisive (see quote above). When music manifests, live on stage or reproduced digitally, its indivisibility is experienced by those how love and listen to every note of it.

Divisions do serve music, but technically. Music bars are divided, each beat can be divided, and the entire piece has distinct and fixed divisions; verse and chorus, c-part and lead out.

The holographic, mathematical order and regularity that can be found on all levels of music create a unity which is indivisible.

As a performing (albeit amateur) musician, I know that on stage, there is only room for truth.

Live on stage, my band members are acutely aware of whether or not I’ve rehearsed the song we’re playing.

If the keyboardist is at odds with the guitarist, that vibe is picked up by everyone else.

Some things become possible to play together, while other things become impossible. Just because of a vibe, a disturbance, the show can suck, even though we made no musical mistakes. Come next gig, it can swing back and be an uplifting experience all around, despite mishaps, just because of a gesture, a friendly smile, a positive connection. Something that wasn’t expected.

Last night we said farewell to two 18-year-old musicians, a guitarist and a bassist, who played their last jazz-jam with us before enlisting with the armed forces. They’ll continue playing music, learning, practicing, and applying for music scholarships.

They are, hands-down, absolutely brilliant and gifted, with a promising future ahead of them.

However, their musicianship isn’t their most prominent gift. As human beings they have a special luster around them. Something that is quite rare in what all agree is an ego-centered art and profession.

For instance, when it comes to accepting visiting musicians into the Sunday jam, they are always very open, unbiased and facilitating. Be it a timid beginner, or a cocky, seasoned veteran, they have a knack for bridging differences, staying focused on what’s important, and making any ad-hoc ensemble work and sound good.

In other words, they are amazingly sane.

The key is to play it like a game.

To understand this point, it is best to image what’s it like to be a child again. Since birth, to every game there are fixed rules and codes of conduct. When the game begins, and each participant plays, it becomes quickly obvious to any kid who is a good player and who is not. Who is fair and who has an ulterior agenda. You don’t have to analyse it too much. It’s a vibe that’s peculiar to each person at a given situation.

You either pick him/her to your team or you prefer not to. Simple.

When a group of musicians get together to jam, there are cliques and sub-groups. People who know each other and strangers. Each one has something to prove. Mostly to him/herself, some to people in the audience.

What brings them all together in unison is how well can each of them play, integrate, communicate, and ascend with everyone else.

Rothschild origins

I think you have to be born on an Aj day to be the head of a distinguished family dynasty, like old Mayer was in the mid 18^th century. He raised his five daughters and five sons – literally raised them, as any spiritual ladder/leader does; from the ghetto to the very top of the world.

Of course, the five sons in particular were his life-long project. In due time, he sent each son to a different country in Europe in order to establish a financial and political beachhead. All five sons succeeded beyond imagination. When the French Revolution came along the family business got a boost from supplying Britain (and other stakeholders in that conflict) with mercenaries. It was a business move that served as a precursor to similar deals still in use around conflicts today.

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild (6-Aj)

In his recent book, Kenneth Johnson depicts Aj-types as being insatiable at their worst. They can never quite get enough of anything. Does this trait fit Mayer’s card by some strange coincidence?

Biographies aside, 6-Aj embodies a unique mix of tradition (6) and family (Aj). These two words seem to go along well together, and share a mutual web of meaning. As opposed to the example I gave above with Rothschild and the extremities of the Aj aspect, 6-Aj is a balanced and nurturing mother – the kind of guiding light of the family and home that Ian Lungold talked about. She draws her power from the last Eastern sign we had – Toj, and her every action is dedicated to elevating herself and her family.

1-Iq: A new surge of spirit (20 July 2019)

Born 1-Iq: Pink, Sade, Robert Johnson, Mick Jones (The Clash), Otto von Bismarck, Scott Bakula, Lesley Stahl

“A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.” – Otto von Bismarck (1-Iq)

For the past ten or-so years, much has been written and said about the Maya culture, and in retrospect, too much of that has been speculation and misleading mirages that lead nowhere, while causing a lot of intellectual and spiritual damage.

Anyone who’s been interested in ancient cultures and knowledge in general, and the Mesoamerican variety in particular, has immediately sensed deep wisdom when first tapping into the Maya civilization. For me, it has always been numbers and mathematics. Since I started studying the various cycles of the Maya count of days, I’ve found many amazing insights into these subjects, while new insights are still being discovered at unknown intervals.

However, I feel I must right off the bat highlight some of the words I jotted above so incautiously, like tapping into, civilization and mathematics. These immediately draw specific pictures within Western minds, but can mean very different things to just about anyone else. Which is why any type of caution and self-reflection have always been good ideas in such studies.

Like any other student of new and radically different knowledge, early western scholars of the Maya culture (my early self included 😉 ) sought creative ways to bridge the cultural gap between, let’s say, the people in the tribe they were visiting in Guatemala and their western audience and peers back home. It wasn’t an easy task by a long shot; the basic worldviews at the heart of each of the cultures are mutually alien to one another.

Some (my early self included) got way too creative.

Also, the strive to ‘keep it real’, and be as authentic and as close to the living Maya as possible, has always been professed by any and everyone serving as ambassadors in the west of the Maya culture and calendars. But naturally, there’s always a difference between simply professing something and actually living by it.

And, like any European or North American fad, the bulk of Maya calendar followers and ‘fans’ jumped ship on December 22nd, 2012, when ‘nothing happened’, and it was high time for a new and different spiritual fix.

My guess is that only a handful of us die-hard, English-speaking Tzolkin Maya freaks are out there – speaking many tongues, scattered far and wide over the globe, and left to navigate this ancient but rock-solid vessel to a new port of call.

Today, sound, serious, and (perhaps most crucially) willing sources of Maya knowledge are still very hard to come by. Which is why I highly recommend you pay a visit to Living the Tzolkin’s new blog.

The blog’s author and owner Paul has been interviewing Mayan scholars on his podcast for some time now, but only recently has he began publishing posts based on his accumulated material, like show-notes and podcast transcriptions.

On 1-Iq, the trecena of good ideas and transmissions, I put in words my own personal wish, that serious Maya students strive to maintain a wiser, humbler, and more sensitive approach to the living Maya culture.

Click here to go to Living the Tzolkin’s new blog.

The new trecena

I like good quotes, which is why I keep copying them into my posts. A good quote puts into words good ideas and points to wise and deep courses of thought. The day of good communications is known as Iq, the sign of the wind and spirit (among other meanings).

In the glyph, the horizontal line represents the wind, and the perpendicular line is a tree. Trees and winds are intimately related in the Mayan culture, and might even be considered to be one organism. The wind carries seeds across great distances, and they fall to become new trees at new locations. The trees reciprocate by ‘calming’ strong and destructive winds down, softening and dispersing them, as they pass through them.

In the same way, good ideas are like seeds that fertilize new lands when they are communicated (like a quote).

A good idea moves mountains and meets deadlines with great gusto. It’s a glimpse of what a better reality could look like, which sets wheels in motion.

Good communications are key in any community, be it a community of brain cells (as in good thinking) or a beehive (good honey) or a Kibbutz (good parties).

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Here’s the godfather of Blues – Robert Johnson (1-Iq):