Burroughs and the Mayans [What the Academics say]

- Posted: 03.Aug.2007.


(Click for full size)

Jennie Skerl’s 1985 book was one of (if not the) first books in which Burroughs was taken as subject for serious academic study. I have not made up my mind as to what Crystalpunk thinks of it. But here is what she writes about Burroughs’ use of Mayan imagery in ‘The Soft Machine’. The book’s cover has a great picture of Burroughs holding several ancient (mayan?) artefacts.

The priest-rulers are associated with the power imagery Burroughs uses for his Mayan and Minraud fantasies. Puerto Joselito is Burrough’s reinterpretation of Frazier’s ‘The Golden Bough’ and a critique of religion in Reichian terms. It is both an homage to and a reinterpretation of ‘The Waste Land’.

The theme of power is given its most detailed treatment in ‘The Mayan Caper’, a historical fantasy on Mayan civilization (seventh routine). ‘The Mayan Caper’ is the single most significant section of the ‘The Soft Machine’ because of its central placement in the text, because it is the longest sustained narrative, and because it gives the most straightforward exposition of how a control system can be dismantled. The Mayans are presented both as the historical beginning and the epitome of “civilization”: a social order in which a few control the many through manipulation of word and image. Literacy only makes the system more sophisticated. The Mayan priest-ruler class controls the mass of peasants through their calendar, a word-and-image system that orders time, space, and human behaviour. The calendar is the basis for the Mayan’s agricultural economy, their hierarchical system of classes, and their religion. The priests exert total mind control and thus have total mastery over the peasant’s bodies. The power imagery associated with the Mayans is the same as that of the Minraud people in the Nova mythology: religious sacrifice, insects, ants, centipedes, scorpions, crabs, lobsters, claws, white heat, and the city. The first part of the ‘I Sekuin’ routine, which immediately follows ‘The Mayan Caper’, makes the link to Minraud explicit and again emphasizes the importance of the Mayan fantasy as the classic type of all control systems.

The Mayans as the Keepers of Ancient Knowledge from the Cities of the Red Night [History with Burroughs]

- Posted: 02.Aug.2007.




Every Burroughologist knows that the 'Cities of the Red Night' comes from a different word-pile than the earlier cycle of books (roughly from 'Naked Lunch' to 'The Job'). Quoting from an online excerpt it shows that the fascination with Mayan timekeeping was permanent with Burroughs. However, the Mayans are now part of a worldwide plot.

The Cities of Red Night were six in number: Thamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that time the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian Sea.
The largest of these oases contained a lake ten miles long and five miles across, on the shores of which the university town of Waghdas was founded. Pilgrims came from all over the inhabited world to study in the academies of Waghdas, where the arts and sciences reached peaks of attainment that have never been equaled. Much of this ancient knowledge is now lost.

...

The effects of the Red Night on Receptacles and Transmigrants proved to be incalculable and many strange mutants arose as a series of plagues devastated the cities. It is this period of war and pestilence that is covered by the books. The Council had set out to produce a race of supermen for the exploration of space. They produced instead races of ravening idiot vampires.

Finally, the cities were abandoned and the survivors fled in all direction, carrying the plagues with them. Some of these migrants crossed the Bering Strait into the New World, taking the books with them. They settled in the area later occupied by the Mayans and the books eventually fell into the hands of the Mayan priests.

The alert student of this noble experiment will perceive that death was regarded as equivalent not to birth but to conception and go in to infer that conception is the basic trauma. In the moment of death, the dying man’s whole life may flash in front of his eyes back to conception. In the moment of conception, his future life flashes forward to his future death. To reexperience conception is fatal.

Burroughs and Bishop Landa

- Posted: 01.Aug.2007.


(Click for full size)

Another scrap of Maya-related writing by William Burroughs, From 'The Job', quoted from K-Punk:

'Here is Bishop Landa burning the sacred books. To give you an idea as to what is happening, imagine our civilization invaded by louts from outer space...

"Get some bulldozers in here. Clear out all this crap..." The formulae of all the natural sciences, books, paintings, the lot, swept into a vast pile and burned. And that's it. No one ever heard of it...

Three codices survived the vandalism of Bishop Landa and these three burned around the edges. No way to know if we have here the sonnets of Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, or the remnants of a Sears Roebuck catalogue after the old out-house burned down in a brush fire. A whole civilization went up in smoke. ...

When the Spaniards arrived, they found the Mayan aristocrats lolling in hammocks. Well, time to show them what is what. Five captured workers, bound and stripped, are castrated on a stump, the bleeding, sobbing, screaming bodies thrown into a pile...

"And now get this through your gook nuts. We want to see a pile of gold that big and we want to see it pronto. The White God has spoken."'

The picture is the 'La Mojarra Stela 1' a craved slab containing the earliest readable Mesoamerican scripts. Found in Mexico and translated by John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman. It's very bloody and very calendaresque.

B1-4 A sun-eating moon [solar eclipse] took place;

B5-C7 Piercingly the bludgeon star [Venus] had shone earlier [the day before], late in the day.

D1-F6 Coronated ones hallowed by sprinkling, noble war-leader ones, fought against succession-supporters [would-be usurpers] .

G1-H2 Earlier a day, a night, and a day had passed, [ [two-day time increment leading to 8.5.3.3.7] ]

H3-I4 (when) behold, there was a prisoner for thirteen years. [13 (and 2 day) year time increment leading to 8.5.16.3.7, 23 June 156 CE, the day before summer solstice]

15-J5 And then there was an imprisonment that was for six months. [six months time increment leading to 8.5.16.9.7]

J6-8 He [HML] speaks:

K1-7 "My arm was bristling/prickling,"

L1-3 (said) the youthful (boy-type) commanding general Harvester Mountain­-Lord.

L4-9 "When I chopped (off his head), he was ruined/it was his ruin."

M1-7 Thus the latter saw the ascent/installation/accession.

M8-16 It was the fifteenth day of the first month; the long count was 8.5.16.9.7, and the day was 5 Deer.

[13 years 6 months and 2 days after previous long count]

Burroughs as Mayaist

- Posted: 31.Jul.2007.




In 1965, Burroughs published his own version of TIME magazine in an edition of only 1000 copies. The text deals with the Mayan calendar, and with this as first post at TRIBE Some very knowledgable folks have left their thought about Burroughs, the Mayans and about what Burroughs actually knew. One link in particular is useful as it directs to Buroughs' Mayan Caper, first published in the Soft Machine. Based on this you could argue that the forword to Ah Pook is Here is an old draft. Here is an excerpt:

My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment —

I went to Mexico City and studied the Mayans with a team of archaeologists — The Mayans lived in what is now Yucatan, British Honduras, and Guatemala — I will not recapitulate what is known of their history, but some observations on the Mayan calendar are essential to understanding this report — The Mayan calendar starts from a mythical date 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu and rolls on to the end of the world, also a definite date depicted in the codices as a God pouring water on the earth — The Mayans had a solar, a lunar, and a ceremonial calendar rolling along like interlocking wheels from 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu to the end — The absolute power of the priests, who formed about 2 percent of the population, depended on their control of this calendar — The extent of this number monopoly can be deduced from the fact that the Mayan verbal language contains no number above ten — Modern Mayan-speaking Indians use Spanish numerals — Mayan agriculture was of the slash and burn type — They had no plows. Plows can not be used in the Mayan area because there is a strata of limestone six inches beneath the surface and the slash and burn method is used to this day — Now slash and burn agriculture is a matter of precise timing — The brush must be cut at a certain time so it will have time to dry and the burning operation carried out before the rains start — A few days’ miscalculation and the year’s crop is lost —

The Mayan writings have not been fully deciphered, but we know that most of the hieroglyphs refer to dates in the calendar, and these numerals have been translated — It is probable that the other undeciphered symbols refer to the ceremonial calendar — There are only three Mayan codices in existence, one in Dresden, one in Paris, one in Madrid, the others having been burned by Bishop Landa — Mayan is very much a living language and in the more remote villages nothing else is spoken — More routine work — I studied Mayan and listened to it on the tape recorder and mixed Mayan in with English — I made innumerable photomontages of Mayan codices and artifacts — the next step was to find a “vessel” — We sifted through many candidates before settling on a young Mayan worker recently arrived from Yucatan — This boy was about twenty, almost black, with the sloping forehead and curved nose of the ancient Mayans — (The physical type has undergone little alteration) — He was illiterate — He had a history of epilepsy — He was what mediums call a “sensitive” — For another three months I worked with the boy on the tape recorder mixing his speech with mine — (I was quite fluent in Mayan at this point — Unlike Aztec it is an easy language.) It was time now for “the transfer operation” — “I” was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan — The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it — I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate — “He is the best transfer artist in the industry” I was told “For a price.”

William Burroughs and the Mayan Calendar

- Posted: 29.Jul.2007.




The Mayan calendar is a hodgepodge of different calendars, of cycles within cycles mapped on a long-count. The Wikipedia page on the subject shows the various methods, principles and knowledge it incorporates. My head spins trying to grasp it, which was exactly point according to William Burroughs. Burroughs did Ph.D work related to the old Meso-American civilizations; I vaguely remember him stating somewhere that he was able to read Aztec. The Mayan calendar features in his work, most notably in 'Ah Pook the Destroyer'. This is one of Burroughs's lesser known works, first published by Calder in 1979. It also contains the 'Electronic Revolution' which was published earlier in The Job, which might explain why it is less 'useful'.

The intention of 'Ah Pook is Here' was to publish it as a Mayan Codix using Burrough's text and Malcolm McNeill's illustrations. This proved unpractical and therefore it became a conventional book in the end with the illustrations seperate from the words. I have typed to the foreword to show how Burroughs fused his typical concerns into the Mayan system for time keeping. It stress on economy nearly reminds one of Ezra Pound's rants against usery. I am not saying it makes any sense:

Foreword to ‘Ah Pook is Here’

The Mayan codices are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say, directions for time travel. If you see reincarnation as a fact then the question arises: how does orient oneself with regard to future lives? Consider death as a dangerous journey in which all past mistakes will count against you. If you are not orienting yourself on sound factual data, you will not arrive at your destination, or in some cases you may arrive in fragments. What basic principles can be set forth? Perhaps the most important is relaxed alertness, and this is the point of the martial arts and other systems of spiritual training – to inculcate a psychic and physical stance of alert passivity and focussed attention. Suspicion, fear, self-assertion, rigid preconceptions of right and wrong, shrinking and flinching from what may seem monstrous in human terms – such attitudes of mind and body are disastrous. See yourself as the pilot of an elaborate spacecraft in unfamiliar territory. If you freeze, tense up, refuse to look at what is in front of you, you will crack up the ship. On the other hand, credulity and uncritical receptivity are almost as dangerous.

Your death is an organism which you yourself create. If you fear it or prostrate yourself before it, the organism becomes your master. Death is also a protean organism that never repeats itself word for word. It must always present the face of surprised recognition. For this reason I consider the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, with their emphasis on ritual and knowing the right words, totally inadequate. There are no right words. Death is a forced landing, in many cases a parachute jump. The motor sputters ominously. Look around for a place to land. The landscape id deceptive. What appears from the air as a smooth field may turn out to be quicksand or swamp mud. Conversely, a mountainous area may contain a hidden valley or a smooth plateau. Focus attention. Look with your whole body. Pick your spot and land in the dark. Blackout.

Death must bring a measure of forgetfulness. Consider the Mayans, cut off in a small area; too much knowledge of death could remove the essential ingredient of oblivion. Death is always regression, a moving backwards to infancy and conception. So why stop there? They had to keep moving further and further back. Otherwise death would be remembered, and death remembered ceases to be operative. Finally they moved back four hundred million years. Who or what was there that long ago? Obviously, such time spans have no meaning in terms of actuality. However, in terms of remembered time, such calculations show how far they had gone in the direction of remembering death. Consider the social structure: a small percentage of priests could read the books and make calculations on the calendar, and a large percentage of illiterate workers. The workers must have served as a reservoir into which priests could reincarnate themselves and re-emerge into the priest caste, identified by certain signs after the Tibetan system.

Time has no meaning without death. Death uses time. This is a cumulative process so that time is used us faster and faster. There is an exact parallel here with inflation, since money buys time. So it takes more and more to buy less and less. How the Mayans react to this impasse? By back-dating time. Like this: the dollar is worth, say, one-fifth of what was worth fifty years ago. So we back-date money fifty years, Then a hundred years, and so forth, moving backwards in time. Eventually we come to a point where there was no money so we are back-dating the concept of money – the concept of time.

The workers could not read the books and undoubtedly they were prevented from learning. Had they been able to read the books they would have learned to remember, to familiarize themselves with death and identify with death. This would have conveyed immunity. Death is a virus and the Mayan books are a vaccine. Death is represented in the codices by one spot of decay through a series of shadings to skeleton figures. In short this is a gradient exposure. Also familiarity with death and consequent immunity is conveyed by actual copulation. A glyph depicts the Moon Goddess copulating with a death figure, and we may assume that the books destroyed by Bishop Landa contained many such scenes.

Time is that which ends. Time is limited time experienced by a sentient creature. Sentient of time, that is – making adjustments to time in terms of what Korzybski calls neuromuscular intention behaviour with respect to the environment as a whole… A plant turns toward the sun, nocturnal animal stirs at sun set… shit piss, move, eat, fuck, die.

Why does Control need humans?

Control needs time, Control needs human time. Control needs your shit piss pain orgasm death. So what does Control intend to do with this commodity that will be so smart? Like the Mayan priests they intend to use human time to make more time.

If time is that which is experienced by a sentient being, then death for that being is the end of time. And with death as zero, checks for any amount of time can be written by adding zeros. Even if there is some memory of past lives, the being has no way of knowing if he has been dead four seconds or 400 million years. These checks would seem to be overdrafts in that they are back-dated to a time when the checks the bank and the depositors did not exist. They bear however the signature of death, which is interruption of sentience.

I have spoken of the transitional forms of death and the identification of the death organism with the dying. This identification may take the form of actual copulation with death. Death, who can take either male or female form, fucks the young Corn God and the Corn God ejaculates 400 million years of corn from seed to harvest and back. This operation requires actual corn and an actual human body to represent the young Corn God. This then is an endorsed check signed by the young Corn God. Once he signed the check any number of zeros can be added. The Mayan time bank operated on these endorse checks. Death is accepted by the dying.

Now consider present time and the proliferation of unendorsed checks… air and car crashes, wars, fires, accidents, random deaths. These checks are good only for the actual time covered. A hundred thousands deaths may buy a million years, but there is always more and more human stock to consume time. The present-time impasse is less and less qualitative time for more and more people. Finally no qualitative experience, juts random time computed on a purely quantitative basis. Ultimately time will be exhausted.

The Mayan system is the exact opposite. Less and less people for more and more precise written time. One systems leads to an excess of mortals and a shortage of Gods; the other to an excess of Gods and a shortage of mortals. In either case, to a dead end. In the case of the present system the cycle of increased population, increased pollution, less and less to feed more and more, is now apparent. So attempts are made towards restoration of qualitative experience: meditation, communes, ecology, bio-feedback, est, encounter groups, magic – in short, transcendence. This is patchwork after the fact. The damage is already done, and the deadly formula of proliferation is already irreversible. These measures, even if successful, would then lead to the Mayan impasse.

And would measure could the Mayans have taken? They could have expanded, colonized, increased population to ensure human reservoir. This then would have led to present impasse. Also they were becoming less and less able to assimilate anything else. Consider the possibility of Mayan endorsed checks erupting in Present Time. This could lead to virgin soil epidemics, reducing the population to Mayan proportions, and finally the Mayan impasse. Similarly, the dumping of unendorsed checks onto the Mayan market would lead to the expansion and proliferation of population and the present impasse.

Time is that which ends. The only way out of time is into space. Why did the Mayan priests need human bodies and human time? Wait. They needed these bodies and this time as a landing field and as launching pad into space. They required actual corn and a human Corn God.

The 'De Landa Alphabet'

- Posted: 28.Jul.2007.


(Click for full size)

The Wicked Ways of History: Diego de Landa Calderón (1524 – 1579), the Bishop of Yucatán, left in his writings the crucial information on Maya script that allowed Yuri Knorosov to decipher it only in the mid 20th century. The same De Landa's however was also responsible for the destruction of thousands of Mayan book and objects. Or as Landa himself wrote:

"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."

The best round-up about The Maya language/scripts also contains many prime facts about Maya customs, the Maya Calender (interactive translation table included) and its decipherment. Again showing the appeal of its images.

Colourful Writing [Mayan Codices]

- Posted: 28.Jul.2007.




The folding books of the Maya were almost all destroyed when those damn Conquistadors reached their shores. One thing is for sure: the visual impact of these books made from tree bark is unequaled. Wikipedia has links to downloadable PDF copies of these books. The above picture comes with the original to clarify the content. Think superhero comic, think blood-thirsty Gothic Monsters.

The Mayan Letters

- Posted: 20.Aug.2008.




Charles Olson's 'The Mayan Letters' sounded wildly interesting and after some searching I learned that this otherwise rare 1954 book is reprinted as a part of Olsen's Selected Writings, published by New Directions. (Strangely ND's website does not seem to mention what writing is in the book. As if they don't want to sell it). I can't yet judge the other parts of the book as I have not read them but the Mayan Letters are a minor classic. And they are part of an interesting sub-genre: American writers/poets writing about Mayan scripts. The other most obvious name in this list would be Burroughs, most notably the Yage Letters. In fact Olsen reminds me a bit of Burroughs, but without the drugs and the sex and the evil gay cowboy act. Both were Harvard boys. That Olsen reminds me of Burroughs, reminds me of something else: Burroughs was a modernist rather than a beat when it came to style. A Platitude. Unlike Burroughs this book places Olsen at the front of another later US genre: EthnoPoetics. One of the few notes I found about The Mayan Letters online looks looks at Olson as a Lovecraftian villain (!):

‘The Mayan Letters’ are a key document in Olson’s ongoing struggle to get past the limitations of Western European thinking and perception, as rooted in (what Olson perceives to be) alienating ancient Greek philosophy. For him (and paraphrasing hugely!) the Greeks separated the object from the discourse, creating an artificial gap between thinking and existing that’s in turn alienated Western consciousness from the world that surrounds it.

As he put it in his essay ‘The Human Universe’, ‘the distinction here is between language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant’. One way – he thought – of reclaiming language as ‘the act of the instant’ is to pitch it in terms of hieroglyphs or ideograms, reclaiming the word as object rather than description. And that attitude in part led him to the Mayans, who built their language on ideograms.

Of course his interest was in Mayan culture was far broader than the purely linguistic – as a researcher, he hoped to uncover the frame of mind that an ideogrammatic language supported, find a way of describing and reintroducing it into contemporary culture, and thus bring about a constructive change in Western mass consciousness (’the shift is SUBSTANTIVE’, as he notes of the past, and will be again).

And that’s what makes him – and ‘The Mayan Letters’, and his broader work, so resonantly Lovecraftian. Whether acting as archaeologist, linguist, historical researcher or just plain explorer, his language rings with the expository excitement of the classic Lovecraftian researcher (’I tried, for a while, to scratch away at the walls of the graves…’), whether hero or villain:

‘Craziest damn thing ever, this place: nothing on it otherwise but two sets of double small ‘pyramids’ at either end of the island… a damned attractive place… was it the reason the Maya… did so come here, choose, this place [to bury their dead]?… Must find out more.’

Andean Staff God

- Posted: 25.Aug.2008.







This staff god is carbon dated to 2250 B.C. This makes it the oldest known icon in the Americas. It is also believed to be principly the same god in use for 4000 years.

Anal Lunch or The Mayan Enema

- Posted: 08.Sep.2007.




While reading ‘The Third Chimpanzee’ by Jaron Diamond I found an unexpected but great addition to the Mayan/Burroughs theme: ritual drug enemas. The picture shows it very clear if you look at it closely. I can’t recall any mention of this practise in Burroughs which seems to suggest he was unaware of it, because he would have used it if he did. Drug enemas are in fact more like something out of Burroughs than Burroughs himself ever invented.

[A]rchaeologists were long puzzled by slender tubes of unknown purpose that they kept finding in Mayan excavations.

The tubes’ function finally became clear with the discovery of painted vases showing scenes of the tubes’ use: to administer intoxicating enemas. The vases depict a high-status figure, evidently a priest or a prince, receiving a ceremonial enema in the presence of other people. The enema tube is shown as connected to a bag of a frothy beer-like beverage – probably containing either alcohol or hallucinogens or both, as suggested by practices of other Indian groups. Many Central and South American Indian tribes formerly practised similar ritual enemas when first encountered by European explorers, and some still do so today. The substances known to be administered range from alcohol (made by fermenting agave sap or a tree bark) to tobacco, peyote, LSD derivatives, and mushroom-derived hallucinogens.

Sylvanus Morley [The Mayaist Who Got the Script Wrong]

- Posted: 07.Aug.2007.




What was Burroughs reading in his pursuit of Maya civilization? Sylvanus Morley was perhaps the most important Mayist during Burroughs' time and seems therefore to be a sure bet. Morley headed many important excavations, wrote many books both academic and popular and was on friendly terms with all other experts in teh field. Concerning the Mayan script, quoting the very rich Wikipedia page, we learn that it was believed at the time that the script was like fictional Chinese, that is to say ideogrammatic. Only from the 1950s onwards did science dispose of this theory as a myth. Can we assume that Burroughs too, during his Mayan studies, was thinking of Mayan as a pictorial language? His books of course were written much later and do not seem to justify this, but if so, what would that mean for his thinking about Mayan Control systems.

In common with most other Maya scholars, Morley was particularly interested in the mysterious nature of the Maya script. The essentials of the calendric notation and astronomical data had been worked out by the early twentieth century, and by the 1930s John E. Teeple had solved (with Morley's encouragement) the glyphs known as the "Supplementary Series", proving that these referred to the lunar cycle and could be used to predict lunar eclipses. However, the bulk of the texts and inscriptions still defied all attempts at decipherment, despite much concerted effort. It was Morley's view, and one that found wide support, that these undeciphered portions would contain only more of the same astronomical, calendric and perhaps religious information, not actual historical data. He wrote in 1940, "time, in its various manifestations, the accurate record of its principal phenomena, constitutes the majority of Maya writing." He also wrote that he doubted that any toponym would be found in the texts. He supposed that the Maya writing system was one based upon ideographic or pictographic principles, without any phonetic components. That is to say, each glyph represented whole ideas and concepts, and how the symbols were depicted bore no relation to the language sounds as spoken by the scribes who had written them.

The convincing evidence which was to overturn this view became known only after Morley's death, starting with Yuri Knorosov's work in the 1950s. Over the next decades other Mayanists such as Proskouriakoff, Michael D. Coe, and David H. Kelley would further expand upon this phonetic line of enquiry, which ran counter to the accepted view but would prove to be ever more fruitful as their work continued. By the mid-1970s, it had become increasingly clear to most that the Maya writing system was a logosyllabic one, a mixture of logograms and phonetic components that included a fully functional syllabary.

Evolution of Mesoamerican Raingod

- Posted: 29.May.2008.




From "Masks of the Spirit, Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica" by Markman and Markman. With a great many illustrations you will love.

Aztec Anarchism

- Posted: 10.Jul.2009.




I am a sucker for a good anarchist manifesto and The Garden of Peculiarities (2005) by Jesús Sepúlveda deserves a place on the shelve alongside Hakim Bey and Gary Snyder. To be fair the beginning of the book is a bit too flat and too soft and too simple-minded (the opening paragraph on the cover is a sample for this) but halfway the book picks up momentum when it leaves the well-trodden paths of, excuse me, French neo/post-marxist critique and goes indigenista. Sepúlveda argues that civilization and progress should be rolled back up like a carpet and that the last non-civilized, indigenous people on earth, most of whom are in South-America, should do it or at least should inspire this unrolling of 'progress'. By uncoiling the Neanderthal inside us, by reminding us that the discovery of America is not yet complete and that America is not the new world but also an old world, a world that has generated vast stores of specific knowledge on ecological sustainability that is now more needed than ever before. It offers not the garden but, that great Maya wonder, the milpa as the new image and metaphor for our world. Whatever the shortcoming of this book, this suggestion alone is worth the paper this book is printed on.