It is curious the word “Maya” also means “illusion.” The Mayans were masters of the calendar, and some scientists now consider time itself is really an illusion.

The author, who has travelled widely in Central America, and is also co-director of The Sun & Serpent Mysteries Schools, says that embarking on a shamanic quest for the meaning of time is intrinsic to that culture.

Our experience of time is dictated by our perceptions and how we use attention. Alter that in shamanic rituals, and you suddenly enter a world where anything is possible from self-healing to shape shifting to meeting with ghosts and spirits of ancestors.

Mercier laments the impulse to put Coca-Cola stands and electric lights on or near ancient sacred sites. She quotes Chan K’in, one of the last great elders and shamans, as saying:

“The quetzal bird no longer flies, men cut down the forests and no longer respect nature. When the forest disappears there is no place for the Lacondons (builders of temples). The sons of my sons sell arrows to tourists and the god Mensabak no longer speaks to me.”

There is little doubt these sacred power spots had a role to play in the consciousness of the people indigenous to the area.

When Mercier spoke to a young Mexican woman leading the archaeological team at Kohunlich, she was startled to hear that working on some huge ancestral face masks had unexpected consequences.

The woman pointed at the mask and said that uncovering it from the rubble had changed her life. She said she had been having strange dreams that showed her things about the ancient Mayan which had not been covered in her archaeology degree studies.

She said that she was now paying attention to the Maya shamans and the mask has become a doorway into other consciousness and dimensions.

It is theorised that one of the reasons so many people in the West are fascinated by Maya calendars is we have largely lost the rhythm of nature they represent and consequently suffer a good deal of stress the Mayans were immune to.

One of the major preoccupations today is with the date of December 21, 2012, when a cycle of cosmic proportions is due to end and something momentous is set to occur.

It appears the calendar keepers had a binary system centuries before the Western world and the Haab calendar has been calculated by NASA to have a 0.00000001 degree of accuracy to the atomic clock, requiring only a one day adjustment in every 180,000 years, an amazing accomplishment in view of the problems our calendar still has with a Leap Year every four years.

The Central American pyramids, like those of Egypt, contain numerological information. The four original flights of steps when added to the one final step to the temple equal the number of days in the Haab calendar of 365 days. The effect of a serpent of light down the stair balustrade at the spring equinox was created with immense precision, a fact lost on many tourists.

Likewise, the recent rediscovery of resonant frequencies and energy fields find an echo among the shamans who intuitively knew all about it eons ago.

Genuine Mayan crystal skulls may enable coherent energy fields of light to manifest, and generate cellular changes in the body for the purpose of healing. Although the author admits this is speculation on her part, she does say these concepts are leaps into the unknown, but not the unknowable.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell has pointed out the role of the archetype in all cultures in our recorded history, as representing certain fundamentals in human nature. The Hero Twins in the Popul Voh translations are no exception.

Duality, light and darkness, the shadow self, are all contained in the folklore of the Maya. They are, however, in forms we may not recognise at first, as we are not accustomed to dealing with that particular representation.

By confronting the Underworld within, whether through means of a psychotropic compound or ritualistic trance, the shaman achieves psychological wholeness. Then he/she will stop leaking energy and gain a new purpose.

The colour photographs and the appendices giving a glossary of terms and the various calendrical cycles add to the feeling of place the author is able to convey. She is a keen observer, not only of present day Mexico and Guatemala, but of the shamanic mysteries of the long ago past.

It is a difficult task to explain the complexities of Maya shamanism in terms everyone will understand, but she succeeds admirably. A fascinating glimpse into a subject we know very little about.

– Reviewed by W. Ritchie Benedict in New Dawn No. 86