Jaguar Maiden: My Past Life Among the Mayan

Am I dreaming or having some kind of flashback from a past lifetime?

Is this South America? No, Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula... Oh, Sweet Jesus! It looks exactly like the photographs in the old National Geographic magazines. I recognize the pyramid at Chichen Itza.

Not far away I can see the sacred well that has never been fully explored, the Cenote Sagrada: dzonot in Mayan. According to National Geographic, 65 million years ago, pieces from a six-mile-wide asteroid streaked out of the sky and punched through the limestone surface into a fresh-water river, creating more than ten thousand circular wells. The big well at Chichen Itza is two hundred feet in diameter and has sheer stone walls that reach down nearly a hundred feet before meeting the water table.

In my dream, some unconscious motive, or uncontrollable curiosity, draws me toward the enormous well. As I approach, I see a group of women, some of whom I recognize as “my tribe”, and they are beckoning me to join them. On a popul, a rug of woven rushes where they are sitting, they have arranged an assortment of paints, feathers, seashells, and the like.

I am a native Mayan girl of my age, thirteen, and I am being dressed up… this is not good.

They are painting my face and arms and legs, and braiding flowers and shells and feathers in my hair, and this is clearly not good. I know what comes next. Virgins get all dressed up and thrown into sacred wells as a gift to whatever gods happen to be popular at the time. I read this in National Geographic so it must be true.

Thank God I still have self-awareness: I am having a very vivid dream about being a Mayan sacrificial virgin maybe a thousand years ago, maybe two thousand years ago.

Maybe this was happening at the same time Jesus was healing the sick and feeding his sheep and casting out demons and dining with sinners. That's where I'd rather be, thank you. I must have gotten off on the wrong exit. Maybe I can wake up, go back to sleep and start over.

I'll shut my eyes tight, click my heels three times...

Doesn't work.

I am a well-decorated sacrificial virgin on my way to a watery grave.

But first, the tribal women tell me, in a strange language I can mysteriously understand, that I have to visit the jaguar spokeswoman, the Chilam Balam, to receive the secret knowledge passed down from our ancestors and so on.

It occurs to me that I can run. I can just run into the jungle and keep running. But instead, my trembling legs carry me down the limestone road until I reach the edge of Chichen Itza, where the Chilam Balam waits in a low stone building.

She is waiting for me, I know.