Yoga Olmeca II: Penetrating the Olmec World

The tossed concrete-block salad that is today’s Acayucan recalls the crumbling stone-block ruins of yesterday’s Olmec settlements without the justification of the passing time. Mexicans lack the gringo compulsion to order the world. Still, they often derive greater happiness from that world they feel less need to control, which may partly explain this American’s pursuit of happiness in this disorganized place.

For the ragged shoeless Hondurans who beg in the food market before climbing atop a northbound train, Acayucan is gateway to the financial riches of modern America. I stand out like a white bean in a sack of frijoles negros. My search for spiritual riches of the ancient Americas looks odd to peasants engaged in a literal existential quest. I gaze across the bustling hub.

Beyond crowded produce stalls and bloody butcher shops lies the green oasis of a traditional Mexican plaza with a municipal palace, lofty cathedral, and sidewalk cafes. I hustle to this manicured comfort zone. Though my previously published journeys often walked on the wild side, I’m tired of roughing it and plan to make this a civilized pilgrimage. Good food and accommodation needn’t preclude epiphanies. 

You don’t see a gorgeous immigration officer every day, so the bust-button-bursting Mexican government uniform descending the town hall steps rivets my attention, but a parked United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees vehicle that the long legs stroll past refocuses my mind on journalism. Acayucan is a true crossroads of the Americas.

Despite a palpable migration theme, I’m still a bit amazed to observe a Honduran consulate inside the town’s municipal palace. Mexicans do tolerate their poor cousins. Yet, they usually offer them a bowl of food like an alley cat, not a seat at the table. Sometimes, migrants are robbed or raped. So, a welcome mat and sheltering services imply an unusual amount of local compassion and/or an unusual amount of local abuse. I decide to ask a few questions. 

Exchanging greetings with the Honduran consulate staff, I note they’re all several shades whiter than their migrating compatriots. Castes are clearly defined around here. Yet, American media so fixate on micro-oppressions they fail to notice the elephant-sized racism trumpeting and stampeding around the globe. (Combating injustice is clearly not their real agenda.) Skin tones still influence what job one can get and whom one can marry in this corner of the world, but my quest is for the primal wisdom of life that can enable one to rise above the brutal reality of life. 

I listen to observations. Consul Emilson Martinez Sagastume has noticed that migrant numbers are still down, due to the perception that former president Donald Trump’s admin tightened enforcement. Yet, female migration is up to almost 30%. Folks aren’t just seeking higher wages but fleeing Honduras, where a savage epidemic of young criminal males is finally being discussed in the public forum. 

Conventional wisdom is often more conventional than wise. While North Americans hear about the compassion of allowing underground migration, Central Americans suffer with the fatherless gangsters left behind by this family-splitting odyssey. It seems the American dream and almighty dollar aren’t enough to produce bliss in the Americas.

What if we discovered a primal code that enables a bliss and a bloom like the blossom of the lotus, regardless of the mucky life situation into which one is planted? That’s our task in this reverse American migration. The untraditional sagacity (or life secrets) of the Olmec can be located and utilized by a modern seeker. Yet, they can’t be found on the beaten path. Therefore, our first destination is the first city in the Americas, inhabited by Olmecs during the Early Preclassic from 1400 to 1000 BC.

Our first guru is Felipe de Jesus Hipolito. Neither cataracts clouding up his eyes nor thumbs missing on his hands prevent his extracting semen from an enormous bull tied to an iron fence, so I encounter him running his hand affectionately over bovine inner thigh. Even so, I shake his hand warmly. He looks me up then down but fails to detect the inner urbanite struggle against wiping my hand on his shirt. (This is serious journalism people.) “My Olmec ancestors and God reveal mysteries to me,” Felipe quips before adding, “I don’t like Ann Cyphers.” 

His reference is to the renowned archaeologist who excavated the nearby Olmec settlement of San Lorenzo and also gave me travel tips for this journey. Doctor Cyphers has far more formal education than rancher Hipolito, but her matronly aura makes me suspect she’s given far fewer hand jobs. Just a journalistic hunch. (Though she may have disseminated a lot of bull when you consider how much verbiage academic writing contains.) They’re a match made in hell. The asexual tension between the two hangs in the air like a third person in our conversation. 

Felipe owns a ranch overlapping the ancient Olmec city. We hop into his alfalfa-scented truck, drive past the town of Texistepec, and head across low marshlands that flood whenever rain engorges the Coatzalcoalcos river. Civilization is built on water. This watershed is to the Americas what the Nile, Indus, and Tigris are to African, Asian, and European history.

A bluff rises ahead. Here the ancient settlement loomed over the river, where traders disembarked from canoes at a majestic gateway formed by parallel jaguar sculptures and stone human twins facing east. (Maya culture was still passing on stories about twins of the dawning sun two millennia later and recording these tales in their Popol Vuh scriptures.) We disembark at the same spot. A gravel track leads us to higher ground, then jumping over imaginary snakes takes us across a tall grass field, then wading through a valley bog brings us to the base of a steep knoll. 

This is where the historical present meets the mythical past. I’m simultaneously standing in downtown Olmecville and a cow pasture. Fortunately this is typed text, so you can use your imagination and not even get your pants muddy. We huff and puff to the crest. On this panoramic site was found the largest Olmec throne, where a ruler sat on a stone table above sculpted frontal relief of a shaman emerging from a cave. The chieftain was a tribal visionary.

This Olmec leader served as portal to a spiritual otherworld that he visited for wisdom about birth, death, planting, harvesting, and the most sacred element of life: water. A rain deity was carved into stone nearby. This sculpture included a trough that formed the source for one of the world’s first urban aqueducts then dispersed the sparkling liquid diamond drops to the homes and plantations of the settlement, just as Pemex petroleum pipes carry black gold from this same swamp to bolster the Mexican government’s rulership today. 

Close to the throne was also found an iconic colossal head. This represented a past Olmec ruler, who bestowed additional authority on the current leader. There was a half-human / half-jaguar transformation statue close at hand, which symbolized a sovereign’s shamanic power to transform by meditative or hallucinogenic trance. Potent mystical powers. Still, none of these lofty spiritual forces harnessed by a potentate could sustain the community without the sacred force of the mighty river and the monsoon rains producing enough corn to feed a city. When the waterway finally silted up, the urban site was abandoned.

Life flourishes on water – talk about stating the obvious. Yet, most of us don’t maximize this primal force. We don’t start every day and precede every meal with enough water to rev up our digestive juices and flush out our digestive systems, so internal pipes become clogged and sluggish, instead of cleansed and streamlined. Rather than exfoliate our skin to release nature’s cosmetic coolant: sweat, we block our pores with cosmetics not designed by nature for human skin. 

When we shut down the body’s plumbing and cooling systems, it’s like living in a closed-up house full of sewage. No wonder we lose our zest for life. We know we need water flowing through our bodies, but it’s the doing not the knowing that counts. This is basic stuff. Yet, one must begin with this baby step on nature’s transformative path to release energy needed for larger steps along the way. So, drink, loofah, and sweat to start honing body and spirit into pristine condition. (I actually use the scratchy rainforest plant for a somewhat sadomasochistic ritual.)

The Mayan creation story of the Popol Vuh (like the biblical book of Genesis) portrays the origins of life on earth in a vast primordial sea. The Wall Street Journal recently reported a growing scientific consensus that abundant liquid water makes our planet the most life-hospitable place in the known universe and that a master plan designed by a Creator now seems more likely than spaceships designed by aliens. Long before the Maya based their creation epic on a big ocean, they based their culture on the vast wisdom of the Olmecs. The Olmecs based a civilization on the banks of a mighty river. How reasonable it is that a modern person could discover their primal nature and nature’s plan in the New World Garden of Eden.

Driving away from the archaeological site, we stop at the home of Ann Cyphers, where unearthed relics from the ancient metropolis are displayed around the grounds. Segments of the aqueduct are everywhere. My eyes fix on a carving of a jaguar having sex with a corn goddess. The sensual power and primal fertility of the artwork are astonishing. This stone masterpiece testifies how sacred the animal bodies housing our eternal spirits were intended to be, before shoddy processed food and sedentary dehydrated lives partly corrupted our flesh.

The effigy also testifies against the contemporary myth that gender equality requires gender uniformity. Both the moist, fertile, curvaceous woman spread out on her back like the rolling fecund soil of the Olmec landscape and the locomotive haunches of the jaguar planting seed like a drenching jungle rain are clearly forces of nature no less holy or mighty than the opposing and complementary force. How grim, dull, and dry a fluorescently lit world of androgynous business suits looks in comparison to this sexy sunlit waterworld of bold masculinity and femininity.

North Americans often call Latin America machismo. Latin Americans often refer to North America as feminista. People get more annoyed by their neighbors’ flaws than their own, but both cultures can see that disrespecting either gender in nature’s plan produces injustice, oppression, disharmony, and dysfunction.

The insight we’ll uncover in forthcoming posts isn’t just a highway to health but a highway to the deep contentment of healthy relationship. There may be a bit too much spirituality for guy lit and a little too much sensuality for chic lit, because this is human lit, for folks willing to go beyond the boundaries of comfort zones and the jurisdiction of sensitivity police to the primal wisdom of the ages. 

My graduate work was in philosophy. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Gringos constantly assert that people should learn from alternative perspectives, but they usually prefer other perspectives that fit within preconceived notions of acceptable ideas. Carl Jung said “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.” What if deepest life-enhancing truths showed up in unacceptable packaging? Let’s carry on with our pilgrimage bravely, shall we? 

I return to Acayucan exhausted and relax at La Cava del Tinto amidst orange and lime stucco walls with ornate archangel Miguel statues. A wine from Don Quixote’s La Mancha region seems apropos of my metaphysical quest. A Caprese salad and Fettuccine Alfredo render me into a trance state that few Olmec shaman could surpass. I sip steamy dark chocolate for dessert. 

The first known use of hot cocoa was at the dedication ceremony for the Olmec town I just visited. Village elders smashed their pottery cups after a toast to the new venture. How could anyone doubt the civilization that gave us chocolate could offer much to enhance our lives? My journey commences in the auspicious company of Don Quixote, the archangel, wine, and chocolate. Some fine omens. Yet, no more sublime than the celestial revelations to come in the course of my terrestrial shufflings.