My name matters not. I guess you could call me Ishmael, but I think Ibis would be more appropriate since I don’t go fishing white whales. My story you wouldn’t believe in a million years, and quite frankly I don’t believe it myself after living it, so there is no chance that you will buy into these words. Yet, I’ll try my best on you, and if the sun isn’t too bright when you walk out the cave, then you’ll see the shadows for what they really are.



Part I: The Stolen Tablets of Copan: Gateway to the Underworld

My life began when I was 19. Up to that point I had been living as a regular city kid in the blissful ignorance of my age, and had enjoyed the happy childhood that we Westerners are blessed with. My only worries had been superficial preoccupations about my status in the high school pack and wooing that cheerleading captain chick who was inexplicably attracted to bald middle-aged men who drove expensive convertibles. When I graduated from high school I didn’t know what to do. College was too expensive and my job at the coffee shop seemed like a lost cause.

I knew I needed to see the world, to go places and just live something different than the small town lifestyle that my peers were settling for. I had no idea of what I was getting into, but I had this drive in me to just go explore the world, because there had to be something more in this world than life in Middleton. So I left and went south, to backpack across Central America for a few months with some money my parents had given me as a graduation present.

I took the bus and went straight through Mexico to Guatemala. After a week or so I made my way to Honduras near Copan where I stayed to a couple of months. This is where everything began for me. After I had traveled for a couple of days in terrible conditions, I reached a make up bar which was nothing more that a wooden hut in the middle of the forest. My map had been damaged by the rain and I was running out of water, so this improbable oasis was a true benediction. The only thing they served was hot beer but it was good enough for me. I sat down to the ground to drink my beer and rested for a while.

Another white man came through the jungle with a machete in his hand. He was a short chubby man with glasses and a green hat, looking like a mix between Indiana Jones and Homer Simpson. He wasn’t in great physical shape but he did look way more prepared to cross the jungle than I was. I knew he was highly respected by the locals because they got cold beer from under the counter for him, and he didn’t even pay for it. He came to me and introduced himself as Padre Damiano, and said he was an emissary from the Vatican. He told me he needed help to conduct his mission, and offered me food and shelter for the night in exchange of my assistance. I had no particular plan of my own and though it would be a good way to explore the region, so I accepted his offer.

The next day, we left our camp and walked for a couple of hours through the forest. The Padre was an outgoing man with a funny sense of humor. He wasn’t like the clergymen I knew back home, those inflexibly serious devoted men who tend to think they know all there is to know about God. The Padre was actually full of doubt about the nature of God, and he clearly stated that no man knew the answers to the secrets of the ineffable one. It was quite a shock for me to hear from a direct emissary of the Vatican that men couldn’t understand God. Yet the Padre seemed to know more about God than any other man I had previously met. Despite his incertitude, he clearly showed an understanding of the divine knowledge that only a man who belonged to the Order could have known. As we advanced deeper through the forest, the Padre gave me what he said was merely his personal opinion about God.

[edit on 29-10-2009 by townio]

[edit on 29-10-2009 by townio]

He said God was a force, just like gravity, and that this force was necessary for life to exist. Gravity keeps us to the ground where we can live, but it could also crush us to the ground if we fell from a mountain top. Likewise, the use of the God force could have positive or negative results, depending on how we used it. The Padre said that as a general rule, excess was what created negativity, and that excess was a result of ignorance. However, the Padre told me not to believe him. He said that I should find the truth for myself, because the true knowledge came from within.

We reached a temple that was a few miles north of the Copan ruins, hidden under the vegetation at the top of a hill. From there, we could see miles down the forest, and we even overlooked the archeological excavations that were conducted at the Copan site. The Padre told me to be quiet, and that it was important that the archeologists did not see us in the area.

I followed the Padre inside the dark temple. He knew exactly which way to go, and told me to keep close as traps were laid out against looters. We made our way to through a corridor and reached a room with a sort of altar in the middle. Lying on the ground in a corner of the room was a carved stone with a strange serpent biting its tail. I helped the Padre lift the stone up, which revealed a narrow entryway to an underground cache. We went inside and had to crouch because the ceiling was so low. The air was nasty and moist. In the room were about two dozens large fragments of stelae that had been taken from nearby monuments.

The Padre was looking for four specific ones, and once he had identified them, we loaded them in our backpacks and left the temple. The stone tablets were really heavy and made the way back much more difficult, even though we were now going downhill. Going back to the camp took us twice the time it took to reach the temple, and was really exhausting. I was young and I didn’t really realized what I was doing at the time, but I was basically helping the Padre steal the most important and valuable archeological records of Meso-American history. On that day I had over ten million dollars worth of Mayan artifacts in my backpack and I did the job for free. Of course I only got to know that much later.

On the way back the Padre told me about Mayan history and the significance of the stelae. He said the tablets had belonged to the Church ever since the age of the conquistadors, and that the Vatican had requested them to be shipped back because the sensitive information they contained could have led to a disaster if archeologists had found and deciphered them.

During the Maya classic period, there were two power centers which fought for the domination of all Meso-America: Tikal and Calakmul. These city-states had reached an advanced development in science, infrastructure, politics, economy, religion and warfare. The discord between the two cities came from a matter of power as the priestly lineage from Tikal dissociated itself from the royal lineage. The priests took over the then small city of Calakmul and brought it to prominence in a matter of years with the knowledge they had stolen from the Tikal royal bloodline. The rulers of Tikal swore to destroy the betrayers, but the task wasn’t easy as the new rulers of Calakmul captured the cities surrounding Tikal and kept a constant ongoing warfare through the proxy cities of Yaxchilan, Naranjo and Caracol to weaken Tikal’s military power while expending their influence and power unchallenged.

The layout of the cities and the pyramid structures were used as astronomical calendars to correlate celestial observation with mathematical calculations. The Padre said that this type of technology had been used throughout the old world and had descended from ancient extinguished knowledge. He told me that with this knowledge, the Mayans had managed to open gateways to the underworld which allowed them to harvest the power of supernatural entities. The gateways only stayed opened for a few days and were caused by exceptional celestial alignments that the Mayans had been tracking for hundred of years. The Padre added that some of the pyramids were special, and that they had been built to be used at specific times and locations with the purpose of exploiting the gateways to the underworld.

The rulers of Calakmul had built such a structure to harvest a powerful malignant spirit which they believe would help them win the war against Tikal. The construction of the building took over ten years, but it was ready in time for the 622 A.D. celestial alignment, and the spirit of the demon was harvested and hosted in a young male child. As the child grew older the demon grew stronger, and soon he asked to be worshiped as a living God for the services he provided to the population of Calakmul.

The demon, who was known as yajaw maan, led a merciless war against Tikal and any city that would refuse to submit to its will. He required human sacrifice from the people of Calakmul, blood offerings which he drank daily, and he also required the heads of all the enemies defeated by his army during battles. The reputation of the bloodthirsty deity quickly spread fear among the allies of Tikal who decided to side with yajaw maan rather than risking a war with the seemingly invincible spirit. In less than a decade, yajaw maan had achieved the complete domination of all Meso-America, and had forced remnants of the royal bloodline of Tikal in exile.

However, total domination was not enough for yajaw maan, and neither was it its original intention. He was not human, and as a demon he had no attachment to the population of Calakmul. The only thing he enjoyed were the sacrifices, and without enemies to feed his blood thirst, life was not nearly as exciting for him. As the population of Calakmul grew over 300,000 souls, including two thirds of which were warriors dispatched throughout the Yucatan peninsula, yajaw maan thought of a diabolic plan which could afford him daily bloodbaths, and enough heads to build a pyramid entirely with human skulls.

He reinstated the heir of the Tikal bloodline as a puppet ruler in exchange of the heads of his own warriors and a high number of sacrificial slaves that were to be sent to him every year. Collecting blood and heads from both sides, yajaw maan enjoyed his decadent lifestyle until he died of natural causes around the end of the century. But the constant warfare and the extensive exploitation of natural resources combined with the murderous example, which was emulated by his successors who wanted to appear as powerful and frightening as him, resulted in the downfall of the Mayan civilization.

The Padre explained that yajaw maan was not unique to the Maya, and that many cultures throughout history had summoned the spirit to gain advancements and advantages over neighbors and competitors. He was the one known as Satan in the bible and was the source of legends about vampires and werewolves across the globe. The stelae fragments hidden in the temple of Copan described this story and the ones we were carrying included the location and time of the last gateway opening before thirteen baktun; the date we know as December 21st, 2012. The Padre said that if this information fell into the wrongs hands, a demon much more powerful than yajaw maan would be released and that there would be no salvation for humanity if the spirit managed to cross through the last gateway as his power would be millions of times stronger than during the Maya classic period.

It was night when we reached the camp but the Padre said we didn’t have time to rest. He went inside his tent and got out with a sports bag. We got into an old Jeep he kept hidden behind the surrounding trees and hit the dirt road for about another hour. I asked him what was in the bag and he told me to look for myself. I took the bag and opened it.

Inside was more money than I had ever seen in my whole life. There was 50,000 US dollars, according to the Padre, all in small denominations. I asked him what that was for, and he said it was for his plane. Things started to look fishy and I didn’t know what to think. But the Padre said he wasn’t getting any money to do the job, although he could have gotten millions if he sold the tablets on the black market. He said he did it because it was the right thing to do, and because protecting humanity was worth more than money could ever buy.

We arrived at a small grass airstrip in the middle of the forest where a propeller plane waited at the end of the runway. We got out of the car and loaded everything in the plane. The Padre asked me if I needed a ride home but I declined his offer. He told me I could keep the Jeep, and he took off with the Mexican pilot/smuggler and the precious tablets. I made good use of the Jeep during the rest of my trip and sold it for enough money to buy myself a plane ticket to get back home. That was how I first met Padre Damiano, and the first time I had seriously heard someone talk about spirits and demons. But it was only later that I realized how far the rabbit hole really went.

Part II: The Lost Pyramids of Edfu and the Staircase of the Pharaoh

I went back home, got my old job back at the coffee shop and I started dating this girl Cassie who often came there when I was working. She drove a Corvette, and said she had ripped off her ex-husband of all his money. She was kind of strange at times, and always carried a gun in the glove box. She said it was to protect herself from her ex-husband, just in case something went wrong. During the summer she invited me to Egypt, to see the pyramids as she said. Yeah, she was a friendly girl like that and she wasn’t shy on spending money, but I knew nothing about what I was getting into.

We arrived in Cairo, took a boat and went on a cruise upwards the Nile valley. Everything was great until after six days we arrived in Edfu. We followed the tour guide to the temple and after he told us all stories behind the hieroglyphs he let us wander around to explore the site on our own. I was watching the huge front pylon, the massive gateway with a carved fresco relating the grand achievements of the pharaoh, in which the said pharaoh was lashing a bunch of captives kneeled down in front of him. Then Cassie came and told me she had found something I had to see.

I followed her and she got me to a worn down broken carving that only showed a pair of legs. Then she got a phone call, told me it was important and left me in front of the thing, telling me she was going to be back in five.

A few minutes later this Egyptian guy dressed in a traditional outfit came out of nowhere showing me a small doorway closed by a metallic door. He didn’t speak English but kept pointing at the door, and then he handed me a flashlight. I took it; he opened the door with a key, and made this sign with his hand that means money as if he wanted me to give him a tip. But then I had this strange feeling as if maybe the guy was trying to kidnap me. I didn’t want to star in some internet terrorist movie production that’s for sure. So I told him no, but then the guy got really nervous and wanted me to go, he started to push me so I pushed him back. It looked like we were going to fight or something.

And then, Cassie Cox came back with a gun in her hand and shot the guy right through the eyes from like twenty feet away. I did not expect that at all from her, she always was such a sweet girl. Then she pointed the thing to my head and said, “Mickey, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” and I was like WTF!

I still had the brains of the old Egyptian man covering my face and I couldn’t possible process what was happening. She me shoved through the doorway and closed the metal gate. I though that she was selling me to the terrorists and that she had done the same thing with her previous husband. She said nobody would be coming to get me, and that I would die from dehydration within three days. She said the only way out was the other way; she told me, “Good Luck!” and she left. Needless to say, that was the end of our relationship.

I turned on the flashlight after I sat down for a while to calm down. I got up and started to walk through the endless underground corridor that ran from the temple to a group of small pyramids covered up with sand on the other side of a small hill. When I say endless corridor, I mean it just kept on going forever; I thought I was never going to reach the other end. It was going uphill and just kept on getting smaller, so much that I thought I was not going to be able to fit through the end of it.

Luckily I did, and I got into a narrow room with a carving of the, “Judgment of the dead” by Anubis, the jackal-headed God. It was the usual scene from the “Book of the Dead,” with the dead guy taken to the scale by Anubis, and his heart weighted against a feather to ensure he was worthy enough to talk to Osiris, the God of the underworld. If the heart was heavier than the feather, the fellow would be devoured by Ammit, the croco-lion-hippo beast, which guarded Aaru, the heavenly reed fields.



I took a narrow staircase at the end of the room and climbed forty-eight flights of stairs. I arrived into another room which had a carving I had never seen before. I interpreted the scene from what I had seen in the previous temples I had visited during the trip, and from the explanation I could remember from the tour guide.



It looked like after going through the gateway to the underworld, the dead guy would meet the spirit, which was depicted as a bird standing over the gate. After that the dead man would be taken by Anubis back through the gateway, but only after being shown the Tree of Life. Upon his return from the underworld, the dead man would continue his life on Earth as a worker and nurturer of the Tree of Life. Then, he would be anointed by Horus, the falcon-headed God son of Osiris, and proxy ruler of Earth for his father who resided in the underworld. After that, the dead man, who had become the consecrated host of the divine spirit, would be enthroned as the legitimate divine King where he would rule over the four corners of the Earth.

I continued up another twelve flights of stairs, and again reached another room with a wall carving. This time it was a sort of big disk with a multitude of people inside, and which was supported by twelve figures who seemed to be major deities.



Next to the disk carving was a list of the names of the twelve deities, and only the last one had the key of life before his name. It looked like someone had smashed the key of life which belonged to the other deities with a hammer, and I focused my attention on the name of the last deity, which I remembered as “Pancake-making, sitting dude.” Later I learned this hieroglyph stood for the name atum. Under the list of Gods were another scene depicted the dead man drinking from the waters of the Tree of Life between Nut and Maat, the goddesses of the sky and of cosmic harmony, but only after he had defeated the human-like snake demon which held knives in his hands.



[edit on 29-10-2009 by townio]

I climbed again another twelve flights of stairs and started to feel really dizzy. I got to the end of the stairs and a gate stood before me. My flashlight died before I could see any kind of exit and I started to panic. I went through the gate and started to hear this high-pitched noise inside my head. I kept my hand running along the wall trying to find an exit that could lead me back to the surface, but all I could feel was never-ending hieroglyphs under my fingertips. That was the last thing I remembered. I think I might have tripped on something and hurt my head, but I can't say for sure.

I woke up in a tent with Egyptians starring at me. They said I had been unconscious for three days, and that they had found me lying in the desert near the concealed pyramids. I asked them about the pyramids and they told me about the legend, which said that pharaoh would come back at the end of the solar cycle to deliver the final battle against Apep, the serpent, lord of chaos, darkness, and the creator of inequity. I stayed with them for a couple of days to regain strength, then took my plane back to Cairo and headed home. Cassie’s phone was out and it kept on saying her number was not attributed. I wanted to go back to my old life in Middleton, but I didn’t know things could never be the same again.


[edit on 29-10-2009 by townio]

Part III: Streaming Through my Brain: Spirit from the Underworld

I got back home but after a couple of days I started feeling sick. I was tired, I couldn’t focus and I kept on hearing the noise over and over. And then I got this weird dream. I was in Egypt and I was dead, and a bunch of people were around me performing what seemed like funerary rituals. They got a long hook inside my nose, and pulled my brain out. Then, they got me into a sarcophagus and I woke up.

I went outside to get some fresh air. I stared at the bright full moon for a while, and then I heard someone calling my name. There wasn’t anyone around so I didn’t understand at first. I thought I was going crazy but the voice told me not to be scared. The spirit told me his name was atum, and that a perilous journey awaited me, but that he would help me to get through with its magical power. I felt I needed to sleep after hearing something like that, and atum told me to go to sleep.

I woke up a week later. My parents told me I had locked my door, and told them I was sick and needed to rest. I don’t remember a thing. They said I was making lots of noise and didn’t seem to be resting. All I remember was waking up in my bed seven days later.

Everything was normal for the next weeks until I got fired from the coffee shop. Old Miss Leighton got burned by her coffee, after she grabbed the cup, crushed the paper thing and burned her whole hand and her forearm. I got fired, and the coffee shop said it would seek to press charges against me for not respecting the company policy, which stated drinks had to be laid on the counter and not given hand to hand.

It was quite a bad situation. But atum got on it. I started doing things I had never done in my life. I took all the savings I had and invested it in the stock exchange market. Somehow I knew what I had to do. It was just easy, it was like if I could see the things that were going to happen, because I looking at things with a different mindset. And then, quickly, I started to be able to read people’s mind, followed by the ability to make them think what I wanted. It was like everything was clear, easy to predict, and people became easy to influence.

I didn’t have enough money to get a good lawyer, but I found a recent graduate who said he would do it for free. The guy got me off charges, and even managed to revert accusations by proving that ninety three year-old Miss Leighton was in fact a serial scammer who had already burnt herself three times previously; each time in different major chain of coffee shops, and had already cashed over two hundred thousand dollars in compensations during previous cases. The coffee shop then backed me up, and sent old Miss Leighton to jail for extortion.

After a week, I applied for a job in an engineering company that had opened an office in town. They hired me right after the interview, even though I didn’t have the degree required for the job, which I had heard of in a personal email from Stan, who I had not talked to since leaving high school.

I came in for my first day at work and then everything went black. I woke up in a stinking jail with dead skeleton chained next to me.

I didn’t even have the time to comprehend what had just happened that the Padre Damiano came and got me out of the cell.

He said we didn’t have time to talk, and we ran out of the place and went through small circular streets and arrived to his car, which was parked with a driver behind the wheel. The guy started driving and I tried to remember where I was before, but I did not have any memory of what had happened during my first day at “work.”

We were going real fast in a straight line when the driver turned back with a gun in his hand and shot the Padre dead. He made a swift turn and stopped the car in front of a building from which two guys ran out. They got me out of the car and knocked me out before I had the time to do anything.

When I came back to me, I was on an altar encircled by people with masks over their faces holding a knife over my chest. I couldn’t move. I could see the tattoo of the snake on the forearms of the people next to me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, even though I had the impression that they were talking. And then the knife went down. That’s how I died for the first time I think.

I woke up eight years later on a beautiful island surrounded by a clear blue sea in a mansion the size of a football field. I had a servant who kept on calling me Mr Atum. He said there was nothing to worry about and that the plan was working at perfection. I asked him about the plan, but he said I had told him not to reveal the plan to anyone, even to myself.



Badim, my servant, has agreed to tell me we live somewhere in New-Zealand. We have a stockpile of food and water for a years’ worth, but we have no way of getting off the island without exterior help. Badim is getting on my nerves and I want to go back home. Please send a boat or a plane to get me; I will tell you my precise location as soon as I convince Badim to tell me exactly where we are.

Thanks for your help,
Ibis


[edit on 29-10-2009 by townio]

So let me get this straight. You have internet acess, but WE have to send someone to "save" you?

Nice story by the way, new Indiana Jones moviescript?

Yes it was that or the finish like an internet scam type email. Maybe that can make a script who knows? Thanks for reading.