Biography

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee...

not really. The truth will come out episodically.

Episode V - The Gospel of Quetzalcoatl, 1985-1987

Chapter one

It began on Main Street; the science part of it did at least. The art part had begun only a few days earlier at a weekly Dharmic Engineers meeting. Rob Schouten had been on a serious rant about the rosy but non-specific predictions for the future that characterized most New Age thinking. He wanted a prediction with a specific date and a specific event foretold. This was at the height of New Age nonsense, with channeled gurus like Ramtha and Lazaris, actual gurus like Rajneesh, celebrities like Shirley MacLaine, and multitudes of pundits all telling us what was generally going to happen with the dawning of this new time on planet earth, but nothing certain. We were all going to be more enlightened and eco-conscious, we'd all be yogis or tai chi masters, lots of us would have psychic powers, and so forth. It made Rob sick. I wasn't very impressed either.

The answer to this request came only days later, in the form of a book, "The Lord of the Dawn", which simultaneously fell into the hands of two Dharmic Engineers, Ray Pelley and Beau Bond. The book, a long poem by Native-American artist Tony Shearer, told of the life of Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, a Toltec Priest-King who had lived in ancient Mesoamerica a thousand years ago. The poem told of the self-prophesied return of Quetzalcoatl on August 16-17, 1987, a mere two years in our future. The Dharmics were extremely excited and could talk of little else. Which brings us to Main Street.

The Dharmic Engineers did group shows fairly often; at the time we were showing regularly at Carolyn Hartness Fine Art on Main Street, down from First towards the Public Boat Landing. It was a cool little space that was in the center of a trio of small galleries; to the east was a Native-American gallery, and to the west was an African-American gallery. We had a group show open at the Hartness only a few days after finding "The Lord of the Dawn", which was itself an exciting event. This was in the summer of '85, a hot Thursday evening, small spaces filled with people, so naturally there was a throng from three galleries congregating on the sidewalk, where the talk from the Dharmics was all about the predicted return of Quetzalcoatl on a date certain, two years hence.

Present at one such conversation were Thundercloud, a Native-American psychic who did readings at Tenzig Momo in the market, and Dr. John G. Cramer, a Nuclear Physicist from the University of Washington. Thundercloud knew all about the prophesy, the Mesoamerican calendar, and a lot more. He and his friend Crazyhorse, the Lakota artist opening next door, even knew Tony Shearer, and told us some interesting stories about him. Thundercloud said that on August 16-17, 1987, the days predicted for the return of Quetzalcoatl, there would be electro-magnetic disturbances at various sacred sites around the world, including Monte Alban, in the Oaxaca valley, where Topiltzin Ce Acatl spent his last days and made his prophecy according to Tony Shearer. At that point John Cramer said that the occurrence of these phenomena could be verified. When asked how, he replied that an electric field meter and a fluxgate magnetometer would be the instruments necessary, and that if we were interested, he would help us get them. We were interested, and also in Thundercloud's offer to get us in touch with Tony Shearer. Clearly we were riding windhorse, as Chogyam Trungpa describes in his book "Shambhala".

The next twenty months were occupied with planning and preparation for a trip to Oaxaca in August 1987. We followed through on both offers, corresponding several times with Tony Shearer and arranging for the construction of an electric field meter and a fluxgate magnetometer through Dr. Cramer. Cramer wrote letters of introduction explaining our purpose that later proved invaluable in our dealings with INAH, the Mexican agency responsible for archaeological sites like Monte Alban. Shearer introduced us to the world of Mesoamerica, its history, mythology, and to the incredibly ancient and accurate Maya and Aztec calendars, which were central to the prophesy of Quetzalcoatl's return. The Dharmic Engineers did numerous presentations about the proposed expedition to Oaxaca, often at science fiction conventions, where we did it as a performance piece, presenting ourselves as late 20th century versions of Victorian artist/scientist/adventurers. Quite a bit of interest in the trip was generated, so much so that Pelley said to me that we'd look pretty bad in front of a large audience if we didn't actually go. Not that it was ever a possibility; we did successful art shows to raise the money for the equipment and the costs of the journey and were fully committed to the enterprise.

The magnetometer and the field meter were delivered in early summer, 1987, and I began to learn the operation of the magnetometer, which was to be my main scientific responsibility. The instrument was in a wooden box about the size and shape of a large briefcase and weighed about seven pounds. When set up to operate, the magnetometer had to be leveled and oriented towards true north. It gave readings from 0 to 1.0 gauss for the north-south, east-west, vertical, and total strength components of the earth's magnetic field.

The result, when charted on a three-dimensional coordinate system gave a representation of a field line of the earth's magnetic field. Readings were manually recorded in a notebook with date, time and location at five minute intervals. Ultimately, there were to be more than sixty pages of magnetometer readings taken over the next 16 months.

I took the magnetometer for its first run June 14, 1987 on Vashon Island, where I was living at the time. Location #2, halfway down the island from my home on Cove Road, was Lisabeula, a small community of squatters living in the decayed remains of a church camp from the 1930's; about twenty-five small shacks in various states of repair built on a small alluvial fan where a creek came down a steep ravine and opened into Colvos Passage. There, on the gravel beach, I set up the magnetometer and took a reading. It was 2:00 in the afternoon, warm, bright and sunny; no clouds in the sky. Or rather, no clouds in the sky except one; a most unusual cloud that was moving due north, right up the center of Colvos Passage at about 200 feet above the water.

Everyone has seen something in the shapes of clouds. Rarely are they obvious; usually you have to exercise your imagination to make it work. Not this cloud. This cloud was remarkable for how exactly it looked like a dragon. Its head looked like a Chinese dragon. Its midsection, which was long and sinuous, looked like the skeleton of a fish or an eel, with a spine and many, many delicate, paired ribs, and its tail seemed like three or four large plumes. Most remarkably of all, the Sun's light was refracted by this cloud's particles in such a way that the entire shape was illuminated like a rainbow; from head to tail, the dragon radiated all the colors of the spectrum.

Even though the cloud was moving rapidly up the channel towards me, it held its shape remarkably well; in fact it hardly altered at all. Likewise, the rainbow effect continued as the cloud moved north, enabling me to check with the handful of other people on the beach if they also saw the beautiful dragon shaped cloud. Indeed they did, and thought it quite extraordinary.

As the dragon drew even with Lisabeula I returned to the magnetometer for another reading and discovered something else that was extraordinary; all of the meters were showing something different than the previous reading. The most interesting change was in the east-west reading, which was more than .03 gauss different than five minutes earlier; the needle was actually reading .01 gauss on the west side of center. A moment of reflection here will demonstrate how unusual this was; on Vashon Island, as for the rest of the west coast, magnetic north lies to the east of true north. The east-west meter should indicate this by always reading to the east side. Here it was reading slightly to the west, the direction of the rainbow dragon cloud moving up Colvos Passage. This is something that I never saw again doing magnetometer readings. Another interesting thing about the east-west meter was that the needle was quivering; this is something that I saw only one other time. The earth's magnetic field is huge, and although it is constantly in flux its movements are vast and slow; magnetic storms are measured in changes occurring over hours. The only other time that I saw a needle quiver on the magnetometer was at Mitla two months later when four meditating mystics who were consciously trying to influence the readings perhaps succeeded in causing the needle of the total field strength meter to quiver. Getting back to Lisabeula and the rainbow dragon cloud, the effect on the east-west meter was still apparent five minutes later when the cloud was several hundred yards north and I took my last readings at the place.

Six weeks later I was getting on a airplane, bound for Oaxaca. Artist and musician Jim Papp, a Dharmic Engineer who was particularly drawn to the Maya calendar, gave me a book as a bon voyage present. It was "The Mayan Factor" by Jose Arguelles. The book presents a complex mixture of mysticism, maya-ism, Quetzalcoatl-ism, and optimism. Arguelles makes August 16-17 much more than the return of Quetzalcoatl; for him it is Harmonic Convergence, a major shift in the history of the world. Arguelles incorporates Tony Shearer's ideas into Harmonic Convergence (They knew each other), and "The Mayan Factor" is dedicated to Chogyam Trungpa. Clearly there was a self-aware circle of myth spinners at work here, requiring an attention to all the forms of the myth and favoring none, as Claude Levi-Strauss taught.

As I read the book on the trip I discovered that highly motivated people from all over the world would be converging on various sacred sites for this Harmonic Convergence. What they would do at those sites was somewhat nebulous, but it wasn't taking magnetometer readings. Then my sense of cynical objectivity was severely challenged by what I read on page 169 of "The Mayan Factor". Arguelles describes how the returning spirit of Quetzalcoatl "... will be perceived by some as an inner light and by others as feathered serpent rainbow wheels turning in the air. Accompanying the resonant frequency shift, the luminous wave-forms of Quetzalcoatl will re-enter the atmosphere." Here, in mytho-poetic language, was an exact description of my experience at Lisabeula. Here was syncronicity of the first magnitude. Things were looking very good.