The Shift of the Ages

YES! My friend and teacher will be with these elders ina few weeks.
Here's the next initiation, fyi--
www.ponyexpress.net/~starsee...a_002.htm

The fragmented Maya are coming together. So exquisite.

Wow, this looks amazing! Anybody know when it's scheduled for release?

This is very cool! Thanks Hoopes.

"This is not a time for analysis paralysis or dissecting the obvious and forming new commissions to study the outdated. This is a time to visualize new alternatives and co-create the future of our dreams. It is a time to wake from our slumber and remember who we are, and why we are here."

Love this thread! I find much truth here.

I don't think this film is intending to elevate Don Alejandro to savior status. He is a prominenent messenger of the Maya, and they have some very important and timely messages for us.
And I like the bit with the pope. When you consider the role Catholicism has played in Maya history, watching Don Alejandro with John is reminds me of the Dalai Lama thanking the Chinese for their profound lessons.

I am not waiting to be saved, but I wait (and work toward) for the awakening of Christ consciousness on Earth.

We are what we have been waiting for, but we are not the only ones at the wheel.

Back to the trailer for "The Shift of the Ages"...

There are a number of things about it that cause my skeptical antennae to go up (for the geezers, the visual effect is exactly that of what happened periodically to "Uncle Martin" in the 1960s sitcom "My Favorite Martian").

- The two Hispanic women at the beginning are not especially articulate. Both of them stumble over their words, yet are caught saying "profound" things. If their English is bad but they know these things, they must be right. Right?

- The first makes a reference to a physical change, the "pole shift theory" (a la Charles Hapgood). How in the heck did she learn about that? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_shift_theory "Different place, uh, different position?" That's really not so hard to say. What's communicated by this woman's seemingly stumbling to explain an esoteric theory?

- The second woman says something that can't possibly be true: "... to see that there is no difference between religions." That's absurd. Of course there are differences among religions! Big ones, too. She goes on to say, "I believe that everybody is tired of wars. We want peace. And we have to insist that our goverments stop these wars." Well, that part's okay, but it doesn't make the first statement true.

- The title of the movie appears with an image of the Aztec calendar stone, but the movie is about a *Maya* holy man. The Aztecs and Mayas were totally distinct cultures.

- The transitions between scenes have an artificial flipping, light flares, and problems with frame control, like artifacts from old 16 mm film cameras. These are things people associate with the famous Magruder film of the the JFK assassination, clips of Bigfoot in the northwest woods, and footage of UFOs. These are archaic visual artifacts, since they don't appear in modern digital cinematography unless for stylistic "effect". The intention is to create a "conspiracy" feel of secrets traded among the cognoscenti.

- The initial clip of Don Alejandro is shown in reverse, with his cloth belt "leaping" into his hands from the floor. He's next shown with a flame or flash coming from his fingertips (in the mirror). This is obviously an allusion to his "magical" powers, but he doesn't *really* pick up his belt this way or shoot fire from his fingers.

- The music that plays behind the scenes of Don Alejandro is of the "pop Andean" genre, the kind recorded by upper middle-class musicians in Peru. The music has little to do with Guatemala or even indigenous people (beyond folkloric representations).

- Don Alejandro, the "Wandering Wolf" is show shaking hands with John Paul II. What's *that* all about? There aren't too many wolves in highland Guatemala. Not even coyotes. In his "wandering", he takes the train to Machu Picchu, the quintessential middle-class New Ager experience. Why not visit some of the ruins in highland Guatemala, or at least some indigenous village in Peru, rather than a tourist trap where the ecology is far from balanced? (Machu Picchu is an ecological disaster.)

- A woman standing somewhere in the Peruvian Andes (it looks like the valley around Pisac to me) says "...look in to the stars. You just feel more powerful." It then shows images of Andean people blowing on shell trumpets and prayingm then rapidly cuts in images of Tikal, Guatemala and then the pyramids at Giza, Egypt (??!) Pyramids in Egypt?

The allusions to the polar shift theory at the beginning and the images of Egyptian pyramids intercut with Maya ones near the end tag this a flick as one tainted with New Age pseudoscience and speculation from the likes of Graham Hancock. The flickering image transitions and distortions remind me of UFO films. There's "woo woo" all over this trailer. No wonder it's so appealing...

Almost a century ago, in 1908, Richard Hatfield published a fantasy novel called "Geyserland". According to L. Sprague de Camp (in his excellent 1954 book "Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature"), Hatfield "represented the Atlanteans as living a blissful life of pure ideal communism at the North Pole. The book is based upon a theory propounded in 1852 by Alphonse-Joseph Adhémar, that from time to time ice piles up at the poles until the earth becomes unstable and does a flip so that the new poles are where the equator used to be. The last of these cataclysms, of course, formed the basis of Atlantis, Noah's Flood, and so on. Not only was the theory wrong, but also the author [Hatfield] had no notion of how to tell a story. The result is a stupendous mass of politico-economic argument thinly disguised as fiction and quite unreadable" (p. 160).

So, one of the themes in this new movie repeats the premise of a bad science fiction novel written almost 100 years ago.

de Camp notes that "Geyserland" was preceded by a better novel, "Scarlet Empire" (1906), that tells the story of a young socialist who discovers Atlantis thriving under the sea, protected by a giant crystalline zone. Atlantis is described as a "utopian" society that takes egalitarianism to the extreme. Individualism is punished by feeding the offenders to a giant kraken. The book gets its name from the fact that everyone walks around in scarlet robes. As the hero is trying to escape with his girl in a submarine, they are attacked by the kraken. They fire a torpedo at it, which misses and destroys the dome--and Atlantis. The book was written as an anti-utopian jab at socialism.

The practice of intertwining the Mayas and ancient Egypt, Atlantis and utopian visions, all within antiquated theories of geology and world history has been going on for over 150 years now, if not even longer (I suspect the roots lie in Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" of 1515 and the subsequent grown of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry). There's really not much "new" about the New Age, and this movie is just one of its most recent manifestations.

History suggests that these ideas work much better as fiction than fact.