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their knowledge reaches so far. . . . When they changed the nature of their works,
their designs, it was enough that the eyes be marred by the Heart of the Sky. They
were blinded as the face of a mirror is breathed upon. (Tedlock 148)
Here, the imagery of how a “mirror is breathed upon” is of key importance,
for Swedenborg describes the people of the Most Ancient Church receiving
“direct revelation and guidance from God through the mirror of nature.” (Rose
66) After the flood, however, this direct mirror to heaven was too dangerous,
and so God saved the human race “by making the intellect separable from the
will.” (Ibid.) From the perspective of a structuralist, the concepts of a mirror
“breathed upon,” and an “intellect separable from the will” follow the same
directionality; what once was fused is now separate, like the cutting of the
collective umbilical cord. (Levi-Strauss 295)
A new stage of humanity also requires a new form of revelation. Because
direct communication with the heavens was no longer possible, a new medium
needed to emerge. In both the Popol Vuh and the Writings of Swedenborg, this
took the form of an Ancient Word. Up until this point, a strict naturalist might
claim that there is indeed a direct connection between these two texts: the
Christian Bible. But there is a subtle element of eurocentrism in claiming that
all perceived similarities between the Bible and any other texts must be due to
christianization.
It is a form of retroactive cultural appropriation in which a “foreign” text
always has the short end of the stick. Even the natural sciences support the
concept of parallel evolution, through which, for example, both marsupial and
placental flying squirrels have evolved despite 100 million years of continental
separation.
Regardless of this, the concept of an Ancient Word cannot be found
anywhere within the Christian Bible, and yet it is placed in the very first line of
the Popol Vuh: “This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place
called Quichē. Here we shall inscribe, we shall implant the Ancient Word, the
potential source for everything done in the citadel of Quichē, in the nation of
the Quichē people.” (Tedlock 63)
Tedlock makes an explicit connection between the power of this Ancient
Word, and the power that was previously granted to the Golden Age:
When “everything they saw was clear to them” the Quichē lords were recovering the
vision of the first four humans, who at first “saw everything under the sky perfectly.”
That would mean that the Popol Vuh made it possible, once again, to sight “the four
sides, the four corners in the sky, and on earth.” (Tedlock 29)
When Swedenborg introduces the concept of the Ancient Word, he also
hints at the thoroughly allegorical nature of its contents: “It has been told me
by the angels of heaven that there was a Word among the ancients written by
pure correspondences. . . . Those who knew interiorly the correspondences of
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