Today, while reading a paper on Mayan Ball Courts, I came across the phrase Yax Hal Witz, or "First True Mountain." I immediately opened a tab to find the mountain. Or to find if it even existed.
If you search the phrase you end up at an article from the early 2000s Internet entitled The Bifurcated Mountain. (This is relevant since the paper I had been reading suggested a spiritual connection of the cleft in the mountain to the Mayan ball courts.) The thesis of The Bifurcated Mountain is that there are many early civilizations that ascribe significance to mountains with two peaks. The first and strongest example is the twin peaks at Delphi. A number of mythic mountains are named, Yax Hal Witz among them. The interesting bit is that this article is on a website called "Thunderbolts.info". A website that:
"places a spotlight on interdisciplinary research, direct observation, and experimental work confirming the pervasive role of the electric force in nature".
So it's curious that the site has an essay dedicated to an enumeration of legendary mountains, considering there's no thunder involved. But fear not, there is connection in this juicy bit:
This is different in the model presently proposed, according to which the worldwide symbolism of the cosmic axis originated as a set of universal eye-witness accounts of an intense aurora that occurred in the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE. On the basis of petroglyph morphologies, plasma physicist Anthony Peratt has concluded that the plasma in the earth's ancient magnetosphere must have glowed and assumed the form of a luminous column reaching from the visible horizon to the “top of heaven”.
OK, where to start. There's a lot of jargon in this paragraph, that's red flag number one. But there's a whole rash of problems presented here. Where are these 'universal eye-witness accounts'? What on God's green earth is 'the worldwide symbolism of the cosmic axis'? Another red flag is the insecure name dropping of a plasma physicist who somehow individually 'concluded' an event must have occurred thousands of years ago. How did he conclude this? What does the rest of the scientific community think? This sentence read like a creationist's textbook.
But what makes this article nonsensical is its inconsistency. The thesis that some electromagnetic event in 4th or 3rd millennium BCE lead to the universal reverence of split mountains is backed up by facts which simply cannot be. Many of the writing systems five thousand years ago are either too primitive to be provide evidence or too complicated to be deciphered. If you're going to claim these ancient peoples' writings as witness, then have the decency to share the secrets of the Indus valley script (to name one).