Monkey meaning

Amid the sea of trees are occasional signs of ancient habitation, with blue morpho butterflies, spider monkeys, macaws and jaguars. This is the Yucatan peninsula.

The animals were the guides of the ancient Maya. For example the howler monkey, called baats in Maya, was the animal spirit guide, or tonal animal of Mayan scribes. Also the monkey-faced Mayan god of all things sacred was called K’u. The link between the sacred, writing and the monkey spirit were firmly established in the mind of Aleph sometime in mid 2013.

After the dreams began he turned his mind to all previous encounters with monkeys. The realization came to him with a jolt that he had seen one crossing the road into the forest on his first road journey into the tropical flat lands of southeast Mexico.

The first dream was connected to a real event. A friend had asked Aleph to do her a favor, in her absence to collect some traveler’s checks from her house on the edge of the jungle and to deposit them in the bank.

The dream happened before Aleph could carry out the favor. There were two dead monkeys in his friend’s house and the traveler’s checks remained unsigned, hence invalidating them. Aleph's reasoning was as follows. If the monkeys had been alive, therefore the checks would have been signed, because the monkeys are the scribes, after all. A signature equals validity for a check, equals reality in a dream. Aleph took it to its logical conclusion: it is the script that defines the reality, and that script is overseen by the monkey spirit in the Mayan world.

When he went to his friend’s house he had a double affirmation that the monkeys are indeed the scribes. First - and of course - the checks had been signed. Rationally they had to be signed, otherwise there would have been no point in collecting them. Then afterwards Aleph saw a monkey crossing the road as he drove away from his friend’s house. Seeing monkeys was no everyday occurrence, it was only the second ever wild monkey he had seen in his life.

The monkey of dream and myth crossed into the “real” world. It answered a question too. Aleph had already heard that there could be some play between the myth of the society and the dreams of the individual. Like a closing bracket at the end of a sentence, when Aleph left the Yucatan he was driving along the same stretch of highway where he had seen the monkey nearly six years previously. The car broke down and while in the rescue vehicle towing the car back to the only town he saw another monkey, a dead one by the side of the road on this occasion. After recovering from the sadness and strangeness of the sight he could see that the poor dead animal was a punctuating his own story.

#animalspiritguides #Mayanmyth #monkeyscribe