2012: Cometh Ah Puch?

As has been greatly fussed about, the Mayan long calendar is going to end sometime around winter solstice, 2012. This means of course that everything you love and hold dear is going to be made a piece of bean-rind stuck between the unflossed teeth of the celestial Jaguar. The Jaguar who is alone in the family of big cats for killing its victims by crushing their heads with its jaws while the others go for the throat! To save you from this fate, I am preparing a survival guide, which will be issued here, exclusively at Hydra, in irregular installments.

The first of these is a warning from Ah Puch, the Mayan Death God, delivered by William S. Burroughs as “Ah Pook Is Here” beginning in 1970. The project was a collaboration with Malcolm McNeill, whose illustrations (see above) would accompany the text. By 1978 McNeill had produced upwards of 100 pages of illustrated text but, because the book is neither a comic book nor a series of paintings, organizing the works into a publication has never been possible. “Ah Pook Is Here,” which tells of Earth’s immolation by an environmentalist God of death, should serve as a warning to the naysayers of climate catastrophe: There might be an aspect of the divine which is environmentalist!

Although the full illustrated version of “Ah Pook Is Here” is not available, it has been adapted in claymation. Directed by Philip Hunt, the short film gives us the opportunity of informing ourselves of Ah Pook’s activities as he prepares for his approaching moment: