The Return of Collective Intelligence by Dery Dyer

Author:Dery Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Nature
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 8.7. Mysterious beacon and Turtle Mother’s home: Cerro Tortuguero. Photo courtesy of Fran Vaughan Watson and Modesto Watson.

Local people have always considered the mysterious, jungle-draped Cerro Tortuguero, which rises incongruously out of the flat expanse of coastline, a magical beacon that served to guide the turtles back to their nesting grounds. According to veteran Tortuguero boat captain and naturalist guide Modesto Watson, people in the area said Mayan priests who came to Costa Rica from northern Central America originally brought the Turtle Mother rock, which they installed in a cave in the mountain. Old-timers told him they’d visited the cave, where the rock occupied a kind of platform flanked by two stone crocodiles.

Modesto and his wife, zoologist and nutrition expert Fran Vaughan Watson, recall that they took Rudloe and Neitchmann to try to visit the cave. Unfortunately, the 7.1 magnitude earthquake of 1991, which raised Costa Rica’s Caribbean coastline, had collapsed the cave entrance, forcing the explorers to enter on hands and knees—until swarms of bats obliged them to turn back.

Rudloe was sure that the Turtle Mother legend “had some basis in fact, that it was somehow related to magnetic orientation and all the millions of submicroscopic ferromagnetic crystals that scientists had discovered in the brains of sea turtles.” The first confirmation came from the discovery in 1975 by Dartmouth College geographer Vincent Malmstrom that an ancient pre-Olmec stone turtle head found in Izapa, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, had a magnetic nose. The rock had been carved “so that the magnetic lines of force came to focus in the nose. It was bizarre and preposterous—but if true, was the first tangible evidence of the obscure Turtle Mother myth that still scarcely survived on the Caribbean coast of Central America,” Rudloe writes.

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