The Magnetic Turtle Head of Izapa
The Search for the Great Turtle Mother
There is a group of carved boulders on a remote shoreline of Nicaragua, one of which is called “turtle mother.” Discovered by Florida naturalist Jack Rudloe in the late 1970’s, every boulder is a carving of a male or female human figure. They look somewhat like the boulders of Easter Island as they stand like sentinels looking out to sea. Inside each boulder is a field of “reversed polarity,” which is magnetic imprint in the carving that is memory of a time when the earth reversed its polarity. Reversing the earth’s polarity has apparently happened a few times in ancient memory and is attributed to actual collisions or close calls with large comets or other planetary bodies. This grouping of boulders that include Turtle Mother, sit high on the cliff overlooking the sea. The area in each boulder where the polarity reverses is in the left ear of the males and in the wombs of the women. The Miskito Indians, who populate the area, say that the biggest boulder is Turtle Mother. She will send the hatchlings out to sea and then she will bring them in again by magically reversing the polarity of her womb.
Turtle Mother: Early Caribbean Religion
Jack Rudloe believes that once the worship of Turtle Mother was a full blown religion of the Caribbean peoples, lunar, magical and life-affirming and revealing our human lives intertwined with that of the turtle in the natural order of things. Today, Turtle Mother is a myth of Caribbean told by the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua. They remember when the turtle was so plentiful that whole villages made their living from turtling; so plentiful that the loggerhead, the kemp’s ridley, the leatherback, and the hawksbill were common and familiar sights and the rhythms of the turtle’s lives were intertwined with the people who lived near the water
