Here is a nostalgic reconstruction of the old fashioned Mayan methods. The wrong kind of workers with wrong thoughts are tortured to death in rooms under the pyramid ... A young worker has been given a powerful hallucinogen and a sexual stimulant ... Naked he is stripped down and skinned alive ... The Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time ...The Ouab bird stands there, screams, washing through his wild blue eyes. Others are crabs from the waist up clicking their claws in ecstasy, they dance around and mimic the flayed man. The scribes are busy with sketches ...Now he is strapped into a segmented copper centipede and placed gently on a bed of hot coals ... Soon the priests will dig the soft meat from the shell with their golden claws ... Here is another youth staked out on an ant hill honey smeared on his eyes and genitals ...Others with heavy weights on their backs are slowly dragged through the wooden troughs in which shards obsidian have been driven ...So the priests are the masters of pain and fear and death ...To do right... to obey the priests ... To do wrong? the priest's very presence and a few banal words....

The priests postulated and set up a hermetic universe of which they were the axiomatic controllers. In so doing they became Gods who controlled the known universe of the workers. They became Fear and Pain, Death and Time. By making opposition seemingly impossible they failed to make any provision for opposition. There is evidence that this control system broke down in some areas before the arrival of the White God. Stellae have been found defaced and overturned, mute evidence of a worker's revolution. How did this happen? The history of revolutionary movements shows that they are usually led by defectors from the ruling class. The Spanish rule in South America was overthrown by Spanish revolutionaries. The French were driven out of Algeria by Algerians educated in France. Perhaps one of the priest Gods defected and organised a worker's revolution ...

The priest Gods in the temple. They move very slowly, faces ravaged with age and disease. Parasitic worms infest their flesh. They are making calculations for the sacred books.

"400,000,000 years ago on this day a grievous thing happened..."

Limestone skulls rain in through the porticos. The Young Maize God leads the workers as they storm the temple and drag the priests out. They build a huge brush fire, throw the priests in and then throw the sacred books in after them. Time buckles and bends. The old Gods, surfacing from the immemorial depths of time, burst in the sky ... Mr Hart stands there looking at the broken stellae ... "How did this happen?"

[William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution]