A Rick Sage Mystery: Harley-riding PI, Rick Sage, follows his heart into darkness once again when he meets up with ten-year-old Pedro, a Mexican-American kid lost on the streets of Tijuana. Pedro hires Rick, with the two dollars and thirty-five cents he has left in his pocket, to find the gang of antiquities thieves who murdered his parents. Shadowed by a jaguar spirit Rick begins to believe is real, his promise to help the boy takes them on a trail leading from Tijuana to the Copper Canyon, then on to Mexico's Mayan ruins at Palenque, and down a jungle border river into Guatemala. Along the way, Rick and Pedro join up with a beautiful but mysterious redheaded nun, and a magical, fleet-footed Tarahumara shaman. Haunted by his own tragic childhood, Rick is determined to fulfill his promise to Pedro to find the murderers and recover the Jade Death Mask of the Jaguar Cult, as they are drawn deeper and deeper into a dark plot lit only by the beacons of a jaguar's eyes.

In France, Declan Carberry is busy trying to solve a string of ritual serial murders. Are they connected to the South American find of a jade mask? Should Declan be searching the rainforest or concentrating on his higher consciousness for a solution?

Seven authentic Mexican folk masks, each based on an authentic historic example, include two sinister devil masks, a skull mask, a spectacular bat mask, and a tiger mask. Easy-to-follow instructions.

Drawing on secondary works in archaeology, art history, folklore, ethnohistory, ethnography, and literature, the authors maintain that the mask is the central metaphor for the Mesoamerican concept of spiritual reality. Covers the long history of the use of the ritual mask by the peoples who created and developed the mythological tradition of Mesoamerica. Chapters: (1) the metaphor of the mask in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: the mask as the God, in ritual, and as metaphor; (II) metaphoric reflections of the cosmic order; and (III) the metaphor of the mask after the conquest: syncretism; the Pre-Columbian survivals; the syncretic compromise; and today's masks. Over 100 color and black-&-white photos.

Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a preeminent student of the Maya, made many breakthroughs in deciphering Maya writing, particularly in demonstrating that the glyphs record the deeds of actual human beings, not gods or priests. This discovery opened the way for a history of the Maya, a monumental task that Proskouriakoff was engaged in before her death in 1985. Her work, Maya History, has been made ready for press by the able editorship of Rosemary Joyce. Maya History reconstructs the Classic Maya period (roughly A.D. 250-900) from the glyphic record on stelae at numerous sites, including Altar de Sacrificios, Copan, Dos Pilas, Naranjo, Piedras Negras, Quirigua, Tikal, and Yaxchilan. Proskouriakoff traces the spread of governmental institutions from the central Peten, especially from Tikal, to other city-states by conquest and intermarriage. Thirteen line drawings of monuments and over three hundred original drawings of glyphs amplify the text.

The education of humanity is the key to the next century's culture, its social and practical life. The main concerns of education are perennial, but the continuous flood of inventions, the technological innovations that re-shape life, calls for a radically new appraisal of the situation, such as only philosophy can provide. Answering the call of humanity for the measure, sense of proportion and direction that could re-orient present and future education, the phenomenology of life - integral and scientific, in a dialogue with the arts, the sciences, and the humanities - proposes an ontopoietic model of life's unfolding as the universal paradigm for this re-orientation. Taking the Human Creative Condition as its Archimedean point, it offers a unique context for a fresh investigation of the concerns of education, both perennial and immediate.