TIMELORDS magazine - Cosmic Journeys with Maya Artist Branly Gio López

By Agent 76 - Jeanette Groenendaal

In the series Cosmic Journeys — NavaGraha: An Astrological Pilgrimage by Jeanette Groenendaal, we have been travelling through the planetary temples, ritual landscapes, and living cosmologies that shaped the film Dramayama.

​In this issue, the journey turns towards the film’s central companion: Branly Gio López, a contemporary Maya artist, researcher, and cultural practitioner from Guatemala. Dramayama is half shot in Guatemala and tells the story of Branly’s search and motivation.
Branly has spent many years studying and reactivating Maya cosmovision from a postcolonial, decolonial, and deeply personal perspective. His work moves between art, ancestral memory, cultural resistance, ritual practice, and the living calendars of the Maya world. In Dramayama, his presence opened a mirror between two ancient cosmological systems: the Navagraha of South India and the nine-petalled flower of Maya initiation. What began as an artistic and astrological encounter in Amsterdam became a pilgrimage across continents, through which questions of origin, time, identity, spirituality, and cultural survival could meet.

For those preparing to travel with C*I*A on the Venus Journey in the Ycatan, Mexico this coming September, this long-read offers a first encounter with Branly’s work and with the opening chapters of his guide to authentic Maya cosmology and the nine-petal initiation rituals rooted in Maya culture. His reflections are not presented as exotic knowledge, but as part of a living tradition that has endured colonisation, erasure, and displacement, and that continues to speak through fire, seeds, language, ceremony, and the memory of the stars.

Branly masters Nine-Petal readings and Tz’ite’ / Magic Bean divinations that offer a profound blessing to your lifepath. His insights remind us that cosmology is not an abstraction. It is a way of remembering the Earth, of re-entering time, and of restoring dignity to the ancestral intelligence that still moves through living cultures.

Further reading in TIMELORDS magazine...