Thank Goodness It's Monday #387

UNDERSTANDING THE MYSTERIOUS MAYA

ANDTHE LESSON THEY DIDN’T LEARN

My plan for the end of the Mayan long-count calendar 13^th b'ak'tun? (December 21, 2012 if you somehow missed the news.)



Mayan Astronomy
as depicted in The Dresden Codex*



Par-tay! While others may be counting down the k’in (= the Mayan unit for days) with dread … heading for the survivalist hills … expecting a cosmic crash with some as yet detected planet …or digging in to weather some other apocalyptic catastrophe, my view is this: 

TGIM Takeaway:

What matters most is today.

 

How do you live today? How you live each day has more effect on what occurs after December 21, 2012 than any misunderstood interpretation of the history of a little understood people.

In order to better establish the link between this quasi-philosophical TGIM Takeaway and a panicky end-of-the-world mindset, let’s first establish some facts about –

The mysterious Maya. Maya history as we know it firsthand begins with Christopher Columbus. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea met a trading party of “locals” off the coast of Honduras on his fourth (and last) voyage in 1502. The story goes, when asked where they came from the reply was, “from a province called Maiam.”

In fact the ancient Mayan world encompassed much of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But following quickly on the heels of Columbus came other conquistadors and their attendant clerics who fairly well erased large chunks of Mayan history that otherwise might have informed our modern understanding. 

Then they moved on. And the jungle-shrouded existence of the Maya was all but forgotten until 1839 when explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood began surveying the area.

Stephens wrote: “… architecture, sculpture, and painting, all arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory had lived and passed away, and none knew that such things had been or could tell of their past existence.”

Impressive, right? And that led to a growing modern interest in the Mayan world that can now be traced back to 2000 BCE origins. The intervening years of archaeological study fill in much, but hardly all, detail.

The monumental architecture is now well known – the ceremonial centers dominated by pyramids, plazas, platforms, ball courts and palaces. These areas were ruled by leaders who, in constant rivalry with their neighbors, created a resource drain that contributed to the downfall of the Mayan civilization.

What does this have to do with December 21, 2012?

 

Some of the intellectual achievements of the Maya are as impressive as the architecture, most notably in the related areas of astronomy, mathematics and calendar making. 

Although they were rather fond of bloodletting and human sacrifice, and didn’t figure out the keystone arch or come up with a useful wheel, the Maya grasped the concept of zero and created a symbol for it long before the European world which overran them. 

Do the math. Using that symbol (and only two others) they developed a system based on the number 20. Reminder: We traditionally use a base of 10.

 

That mathematical ability, coupled with detailed observations of the heavens, enabled them to predict eclipses and create calendars as accurate in their way as the one in current use.

So the Maya mystery is: How and why did this civilization, so highly developed in some respects, disappear so quickly and completely?

The current pieced-together scholarly answer brings us back to December 21, 2012.

Unfortunately the calendar was not only a guide to keeping time, but was viewed as a predictor of the future, with each day having omens and associations – what Mayanist Michael Coe called “… a kind of perpetual fortune-telling machine guiding the destinies of the Maya ….”

Many contemporary theorists now feel that the strong belief of Mayan leaders in the predictive power of their calendar precipitated the downfall of the Mayan civilization. 

More specifically: Much like today, it seems that the end of a calendar cycle in 790 CE was believed to predestine political upheaval.

In their book Ancient Mysteries writers Peter James and Nick Thorpe conclude: “Warfare, social unrest, and invasions were therefore inevitable and should not be stopped because they were ingrained in the very fabric of the universe. Indeed wars became more bloody as rulers of neighboring cities fought during this ordained time of war, sacrificing their captives to feed the demands of the gods. Tired of watching their world fall apart as aristocrats did nothing but fight among themselves, the peasants took matters into their own hands.”

Whether this view of the disappearance of the mysterious Maya is entirely accurate, or whether it’s a contributing factor – along with overpopulation, disease, drought, or other natural disasters and capped by the invasion of the conquistadors – there’s still a TGIM lesson or two for us in the 21^st Century.

TGIM ACTION IDEA: What you do and how you think today has more impact on what occurs in your life in the days ahead than anything anyone suggests is planned outside of you.

TGIM IDEA IN ACTION: How you live each moment dictates tomorrow. No hocus-pocus, alignment of stars or calendar dates has greater power.

As we’ll probably remind you once again when 2012 rolls over to New Year 2013, a calendar is a very arbitrary thing; a human-made contrivance with starts and stops and steps in between that suit the planning and time management of the solar/lunar/seasonal cycles they measure. 

• They are structures we can use to our benefit if we endeavor to do so.
• Or they can lead to our downfall if we foolishly let a misplaced adherence to them dictate our future actions.

The future lies within. Being driven by the calendar – any calendar – or by the “wisdom” of the crowd shared via contemporary technology, may not serve as well as being guided by “good old gut reaction” – that established-by-experience instinct that tells you what action is right for you and when the time for action is right.

What goes around comes around.  Or vice versa. There seems to be no evidence that the Mayans themselves believed that the current version of creation would come to an end at its 13^th b'ak'tun. A five-numeral count will reset after the 13^th b'ak'tun, but this is celebrated as the completion of a cycle, and was not necessarily seen as a doomsday event by Mayan culture.

So let’s get ready to par-tay! If you're concerned about the fate of mankind, there are more pressing issues than the end of the Mayan calendar. If you’re considering making some sort of Maya “New B'ak'tun” Resolutions, keep the opportunities to create a brighter future in mind.

Geoff Steck
Chief Catalyst
Alexander Publishing & Marketing

8 Depot Square

Englewood, NJ 07631
201-569-5373
tgimguy@gmail.com

P.S. "We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism." Rigoberta Menchú said that. 

Why are we quoting her here, today? 

Here’s the Maya connection: She is an indigenous Guatemalan, of the K'iche' ethnic group who has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala's indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country.

 

Menchú is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. And, in case you missed it, she received the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize.

 

* In addition to a sophisticated number system the Maya had also developed a written language. However, because the Spanish conquerors were appalled at the religious practices of the meso-Americans they viewed anything not connected with their European-style religious beliefs, especially the writings about astronomy, as evil and to be destroyed. So only a few examples of the Maya codices survive. These codices are now named after the European cities where they eventually re-appeared.

Probably the best preserved is the Dresden Codex pictured here. It is a detailed account of the astronomical observations of the Maya.

The huge effort and accurate measurements of the Maya do not seem to be applied toward an effort to understand how or why the sky appears as it does. Instead, the heavens are treated as an immense, accurate piece of clockwork that is used in the same sense as the signs of astrology, to predict the future.

We can admire the technical skills of the Maya astronomers, be awed by the resources their society put into their temple/observatories, and even speculate that, given time, they might have produced a Maya genius who would have bent their effort into a more scientific direction.

However, so far as it went, their astronomy was a scientific dead end.