The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012

4: The Calendar: Jewel of the Maya Crown

65 Western civilization is not alone in seeking its origins in deep time. We bundle our years into decades, our decades into centuries, and our centuries into millennia. Our ages—the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Middle Ages—are packaged into eras, such as the Christian and pre-Christian eras. For the believer, the Christian era will end with the second coming of Christ, for in the Christian historical view all things were made by God expressly for the ends they fulfill. The new era that will follow will constitute a timeless eternal existence to be experienced only by the true believer. Philosophers call such a temporal concept a teleological timeline, because it is dictated by things that happen at the end, which are responsible for propelling time’s arrow forward. Before Christianity introduced this linear concept, “big time” in the West was based in the pagan tradition of the Classical world. Time was made up of rhythmic, repetitive events centered on the return or reenactment of earlier events often reckoned by celestial T h e C a l e n d a r : J e w e l o f T h e M a y a C r o w n 4 The Calendar: Jewel of The Maya Crown 66 cycles, such as planetary conjunctions. (Recall our definition of the two kinds of time in the Preface—historical-linear and mythiccyclic .) Crossings of Jupiter and Saturn were popular choices in the ancient Chinese calendar, whereas the Chaldeans of the Middle East favored the assemblage of all the visible planets in the constellation of Cancer. The Hindu calendar, on the other hand, was a purely mathematical contrivance based on 1,000-year multiple cycles of years, called yugas. The grandest cycle of time measured in yuga lengths was thought to be a “day” in the life of Brahma. The bigger the tree, the deeper the roots. One way or another, all complex civilizations ultimately establish their origins in the very distant past. The Maya were no different when it came to the subject of time. They wove the history of their dynasties into the fabric of deep time in order to legitimize their right to rule. Our contemporary political leaders do no less when they conjure up famous figures from the past as role models: if it was good enough for Lincoln, or Washington, or Reagan, or Roosevelt, then it’s good enough for me! The Maya ruler also took advantage of time’s natural indicators in the sky as vehicles for validating authority. I do not mean to suggest here that the king or the commoner tilling the fields did not hold to any fundamental set of deeply revered beliefs underlying a well-thought-out Maya philosophy of time; in other words, I do not believe the power structure was simply manipulating time to hoodwink the people. That is too simple. During the Classic period the Maya developed a passionate interest in time and number. I think this is one of our biggest reasons for admiring them—they seem so much like us. By the middle of that period their interest flowered into a fascination that bordered on obsession. It is as if scribes and calendar keepers, all members of the elite class, perhaps led by one or two unknown geniuses, the likes of Newton and Einstein, had created a veritable Maya Institute of Advanced Studies. By examining some of the inscriptions the Maya produced during this exciting intellectual period we can begin to acquire a feeling for this mathematical passion and the skill that accompanied it. The Calendar: Jewel of The Maya Crown 67 Recall from our translation of Copan’s Stela B (Figure 4) that the first bits of information in a Maya inscription consist of numbers that refer to time. What distinguishes the Maya love affair with numbers is their preoccupation with what I have called the commensuration principle—the habit of organizing time cycles, large and small, to interlock and fit together in ratios of small whole numbers, such as eight to five, the seasonal year and the Venus cycle. (We will discuss some of these specific ratios below.) Where did these ideas about time management come from and how is it that timekeeping was catapulted to such a lofty level in Maya culture? Although what survives is carved in stone, the Maya probably engraved their earliest chronological records...