The Apotheosis of Janaab' Pakal: Science, History, and Religion at Classic Maya Palenque

3: Constructing Portals

C h a p t e r t h r e e Constructing Portals Approximately 150 years after the death of Janaab’ Pakal, at the end of the Classic period, the city of Palenque was abandoned. Its structures lay dormant for several centuries thereafter, slowly reclaimed by the forest. Interest in the ruins remained local until the end of the eighteenth century when representatives of the Spanish Crown visited the site in search of collectibles (Griffin 1974; Schele and Freidel 1990:460). Soon named after the nearby town of Palenque, the ruins attracted further visitors who made drawings of a number of carved tablets found in three small temples. Over the next 100 years, these drawings made their way into the nascent Mayanist literature, eventually piquing John Teeple’s mathematical interest, as noted in the last chapter. 75 Constructing Portals 76 Teeple recognized that a portion of the calendric dates in many Classic Maya inscriptions contained lunar information. Maya scribes had included the moon age after the Long Count date, usually sandwiched between the chol qiij and the haab’. It is fifteen days after the arrival of the second goddess moon. X3 is the name of the twenty-nine days. By convention, moon ages were recorded as days elapsed since first appearance, and each lunation was assigned to a supernatural patron (for complications, see Satterthwaite 1951). For the Classic Maya, three patrons (a goddess, the Jaguar God of the Underworld, and Death) governed up to six months each in accord with local numerology (Aldana 2001b, 2006a; for earlier work, see Linden 1991; Satterthwaite 1959; Schele et al. 1992; Teeple 1931). Before the advent of archaeoastronomy, Teeple recognized that lunar data in several Palenque inscriptions produced an intriguing question that introduces the central problem addressed in this chapter. Notably, three dates possessing lunar records corresponded to times approximately 3,000 years before the Classic period. Teeple recognized that either the scribes at Palenque were privy to extremely old records of the moon or the moon age was calculated based on an approximation to its synodic period (see Table 3.1). Taking the latter scenario as the more likely, Teeple was able to determine the Maya approximations used in these texts as 81 moons counted as 2,392 days—or 29.5308642 days per month (Teeple 1931:65). Some forty years later, Floyd Lounsbury argued that Teeple had recovered examples of a specific type of interval—one intended to do more than simply record an ancient event. Lounsbury (1976:218) proposed that the dates from mythological times were constructed to parallel historical events such that both might be considered “like-inkind .” To illustrate, Lounsbury made use of the date 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ajaw 18 Tzek, the birth date of the primordial mother figure Ix Muwaan Mat and the first date listed in Table 3.1. This date and the birth of Janaab’ Pakal, 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ajaw 13 Pop, both occurred on the same day Constructing Portals 77 in the chol qiij: 8 Ajaw. The large number of days that separated the two births was therefore a multiple of 260 days. This correspondence is not so surprising or infrequent, but Lounsbury dug deeper to find that the large interval also contained other “significant” factors connecting the two events: 364, the “Maya computing year”; 780, the synodic period of Mars; and 819, the period of a cycle recognized for some time but as yet not explicated. Lounsbury dubbed this phenomenon—of which he found a number of other instances—a “contrived number” (Lounsbury 1976:215; 1978). These date pairs were not serendipitously linked by fate, he claimed, but intentionally manipulated by Palenque astronomers to effect certain “like-in-kind” relationships, using both astronomical and calendric cycles. Lounsbury’s “like-in-kind” proposal stemmed from his understanding of the Palenque inscriptions as heavily concerned with dynastic legitimation (Schele and Freidel 1990:223). We will see in the pages that follow that a concern with legitimation was important but also that a fuller historical treatment reveals more subtlety and intricacy than Lounsbury or his colleagues expected. We will find that there were both practical dynastic purposes for calendric contrivances as well as religious motivations and also that such a practice does not mandate an interpretation of deterministic history. The practical purposes fit into a tradition for maintaining—or recovering—the rights and responsibilities of the ruling elite...