Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos

3. Maya Politico-Religious Calendrics

chapter 3 Maya Politico-Religious Calendrics A direct-historical approach to Classic lowland Maya political organization begins with proximate groups—close in time, location, language, and culture—for which there is ample information about not only political structures and functions but also their archaeological correlates. Such groups are the Postclassic and Colonial period Maya of the northern Yucatán peninsula, whose geopolitical organization was ordered through a complex web of calendrical cycles and their regular celebration . This chapter focuses on the nature of Maya calendrical science, on the calendrics of the Postclassic Maya of the northern lowlands, and on the principal Maya textual sources for information on ritual surrounding 256-year may cycles, the books of the chilam b’alams. Maya Cosmology and Calendrical Science Maya political organization was rooted in cosmology, religion, and temporal cycling, themselves inextricably bound: “time is cosmic order,” asserts Farriss (1987:574). And Barbara Tedlock (1992:1) notes, “The ancient Maya were great horologists, students of time[,] . . . interested not only in the quantities of time but also in its qualities, especially its meaning for human affairs.” The Maya viewed time as both linear (the familiar western conception of historical time) and cyclical. Cyclical time seems peculiar—even prelogical—in the modern world, casually dismissible by the epigram “History repeats itself.” But belief in cyclical time, and its integration with linear time, is widespread in prehistory and among modern non-Western peoples (Eliade 1954; Geertz 1973:389–398). In fact, the Maya view of time and a quadripartite universe is not too distant from that of today’s physicists, who see the relatively undifferentiated past, present, and future “laid out in a fourdimensional block composed of time and the three spatial dimensions” (Davies 2002:43). Still, the Maya transcended the familiar recurrence of day and night, and rainy and dry seasons, to calculate and commensurate the infinitely interlocking periodicities of months, years, eclipses, and movements of astral bodies, simultaneously retrodicting them thousands of years into the past and predicting them thousands of years into the future (see Lounsbury 1978; Aveni 1981; Milbrath 1999). Maya skills in predictive astronomy allowed them to foreknow upcoming celestial events, which provided a justification for scheduling important rituals and a “sacred mandate for elite decision-making” (Justeson 1989:104). In addition, astronomers ’ calculation tables permitted them to project events backward in time, thereby manufacturing “precursors” and “precedents” for the timing of ritual and other activities in the present and future (Justeson 1989:104). This is how the Maya created and re-created their calendars , their histories, their elite affairs, and even their verbal arts (Fought 1985), an unceasingly recursive process that permitted them to “remember their future and anticipate their past” (Farriss 1987:589; see also Bloch 1977). Ancient Mesoamerican peoples from Mexico through Costa Rica shared a basic native calendrical system. According to Edmonson (1988: 4), “[D]espite its employment by nearly 100 ethnic groups speaking almost as many different languages, it has retained . . . [its] unity over a period of more than 2600 years. This is not just a matter of pattern similarity but of precise mathematical accuracy in the measurement of time.” Irrespective of this essential unity, there were sufficient differences in the basic Mesoamerican calendars that at least sixty variants are known (Edmonson 1988:Fig. 3). The ancient Maya, primus inter pares of this system, also maintained numerous calendars based on alignments, visibilities, and movements of the sun, moon, Venus, Mars, and other celestial bodies, as well as occurrences of eclipses and other phenomena. Precise records tracked both linear and cyclical time, but temporal cycling was paramount. The intricacies of Maya calendrics, including correlations with modern calendars, need not be pursued here, but certain points are crucial to understanding Maya concepts of time and the temporal units incorporated into the may (for a fuller discussion of Maya calendrics, see Thompson 1960; Edmonson 1988; Sharer 1994:513–629; Marcus 1992a: 132–140; B. Tedlock 1992; Lounsbury 1978; Aveni 1981; Milbrath 1999). Maya Calendars The fundamental unit of Maya time was the day, or k’in. The k’in interrelated and embodied notions of sun, day, and time and became “not an abstract entity but a reality enmeshed in the world of myths, a divine being, origin of the cycles which govern all existing things” (Leónmaya politico-religious calendrics 57 58 maya political science Portilla 1988:33; B. Tedlock 1992:2–3). The Maya...