Today’s guest contributor is Prof. Enrique Alberto Gómez.
My first inkling that something had gone wrong in the culture with our understanding of the Maya Calendar was in 2009 when I was invited to an alternative school to talk about Maya astronomy. I thought it was an oddly specific request. This alternative school was set up by the local school district at the time to address students with behavioral problems.
I prepared a hands-on exercise where the students had to find the Maya date on drawings of stone carvings (not a hard thing, just find the bar-and-dot numerals at the beginning of each hieroglyphic inscription) write them down, and enter them on a browser-based date calculator that I had authored to get the equivalent date in the Western Julian calendar. We went over the constellations, the significance of the Milky Way, and how it would appear to rise and set on the horizon. The students were interested and engaged.
After the class, a teacher took me to the side and said how pleased he was that one particular student had quietly but successfully completed the activity.
“We haven’t been able to get him to do any work,” the teacher explained. “Whenever we give out an assignment, he falls back on how he had learned that the Maya predicted that the world would end in 2012 and that there was no point in learning anything. He’s been quite depressed about this and disrupting the other students.”
Later that year, Ronald Emmerich released a film by the name 2012 with the plot centered on a worldwide cataclysm reportedly predicted by the ancient Maya. This film also included an alarming cartoon animation that served as an introduction to millions of people to the Maya calendar while at the same time boosting eschatological interpretations far from the consensus of Maya scholars. Authors like Daniel Pinchbeck in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl were claiming an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean.
A year later I attended a conference of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. During a session dedicated to dispelling beliefs about the 2012 end of the world, I got to hear from NASA public outreach and other academics sharing alarming messages they had received from the public, such as a practical query from a distraught woman wondering when she should put her dogs down so they would not have to suffer through the end of the world. What I saw in the Q&A session is several earnest voices from science educators and popularizers concurring that it was imperative we debunk this apocalyptic claim as thoroughly and consistently as possible.
But I also saw something that troubled me as well. In that panel, there were no Indigenous Maya people represented, and their absence was implicitly conceding that the Maya past and present did believe such claims. There did not seem to be any interest nor evidence that anyone in the room had reached out to professional archeologists or epigraphers of the Classic Period Maya to get their thoughts on how to best to educate the public while being sensitive to the millions of speakers of Maya languages alive today.
Maya Gallery, INAH, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City. [Public Domain Courtesy: Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D.]
By that time, I had already given several presentations on Maya astronomy and their calendar to general audiences and even groups of amateur astronomers. I had hoped to introduce these audiences to a worldview and a concept of time that is different from one shaped by the Gregorian Calendar. But afterward, I concluded that there was little or no interest in what non-European people thought about time. People just wanted the conclusion about whether the world would end in our lifetime rather than any reasoning about why.
I came to understand Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta’s assertion that in the West we are interested in the products of Indigenous thought, but we are not interested in the Indigenous thought process that produced it. There was also no shortage of living Maya speaking up.
Jesus Gómez of the Guatemala-based Grand Conference of Counselors and Guides Ajq’ijab’ Mayab’ told The Sunday Telegraph in 2009, “There is no concept of apocalypse in the Mayan culture.”
Did the Maya believe that the world would end in 2012 before the conquest?
There are preconquest stone inscriptions that reflected Indigenous thought. Scholars were actively discussing it for years. Of the corpus of hieroglyphic inscriptions, there is only one known inscription that mentions the completion of the 13th baktun cycle (each baktun lasting about 400 years) that took place in December 2012 on the Western calendar. This was Monument 6 found in the archeological site of Tortugero.
The translation of the damaged text by David Stuart and Mark Van Stone states on such a date, “(It will be) the descent of the Many Strides (uncertain translation) to the great (or red) ma-(undeciphered glyph).”
There the epigraphers point out the ambiguity from glyph homonyms could mean that the figure of Many Strides could also be translated as “9-Dog-Tree,” “Many Roots,” or “Many Supports.”
Either way, this is not a central figure in any other know text. This would be the most underwhelming declaration for a world cataclysm if it is one at all. There is more evidence that the Classic Period Maya did not believe in civilization-ending disasters than otherwise.
William Saturno of Boston University commented to National Geographic News at the time, “We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change.”
This is not the message that we were wanting to hear from the past. Reflecting a decade since, the obvious conclusion is that we were projecting our anxieties about the condition of the world unto another culture, and we were audacious enough to tell that living culture what they believed rather than engage in conversation.
Apocalyptic disaster narratives, whether they be biblical or science-based, are comforting in a perplexing way because they are singular in time, unrelenting and unavoidable thus giving us a license to abdicate collective responsibility for long-term action. Predictions of immediate disasters catch our attention, but we cannot even process a call to respond to planetary crises at a scale of several generations.
If there are no days of reckoning but instead millennia of long emergencies, what can the ritual calendar of the Maya past or present do for us?
I am a Mesoamerican Reconstructionist. I draw from historical documents and living traditions from the cultures of Mesoamerica: Maya, Mexica, Totonac, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha, Otomi, and dozens of others. This cultural zone comprises over 50 distinctive living languages: some as different from each other as Vietnamese is from Portuguese.
Even within each language area, you cannot claim that there was an orthodoxy of belief or rigidity of practice ever. At best, you can claim that there was a shared vocabulary of images and cognate practices, and at the center of this is a ritual calendar that lasts 260 days of two cycles of 13 numbered days and 20 named days. The closest analog in our calendar is the days of the week. A day named “13-Flower” by the Mexica will be followed by the day “1-Alligator” just like Monday follows Sunday.
What we call the Maya Calendar is a system of several concurrent cycles with shorter ones adding to progressively longer ones like digits in an odometer. Since the 2012 debacle, I have turned my attention less to these longer cycles toward this baseline 260-day calendar. It is this one that you can find in Olmec ceramic seals dated to 650 BCE. We do not know what language the Olmec spoke, nor if they were even one culture, but their date glyphs can be read.
Stone version of the Maya 260 calendar at the Smithsonian – Image credit: Matthew G. Bisanz – CC BY-SA 3.0
The 260-day calendar was adopted by several language groups and survived several social collapses over the past two millennia: El Mirador in 150 CE, the Classic Period collapse in the Maya lowlands and Central Mexico in the 700’s, or the Itza in 1250’s. With each new adoption, you see both the preservation of form as well local adaptation. While the Yucatec Maya Tzolkin, Zapotec Piye and Nahua Tonalpohualli all observed the same day-name meaning “Monkey” (Chuen, Loo, Ozomatli), they would also observe nine days later a day-name meaning either “Lord,” “Eye,” or “Flower” (Ahau, Lao, Xochitl).
If this calendar is not keyed to the agricultural year of about 365.24 days, why did it survive?
I have now followed the Mesoamerican calendars for a quarter of a century. I have marked each day by flipping cards, marking on boards, writing on journals, and spinning cardboard wheels. I wrote its dates on my professional research notebook entries as well as dream journals marking patterns and synchronicities.
What I discovered on my own is that it is precisely the fact that it is not locked to the seasons and the agricultural year that makes this calendar useful. It allows you to step outside the agricultural cycle to realize that there are biological, social, and ecosystem-wide cycles that are just as important.
It is also still a human-scale cycle: 260 comes close to the human gestation period. It is easy to teach and remember. There are 20 fingers and toes and 13 major joints, so the shape of our body is a mnemonic for it. Following it, it becomes easy to generate heuristics to space events in time. I water my plants on “Snake” and “Eagle” days, check and replace filters on “Wind,” change contact lenses on “Flint,” start and begin diets on “Dog” to “Flower.” Day names with a numeral were also used to name historic individuals, cultural heroes, and mythic figures, so you are regularly prompted to remember their stories.
These last few years I have asked what it would take not just to follow the calendar, but to live it thoroughly. Adapting it to my local milieu. Use it to think about patterns in time just like millions of people centuries past.
I had a taste of this during the pandemic lockdowns when the marking of the days of the week was not driven by work obligations. There were days when I could not remember if it was a Monday or a Tuesday, but I was certain it was a “Seven-Monkey” day.
I live in a subtropical, nut-bearing forest region of Western North Carolina where we put attention to mast years when oak, hickory, and beech trees produce more nuts than usual. Poor nut-producing years mean that bears make their way to backyards. Looking at 30 years of data on nut production locally, I generated an almanac with a heuristic based on the Mesoamerican Calendar.
Years when Venus reaches a greatest western elongation on a day named “Earth,” “Alligator,” “Death,” or “Monkey” are more likely to be mast years, but autumns preceding a greatest eastern elongation for Venus on days “Eagle”, “Flower”, “Snake”, or “Dog” are likely to bear poor fruit, so animals will decline.
With this, I am not saying that Venus is responsible for this activity. Nor am I saying that the ancients predicted such a pattern. I am certain that this pattern applies to my local ecosystem but not necessarily yours, and that likely it was not true when the calendar was invented as human-driven climate change has changed the seasonal patterns where I live.
However, it is the use of the 260-day calendar that allows anyone to search for their own local time patterns. The calendar can teach you how to think like the forest you inhabit. That is the calendar’s genius.
One day, I hope to use the 260-day calendar to craft an almanac for my river basin of the Tuckasegee River, the second oldest river in the world. I also know that one day, such documents will be destroyed just like deer-skin folded books rotted during the collapse of the Classic Period cities in the 700’s or were burned in the 1500s by Bishop Diego de Landa who claimed that such books contained “nothing but lies.” And I must be OK with this because I have faith that such patterns, if real, will be rediscovered again.
Ivo Dominguez writes that if the corpus of the Western magical tradition were destroyed except for the practice of gathering in a circle and acknowledging the cardinal directions, then an essential part of this tradition would be recuperated. I believe that keeping a count of 260 days will maintain the continuity of some of the cultures of Mesoamerica.
We leave the focus from a supposed calendar apocalyptic prediction to the wonder of mundane patterns in a time marked by a day count that is 26 centuries old. I get comfort in connection and solidarity with people across the chasm of climate-driven collapse and colonial decimation by following the same daily rhythm of day counting.
And it is as simple as a gesture of naming each day and repeating the Nahuatl daily phrase recorded by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, “Ca ie tequitiz, ie tlacotiz in Tonatiuh; quen vetziz in cemihuitl/Now it will work; now it will labor, the Sun. How will this day end?”
Enrique Alberto Gómez was born in Mexico City. He is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Western Carolina University with a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama.
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