If we wateh the daily position of appearance and disappearance of Venus relative to the horizon, two facts become obvious. First, Venus fluctuates like a pendulum over an 8-year period between two great horizon extremes eentered on the east and west points of the horizon; and second, the seasonal recurrence of these great extremes is correlated with the length of the disappearance intervals before morning heliacal rise, which can vary several days either way from the well-known 8-day mean. One explanatory note about each of these observations: on the first one, we might well expect a Venus 8-year period because of the way the 584-day cycle interlocks harmoniously with the seasonal 365-day year in the ratio of 5 to 8; and on the second, the 8-day disappearanee period quoted in dots and bars in the Dresden Codex is only an average. Depending on the season of the year, Venus can be absent from the sky for 20 days or more; and at the other periodic extreme, it can return to the sky on the very next morning following the evening on which it disappears. In both cases, 8 emerges as the quintessential—or we should say "oct-essential"?—Venus number, at least for those who follow its course across the sky with rapt attention.
These observations may seem a bit esoteric. Indeed, they were of little importance to European astronomers, who paid little attention to what happens in the region of the sky close to the horizon: our astronomers were simply too busy looking up. But both these Venus precepts were not only carefully watched by Maya astronomers, but also put to good use by the patrons they served to create an atmosphere for worshiping the gods in which aspects of both the environmental and social world merged in the space of the ceremonial center. There are at least three well-documented instances of such Venus timings in Maya structures at Copan, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza.
Temple 22 at Copan has at least two attractions for the modern astronomer. We call it the Temple of Venus because of the presence of Venus symbols (exactly the same kind as in the Dresden Codex) in an elaborate sculpture adorning its entrance (figure 6.14A). It also possesses a window, an unusual attribute for a Maya building. The slotlike aperture, measuring about 70-by-15 centimeters, opens on the west side of the building. Its axis is parallel to the baseline connecting a pair of carved stelae (numbered 10 and 12 on Copan maps), two bigger-than-life pillars perched on hills 7 kilometers apart on opposite sides of the Copan Valley where they likely served as territorial markers. Now, the view from stela 12 to stela 10 aligns with the sun set point on 12 April, the annual start of the Maya agricultural season. Today farmers still initiate the growing season by burning the old vegetation to prepare for the coming of the rainy season. The Venus symbolism on Temple 22 suggests that it too may be involved in the sun-rain connection.
Today the view out the narrow window is blocked both by intervening vegetation and by another building the Maya added at a later date. But even if we could peer through the slot on a really dark night, we still would not see what the Maya saw when they built it; the sky has changed. With modern computer graphics, however, we can effectively climb back into that darkened chamber over a thousand years ago and replace our eyes with theirs. When we do, we discover that Venus passed through the narrow window at regular intervals that marked important points in the agricultural cycle. Its first appearance in the slot coincided with the coming of the rains in the year before the
FIGURE 6.14 Maya expressions of their knowledge of Venus. [A] Detail of the bicephalic (two-headed) serpent hanging over the doorway of Temple 22 at Copan shows in the middle a Venus symbol (inverted) like ones found on p. 46 of the Dresden Codex in figure 6.9. A sun symbol (not shown) lies higher up on the serpent. (B) The House of the Governor at Uxmal (see figure 6.13). (C) The view from its central doorway aligns with a distant pyramid as well as with one of Venus's temporal turning points on the horizon. (D) Carvings on the building attest to Venus worship. They include over 300 Venus glyphs, and (?) the magic Venus number "8," shown as a bar from which three dots are suspended. (F) Windows in the Caracol Observatory at the ruins of Chichen Itza capture the rays of setting Venus at both its horizon extremes. Source: Photos by H. Hartung.
Planet reached one of its horizon extremes. And the last appearance of Venus in the window marked the coming of the rains in the year following an extreme. Imagine a cuckoo clock, whose pendulum climbs to its greatest height every time the little bird inside chirps. Venus swinging and rain falling: the two beat rhythmically together. Like bird and pendulum, they constitute a single entity when viewed from the proper perspective. This correlation could mean that one of the principal purposes of the temple was to host the rites related to the annual coming of the rains and the growth of the new maize crop. The window, like the secret Dresden document, could have served as the observatory through which the Maya priests sighted and determined the celestial event.
Uxmal is the site of a second example of an ancient Maya building tied to the celebration of Venus events. Typical of the ancient Maya ruins of northern Yucatan, the ruins of Uxmal overlook a virtually flat horizon dotted with distant sites which often are visible from the tops of its remaining pyramids. Most of them were erected about a d 800, and they all line up on the same east-of-north axis, except for the House of the Governor (figure 6.14B). This imposing structure, so nicknamed by modern travelers because it looks regal enough to have housed a ruler, lies perched on an artificial square mound about 10 acres in extent. Its visual aspect is remarkable even to the casual visitor, for it is skewed out of line nearly 30 degrees, its doorway facing south of east.
Standing on the "porch" of that building, you can sight along a perpendicular line from the great central doorway of the building over a solitary man-made mound 6 kilometers distant—the only blip on a featureless, flat horizon. The sight line from Uxmal to the distant pyramid also points to one of the Venus turnaround points or extremes. If you stood in the doorway of the palace at the right time in about A D 800, you would have seen Venus hovering above the distant pyramid when it made its first appearance in the southeastern sky at the time of arrival at one of its extreme points. Did a great ceremony celebrating cyclic closure take place on the porch of the Governor's House on that occasion? Was a ruler's accession to office being commemorated? Perhaps a marriage between rival city-states sealed the completion of the social side of the time cycle. Or was it the taking of captives in war for which the Maya of Bonampak already had invoked Venus, or perhaps an agricultural event as at Copan? Not many inscriptions survive on the fragile limestone carvings that make up
Uxmal's literary corpus. But the masks of the rain god Chac that adorn the building may hold part of the answer. Looking across the cornice of the Governor's House, we can see carved Venus symbols—hundreds of them—positioned beneath the eyelids of the Chac masks. And on the palace cornerstones is found the number 8, the Venus number carved in the form of a bar and three dots carved onto the stucco masks (figure 6.14D, E).
As for the distant pyramid, an arduous trip through the rough brush flanking the Pan-American highway near Uxmal reveals the aligned distant mound (C) to be the largest among an array of buildings that rival Uxmal both in size and in extent—the ruins of another ancient city. Once it was connected to Uxmal by a sacbe (an elevated "white road") that began just across from the Governor's House. The cosmic axis that ties Uxmal with the neighboring site raises an interesting question which cannot be answered without further study: Did the Maya notion of geography employ cosmological ideas that included a set of geometrical and astronomical rules for the placement and orientation not only of individual buildings like the House of the Governor but also of entire ceremonial centers relative to one another?
The Caracol of Chichen Itza (figure 6.14F) offers a third example of Venus-aligned architecture. Chichen Itza is a sprawling Maya-Toltec site in north-central Yucatan, and its Caracol symbolizes the joining of these two cultures, an event that took place in Yucatan sometime around the tenth century. According to Spanish chroniclers, the Caracol's round shape symbolized Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, the Venus deity. We know it was built at about the same time and roughly in the same area where the Dresden Codex and its Venus table originated. It may even be the almanac in stone that incorporated the Venus directions and astronomical observations that gave rise to the Venus calendar written in the codex. The building looks like a cylinder resting atop a two-layer quadrangular platform, one tier being misaligned by 5 degrees from the others. (Misalignment always seems to indicate that a building may be astronomically oriented—as is true even of our modern solar-heated houses.) Four entranceways on the perimeter of the cylinder give access to four more doorways inside. These lead to a narrow passageway that coils upward like the shell of a snail and leads to a rectangular room at the top of the structure (this coiled shape gives the building its modern name "Caracol" or snail in Spanish). Three windows are all that remain venting outward from the chamber,- they open
To the south and west and can only have been made to look at the heavens through. Modern studies have revealed close correlations with astronomical events at the local horizon for most alignments that have been measured on the building. These include sunset at the equinoxes and sunset on the days the sun passed the zenith.
Most significantly, four of the most important directions match the Venus horizon extremes. The base of the lower platform and the principal altar, which support a pair of round columns set into the stairway of the skewed upper platform, marked the Venus northerly extreme around a. d 1000, about the time the building was erected. A diagonal sightline through one of the windows of the upper chamber is exactly parallel to this direction. Another window alignment matches with the Venus set position when it attained its southern extreme. In these orientations lay the priestly power of prediction, for by sighting where Venus disappeared at the western horizon, astronomers situated in the Caracol could predict precisely when it would reappear in the morning sky. Thus, they could anticipate whether the great luminary, the god Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, would arrive before or after the 8-day average they had calculated in the codices. Building alignments are a reasonable way of permanently encoding significant astronomical information in a landscape devoid of natural peaks and valleys that might aid in the task of marking time. As we look more deeply into the role that architecture played in Maya cosmic expression, we might well expect to find more structures astronomically aligned, for only recently have we come to view the Maya as a people who saw time and space connected in this concrete, physical way. Apparently this form of expression was allowed to develop and flower in different ways in different Maya cities. In the Caracol, the west-facing windows in a single building caught the essence of Venus's motion; while at Uxmal, time was a factor in the spatial relations among different buildings.
For the Maya, keeping time by the stars did not simply entail writing a bunch of numbers down in books. Cosmically timed cyclic events needed to be piped directly into the environment where the ritual took place. For us, it is the closed interior space of cathedral and synagogue; for the Maya, it was the open exterior space of the ceremonial center. Venus, priest, and people—all had to arrive in the theater at precisely the same instant. This is why the priests of Uxmal distorted the layout of the House of the Governor, why the Maya skewed the axes of their cities all across Yucatan. Keeping the right time was an intimate part of the Maya notion of city planning.
Both Maya public art and architecture seem to focus upon celestial power as the ultimate creative force in the universe. At the same time, these expressive media offer a public display of the power of kinship in Maya social life. The mixture of kinship and divine authority evokes values remote from the way we run our cities today.
World History
