What kind of people dare to write their history alongside that of the gods—to use time as a vehicle to legalize and canonize the authority of their rulership of the state? What were they like? Their effigies first begin to appear on carved monuments in Maya cities shortly before the beginning of the Christian era in the Old World. Today there is no doubt the figures sculpted on Maya statues were real people; we have even given them nicknames like Bird Jaguar, King Chocolate, 18 Rabbit, Lady Zac-Kuk, and Shield Pacal, after the pictorial aspects that make up hieroglyphs that represent their names. Most of them were members of various royal bloodlines, though a generation ago we believed they were gods or other mythical characters conjured up by mystical metaphysical Maya who were concerned only with astronomical knowledge for its own sake—those New World Platos and Aristotles I mentioned at the start of this chapter.
The Tablet of the Cross at Palenque (figure 6.8) reveals one of the most graphic attempts made by the Maya to link genealogical with mythic time. This Classic Maya city is located southeast of Vera Cruz, where the humid Gulf Coast plain meets the mountainous inland rain forest. The engraved stucco tablet, with its nearly life-sized figures, lies in a recessed chamber in the Temple of the Cross, so called because the cross-shaped symbol at the center of the sculpture was thought by early explorers to represent a Christian cross (more likely it is a tree of life that symbolizes the axis connecting heaven with the underworld). The cross is adorned with a double-headed serpent and topped by a huge bird; both represent sky deities, the ultimate source of royal power. King Shield Pacal is the smaller figure on the left. He has just died and, like the setting sun, is about to pass into the underworld. The lid of the sarcophagus in his tomb, which lies only a hundred yards away, shows him making the descent. In the Cross tablet Pacal passes the symbols of royal power on to his son, Chan Bahlum, the larger figure who stands to the right of the cross-tree.
The Tablet of the Cross depicts a great moment of tension—the point of transition in the succession of rulership; he had erected the temple in celebration of this important event. Much of the imagery in the scene is concerned with the vestments of power. Notice the sacrif i-cial stingray spine, the instrument of penitential bloodletting, along the axis of the cross. Chan Bahlum holds the same symbol in his hand just below the kin/sun floral symbol in the depiction on the outer left panel; we can even see the sacrificial blood flowing from it. And on the inner right panel, he receives the serpent-footed jester god, an instrument connoting rulership.
The inscriptions (not shown) on the tablet artistically express the symmetry the Maya envisioned between natural and supernatural worlds, laced together by the thread of time. They tell of events in the lives of the king that are combined with happenings from the past, many of which refer to astronomical events that actually occurred in Palenque. The inscriptions on the left half of the tablet, flanking the dead father, date from baktun 1, a time preceding Pacal's life by three and a half millennia. They offer a chronology of legendary events— the birth of the gods at Palenque from whom Pacal is said to have descended, gods who existed even before the beginning of the present era. In stark contrast, in the text to the right of the living descendant of Pacal, the scribe has recorded dynastic historical events—what we would call real time events. In tune with the katun and tzolkin prophecies, the Maya rulers advertise these events on the right side as re-enactments or consequences of the godly events carved on the left side. Quasi-historical happenings bridge the birth of the gods with statements about the immediate past lineage of Pacal and his son. For example, one name recorded at the bottom of the left panel as well as at the top right is thought to be that of an Olmec ruler born in 993 b c. (our time), who acceded to the throne in 967 b. c. Since Pacal died late in the seventh century a. d., shortly after which the Temple of the Cross and its commemorative tablet were erected, this luminary must have preceded the Palenque king by nearly seventeen hundred years, a greater interval than the one separating Moses from Christ. Surely he
FIGURE 6.8 (overleaf) Dynastic and deistic time. The Tablet of the Cross at Palenque commemorates the accession of Chan Bahlum (right) who receives the instruments of office from his deceased father. Shield Pacal. A glyphic text to the right of this panel is essentially family history, but a matching text to the left ties the ruling family's roots to the birth of the gods at Palenque. Source: L. Scheie, "Accession Iconography of Chan Bahlum in the Group of the Cross at Palenque," in M. Greene Robertson, ed., The Art, Iconography and Dynastic History of Palenque, part III (Pebble Beach, Calif.: R. L. Stevenson School, 1976), fig. 6.
Must be legendary, at least in part. This same juxtaposition of real and mythic time scales, with legendary interfacing, is repeated in other tablets at Palenque. In each, the principal focus is the passage into the afterlife of the great lord Shield Pacal. To judge from all the Palenque monuments dedicated to him, he must have been as influential in the New World as Caesar or Alexander in the Old.
Maya kings tell their dynastic story not by writing out a chronological list of dates, but by recording elapsed time. The inscriptions always begin with an event, then an interval, then another event follows, then another interval, another event, and so on, most of the human events in the inscription denoting the birth and death of his ancestors. Epigraphers call these intervals "distance numbers"—with, I think, the deliberate intention of implying that the Maya really thought of time as distance, a road traveled. Things happen in rest periods or breaks separated by these distance numbers. All events are pegged to a Long Count date at the beginning of the inscription. During these intervals, the gods carry time's burden from one happening to the next. With inventions like Long Count and distance number, a ruler like Pacal could proclaim the longevity of his bloodline in concrete terms. His rulership could acquire new depth, and the monumental carvings would demonstrate his permanence in the public eye.
The change of presidents and premiers, the death of a ruler and the succession to office of his replacement—what a critical time in the history of the state. Such an abrupt discontinuity, so unsettling; for the Maya it would be like a kink in the circle of time. How would the people know that once their old leader was gone, his son would possess the same powers? What guarantees it? For Americans, continuity of rulership is promulgated by faith in the democratic process; for the Maya, it was by faith in the bloodline. Blood is the answer. Kinship and dynastic bloodlines are proclaimed the principle of immortality in the Tablet of the Cross. Pacal tells the whole world that Chan Bahlum is his legitimate extension, and uses celestial analogy, as well as specific sky events like eclipses and planetary conjunctions, to validate the principle of continuity in his rulership. The Maya creation myth says that when the old gods died they re-emerged in the east as the sun and Venus. So it was for the kings. After Pacal undergoes his apotheosis in the underworld, his powers are reborn in his son. Like the coming spring after a long dark winter, his life will re-emerge invigorated in the body of his son. In one text from Tikal, a dead ruler is actually shown being transported through the underworld in a large canoe pad-died by a group of mythical animals who represent the underworld gods. The text is carved on a series of bones discovered in the ruler's burial crypt.
Today in Palenque you still can see the sun at winter solstice, the year's most prolonged period of dark time, diving into the place where Pacal is interred beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions, a short distance west of the Temple of the Cross. In this architectural hiero-phany, the plunging sun is Pacal beginning his descent into the underworld, as he takes the first steps on the temporal road to his resurrection. He is clearly represented falling into the underworld on the elaborately carved lid that caps his sarcophagus beneath the stairway to his crypt. The message plays on the Maya fascination with cyclic time. Death is necessary to life: it is the ultimate creation force that produces birth. Chan Bahlum not only lives on as a continuation of his father; he literally is his father, a re-emerged, re-envisioned version of his predecessor by blood in the cycle of courtly life. Pacal's death is not an event to mourn; rather, it should be celebrated, for it is the first step in a great transformation that gave human insight and access to the process of renewal and rebirth.
Maya people and Maya culture live on through the immortality of Maya rulership. The events carved on the Tablet of the Cross assured it—events that extol the unbroken connection between mundane time and eternity. Through the Long Count, Maya royalty could vastly lengthen time, give themselves room to breathe, room enough to hitch their impressively long bloodline to that of the very gods who created the universe and time itself. How much time did they need? Enough to assume that if they extrapolated into the future they could be assured of the same long-term stability and permanence their society had experienced in the past. Maybe it isn't so different for us. We care little about the "imminent" destruction of the world the modern cosmolo-gists tell us will surely occur several billion years from now when the sun violently blows away its hot outer atmosphere. While we may be concerned about our children and our children's children, we are hardly moved to think and act in anticipation of events forecast millions of generations ahead. Like the Nuer, age-sets far away from us in either direction of time seem to dissolve into an equidistant past/ future that seems unreachable. We occupy ourselves only with those strips in either direction along time's road that have not vanished in the impenetrable fog as we try to steer our way with a minimum of disorder through that portion of the highway we can keep clearly in focus.
Just how far back into the past did the Maya calculators delve?
How deep did they seek to penetrate that fog? We know they produced a recyelahle table for predicting eclipses that was 11,960 days long and a reusable Venus ephemeris of 37,960 days—over a hundred years. These tables appear in written manuscripts used by the priestly elite to make astrological predictions. Each table had been updated and recycled over a period of at least a few centuries. But some of the cycles they played with were far longer than this. Some Maya inscriptions take us four places higher than the baktun—that is, to 64,000,000 years; and one inscription may involve a calculation going as much as half a billion years into the past. The use of such vast quantities of time by Maya astronomers would have staggered our imaginations had we found out about them before we made the geological discoveries of the last two centuries that have drastically expanded our own historical time scale.
The numbers the Maya wrote down emphasize completion and the harmonious intermeshing of cycles. Take the Long Count date 9.9.16.0.0 for example, which is recorded in one of the Maya codices, where it is thought to mark an appearance of the planet Venus because it opens a tabular ephemeris for that planet. Epigraphers call it the "super number of the codices" because of its unusual capacity for swallowing whole time units. The super number is not only an integral number of tzolkin, Haab, and Calendar Rounds, but also an exact multiple of the cycles of Venus and Mars as seen in the sky. Clearly, the Maya elite in their Classical heyday somehow became as fixated on commensurate numbers as they did on the matter of coordinating religious activities with astronomical events. Consider the enormity of the task of choosing a Venus event that fell close to the day 9.9.16.0.0 for the starting position in a calendrical table. Imagine mathematically searching for a coronation day or an inauguration date in our own calendar whose Julian-day number must be divisible without remainder by a host of other important magic numbers. But at the same time the celebration must take place at the actual time of occurrence of a major celestial event! Calendrical coordination of this order, with ritual restrietions uiiderlying purely astronomical calculations, has been attempted only rarely in the history of the world. There must have been a Maya Kepler or Newton at work among the calendrical specialists who walked the halls of the royal palaces mulling over these very serious problems of their temporal art. In our world, too, the clergy were also the first to become possessed with how to gain a foothold on eternity.
The innovative keepers of the Maya calendar who made those laborious calculations must have been members of the noble class, close advisers to the rulers, persons of high rank:
They had a high priest whom they called Ah Kin Mai [literally,
"he of the sun"). ... In him was the key of their learning and it was to these matters that they dedicated themselves mostly and they gave advice to the lords and replies to their questions. . . . They provided priests for the towns when they were needed, examining them in the sciences and ceremonies, and committed to them the duties of their office, and the good example to people and provided them with books and sent them forth. And they employed themselves in the duties of the temples and in teaching their sciences as well as in writing books about them. . . . The sciences which they taught were the computation of the years, months and days, the festivals and ceremonies, the administration of the sacraments, the fateful days and seasons, their methods of divination and their prophecies, events and the cures for diseases, and their antiquities and how to read and write with the letters and characters, with which they wrote, and drawings which illustrate the meaning of the writings.®
This description of the calendar-priest and his duties by a sixteenth-century Spanish clergyman documents the specialized nature of the calendrical scribe's work. He was skilled not only in mathematics and astronomy but also in matters of calendrical divination. Descendants of such experts still exist among some of the Maya groups. These calendrical shamans retain a knowledge of the 260- and 365-day cycles and know all about the year bearers that tie the two together.
Modern anthropologists have observed that day counting and tallying is but a small part of the astrological repertoire of these specialized calendar-priests, who still are much revered by the indigenous community. A shaman's task is not simply a matter of consulting a list of days and naming their properties. The whole process of making calendrical prognostications operates more like a dialogue between priest and client, and much of the outcome depends on their social rapport. A modern ethnologist describes one such dialogue:
Then the diviner announces that he or she is taking hold of the divining bag and borrowing the health of the particular day (of the 260-day cycle) on which the divination is taking place: "I am now borrowing the yellow sheet-lightning, white sheet-lightning, the movement over the large lake, little lake, at the rising of the sun (east), at the setting of the sun (west), the four corners of the sky (south), the four corners of the earth (north)." At this point, sensing that the "blood" and the days are ready to respond, the diviner, after saying "one is now giving clean light," then proceeds to frame the divination in a formal way. For example, the first formal question in the case of illness would be, "Does the illness have a master, an owner?" etc.*°
We have no reason to think the calendrical divining process was basically any different in the past, except that in Classical times the priest probably carried his book of computations along with him and may have been accompanied by considerable fanfare. Sadly, practically all the books were destroyed in huge bonfires by the Spanish priests who believed they promoted idol worship, which would seriously impede the invaders' plan to establish the Roman Catholic religion among their subjects.
World History
