Though the ways of expressing the calendar in post-Classic and Conquest times hear little resemblance to the elaborate undertaking one thousand years before the Spaniards first made contact with the natives of the American continents, time still held the same meaning for these people. We wonder what the Spanish really conquered. Surely not the mind, for the Maya philosophy of time endures today and continues to display distinct qualities.
Above all, cyclicity was paramount. Like the movement of the sun and other astronomical bodies, which must have served as one of nature's sources for such thinking, time's cycle was limitless. There are three cycles in the pilgrimages undertaken by the Quiche lords of the Popul Vuh as well as in the wanderings of the hero twins. There are cycles in the katun prophecies of the books of Chilam Balam. Unlike the linear movements our eyes make when scanning across the horizontal lines of a wall calendar, when we look at the katun wheel in figure 6.6A, the round-and-round movement of the eye in a circle becomes the metaphor for time's flow. Counting from one katun to the next, we move counterclockwise in an ever-widening circular spiral.
In the codices, the cycles of Venus and other celestial bodies resonate the same message: time repeats itself. Each page of the Venus table in the Dresden Codex foretells what will befall the people on the occasion of Venus's reappearance in the sky; but, as we also have seen, the omens as well as the planetary aspects that bear them change slightly with time. Great extremes at the horizon are not exactly the same, nor is every battle and subsequent capture. The Maya wrote history the way a musician composes variations on a theme: the themes that portray the actions of the gods and their distant ancestors are not repeated; they are re-enacted. Past deeds already harbor the seeds of the future.
The idea of time going round and round, of events being conceived as marks on a circle thematically repeating themselves, is totally at odds with our way of thinking of time. Our temporal model is like a long thin wire. We stand poised at one position upon it. One direction we face is the future, and we can sight along the wire in that direction only to a certain extent. Over our shoulder lies the past—the
History of civilization, preceded by the history of Homo sapiens; before that, the creation of the earth; and farthest back along that onedimensional continuum, the creation of the entire universe, where time's string starts. To be sure, our time string is much longer than one trip around the biggest Maya time circle—a few million times longer. But the Maya were calculating and contemplating previous creations; they could project themselves as far backward or forward as they wanted because, for them, time was something without end or beginning. As far as we can judge, they believed in ultimate creation; and for them, there would be no final destruction.
Though we tend to focus on history's linear aspect—we all remember dates like 1492 and 1776, and no schoolchild is taught to think the events that happened in those years will happen again—still the idea of time as oscillation, of successive destructions and creations, lies submerged beneath the fabric of our own calendar. If we care to dig down and look, history really does repeat itself. Even though we throw away our wall calendar at the end of the year, the new one issued for next year will contain the same repeatable intervals. We all believe there will be a lovely July (at least in part) to match this year's. We once believed in a world that existed before the present one—the world before the Flood. That world was destroyed, the Old Testament tells us, because of the evil wrought by mankind in breaking the covenant. Western Christendom once held the belief in Armageddon, a theme that has been revised and recast today in the form of impending nuclear disaster. And we focus attention and concern on the Jewish Holocaust because somehow we all have the feeling that it might just happen again. Some modern cosmologists envision another universe that existed before creation; but by the rules of the scientific game we play, they must offer material evidence to argue their case—a difficult requirement, for how can one collect data on the galaxies, stars, atoms, even the DNA molecules that might once have comprised a cosmologist's brain, if all the constituents of that previous universe were crunched into an archaic, ultra-hot cosmic fireball?
I have tried to suggest that the historical element of formal Maya timekeeping developed out of political concerns when a series of rulers, likely related by blood, came to power. They skillfully regulated agricultural production and trade among the competing city-states they governed. The calendar became a part of their ideology. They expanded the time scale and manipulated the time packets that comprised it, and expressed their temporal ideas in space-bound meta-
Phors in the monumental art and architecture of the ceremonial centers they erected to commemorate themselves. Time became the transcendent principle—the set of rules used to justify their special place in Maya society. The more power they sought, the greater the need to justify it. Inscriptions became longer; temples of worship, larger.
In this respect, the Maya are no different from us. We all find strength from our identity with the past. Today's American political leaders will go to great lengths to enhance their status by boldly stating that they stand for the same principles that Jefferson, Lincoln, even Roosevelt stood for. Russian leaders appeal to Lenin; Indians, to Gandhi; Mexicans, to Juarez;* and so on. And most religious leaders also plant their values firmly on moral foundations written in the far distant past—in the books of the apostles and the prophets.
Astronomy, astrology, history, politics, and pure numerology— this seemingly unlikely set of bedfellows conspired to create one of the most unusual timekeeping schemes ever devised by any ancient civilization. In the eyes of the people, most of whom neither read nor wrote, the mathematical edifice of the Maya calendar was the product of religion and astrology—a structure designed to uphold the proposition that differential social ranking was the natural order of things. The people really believed their ruler was special: he was closer to the gods. His understanding and use of the power inherent in celestial phenomena proved it, just as any prophet's vision of the almighty demonstrates his special relationship to the deity. The Maya priest, perhaps in some instances the ruler himself, must have labored hard to forge precise temporal connections among these seemingly diverse aspects of human affairs—war, politics, agriculture, climate, the environment—and the movements of the celestial bodies. This strange-sounding mixture of careful observation and chronicling together with astrological prognostications has long dissuaded Western scholars from attributing intellectual worth to the Maya timekeeping system. But religion can be a positive as well as a negative force in the progress of science. More than the desire for pure mental exercise and curiosity drove these people. The Maya had real motives for devising a Venus calendar accurate to the day over several centuries: the social and spiritual livelihood of the community demanded it.
‘Benito Juarez, a Mexican of Indian parentage, freed Mexico from its European oppressors in the nineteenth century.
Their cosmology lacks the kind of fatalism present in our existential way of knowing the universe, one in which the purposeful role of human beings seems diminished. These people did not react to the flow of natural events by struggling to harness and control them. Nor did they conceive of themselves as totally passive observers in the essentially neutral world of nature. Instead, they believed they were active participants and intermediaries in a great cosmic drama. The people had a stake in all temporal enactments. By participating in the rituals, they helped the gods of nature to carry their burdens along their arduous course, for they believed firmly that the rituals served formally to close time's cycles. Without their life's work the universe could not function properly. Here was an enviable balance, a harmony in the partnership between humanity and nature, each with a purposeful role to play.
World History
