-Arthur Dent
The mere existence of cycles calls out
for us to try to find correlations between the present and the past.
Arthur is having trouble with the conversation with Ford so he
correctly concludes that it must be Thursday. Garfield has found
Mondays unpleasant in the past, therefore future Mondays will be
unpleasant. Friday the 13th is bad. (Though, actually,
yesterday seemed just fine to me.)
A solar calendar, such as our own, is
designed with this in mind. It's set up to track the seasons so
that, “It got cold this time last year,” is actually useful
information when trying to figure out whether it is likely to get
cold at this time this year. If you happen to know what time it got
cold the last six years, even better.
My understanding is that when the Maya
made predictions about the future it was often based on the idea that
what has happened before is a signpost to what will happen again.
They definitely had a firm grasp of the idea of linear time, the Long
Count (particularly the occasionally used extensions of it) proves
that. None the less they had their cycles and believed that those
could shed light on what was to come.
This is, unfortunately, something I
know almost nothing about. It's no problem writing about how
something like the Tzolk'in works with limited knowledge of the Maya
because you don't need to know all that much. If you know that it
works on interacting cycles of 13 and 20, and you know a bit of
modular arithmetic, you can talk about how it works perfectly well.
How it's interpreted is another matter entirely.
I know that there were meanings to the
days, I believe that every one of the 260 days in the Tzolk'in had
some kind of meaning associated with it, I'm guessing some in more
depth than others. I could try to look up those meanings but I'm not
sure how comfortable I would be simply relaying that here, unlike the
math of the calendar I can't double check it using things I already
know. I think taking about that should probably be restricted to
people who actually know what they're talking about. I've seen what
happens when people who don't know what they're talking about start
going off on the Maya. I watch Ancient Aliens. (On occasion. I
don't watch it all the time. Don't judge me.)
Also, there are 260 of them, which
seems daunting.
Another set of prophecies I've heard
brought up a lot has a much smaller number to deal with, by a factor
of 20. That seems like a simpler thing to work with. It requires
introducing yet another calendar.
If you're like me it probably occurred
to you that the Long count could be connected to the Calendar Round
to make a really big cycle. Not as big as it at first appears. I
had completely forgotten that there were 13 of the largest unit (in
part because in the extended version there are 20 of them.) That
means that the Long Count is divisible by both 20 and 13 so adding
the Tzolk'in wouldn't extend the cylce any. Adding the Haab', on the
other hand, would create a cycle of 73 Long Counts.
That didn't happen and there is not a
giant Mayan Calendar with a cycle of 377,151 years and change called
the Longer Count.
But at some point someone did get the
idea to make part of the Long Count cyclical. They threw out the
Ba'ak'tuns so that the k'atuns (which last about 19.7 solar years)
were there largest unit, and then they differentiated those using the
13 number days from the Tzolkin. Thus the Short Count was
born.
For reasons I don't pretend to
understand they named each k'atun after the last day in it.
The first one started on 1 Imix. Since
the number of days in a k'tun is divisible by 20 the first day of
each k'tun was Imix' and the last day was always Ajaw, which is also
written Ahau (I think I've been inconsistent with how I have spelled
it). What changed was the number day.
A k'atun is 20*18*20 days. Or 7200
days. That's 11 mod 13, so the last day of the first k'atun was 11
Ahau and that is what it is called. 11 = -2 (mod 13) and that'll be
easier to work with. To find the order of the k'atuns we just
subtract two from eleven repeatedly:
11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2,
13
Just in case anyone was confused by it:
1 – 2 = -1 = 12 (mod 13) and
2 – 2 = 0 = 13 (mod 13)
So that's why it goes from 1 to 12 and
2 to 13. There are various ways to think about why that works, but I
think the easiest is to just think of it as a circle where 13 is
number before 1. One step before one can be called zero, but in this
case it also happens to be 13, and we could call one step before that
negative one, but it also happens to be twelve.
I'm never sure how much I should
explain the modulo math. On the one hand, saying that one minus two
is twelve looks like something that needs an explanation, on the
other hand I don't know if people are getting frustrated that I
explained it again.
So, moving on, there is this cycle of
k'atuns and there are prophecies associated with them. The
prophecies are created by looking at what already happened and
assuming it will happen again. They're largely negative, probably
because text I know about was written after the Spanish showed up and
thus the past they were looking to wasn't exactly happy.
So what does it have to say about
k'atun starting in December of 2012? (That is what everyone is
supposed to wonder about these days, right? The History Channel
won't stop making shows about it, after all.)
Well if you look to the internet you'll
almost certainly find that it says something like, “For
half there will be food, for others misfortunes. A time of the end
of the word of God. It is a time for uniting for a cause.”
And no one ever seems to say where they got it from. They'll tell
you that it's from the prophecies of Chilam Balam, but there are
multiple such books. Also, it isn't as if they were written in
English, someone had to translate. But the quote always seems to be
attributed to Chilam Balam as if he personally dictated it to them in
English.
I
think it comes from this article from 1996. Its version is, “For
half of the katun there will be food, for half some misfortunes. This
katun brings the end of the "word of God." It is a time of
uniting for a cause,”
and unlike most of the rest of the internet, it says where it gets
that from. Before laying out its version of the k'atun prophecies
the article states that, “The
delineations below are a composite taken from the Book of Chilam
Balam of Chumayel and the Codex Perez and the Book of Chilam Balam of
Mani.”
The
Codex Perez is more commonly known as the Paris Codex. It was
written in hieroglyphics and I cannot read it. If there's an easy to
access translation I do not know of it. You can find photographs of
it online, if you want them. It appears to be in poor condition.
In
the case of the Chilam Balam book of Mani, just like the Paris Codex
there's a problem of access to English translations. I don't see any
online, and I'm not going to try to get a book from the library,
probably involving inter-library loan, in the middle of writing a
post.
That
leaves the book from Chumayel. An English translation of that (from
1933) is available online, and is very easy to find at that. Here is
a PDF of the translation that was linked to from Wikipedia.
Here
is what it has to say:
Katun
2 Ahau Is the twelfth katun. At Maya [uaz] Cuzamil the katun is
established. For half <the katun> there will be bread; for half
<the katun> there will be water. <It is> the word of God.
For half of it there will be a temple for the rulers. <It is>
the end of the word of God.
There's
nothing about uniting for a cause, but perhaps that came from one of
the other sources. If you accept that that water == misfortune then
the version from the 1996 article seems to stick reasonably close to
the source.
I
think that the reason for that is simply because the original is so
short. Most of the things are significantly longer and more
historical in their nature than the Katun 2 description. As the
article's author puts it, “In
the several books of Chilam Balam, the influences of the thirteen
katuns are stated, usually as a description of historical events that
occurred during previous cycles.”
There
is actually a lot of history in some of the accounts and it's hard
for me to separate the history from the prediction*. The article
attempts to do that creating short summaries. The problem is that
these summaries then get taken, have the parts that might indicate
they are summaries chopped off, and get sent around the internet as
if they were the actual texts of the prophecies.
And
it's not just the internet. The History Channel in all it's
misleading glory has shows where a narrator with an imposing voice
reads parts of those summaries as if they were the actual words of
Chilam Balam with no indication that they're highly condensed
summaries.
The
prophecies take up 3451 words in the 1933 translation (which, recall,
is stated to be but one of three sources.) The summaries 555 words.
Some of those get thrown out. The summary for k'atun 8 is:
This
may be the worst of the katuns as both Chichen Itza and Mayapan, the
two great ruling cities of Yucatan, were destroyed during its period.
The texts speak of demolition and destruction among the governors, an
end to greed, but much fighting. It is the katun of "settling
down in a new place."
It
gets cut down to:
A
time of demolition and destruction among the governors, an end to
greed, but much fighting. A time to settle down in a new place.
So
you can see how little of what was started with must be left in the
version you end up with, but that is what is presented as the
prophecy. Which is why it made me think that this would be something
I could tackle so I could actually share some the the prophecies
here. It looks like it would be significantly more difficult than I
thought, and once again I find myself running out of day.
So
I'll close on this. I may not know exactly what the Maya prophesied,
I certainly have no idea if those oft quoted summaries are accurate
(I only have access to one of the sources that we're told were used
to make them), but I do at least have a grasp on how the prophecy was
supposed to work.
The
basic idea comes to us from Battlestar Galactica: All this has
happened before, and all this will happen again. I'm told the phrase
was taken from Disney's Peter
Pan,
proving that at least in the case of the phrase, it did happen
before. The k'atun cycle gives you the schedule. About every 256
years. Closer to 256 and a quarter if you want to be more precise.
So
that's the whole idea. Want to know what will happen from 2012 to
2032? Look at what happened from 1756 to 1775. Also try 1500 to
1519. Or the one before that, or the one before that.
This
post did not turn out at all how I expected it to. I was hoping to
be able to share at least some of the prophecy in an interesting way,
but it looks like I'm really not equipped to do that. So instead
I've given you the tools to make your own. Look at the past and you
should be able you make your own prophecy the way the Mayans made
theirs.
-
*In
a certain sense history is prediction here, but I very much doubt
that they thought the exact same thing would happen the next time
around. I have no idea how similar they expected it to be. Did they
expect white men with red beards to come from the east 256 years
after the time written about in the prophecies, or did they just
expect invaders from somewhere, or did they expect something that
would feel like invaders from somewhere? I have no idea.
-
[Previous]
No comments:
Post a Comment