Mayan Numerology
Written by Amorymeltzer
ATS Weekly, Edition 019, November 22, 2005
Since the Mayans come up so often around here, and since my current work involves them, I thought I'd share some of what I've been learning about
their culture and society, and how based around numerology it is, especially the concept of Zero.
For the Mayans, time started with Zero. August 13th, 3114 B.C. was day 0 and the rest of time was counted from that date. The Mayans took keeping
track of time seriously, and devoted almost their entire culture to it. Time was counted in a process since dubbed "The Long Count." The Mayans had
18 months (uinal) each with 20 days(kin). The resulting 360 day year (tun) was grouped in 20s called katun(7,200 days), 20 of which in turn made a
baktun (144,000 days). The groups kept going onward, up to over 64 Million - quite a lot for a society that only ending up lasting about 1200 years!
The date was simple - the number of days since day 0. When writing the date, the Mayans used a positional system, writing the number of baktun,
katun, tun, uinal, and kin out. They used dots and bars for numbers, each dot representing one, and a bar equaling five. So, 14 would look like this:
For zero, however, a symbol was used. There were many different possibilities, but most involved a face or a some sort of intricate design. And,
unlike the Sumerians, the Mayans always included the final zero, a definite sign of how important their rigorous numerical system was. Normal counting
occurred until 20, when another tower appeared representing 1x20, 2x20, Nx20. After that, though, rather than being 202 it was 360. Following that,
the pattern continued with 20s - 360x20, 360x20x20, etc.
There also existed the Haab, a more civilian calendar, with the same 18 day months, but with 5 holy days stuck in at the end to make up for the
lost time compared with the astronomical year. During the months of the Haab, the first day was numbered as 0, the second as 1, and so on and so
forth, something completely unique among all cultures. The god Zero oversaw the transferring of months, a process so important that it took a full day
to occur.
And yet there was a third calendar, the sacred Tzolkin. 260 days long, it moved with a bizarre cycle of 20 day names and 13 numbers. The day names
matched up with the numbers, each cycle shifting the matched sets along until finally day 1 matched number 1 260 days later. There’s no real
explanation for why they created such a complex system, but it is believed to be derived from the intertwining of the human number, 20 (we have 20
digits), and the number of their upper-world gods, 13, which probably gives rise to the holiness of the calendar. It’s very convenient to use,
however, because every combination of day and number is a specific date during the year, unlike Monday the 2nd which can be anytime during the year.
There was a calendar based on the Moon, with 29 and 30 day months, and also a 584 day cycle based on the travel of Venus across the Sun (a synodic
calendar). They also calculated the synodic calendar of Mars (780 days) and most likely counted Mercury's synodic cycle, which at 116 days was
dangerously close to 9x13=117. It goes without saying that since 9 represented the nine lords of the underworld, they had a calendar with cycles of
nine days, with each lord ruling a day.
As it turns out, the one thing the Mayans feared most was the end of time. The logic was that time would kill all of them eventually, so why could
it not "kill" everything else? In the hopes of preventing this, they first transferred the observed cycles from the heavens into linear progressions
of time, so that time could only stop when the cycles were finished. Thus, they lived in perpetual fear of the time when the various cycles matched
up. The "Calendar Round," a period derived from the times the Haab and Tzolkin took to match up (52 Haab and 73 Tzolkin) was a terrifying ordeal,
and they took to such drastic measures as virgin sacrifices, rites of blood, and cutting hearts from live victims to prevent the constant predictions
of disaster. Then, since five was the common divisor of 365 and 260, every five years was something to fear as well, so the current king would bleed
himself in some horrible fashion to try and appease the gods into continuing counting.
As it turns out, the nine lords of the underworld were ruled by the Death King, also known as Zero. The Mayans put on huge shows of "killing"
Death vicariously by killing someone who represented Death. In one game, they would dress an important prisoner, an enemy king or some such, up as
Zero, and have two ball players beat him to a bloody pulp. They would even dress humans up as Zero, and then kill them by tearing off their lower jaw,
a distinctive feature of the Death Lords.
The Mayans lived in perpetual fear of Death. The stopping of time was synonymous to a return to Zero, and for them this was terrible. They, through
clever tricks, devised a system of tracking time that would keep them alive for approximately 2x1027 years, many orders of magnitude greater than the
13 Billion or so years the universe as existed thus far.
Amorymeltzer
ATS Moderator
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