WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Mayan Astronomy

Note 1: Rousseau/Derrida and (Post)Structural Linguistics. 2/11/99

Understanding the philosophical constructs of a foreign people, especially when they are decidedly Other to your own cultural heritage, when they are savages living in a rain forest, when their apparent cultural peak occurred as much as a thousand years prior to your own time, is a problem in and of itself so daunting, so inconceivably difficult that, if you knew and truly understood the range of difficulty confronting you, chances are you would find a more profitable way to spend your time. Life is short, after all, and there are any number of more compelling challenges confronting us today than trying to comprehend a single ancient text (Dresden Codex) and the apparent record it contains of astronomical observations made during the Classic Period (250-1200 A. D.) of a civilization that no longer exists in any reasonably similar form to what it was then in today's world. Why even bother to study such things at all? Maya culture has contributed nothing of significance to Eurocentric perceptions of reality, to European metaphysics, and the likelihood that it ever will are certainly minimal at best. One cannot even make a convincing argument that the Mayas of the Classic Period made any significant or lasting contributions to native American culture either. Traces of their presence in the Western hemisphere are limited to Central America, to their jungle environment which, even though it is lush and tropical, might as well be an inhospitable wasteland where no one at all has been able to live productively since their civilization collapsed 800 years ago.

The "collapse" of their culture, which occurred over a period of approximately five hundred years, and not overnight in the blink of an eye as words like "collapse" might lead you to believe, but rather slowly over time with one ceremonial center passing beyond its usefulness (to the Mayas) as another began to reach its peak, and as yet another somewhere else had barely started down its road to growth and expansion, was incremental, not sudden. Europeans argue that the Mayas over- extended themselves and exhausted the resources of their natural environment, that they committed a kind of ecological suicide, suggesting with their evaluations of the possible causes of the "collapse" that Mayas are really only another version of Europeans, who are well down the road to committing that same error themselves. This view of Maya culture is absurd. No native American culture, at any time in the history of the Western hemisphere, prior to the European invasion, ever destroyed or diminished its own environment. That is impossible, unthinkable. Native Americans do not, and have never, destroyed nature. Europeans are the only people on the face of the earth who do that. No one else does.

A more likely explanation for what we see in the Maya homeland is a continuation of the process of rise and fall and rise again of the cultures that have always been there. San Lorenzo and La Venta, Olmec sites near Veracruz, were built and abandoned between 3600 and 1500 B. C. Seven hundred years later, to the southwest, the first proto-Maya sites appeared. After they "collapsed," sites began to appear in the Peten region of Guatemala. After that the culture spread and renewed itself in the Yucatan. Between 1200 and 1500 A. D., the Mayas were re-inventing themselves and their culture just as they had done countless times before in Central America. So, what happened to the next Maya florescence? The Europeans came ashore and destroyed everything. The idea that the Mayas did it to themselves is just another way for Europeans to justify and excuse (would Derrida say erase?) their practices of genocide against people who do not have white skin. This is not rocket science.

How do I know that this is what they were doing? Because they still had the book. Europeans, the ones who stole it from them and carried it off to Europe, call it the Dresden Codex. In reality, the Codex is a blue-print for re-inventing Maya civilization. That is why they still had it when the Europeans arrived. Bishop Landa, so it would appear, made one fatal mistake: he did not burn every Maya book. Calling that failure a "fatal" mistake, since Landa is surely dead already and has been for a considerable length of time, eternally say, even in the context of his own belief system because not even the Christian God could forgive genocide, well maybe He could and has and continues to do so, may seem over-determined but in reality it is not that at all because the issue at stake here is the relative survival of cultures not of individuals. Landa's objective in burning Maya books was to annihilate the culture that produced them. Since he did not burn every single book, one can argue that he failed to obliterate the culture and that it still exists in some state or another, Chiapas say, even to this day. What I mean, of course, in saying that the blue-print for reconstructing the culture Landa thought he had destroyed still exists, is that any people who set out on a course of genocide against the Other damn sure better be thorough, damn sure better finish the job, because if they leave one stone standing on top of another that stone is going to come back to haunt them sooner or later. The mistake Landa made is "fatal" because the Codex, and the knowledge it contains, is all anyone needs to reverse the flow of history and put another stone on top of the two Landa failed to knock over.

Let me defer getting to Rousseau and Derrida for a minute. I have a digression I need to pursue first. For anyone reading this who believes that I am talking about something irrelevant because it happened long ago and far away, I downloaded a document from the World Wide Web this morning (2/11/99) which claims to be a summary of significant points made in a book published in 1994. The topic of the material I downloaded is animism, a word used in Eurocentric discourse to identify native American, and all other, tribal belief systems in the twentieth century. What you should look for as you read it is all the various ways in which it can be characterized as denigrative toward native and tribal cultures. If the defamation is not obvious to you, one of two things is true; either you have not heard a single word I have spoken, or I have spoken badly:

Central to the animist belief system is a belief in the spirit world, which interacts actively in peoples' lives. All of life is said to be controlled and influenced by these spirits. The fear of these spirits leads people to try to appease them through rituals and sacrifices.

C. Gordon Olson (1994) writes that there are four categories of beliefs and practices of animistic people:

1. Necrolatry

Necrolatry is worship of the dead. The souls of dead people and animals are worshiped, revered or feared. Departed ancestors are regarded as still being part of the tribal clan, and rituals are performed to appease them, for they are seen as still having the power to harm (especially if the death was due to unnatural causes).

2. Spirit Worship

Animists believe in the existance of both impersonal spirit forces in nature, and personal spirits or demons. Water, mountains, air, fire, animals, and the earth are believed to be inhabited by these spirits, which are appeased through ritual and the observance of taboos.

3. Naturism

Animists personify and worship nature, such as storms, fire, the sun and moon, volcanoes, and animals. Nature worship, rituals, and sacrifices are used to guarantee agricultural and human fertility. Nature worship can develop into idolatry and polytheism.

4. Totemism

This emphasizes the unity of the clan with some sacred plant or animal. This is an aspect of the continuity the tribalist sees between human life and nature around him. The totem animal or plant is thus sacred to the tribe and must not be eaten except at special ceremonial feasts.

There are four main characteristics of animistic religion and culture:

The whole of life is pervaded with fear.

There is an absence of love and consolation from religion.

There are no absolutes of morality.

The lack of relationship with God causes a fatalistic attitude since all the events of life are predetermined and controlled by nature or demons.

Source: "What in the World is God Doing?", C. Gordon Olson, Wm Carey Publishers, 1994.

The first thing here to remove from your head is the word "worship." I've already said this elsewhere in this document but it bears repeating: animists do not worship spirits. When you live in a world dominated by the existence of hierarchical structures, as Europeans have always already done forever, at least since Genesis anyway, it is hard and difficult to comprehend a people who have never embraced the notion that one thing (plant, animal or person) has and exercises dominion over another thing (plant, animal or person). To worship, first and foremost, requires, demands, insists, that things be ordered vertically from lowest to highest. That is one very appropriate definition of logocentrism. Worship requires that its object exist on a higher plane of being than the worshiper does. Spirits are not above any human being, well, with one exception perhaps; spirits are above Europeans because Europeans are afraid of them.

I do not want to go on with this. There is little or no point in refuting elements of Eurocentric anti-tribal racism piece by piece because when you finish doing it once, you have to do it all over again. I will, however, respond to a general idea expressed here again and again: that tribal people perform rituals and ceremonies to appease the demons they worship because they are afraid of them. Saying that about tribal people is exactly the same thing I am now going to say about Christian people--one of whom quite obviously wrote this nonsensical diatribe. Christians are cannibals because they eat the flesh and drink the blood of their human savior (called Jesus Christ) to appease his anger against them for committing sins. This ritual, called the Mass or Communion, must be performed as often as possible because Christians are unable to go even one entire day without committing ten thousand sins against the moral code they pretend to follow. If they do not confess their sins against God every day they will be condemned to eternal suffering in hell, which frightens most of them witless every day of their unnatural lives. If anyone disagrees with what they believe, those unbelievers are put to death in the most horrible ways imaginable. While Christians burn heathens, they preach sermons to the ones they are burning about all the endless love and consolation true believers derive from their cannibalistic religion. They believe that only certain members of their own group, people chosen by God, the pre-blessed, have any chance at all of getting to heaven, while all the rest of us are condemned to hell. Most importantly, all this depends on God's grace and is predetermined before you are even born. This concept is called Providence.

The question this raises is: how can it be possible to describe Christianity in exactly the same terms Christians use to describe the beliefs of animistic people? The answer to this question, like most other questions that arise in reference to logocentric discourse, can be traced directly back to the concept of hierarchy. Hierarchical concepts in Christian cultures are all-pervasive. They exist and underlie the structure of all thought in logocentric discourse. Hierarchy is like God, like ideology. It exists everywhere. It is everything. It is conscious and unconscious. It is all-inclusive and pure delusion. Christians are taught from the birth canal to internalize hierarchical structures. The one that applies here is the idea that every person, but most importantly "I," as Jameson is quick to remind us, am a being conflicted and torn between my best intentions and my worst instincts. That dialectic has always already defined the European consciousness from the beginning of its time on the earth. At the top of every Christian's internalized hierarchy is the best intention. At the bottom of the great chain of moralistic nonsense Christians inflict on everyone else is the worst instinct. Since Christians will do anything to avoid self-reflection, including but not limited to committing genocide against entire races of other human beings, they always already project their worst fears, their deepest terrors, outward and away from themselves. Where do they see themselves? In the face of the Other. In the beliefs they harbor in themselves about the true nature of their own religion, that it really is unseemly and monstrous to eat human flesh and drink human blood behind the claim that such behavior purifies the soul and makes the one who does it holy. That reality is at the bottom of the Christian's great chain of belief because what sane person can believe that cannibalism elevates and purifies the soul. Only a monster and a demon could believe an idea like that. Animistic people believe the worst about Christians. Tribal people do so because we know that Christians cannot face their own worst terror--that the monster and the demon really is what they see when they look in the mirror of the Other, that they call themselves reflected there the Other because they cannot accept the "me" of their own practice and belief.

Derrida says this about the stratification of types of writing (or speaking) among Rousseau's three levels of civilization:

"Although barbarians hardly speak and do not write, one finds the characteristics of a certain writing within barbarity. [When Rousseau says] thus that 'the depicting of objects is appropriate to a savage people, signs of words and propositions, to a barbaric people, and the alphabet to civilized peoples . . .', one does not contravene the structural principle, rather one confirms it. In our society, where the civil type has appeared, the elements of pictographic writing would be savage, the ideo-phonographic elements barbaric. And who would deny the presence of all these elements in our practice of writing?" (Of Grammatology, 294)

This statement, wherein Derrida accepts Rousseau's classification of language types as a legitimate structure based on a judgmental hierarchical scale, running upward from savage (pictographic) to barbaric (ideo-phonographic) to civilized (alphabetic), of writing techniques, fixes for all time in Eurocentric discourse the teleological fact that alphabetical scripts are not just civilized, but also superior to all other forms of verbal and written expression. How you write, according to this formula, because writing is a technical achievement that judges your level of civilization, determines also and simultaneously how you speak (or even whether you are capable of speaking at all) and therefore determines for all time how well you (or even whether you can at all) think. Teleology and hierarchy always already work fist-in-glove to parcel out the relative standing of all cultures in Eurocentric discourse's assessments of the Other. Note what Derrida says: "In our society, where the civil has appeared . . . ," there are also elements of the lesser forms of communication. The point is that the alphabetical form is already judged to be the highest and the best form of communication, of speaking, of writing, of thinking, and therefore is the only one of the three types capable of making the judgment that the other two are inferior to it. This goes without saying, of course, because to say so at all invites anyone with half a brain to question the validity of the judgment on the basis that it might be racially motivated to find that all people of color, unless they have been taught otherwise by Europeans, are inferior by definition because they do not use alphabetical scripts. Derrida attempts to blunt that assessment of his own discourse by allowing for the possibility that civilized France still retains an element or two, here and there, of barbaric and even savage forms of signification. I feel such an overpowering sense of brotherhood with Derrida because of this incredibly benevolent gesture of solidarity with his inferiors.

Or, on the other hand, could be he's just a patronizing, genocidical pig.

Let me explain how this process of language classification really works. In the beginning, Eric Thompson said "Let there be light cast upon the dark waters of the Maya jungle," and sure enough, or as you would expect, he argued that the Mayan script was purely pictographic in nature and published a Catalogue of Mayan Glyphs, which I own but cannot find, giving his interpretation of what each of several thousand Maya pictures represented in terms of a purely Eurocentric vision of native American reality. Thompson was English and was eventually elevated to the peerage by the Queen. Hence, he is Sir Eric Thompson. There are two things wrong with this picture. On the one hand, it places all Mayan writing in the hands of a single individual who is the only one on the face of the earth who knows (by divine inspiration?) what any Maya glyph means or represents. Thompson had a very condescending and patronizing and benevolent view of the Classic Period Maya. Whether there is evidence that he hated contemporary Mayas is locked within the minds of those natives he came in contact with while plying his trade as an archeologist. The other problem, of course, is the contradiction inherent, by virtue of Rousseau's and Derrida's concurrence, that people who use pictographic script are incapable of using speech and are savages. Thompson's position, therefore, is self-contradictory because he waxes so eloquent about the virtues of Maya philosophy and religion, things which a savage, pictographic-using population could not produce or acquire.

While Thompson, and his followers, were dominating the field of Maya studies, probably from 1945-1980, there was a counter-movement, even revolution, going on under the surface of the field, like worms or snakes burrowing along just beneath visibility, which was trying to convince anyone who would listen that the script was actually ideo-phonographic and not pictographic at all. That view, if accepted, would open study of the Maya texts to linguistic analysis, especially structuralism, and make it possible for anyone to master things like grammar, punctuation, style, and so on. At the same time, of course, the culture itself, if this view proved to be true, could be upgraded from savage to barbaric. No hope, of course, that any European would ever (mis)take a Maya for civilized because the script cannot possibly be defined as alphabetic.

What does any of this mean? Put another way: what do I think about this argument between pictographers and ideo-phonographers?

My sense of this problem is that neither position is worth a bean, as Chaucer would have said, because all such linguistic terms are teleological and ideological in their intent. Both views of the script will only serve to prove what Europeans always already know: that Mayas are inferior to Europeans and therefore are suitable objects of Eurocentric genocide.

How do I characterize the Mayan script? I don't do that. Instead, let me tell you what I have learned about Maya writing in the Dresden Codex and you can make your own descriptive terms to say what it is. My expertise is centered on the Maya calendar and the way in which the astronomers of the Classic Period both perceived and expressed concepts of celestial motion. Saying anything about Maya "astronomers" necessitates a recognition of the fact that they were not the kind of people you would expect to find hanging out in the company of telescopes and computer terminals. The Maya people were neolithic, people who had developed a dependence on agriculture and were able to manufacture sophisticated stone implements. They were stone-age people. While not evident beyond all doubt, it is probably true that the astronomers relied purely on naked-eye observations of planetary events. There is no firm evidence, in other words, that they had developed any tools to aid them in watching the skies, especially with respect to optical instruments. It is also true that they did not know, or did not use, fractional numbers but did all computation in whole integers. These two things are perceived by Europeans as being serious handicaps to a sophisticated practice of astronomy. Another perceived weakness in Maya astronomy, according to European ideology (i. e., false consciousness), is the fact that the Mayas did not employ an extra-calendrical day every four years to square the actual length of the solar year (365.25 days) with the period they did use (365 days) for the duration of the tropical year. This is perceived as a weakness because the calendrical day on which the equinoxes and solstices occur regresses one day every four years if the extra leap-day is not added to the count.

The calendar the Mayas developed, however, and the way in which they used it, makes this fact totally irrelevant. This is true because of the calendrical interval known as the Katun in Mayan astronomy. This period is equal to 20 X 360 days, with five days (called Uayab) each "year" being left uncounted, which period occupies a designated position in the long-count notation of every date that can conceivably be recorded in the Mayan script. Since there are 5 periods of four years each in every Katun, and if you know the day-name positions of the solstices and equinoxes in the first "year" of the count, you can calculate the new position as time passes if you are able to count to five. My granddaughter mastered that incredibly difficult task by the time she was two years old. I assume Maya astronomers, who surely must be credited with inventing their own calendrical system, were able to do the same. In other words, it would have been unnecessary and completely redundant for the Mayas to have used intercalary days in their calendar. Only a European would be stupid enough to denigrate the Mayas because they were not stupid enough to do something stupid. To this day most Europeans scholars do not comprehend why the Mayas left leap-days out of their calendrical system.

Reason one for leaving intercalary days out: they are necessary only if you are too stupid to learn how to count to five.

Reason two: if you use 365 for the solar year, it becomes possible to correlate the synodic period of Venus to the tropical year using this formula: 8 X 365 = 5 X 584 = 2920 days. What this means is that, instead of freezing the equinoxes and solstices on the same calendrical day each year, you can freeze synodic positions of Venus in their place. The Mayas did this in the Venus table in the Dresden Codex. Do any Europeans know this? Not yet. They have been too busy proving that Maya astronomers are either savages or barbarians, too busy trying to decide if their script is pictographic or ideo-phonographic.

A parting thought: the base-day of the Dresden Venus table was written by Maya astronomers as 9.9.9.16.0 1 Ahau 18 Kayab. The day-name for the long-count designated by this date is 1 Ahau 18 Kayab. This day-name in the Calendar Round (CR) occurs one time in every 52 Maya years (52 X 365 = 18 980 days). The glyph for each of these four separate elements represents a spirit power that comes into the world whenever the element appears in a Maya day-name during the count of the CR. In other words, this particular combination of four spirit powers exists in the world on only one day out of the 18 980 days of the CR sequence. The glyph which represents the number 1 in the first place occurs a total of 20 times in every 260-day sequence (Almanac) and the spirit power represented by the number enters the world whenever it occurs in a date. The name Ahau occurs 13 times in every 260-day period and the spirit Ahau enters the world when it occupies a place in the date. The glyph and the spirit power represented by 18 enters the world 20 times in every 365 days. The name Kayab occurs on twenty consecutive days when its month comes due during the course of the 365-day year.

The point here is that every Maya day-name is composed of four separate elements, each of which represents the entry of a group of four spirit powers into the world of material reality where the people live. Those four spirits influence and shape, but do not determine, the nature of that day. In the Popol Vul, the Quiche Maya say that: "Time is the bridge between this world and the world of the spirits." Anyone with half a brain ought to be able to comprehend what that means. A word of warning or, if you will allow me to repeat what I said earlier, if you read that statement the way C. Gordon Olson does, you are probably shaking in your boots in abject fear of the demons and monsters that are flying about in the world. If you take it the way I do, you have a chance to live a meaningful life.

To reach [Note 2]; [Note 3]; [Note 4]; [Note 5]; [Note 6]; [Note 7]; [Note 8]; [Note 9]; [Note 9a]; [Note 10]; [Note 11]; [Note 12]; [Note 13]; [Note 14]; [Note 15]; [Note 16]; [Note 17]; [Note 18];in this series of thoughts.

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