WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Mayan Astronomy

Note 2: Paul Goodman. 2/13/99

I am somewhat reluctant to talk about Paul Goodman because everything I know about him, and about his work, I have learned from reading other people's comments about him. Put bluntly, then, I know nothing about Paul Goodman's work except what I have gleaned from rumor and gossip. I have no first-hand knowledge of anything he did or wrote. Everything here is the result, not of bad scholarship, but of no scholarship at all.

As I understand it, Goodman was a linguist working toward the codification of the Mayan language in Guatemala. In one particular Maya village, he found people who were still using the 260-day almanac as a daily calendar. When he asked them about the day-name 1 Ahau, which is associated with the Venus table (as the base-day) in the Dresden Codex, they told him that the Lord Ahau (Venus) rose with the sun to his glory in the morning sky on that sacred day. Goodman either knew at the time, or found out later, that the astronomical position described by the Mayas in the 1930's was the same as Venus's heliacal rising after inferior conjunction with the sun. This synodic position of the planet occurs every 584 days on average and is characterized by a short period of invisibility as Venus enters and leaves its close proximity to the sun from a point of observation on the surface of the earth. In other words, because Venus is an inferior planet, its orbit takes it between the earth and the sun where it is lost to visibility for a period of one to twelve days as it moves into the sun's light just before sunset, or as it approaches inferior conjunction, where it can be seen low in the western sky, to a position on the eastern horizon in the early morning just before sunrise after inferior conjunction. Venus then continues to move higher and higher in the morning sky day by day until it reaches western elongation from the sun at approximately 47º of arc. At that point it becomes stationary for a few weeks and then begins to move back toward the sun and superior conjunction. During superior conjunction, when Venus is located on the other side of the sun from the earth, it is invisible for about 50 days. It then re-emerges into visibility as the "evening star" and moves toward eastern elongation from the sun.

Goodman, because he was a structural linguist, assumed that the Mayas he studied, who were venerating Venus as it emerged into the morning sky after inferior conjunction, were following a long-standing tradition of the kind that structuralist associate with synchronic aspects of language-use. The veneration of Venus as it emerged into the morning sky, therefore, was most likely something that the Classic Period Mayas also did. He reasoned from that assumption that the 1 Ahau position in the Dresden Codex must reflect Venus's heliacal rising after inferior conjunction with the sun as it emerged into the morning sky.

This made perfect sense to structural linguists because the structures of language-use, the deep structures, do not change over time and are completely stable. Hence, if contemporary Mayas in Guatemala are doing something deeply structural in the veneration of a "god," they are most likely following a tradition that is relatively timeless in their cultural practice. Goodman encountered little or no resistence to this idea at the time and Eric Thompson, who we met in the last note, agreed with the assumptions and supported Goodman's proposal for a correlation between the Maya calendar and the European calendar based on a heliacal rising of Venus after inferior conjunction as the most probable base-day event for the Venus table in the Dresden Codex. The Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation, as it has come to be known, is now accepted by Maya scholars as correctly reflecting the connection between all Maya and European dates in the two respective calendrical systems.

There is, of course, a spot of mold growing on this ointment; more than one actually. If you read Note 1 in this section, and have a reasonable grasp of the point of view that underlies its essential argument, you already know what I am likely to say next. In any movement in Eurocentric discourse that involves hierarchical structures, and here, of course, we are dealing inescapably with hierarchy because on the one hand we have the European calendrical system which is always already perceived as being superior to the Maya way of reckoning time (if only because it freezes the calendrical days of solstices and equinoxes and the Maya does not), while on the other hand we have the Maya calendar in a subordinate position because the impulse to correlation has always been to make it possible for Europeans to unfavorably compare the relative states of cultural achievement that coexisted across the divide separating European and Maya civilizations, and in that movement of hierarchical discourse it is always necessary to bring the inferior system into correlation with the superior system of reckoning time. In short, then, to correlate means to show that the European calendar is superior to the Maya calendar and that the proper thing to do, therefore, is to list and record all Maya historical events, in as much as we know what any of them are, in European calendrical notation.

Rather than taking about 9.9.9.16.0 1 Ahau 18 Kayab, European scholars want to be able to refer to a Christian European date, say January 25, 623 A. D., because every European knows where that date is located relative to the Fall of Rome, for instance, but no European has any perception of where the Maya date is located relative to anything at all. Talking about any Maya date creates a profound temporal and historical dislocation in European consciousness because each one of them exists in a state of expression that not only seems meaningless to Europeans but actually springs forth out of its own ground of being relevant, in its own internal connections to other Maya dates, and calls the events of Eurocentric history into question. Maya dates, in other words, negate the significance of European dates. What significance does the Fall of Rome have to anything that ever occurred in Maya history? None whatsoever seems to be a reasonable answer to that question.

What I am suggesting here is that the European impulse to correlation has no purpose other than to transform the discourse about the Mayas into one about Europeans. Look at it this way: while the Mayas were piddling around making this absurdly long and complex table about Venus's motion relative to the sun, and they did not even know at the time that the motion they were measuring was only apparent motion and not real, because Venus does not orbit the earth, we, here in Europe, were suffering through a truly taxing and horrific experience because a hoard of God-cursing barbarians, who were little better and maybe even worse than the God-cursed Maya heathens themselves, were sacking Rome and destroying one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. The correlation then actually involves a comparison between the barbarians who sacked Rome and what the barbarians of the New World are likely to do, if given half a chance, to the greatest civilization the world has ever known after it reconstructed itself from the collapse of Rome.

The impulse to correlation, then, is suspicously like every other attempt Eurocentric discourse makes to denigrate the other. A second, more troubling, problem with this discourse concerns the fact that Goodman, Thompson, et. al. have ignored the forced conversion of the Mayas to Christianity and the role that coersion may have played in the veneration of Venus as the "morning star" by the Christianized Mayas of Guatemala in the 1930's. When Venus enters inferior conjunction with the sun during the Spring, in proximity to Easter say, it is usually invisible for a period of three days. The Mayas might have associated planetary invisibility with death and the entry of the spirit of the planet into the underworld. Its re-emergence to visibility after its journey through the underworld was considered to be a rebirth and could just as easily be called a resurrection from the dead. Venus came to be associated with Jesus Christ after the invasion and conquest of Central America by Catholic Europe at the end of the Middle Ages (1519 A. D.). Catholic priests in Mexico, when confronted with the deep passion of Maya belief in the significance of Venus's motion, and saw for themselves the similarity between Venus's three-day period of invisibility near Easter and the death and resurrection of Christ, simply accepted the utility of allowing a natural confusion of one thing for the other to assist them in the conversion of heathens to the true faith. The fact that Goodman and Thompson, et. al., accepted the heliacal rising of Venus after inferior conjunction as the most likely position for the planet at 1 Ahau 18 Kayab in the Classic Period, without even acknowledging the fact that the ground for its contemporary use was derived from post-conquest conversion to Christianity, casts more than just a little doubt on its validity. At the very least the question ought to be re-examined.

The Venus positions that are generated from the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation in the Dresden Codex Venus table, while I have not studied them extensively, and why would I bother to do so, show little or no consistent or coherent pattern of repetition over time because the base-day position at inferior conjunction is the least stable position of the planet from one synodic period to the next. The point here is that there is no justification for having a Venus table at all if it cannot stablize Venus's synodic motion in a calendrical articulation. If there is no consistency of the position marked by successive day-names in the structure, what is the point in listing them over a period of 104 years? The point here is really quite simple, especially taken from a Eurocentric point of view: because the Venus table, as the GMT correlation describes it, accomplishes absolutely no useful purpose, it proves that Maya astronomers were completely incompetent, even absurdly ridiculous, to have pursued the creation of an astronomical articulation that produces no positive benefits to scientific understanding of planetary motion whatsoever.

Worse even than this problem, but again one that reinforces the perception of Maya incompetence, is the fact that when the Venus position is projected forward in time to the point where it overtakes the base-day of the Dresden Codex Eclipse table, there are no eclipses of any kind which occur on the days the Mayas recorded for those events. Not only did the Mayas create a Venus table which accomplishes nothing significant, but they also wrote an eclipse table covering a 34-year sequence that fails to record a single eclipse on the day-names specified. Maya astronomers were such incompetent dummies that they deserve whatever happened to them.

Get Real for ten seconds. Ask yourself a question: what's wrong with this picture?

Ivan Sprajc, in a two-part essay entitled "The Venus-Rain-Maize Complex in the Mesoamerican World View," has provided a copious amount of ethnographic evidence that refutes the notion that Classic Period Mayas venerated Venus as the "morning star." His research, in fact, supports the opposite view; namely, that the more important position for them was Venus's appearance in the evening sky after superior conjunction. Whether Sprajc's research is considered to be conclusive or not probably depends on your overall investment in the GMT correlation. If you have published books and articles using the Thompson correlation, Sprajc's argument is inconclusive, irrelevant, and baseless, speculation. If you seek a truth beyond a view that denigrates Maya civilization, then Sprajc's position provides an opportunity to evaluate the culture objectively and without Eurocentric bias.

Prior to reading Sprajc's work myself, I had developed a strategy for investigating the correlation problem by using the Dresden Codex Eclipse table as a standard for connecting the Maya calendrical system to its inferior European counterpart by searching for an eclipse sequence that exactly matched the one the Mayas recorded in the table. I found a contemporary sequence (from 1970 to 1992) that did exactly that. This sequence proves beyond question that the Maya Eclipse table functions perfectly to predict a 34-year sequence of eclipses. More recently, I was able to find the ancient sequence itself. In the notes that follow, I will outline some of the aspects of that part of this study.

To reach [Note 1]; [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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