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Mayan Astronomy
Note 6: Circles of Time. 3/16/99
The Maya Calendar Round is best understood as a circle of day-names that begins with the first day, 1 Imix 9 Pop, counts 18,980 days in a sequence, and then returns to its starting point on the first day. 13 Ahau 8 Pop is the final day of each sequence. Each 52-year cycle of days always has the same order of day-names and each one is a complete, separate sequence identical in every way to the one that came before it and to the one that will come after it. Since each cycle of CR day-names is identically repetitious, it is not inappropriate to argue that the cycle of spirit-powers represented by the four elements of each day-name (the two numerical coefficients and the almanac and haab names--1 and 9, Imix and Pop, or 13 and 8, Ahau and Pop) preserves and inscribes a spiritual consistency in life that never varies from one Calendar Round to the next. Hence, every person who lives to the age of 52 years has seen and experienced every nuance of spirit-power that can be said to exist, or come into being, across the bridge that time creates between this world and the spirit world. One reason tribal people venerate the elders among them is directly related to the fact that they have already seen and lived through everything that one can expect to encounter in a spiritual context in the duration of a Calendar Round. For every day lived beyond 18,980 days, in other words, every elder among us has seen the same spirit-power from two separate vantage points, once in youth, even infancy, and yet again a second time in mature, even old, age. Europeans dis(respect) the elders among them because their perception of time is truncated. Nothing ever happens twice in Eurocentric perceptions of reality and if something does happen a second time it is condemned, even feared, because it is repetitious.
Since the Maya concept of time is directly tied to the motion of the objects of time, to the celestial objects that are essentially responsible for (wo)man's ability to differentiate one day from the next in any meaningful way whatsoever, objects like the sun, moon, visible planets and the stellar background, since Maya time is counted as precisely as possible using the periods of actual visible motion, as it were from the surface of the earth, the life of every individual on the earth is itself counted out in the regular and inescapable increments of time and motion that are also perceived as the source of all spirit-power in the universe. These things are literally inseparable. Ask one question. Does the past still exist? Of course it does. How could it not still exist? The objects of time (sun, moon, visible planets, stars) are still in the sky and are still moving at exactly the same rate that has counted their motion since the beginning of the existence of the solar system. The Maya Calendar Round preserves every nuance of every day that has ever occurred in the time of (wo)man's existence and every person who has ever lived still exists in the space of the CR that defines his/her specific life.
To Europeans, of course, a concept like this is anathema, not because it is a bad idea, or logically inconsistent, or unsupportable from the facts, but because it contradicts at the most basic, most fundamental level possible the death-embracing, life-denying philosophy of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Die the death of the martyr, the sooner the better, in order to achieve eternal life when it is clear from every indication anyone can point toward that human being means mortal and everyone who has ever lived, or will ever live, has also, and must also, die. That's the fate man was born for, to quote or paraphrase the poet, and the response to that fact immutable, which Christianity has always taught, is to do it as soon as possible because the world, the flesh, and the devil will get you if you don't and if they do you will not live forever. Lessons from a petulant child pissed off at the father because HE did not create you immortal is what that sounds like to me. Christianity is the art of cutting off your life to spite your mortality.
Christianity has always condemned native American concepts of spirit because the early life-affirming religions of the Near East, where Christianity emerged, were also essentially shamanistic in orientation with an active and healthy respect for the spirit world. The early church fathers, even the "historical" Jesus himself, condemned everything in the world that affirmed life, associating life itself with the wickedness of the devil, and insisted that true believers must first hold life itself in contempt because it is evil and then must seek out a way to die, preferably through martyrdom to assist in spreading its insane doctrine among the heathen devil- worshipers who enclosed it, as soon as possible after conversion. Origen (184-254 A. D.), in his treatise entitled Against Celsus, a point by point refutation of arguments Celsus, a Stoic philosopher, made against Christianity in the third century, says that,
"it is by the names of certain demons [according to Celsus], and by the use of incantations, that the Christians appear to be possessed of (miraculous) power; hinting, I suppose, at the practices of those who expel evil spirits by incantations. And here [Celsus] manifestly appears to malign the Gospel. For it is not by incantations that Christians seem to prevail (over evil spirits), but by the name of Jesus, accompanied by the announcement of the narratives which relate to Him; for the repetition of these has frequently been the means of driving demons out of men, especially when those who repeated them did so in a sound and genuinely believing spirit. Such power, indeed, does the name of Jesus possess over evil spirits, that there have been instances where it was effectual, when it was pronounced even by bad men." (Chapter 9)
I need only point out the fact here that the "evil spirits" being driven out of men by the miraculous power of the "name of Jesus" are the very same ones that the animistic people of Western Europe held in deepest respect before Christianity spread its insidiously destructive anti-life ideology among them. This same bigotry against life-affirming spiritualism was the cornerstone of Eurocentric genocide against native Americans in the New World as well. The fact that even "bad men" can drive out a demon with the "name of Jesus" also suggests what kind of people did so most often. Of course, it always helps if you add a little real fire to the area around the stake where you have tied the victim of Christian incantations against the world, the flesh, and the devil before you begin using the sacred name to drive demons and evil spirits out of the community you are attempting to convert. Burning people to death, especially children, always adds a certain force of its own to the sacred Word of God's desire to see everyone reduced to ashes as soon as possible. That truth was never far from the mind of any Church Father.
With respect to the notion that Christianity always encourages its converts to die by martyrdom as soon as possible after conversion, I simply refer the reader to St. Ignatius's Epistle to the Romans, relevant sections of which have been discussed elsewhere in this document. One can also read Chaucer's account of the life of St. Cecilia in the Second Nun's Tale in his Canterbury Tales for a fourteenth century version of this same phenomenon.
As Christianity grew to become the dominant ideological force in the Middle Ages, as its power and wealth increased to the point where it had become the single largest corporate body in Europe at the time, the early emphasis on swift martyrdom was maintained as an ideal method of achieving a sure and immediate journey into the heaven of the afterlife. Chaucer's use of the story of a martyred Saint in his pilgrimage illustrates the popularity of the genre. This point of faith was preached incessantly to the lower classes of society, was always coupled with the insistent incantation that the world, the flesh, and the devil were the major stumbling blocks to a successful passage into paradise, while members of the aristocracy, especially those in the upper levels of the hierarchy of the church, pursued an active and energetic course of exploitation against the masses of people, usually referred to as serfs, who were coerced into subservient positions from which there was little or no hope of escape. From the unrelenting exploitation of people, of course, only a small step was required for the wealthiest churchmen and secular princes to justify turning their collective hands to the process of taking from the earth every ounce of measurable value they could extract. Since the world was considered to be evil, there were no restrictions placed on how much destruction was acceptable to extract value from it. In Puritan theology, as everyone in the Americas knows, a person's righteousness before God has always been judged by the amount of material wealth he/she has managed to amass during his/her lifetime. God loves the wealthy; and loves the excessively wealthy even more. Nothing keeps a theology alive and active so much as a little hypocrisy here and there does. One might also suggest here that George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest among us has its origin precisely in this ideology, making him a true believer par excellance.
By the time Christianity reached the New World, the concepts of wealth versus evil had been refined to the point that it became a Christian's duty to amass fortune at the expense of nature and everyone who lived in it. Native Americans were perfect objects of European greed. Not only were they savages, and on that point in need of salvation, but were also evil, and so any resistance they might offer to forced conversion always already justified their annihilation. Hence, European genocide against native Americans was always already justified as a true Christian's duty.
In sharp contrast to this view of the human condition, native Americans knew from every day experience that people who inscribed themselves into the space of their allotted time on the earth as living entities, as people who affirmed life by living it in accordance with the respect that all living creatures deserve, would not, and did not, pass out of existence simply because the circle of their time turned beyond the point of their own death. That fate awaited everyone and everyone came back again in the spirit world of time's endless repetition. That Europeans perceive this fact of human reality as the work of the devil only testifies to the depth of their estrangement and alienation from the natural processes of human existence and experience.
To reach [Note 1]; [Note 2]; [Note 3]; [Note 4]; [Note 5]; [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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