We turn to the astronomy of Mesoamerica, with a particular focus on the Maya and Aztec. The central feature of their astronomy was a pair of interlocking calendars which regulated all aspects of life. The surviving Maya manuscripts also deal extensively with the motion of Venus, which may also have driven decisions to go to war. We also look at the famous Aztec Sun Stone, the 2012 phenomenon, and the fall of the Itzá Kingdom. NOTE: The Song of Urania will be going on hiatus and will return on the first full moon of 2026.

Transcript

Good evening, and welcome to the Song of Urania, a podcast about the history of astronomy from antiquity to the present with new episodes every full moon, usually.

Last month we learned how the Polynesians used astronomy to voyage across the Pacific. This month we will cross the Pacific ourselves and spend some time with one of the great astronomical civilizations the ancient world has produced: the civilizations of Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya and the Aztec. But, as we’ll see, although the civilizations of this region are often reduced to the Maya and the Aztec, there was a large family of similar cultures that inhabited Mesoamerica over the millennia.

But, as always, we will start with the geography. In modern terms, the area we’ll be focusing on in this episode is today occupied by central Mexico through northern Guatemala. If you start from northern Mexico and go south, the country starts to narrow like a funnel and bend towards the east. After you have passed by Mexico City in central Mexico the country continues to narrow and at some point has bent entirely to the east. It then narrows to a region called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec where the Gulf of Mexico to the north is separated from the Pacific Ocean to the south by only 137 miles. As you move further east the land widens again, mostly due to a large peninsula that juts out northeast into the Gulf of Mexico, called the Yucatán peninsula.

The entire region of Mesoamerica sits within the tropics, but the Isthmus of Tehuantepec forms one of the main geographical divisions. To the west and north of the isthmus the geography is characterized by highlands and tends to be arid, especially the further north and west you go. To the east of the isthmus the geography is characterized by lowlands and very dense jungle.

Now, ordinarily when I talk about the geography that a culture inhabited, it’s with an eye toward explaining how the geography influenced the astronomy. But in Mesoamerica it’s a rare case where it also works the other way around. Astronomy influenced the geography. Sixty-six million years ago an enormous asteroid ten kilometers in diameter impacted the Earth right off the coast of what is now the Yucatán peninsula. This impact, of course, had major consequences for life on Earth. This event is the leading theory as to why the dinosaurs died out, which then made space for mammals to evolve into more ecological niches, and eventually, for humans to evolve and start doing astronomy. But more relevant specifically to the astronomy of Mesoamerica, this asteroid impact created a very large crater. And, in fact, most Maya archaeological sites sit on top of this crater. The asteroid impact seems to have created a large sedimentary basin, which then led to the creation of aquifers. Sources of water in Mesoamerica are otherwise rather scarce, especially in the north, so the creation of these large aquifers probably facilitated human settlement of the region.

Well, the timeline of the original human settlement of Mesoamerica is not especially well understood. At some point in millennia past humans crossed over from eastern Siberia into what is now Alaska. You may recall from Episode 45 on Aboriginal Australian astronomy that the settlement of Australia was facilitated by the Last Glacial Maximum, or more colloquially, the Last Ice Age. During this period sea levels were around 110 meters lower than they are today. You may not be surprised to learn then that this period also facilitated human migration into the Americas. Instead of Siberia and Alaska being separated by the Bering Strait, they formed a continuous landmass called Beringia.

Now, although we more or less know when these two continents were connected, unfortunately the timeline of human migration into the Americas is notoriously uncertain. There’s good evidence that there was a large scale migration into the Americas around 16,000 years ago. But there is also some evidence, along with a lot of arguments as to how seriously it should be believed, that there may have also been an even earlier wave of settlement 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Either way, these new populations began to expand into the Americas. Here, again, though, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to how this migration proceeded. One theory is that these populations first moved south along the Pacific coast and only later began to migrate inland. But the theory is difficult to test because with the lower sea levels, the shoreline was much further to the west than it is today, and any archaeological sites they would have left would now be under about 100 meters of water.

However it happened, the later wave of migration (or only, depending on your preferred theory) very quickly expanded throughout North and South America. Within around two to three thousand years these populations had expanded from Alaska to the southernmost tip of Chile. This might sound like they were practically sprinting across two continents, and in some sense they really were, but it works out to be an average migration rate of just a couple of miles per year.

At any rate, by about 14,000 years ago Mesoamerica had become populated. Whether it was settled much earlier than that is not known. And whether the original settlers were the ancestors of the Maya or whether the ancestors of the Maya displaced an earlier group is also not known. For many millennia the peoples of Mesoamerica were hunter gatherers, but between 8000 and 2000 BC agriculture began to develop in the region with corn being the principal grain. This corn, incidentally, was originally nothing like the big, fat cobs of corn that we’re used to today. The original plant produced only a single ear of corn that was maybe a few inches long and about as wide as your pinky finger. Only after many centuries of selective breeding did the plant start to resemble what we think of today when we think of corn.

Well, Maya civilization proper really shows up around 1200 BC. Now, for convenience, we talk about “Maya civilization,” and “Mesoamerican culture,” but it wasn’t a monolithic thing. It’s similar in many ways to the idea of Mesopotamian culture. Mesopotamian culture was made up of a variety of cultures and states who all shared cultural and linguistic patterns. Likewise there were dozens of states that made up Maya civilization, and over the centuries some of these waxed in power and then waned. And likewise there were cultures that were a part of Mesoamerica more broadly and shared many cultural traits with the Maya, but didn’t speak Mayan languages. Again, these other Mesoamerican civilizations variously waxed and waned in power over the centuries with the Aztec becoming the most powerful by the time that the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s.

Now, interestingly, although there were huge commonalities across the various Mesoamerican cultures in terms of language, writing, religion, and even sport, there did not seem to be any self-conception that they formed a unique culture the way that, say, the Greeks did. The Greeks also had dozens of independent city states, and various dialects of the Greek language, but they all recognized that they formed a cohesive culture that spoke one unique language. Despite their mutual rivalries, the Greeks nevertheless divided the world into the Greeks who spoke Greek, and the barbarians who spoke anything else. But there was no similar kind of recognition of the similarities of their cultures among the Mesoamericans. In this way they were again more like the Mesopotamians, who, despite a great deal of cultural similarities with each other, also never really subscribed to the idea that they belonged to some common Mesopotamian identity. In the case of the Mesoamericans this can probably be explained by the fact that they had no barbarians around, so to speak. Until the arrival of the Spanish, they just had each other, so the ways that they behaved were just the ways that humans behaved. They was no need for some special Mesoamerican identity to unify them.

Well, around 1200 BC the first true Mesoamerican civilization emerges, called the Olmec, near the northern point of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The Olmec are considered to be the mother culture of Mesoamerica, because many of the common features of Mesoamerican civilizations first appear among them, from the agricultural crops to the artistic styles to the religion, and, importantly for us, the calendar. As agriculture became more sophisticated, we start to see the transition from villages ruled by isolated chiefs, to kings, who can exercise much more power over a much larger number of people. With the emergence of kings you start to see the concentration of wealth, and the kings could then use they wealth they accumulated to commission grand monuments and artworks to extol their grandeur. It’s in this earliest ceremonial artwork that we see the first hints of Mesoamerican astronomy where the art draws a connection between cosmological symbols and political power. In this way, early Mesoamerican art resembles the Hawaiian creation myth of the Kumulipo that I talked about in the last episode, where the story legitimizes the king’s rule by delineating his genealogy, from recent ancestors in living memory back through mythic heroes of yore, and then further back to the gods who created the universe.

Well, some four or five hundred years after the earliest artifacts from the Olmec appear, writing develops in the region, at around 800 to 700 BC. This is quite a remarkable thing since it’s generally believed that writing independently developed only four times in humanity’s history: once among the Babylonians, once again among the Egyptians, once among the Chinese, and once here among the Olmec in Mesoamerica. It’s kind of interesting to note, too, that although these writing systems all began with pictographic symbols, they evolved into quite distinctive styles. Although the Egyptians and Mesoamericans both used hieroglyphs you’d never confuse one for the other. The Maya glyphs are written in a characteristic rectangle with rounded corners.

At any rate, to continue our brief overview of the pre-Columbian history of Mesoamerica, it’s a few centuries after writing develops that the Zapotec civilization emerges southwest of the Olmec in the Valley of Oaxaca. The Zapotecs were a relatively militaristic culture and many of their relief carvings depict their military victories and the various ways in which they would torture their captives. Now, the Zapotec civilization actually survived all the way until the arrival of Hernán Cortés, but it came to be eclipsed by other Mesoamerican civilizations after a few centuries, between 100 BC and 200 AD. By the 1100 AD or so it underwent a political decay and ultimately ended up getting folded into the Aztec empire. And this kind of story is fairly common in the region.

One of the features of Mesoamerican history is that there really isn’t much in the way of a single empire that arises and conquers everyone else in the region, at least until you get to the Aztec. Instead you have kingdoms in various corners of the region that at various times grow in power, maybe expand somewhat and conquer some of their neighbors, shift the center of gravity of cultural development, but then over time become less powerful and shrink.

The first period of Maya civilization, called the preclassic period has this happen with the Olmec and then the Zapotec. But from 200 AD until 900 we enter into the Classic period of Maya civilization. During this period many more kingdoms wax and wane across the region. The most important of these was in many ways the most mysterious, a city-state called Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan was located just to the northeast of modern day Mexico City, so it was actually a fair ways away from the Olmec in the cradle of Mesoamerican civilization at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Teotihuacan emerges around 100 BC and underwent some three centuries of construction. The city that its people built was simply massive. From its founding until 600 AD it was the largest city in all of the Americas, and towards the end of this period it was among the largest cities in the entire world with a population of around 200,000. Teotihuacan was evidently highly organized. The whole city was built on a regular grid of streets and there was a main avenue about a mile long which ended in two massive pyramids, today called the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. At the time they were constructed these pyramids were one of the largest structures in the world. In addition to just being an impressive city on its own terms, Teotihuacan also seems to have been hugely important to Mesoamerica more broadly. It had a large trade network across the entire region and seems to have culturally influenced the rest of Mesoamerica.

But despite its importance really very little is known at all about Teotihuacan. We don’t even really know the basics like who its rulers were, what its social structure looked like, or even what language they spoke. I mentioned that the two massive pyramids they constructed are today called the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, but they’re just called that because we don’t know what they were originally called. Teotihuacan seems to have made some excursions to the east to try to conquer the Maya in the 4th and 5th centuries, but these invasions went poorly. By 500–600 AD Teotihuacan went into decline. It seems this happened the same way that Hemingway described going broke, first gradually, then suddenly. Towards the end the city was essentially abandoned, and its residents scattered across Mesoamerica. Centuries later the area was occupied by the Aztec who, rather like medieval Romans or Greeks, were somewhat in awe of this great ancient civilization whose ruins they occupied. Given how little we know about Teotihuacan at its peak it will perhaps be no surprise to you that we also don’t really know what caused its collapse.

Over to the east on the Yucatán peninsula, the Maya also saw something of a golden age during the Classic period. There were various shifts in regional power centers over the years, but the period from 200 to 800 AD sees a huge amount of ceremonial monuments and art built. This Maya golden age lasted a little while longer than Teotihuacan did, but it, too, eventually saw a collapse in the 9th century. It’s thought that this collapse may have been driven by population growth which led to disease and popular uprisings, and which then led to the kingdoms becoming unstable and vulnerable to invasion.

After these collapses we then enter into what’s called the Postclassic period, which lasts from 900 AD until the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. The Postclassic period is really dominated by the rise of the Aztec Empire. Like the Romans, the prehistory of the Aztecs is more myth than anything else, but the traditional account goes that they began as a nomadic group, usually called the “Mexica,” in western Mexico. During their years of wandering the god Huitzilopochtli told the people to look for an eagle sitting atop a cactus eating a snake. Sure enough, near Lake Texcoco they saw the sign and founded the city of Tenochtitlan, a few dozen miles southwest of the ruins of Teotihuacan.

The Aztec were a rather minor power after the founding of Tenochtitlan, but around the middle of the 15th century they began to expand explosively under Motecuzoma I, whose name is usually Anglicized to Montezuma I. By the arrival of the Spanish 75 years years later the Aztecs had expanded to rule nearly all of modern day Mexico. To achieve this explosive expansion, the Aztecs were remarkably brutal, and this won them little love among their vanquished neighbors. One of the major reasons why Cortés’s force of only 200 Spaniards managed to conquer the largest empire the Americas had ever seen was that they weren’t doing it on their own. They had legions of disaffected vassal kingdoms ready to line up and do whatever they could to bring down the Aztecs.

So that is a quick overview of the history of Mesoamerica, at least the pre-Columbian history. Three periods, preclassical, classical, and post-classical. The foundations of Mesoamerican culture really get set during the preclassical period, and then there is a huge elaboration and refinement of culture during the classical period. There’s less cultural development during the postclassical period, but as I’ll talk about more, we happen to know quite a bit more about this era.

So before we really get into the astronomy specifically, it’s worth asking how we know what we know about Mesoamerican astronomy and its history more generally. Like everything else in Mesoamerican history, our sources can be divided into two categories: pre-Columbian, and post-Columbian. The post-Columbian sources are much more numerous and much more accessible, but they have the limitation that the vast majority of them were written by the Spanish, largely Spanish clerics. So their contents are necessarily filtered through a European and Catholic worldview. Ironically, one of the most important sources we have for Aztec culture is also the reason we have so little source material in the original Mayan languages. A Franciscan friar named Diego de Landa arrived on the Yucatán peninsula in 1549 with the purpose of converting the Maya to Catholicism. He engaged in his missionary work with gusto, resolving to walk the entirety of the peninsula and bring the faith to even the most remote village. Although there was understandably a huge amount of anti-Spanish sentiment among the Maya he was fearless in preaching to even hostile audiences. There is a story of Landa stumbling upon a group of hundreds of Maya about to ritually sacrifice a boy. Landa pushed his way through the crowd, released the boy, smashed their stone idols, and began to preach to them the error of their ways. And, at least in this account, the crowd was so astonished by him that they asked him to stay with them longer and teach them more. Well, through this missionary work among the Maya people, Landa began to gain their trust, and eventually he became privy to some of the more secret aspects of the Maya religion, most importantly the Maya codices.

The Maya had a practice of writing what are more or less books. They used a kind of paper made out of pounded tree bark. This was then folded like an accordion to make pages, and these pages were bound between two covers. Well, after being in Yucatán for over a decade, Landa began to realize that many of the supposed converts to Catholicism were still practicing their native religion, worshipping idols, and even in some cases, performing human sacrifices. Landa’s response to this was to order an Inquisition to root out any Maya whose hearts had not truly converted to the Catholic faith. At the culmination of this Inquisition, Landa collected 27 Maya codices, and possibly many more in some tellings, which he asserted contained nothing but devil worship and superstition, and he burned them all.

Now, Landa’s burning of all the Maya codices that he could get his hands on was actually quite controversial at the time. Many of his fellow clergymen were aghast at this book burning and felt that by better understanding the Maya religion they would be better equipped to convert the Maya. And, in fact, when news got back to Spain, Landa was ordered to return home and stand trial for his actions. Although he had been put in charge of the missionary efforts on the Yucatán peninsula, he was still just a simple friar and didn’t have the authority to order an Inquisition — this power was reserved for bishops. In the end a tribunal acquitted him of his crimes, and a few years later when the previous bishop of Yucatán died, Landa was promoted to the rank of bishop. But during his time back in Spain, Landa put pen to paper and detailed everything he had learned about Maya language, religion, and culture during his time among the Maya people. The resulting text, called Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, is by far the most detailed and comprehensive account of Maya civilization at the time of European contact. The Mayanist William Gates wrote, “ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in [his work], or have learned in the use and study of what he told.”

Well, despite Landa’s best efforts to the contrary, four Maya codices escaped his destruction. Three of these are essentially complete, and are called the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices, named for the cities in which they are today located. There is a fourth, more fragmentary codex that was once called the Grolier codex because it was first shown publicly at an exhibition at the Grolier club in New York. Today because it is stored in Mexico City it is known as the Maya Codex of Mexico. Of these four codices the most important for Maya astronomy is the Dresden codex, although all four have some astronomical contents. The provenance of the Dresden codex is somewhat murky. It first appears in the historical record when it shows up in a private collection in Vienna in 1739. How it made its way from the Yucatán peninsula to Europe and escaped Landa’s purge is completely unknown. It’s speculated that it may have been sent to Spain by Cortés himself as part of the so-called Royal Fifth. The Royal Fifth originated in Muslim kingdoms but was later adopted by the Spanish and Portuguese. They idea was that any booty that was taken during war or conquest was taxed by the monarch at 20%. So 20% of anything that the Conquistadors took, they had to send to the Spanish king. King Charles I of Spain also happened to be the Holy Roman Emperor, whose capital was Vienna. So it’s thought that maybe this is how the codex ended up in Vienna. At any rate, in 1739, it came to the attention of a director of the Royal Library, who purchased it for his own personal use from this anonymous private collection. Some time later, he donated the codex to the Royal Library in Dresden. At this point the Dresden Codex sat completely ignored for about 150 years. In 1880, a librarian named Ernst Förstemann stumbled across it while he was going about his routine archival work. Förstemann became obsessed with the strange Maya hieroglyphs and began to spend all of his spare time trying to decipher them. He kept the book in his desk drawer and would pull it out and study it anytime he had a bit of free time. Using Landa’s treatise as a guide, he noticed that there were patterns in the text that matched the Maya calendar and numbers kept showing up that were important in Maya numerology. Unfortunately, the Dresden codex suffered significant water damage during the firebombing of Dresden during WWII, but thanks to Förstemann’s work to publicize the text, by that point detailed photographs had been made of the artifact.

Well, the other major figure in the early work deciphering Maya hieroglyphs was an American named Joseph Goodman who a relatively unusual background. When he came of age in 1856, he moved with his father from New York to San Francisco. Within a couple of years, though, the Comstock lode was discovered in Nevada, setting off the Silver Rush, and Goodman moved to Nevada to be closer to the action. There he bought out a small local newspaper called the Territorial Enterprise and grew it into one of the most important western newspapers of the day. In 1872, Goodman used his newspaper to oppose the candidacy of William Sharon to the US Senate, who was one of the most richest and most powerful men in the West. Thanks in no small part to the relentless criticism of Sharon in the pages of the Territorial Enterprise, William Sharon lost his election bid. So, when the next senate election came up in 1874, Sharon decided he did not want this particular thorn in his side, so he bought out Goodman’s share in the newspaper for a hefty sum.

With a lot of money in his pocket now, Goodman moved back to California and started to pursue a passion of his for archaeology. He came across the descriptions and photographs of Maya ruins taken by the explorer Alfred Maudslay and set about trying to decipher the hieroglyphs. As with Förstemann over in Germany, Goodman’s big breakthrough came about when he discovered Landa’s detailed treatise on Maya culture. With that, he was able to independently reconstruct various aspects of the Maya calendar and numbering system.

Well, after these early breakthroughs, much of the next half century of Maya research was focused on deciphering dates and chronologies. Some archaeologists even went so far as to assert that there was nothing to Maya writing except dates and astronomy. One Mayanist, Sylvanus Morley, wrote in 1922,

No grandiloquent record of earthly glory these. No bombastic chronicles of kingly pomp and pageantry, like most of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian inscriptions. On the contrary, the Maya priests would seem to have been concerned with more substantial matters, such as the observation and record of astronomical phenomena.

Well, this turned out to be a quintessential example of selection bias. All the Maya writing seemed to be about dates and astronomy, because those kinds of numerical glyphs were basically the only things that had been deciphered. The next major breakthrough came in 1960, from a Russian-American Mayanist at the Peabody Museum named Tatiana Proskouriakoff. The Peabody Museum had a collection of 40 Maya stelae with inscriptions on them, and Proskouriakoff noticed that these stelae could be grouped into seven sets or series. In each series, they began with a glyph of a man dressed in fine clothes, sitting atop a throne. This initial glyph would then be followed by other men in fine clothes conducting rituals or warriors standing over their conquered enemies. These glyphs would be accompanied by dates. She noticed that the dates on these monuments all spanned a few decades. The first date was accompanied by a particular action glyph, and the last date was also accompanied by an action glyph. Proskouriakoff’s realization was that these series must have been describing the life and accomplishments of a king. The first date given was, of course, none other than the date of the king’s birth, which implied that the first action glyph that accompanied this date meant “birth.” The second action glyph she interpreted as a coronation. This was the first time anyone had managed to decipher a non-numerical or astronomical glyph.

Another major breakthrough had happened a few years earlier, although it took longer to trickle into the broader community of Mayanists. A Soviet philologist named Yuri Knorosov argued that Maya hieroglyphs were not logographs, representing entire words, but were actually syllabic, and that the glyphs actually represented phonetic sounds. Incidentally, there’s a story which is almost certainly apocryphal that Knorosov’s interest in Maya hieroglyphs came about during WWII. Supposedly, Knorosov was part of the Soviet invasion of Berlin, and during this invasion the National Library was set on fire. Knorosov rushed into the library, grabbed a handful of books, and one of them turned out to be a rare reproduction of the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid codices.

Well, however he got interested in Maya studies, Knorosov’s insight, that Maya hieroglyphs are largely phonetic turned out to be essentially correct. Unfortunately it was roundly panned in the West after he published it. His results were dressed up in Soviet jargon and were trumpeted by the Soviet propagandists as being a victory of Marxist-Leninist methods. At the height of the cold war, this kind of language didn’t go over well in western circles. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that Western scholars gave his ideas another look and started to come around to them.

One of the reasons that Knorosov’s idea was not immediately obvious is that there was a huge amount of variation in the way that scribes would notate particular glyphs. A single underlying glyph might be drawn dozens of different ways, depending on how much elaboration a particular scribe wanted to make on some particular glyph. Once it was realized that these dozens of apparently distinct glyphs actually represented the same phonetic cluster, the hieroglyphs were fairly rapidly deciphered. By the early 2000s the vast majority of Maya writing had been deciphered and was understood.

Well, in addition to the post-Columbian Spanish texts about Mesoamerica and the various Maya and Aztec writings themselves, another important source is a post-Columbian Maya text called the Books of Chilam Balam. Unlike the earlier Maya texts, the Books of Chilam Balam were written long after knowledge of Maya hieroglyphs had been lost, so although the texts are written in native Mayan languages, they were almost entirely notated using the Latin alphabet. Incidentally, as a bit of a pedantic aside, if you are wondering why I sometimes say Maya and other times say Mayan, the general usage is that the adjective Mayan applies only to the language. Otherwise, we speak of the Maya people, Maya culture, Maya astronomy, and so forth. At any rate, the Books of Chilam Balam are named after a Maya prophet. The words “Chilam Balam” literally translate to “Prophet Jaguar,” and the name Balam for jaguar was a common family name. Whether this figure really existed or was purely legendary is a matter of debate, but if he did exist, traditional legends say that he lived during the end of the 15th century and put him in the area of Maní in the southwest of the Yucatán peninsula, as it happens, the same site as Bishop Landa’s book burning. Chilam Balam had a similar kind of reputation as Nostradamus in Europe. According to tradition Chilam Balam predicted that strangers would come from the east bearing a new religion. Thanks to this reputation, over the centuries various texts were attributed to this famous seer and they came to be collected into the Books of Chilam Balam.

The real authors of the Books of Chilam Balam would have been other chilams in Maya society. A chilam was an important role, and any Maya village worth its salt would have one. The chilam was not so inaccessible as a high priest. They lived among the people and worked closely with them, acting as a combination of fortune teller, counsellor, and doctor. To receive his prophecies, a chilam would lie flat on the floor of his house and listen for a god or a spirit to speak to him from a roof beam. It’s hypothesized that this practice may have involved interpreting bird songs, since the words for “bird” and “omen” are homophones in Mayan languages. At any rate, the Books of Chilam Balam contain prophecy, history, astronomy, chronography, and medicine. The contents were probably mostly written between the 16th and 17th centuries, but the underlying concepts were generally pre-Columbian.

Okay, well I’ve been talking at some length now about the broader history and how we know what we know, but what is it, exactly, that we know about Mesoamerican astronomy? Well, the place we’ll start is with the calendar, since the calendar was the central feature of Mesoamerican astronomy, and also, maybe not coincidentally, the feature for which we have by far the most documentary evidence. The main features of this calendar appear throughout all of Mesoamerica, from the Maya on the Yucatán peninsula to the Aztec all the way in the northwest. The calendar consisted of two principal cycles: a solar cycle of 365 days, and a ritual cycle of 260 days. In addition to these two primary cycles, the Mesoamericans also kept track of a third cycle, the cycle of Venus, which I’ll go into in more detail in a bit.

The main use of the solar cycle was to organize civil affairs. The solar cycle of 365 days was broken into 18 months of 20 days apiece with an extra five epagomenal days that existed outside of any month. These five extra days were considered to be particularly dangerous since the barriers between the mortal realm and the realm of the spirits broke down. To ward off evil during these days the Maya would not leave their homes and would engage in various rituals.

Now, you’ll notice that the length of this solar cycle is 365 days, but the true length of the year is more like 365 and a quarter days. Most calendars address this issue by periodically adding in some kind of a leap day, but for whatever reason the Mesoamericans never bothered with this. It is clear from their texts that they were aware of a more precise length of the year, but they evidently didn’t have any need to incorporate that extra precision into the civil calendar. Consequently the solar cycle slowly drifts throughout the year, by about 25 days over the course of a century. In this way the Mesoamericans were similar to the Egyptians, who also adopted a fixed 365 day cycle. Incidentally, you may have noticed that there are a number of parallels between the Egyptians and the Mesoamericans. Both had this regular 365 day cycle in their calendar, they used an even division of months, they had five extra days in the year which were considered to be unlucky in both cultures. They both wrote with a phonetic hieroglyphic script, they both built giant pyramids. These connections are almost certainly coincidences, but they have led to no shortage of enthusiasts claiming that the Egyptians must have traversed the Atlantic and brought their culture to Mesoamerica. Or, even more radically, that the Egyptians and Mesoamericans must have obtained their culture from a common source — aliens. These ideas are actually part of a very long tradition of speculation that the Mesoamericans recently came from Mesopotamia or Egypt and brought the culture of those regions with them. When the Spanish arrived in Mesoamerica and discovered that it was peopled, one line of thought was that the Mesoamericans were, in fact, Jewish, and were the lost tribes of Israel. It was well known to them from the Old Testament that there had originally been twelve tribes of Israel, but after they were conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, nine of these tribes were scattered and lost, leaving only the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and the priestly tribe of Levi. When news returned to Europe that the Americas were peopled, a going theory for many centuries were that these peoples must have been none other than these scattered tribes of Israel. Anyway, this is not the last I have to say about the more, shall we say, speculative ideas regarding the Maya.

Well, the basic structure of the solar cycle was shared throughout all of Mesoamerica, but the names of the months varied quite a bit regionally. Each kingdom generally had its own unique names for the months, and there wasn’t all that much commonality even between neighboring kingdoms. By contrast, the other major cycle, the 260 day ritual cycle, was much more consistent geographically. The Maya all essentially used the same terminology, and the Aztec also all essentially used the same terminology, and there were a lot of similarities between the two after you account for differences in language.

The ritual cycle consisted of 20 day names with 13 numbers apiece, but these names and numbers cycled simultaneously. It’s perhaps easiest to explain by making it explicit, the first day name in the Maya calendar was Imix which means “crocodile.” The second day name was “Ik” which is usually translated as “wind.” The third is “akbal” which is usually translated to “night-house” but also means darkness. So, you might think that the way that the calendar would go is that you would have the first of Crocodile, followed by the second of Crocodile, and so forth until you got to the 13th of Crocodile, and then you’d have the first of Wind, second of Wind, and so forth. But the numbers and names cycled simultaneously, so it would really be the first of Crocodile, followed by the Second of Wind, followed by the Third of Night-House, and so forth. Because the numbers 13 and 20 are relatively prime, you would hit every combination of number and name exactly once in a 260 day period.

If the solar cycle was mostly used for regulating civil affairs, the 260 day ritual cycle was mostly used for divination and, well, ritual. Each day and number in the cycle had its own character, some propitious, others ominous. In the Aztec language, Nahuatl, this cycle was called the “tonalpohualli,” which is usually translated to “the counting of days,” but the word “tonalli,” literally means the Sun’s heat, which, by extension also represented a person’s life force. A person’s fortunes would be read by a “tonalpouhque,” who occupied the same sort of role in Aztec society that the Chilam did in Maya society that I talked about earlier. Incidentally, the divination that a tonalpouhque did was distinguished from what was called “nagualism,” which was more akin to sorcery and witchcraft. Nagualism was practiced in secret and was associated with malevolent forces. The friar Bernardino de Sahagún wrote about them,

The soothsayer, the reader of day signs … is a wise man, an owner of books [and] of writings. The good soothsayer [is] one who reads the day signs for one; who examines, who remembers [their meaning]. He reads the day signs; he brings them to one’s attention. The bad [soothsayer] is a deceiver, a mocker, a false speaker, a hypocrite—a diabolical, a scandalous speaker. He disturbs, confounds, beguiles, deceives others.

Well, as with European astrology, the most important determinant of an individual’s future was the day on which they were born. After birth, a child would be ritually bathed and assigned to his day sign. Usually this ritual bath was conducted immediately after the child’s birth. But if the child happened to be born on a particularly unlucky day, the priest might tarry a day or two to give the child a more propitious day. Priests had the latitude to delay the ceremony as long as it fell within the same 13-day week that the child had been born in. An example of the significance of a day sign was recorded by Sahagún, whom we heard from just a moment ago. He wrote,

The man born upon [the day sign of One Flower], they said, and it was averred, would be happy, quite able, and much given to song and joy: a jester, an entertainer. And it was said that women were great embroiderers. It was said that this sign was indifferent; that is to say, a little bad and a little good.

But the significance of the ritual calendar went well beyond divining an individual’s personality. It regulated all aspects of life. The friar Diego Durán once recounted how it had determined the appropriate date of the harvest. He wrote,

I dare to swear to these things because in church I myself have heard the public pronouncement, all the people being present, that the time of the harvest had come. They all rush[ed] off to the fields with such haste that neither young nor old remain[ed] behind. They could have gathered the crop earlier, at their leisure; but since the old sorcerer found in his book or almanac that the day had come, he proclaimed it to the people, and they went off in great speed.

Fray Diego Durán went on to describe the wide variety of ways that the ritual calendar specified what they would do and when.

The characters [for the days] also taught the Indian nations the days on which they were to sow, reap, till the land, cultivate corn, weed, harvest, store, shell the ears of corn, sow beans and flaxseed…. [T]hese signs were common not only in agriculture but also in trade and commerce, in buying and selling, in marriage, and in bathing. The same was the case in the eating of certain foods; except on specified days and times certain foodstuffs could not be eaten. I believe this superstition to be difficult to uproot, and I fear that in certain places these ancient rules and rites have not disappeared. I see that they are still kept strictly, and I base my opinion upon the fact that one day I asked an old man why he was sowing a certain type of small bean so late in the year, considering that they are usually frostbitten at that time. He answered that everything has a count, a reason, and a special day.

Fray Durán’s intuition that the ritual calendar would be difficult to uproot turned out to be quite correct. Although the Catholic Church discouraged its use, it persisted for centuries after the Conquest. In fact, in the late 1800s, when Ernst Förstemann and Joseph Goodman were piecing together the mechanics of the ritual calendar in the late 1800s, they were under the impression that its use had long since died out. But during some ethnographic investigations into rural parts of Yucatán in the 1920s it was discovered that the ritual calendar was alive and well. Two anthropologists, Oliver La Farge and Frans Blom found that many different remote communities still used this traditional calendar, and, what’s more, their dates all agreed with each other. Its use even survived the Guatemalan Civil war in the mid 20th century during which the Guatemalan government perpetrated a genocide on the indigenous Maya and attempted to suppress their culture as best they could.

Well, the basic structure of the ritual calendar as a continuous cycle of 260 days is straightforward enough. But the motivation behind it is rather more mysterious. It’s really quite unique in the history of human civilizations. Pretty much every culture has recognized concepts like a year and a month, and most have some sort of week that is intermediate between a month and a day. But there’s no obvious motivation for a 260 day cycle. So why the Mesoamericans developed this 260 day cycle and put so much significance in it is still an open question. But, of course, that’s not for a lack of ideas. Scholars have noted that 260 days is roughly the length of a pregnancy. But apart from the fact that the durations match, there’s not really any other evidence that this was the motivation. That being said, if you ask modern Maya daykeepers in rural Yucatán why the ritual calendar is 260 days long, some have given the gestation period of a baby as a reason. But it’s unlikely that the original motivation for the ritual calendar survived nearly three millennia from its origin.

Another hypothesis is more astronomical in nature. Mesoamerica falls entirely within the tropics, and this means that at two points during the year the Sun passes directly overhead, through the zenith. This is actually a rather noticeable phenomenon, because objects appear to cast no shadow. And these two days when the sun made its zenith passage had special ritual significance. Well, in the cradle of Mesoamerican civilization, where the Olmec emerged, the two dates of the zenith passage are at the beginning of May and again in early August. These two dates are 105 days apart. This means that after the time from the second zenith passage in August back to the first zenith passage of the following year is 260 days.

A third hypothesis is that the 260 days of the ritual calendar derived purely from numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. The number 20 was important because it formed the base of the Mesoamerican numbering system and also was the number of digits on the human body. The number 20 was therefore associated with humanity generally. As we’ll see in a bit more detail later, the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. The product of these two numbers to form the 260 day ritual cycle could then be viewed as an interlocking of the human with the cosmic. And of course, there’s no reason that the Maya needed to have just one reason to develop this cycle. It’s possible that they recognized that this 260 day period had a variety of connections, from the length of pregnancy, to the astronomical, to the numerological, and these different motivations all reinforced each other to impress upon the early Maya the significance of this cycle.

Well, given the 365 day solar cycle and the 260 day ritual cycle, this meant that every day actually had two names associated with it, and when writing dates, both names were typically given. If you do a bit of math, you can work out that if you take these two dates together, this combined cycle will repeat itself every 52 years. This 52 year period is generally referred to as the “calendar round.”

The transition from one of these 52 year periods to the next was a major event and was accompanied by solemn rituals. Among the Aztec, this event was associated with the Pleiades. The Pleiades had special significance all throughout Mesoamerica, and the period where it disappeared behind the Sun and then emerged 40 days later at its heliacal rising was closely tracked. I mentioned a moment ago how in Mesoamerica the Sun would pass through the zenith in the month of May. This was an important event during the year, but the point opposite it in the year, six months later, was also significant. At this time, in late November for the Aztec, the Pleiades would transit the meridian at midnight. Since this was half a year away from the zenith transit of the Sun, this time of the year was considered to be the nadir of the Sun.

Well, every 52 years, when a Calendar Round ended, the Aztecs would mark this transition at this time of the year when the Pleiades transited at midnight and the sun was at its nadir. Incidentally, you might think that the new Calendar Round would start on a date like the First of Crocodile, since Crocodile is generally listed as the first month of the ritual cycle. But in fact, for numerological reasons, the new cycle began on the second of Reed, Reed being the 13th month in the cycle. And this won’t be the last time that the number 13 crops up. This is the date in Aztec mythology on which the heavens were created and the god Tezcatlipoca, the god of the night sky, was born.

Well, on this date in late November every 52 years, the Aztec would mark the occasion by performing the New Fire ritual. The friar Sahagún described it like this:

First they put out fires everywhere in the country round … And when it came to pass that night fell, all were frightened and filled with dread. Thus was it said: it was claimed that if fire could not be drawn, then [the Sun] would be destroyed forever; all would be ended; there would evermore be night. Nevermore would the Sun come forth.

In the five days leading up to the ceremony, the people would fast, refrain from speaking, and throw out clothes, cooking vessels, idols, jars, and other household items that would tie them to the past Calendar Round. Then, on the day of the ceremony, the Aztec emperor would ascend the mountain Huixachtlan, accompanied by the high priests. There, the priests tied a prisoner to a rock and cut out his heart. In his open chest cavity they placed kindling, and then used a pair of sticks to ignite the kindling in the man’s chest. This fire drill was symbolic of the Pleiades overhead, which had the name “fire drill” in Nahuatl. Once this new fire had been lit, it would be carried down the mountain to light great bonfires throughout Tenochtitlan. This signaled to the people that they had safely made the transition from the old Calendar Round into the new.

Well, in addition to the solar cycle and the ritual cycle, Mesoamericans also tracked the cycle of Venus. In fact, much of the astronomical content of the Dresden codex consists of tables of Venus’s motion. This cycle lasted for 584 days, which is the synodic period of Venus. Over the course of two Calendar Rounds, the Venus cycle would reset with respect to the solar and ritual cycles. Within the cycle, Mesoamerican astronomers tracked four stages of Venus’s motion: its time when it was visible as a morning star, when it was invisible at superior conjunction, that is to say, when it was behind the Sun, when it was an evening star, and then when it was invisible at inferior conjunction, that’s to say when it was in front of the Sun. Now, one of the interesting features of the Venus cycle as it is described in the Dresden codex is that the periods given for these four intervals are rather stylized. The overall duration of 584 days for Venus’s synodic period is correct. And actually, Venus’s synodic period varies somewhat from one year to the next due to the eccentricity of its orbit and the Earth’s. So the Maya had to have measured many cycles to correctly determine the mean synodic period. But the way that they broke it into intermediate lengths of time is actually rather far off from the true values. They listed its time as a morning star as 236 days when really it’s more like 263, nearly a month off. And the time at superior conjunction was listed at 90 days when really it’s more like 50. It seems that the Maya rounded off these two periods to the nearest whole number of lunar months, possibly to help it better conform to their ritual cycles.

There is also some archaeological evidence of Maya observations of Venus. The ruins at Chichen Itza contain a building called El Caracol, or the Snail because of a rounded dome that looks remarkably like a modern observatory dome. Windows in this building are aligned towards the position of Venus at maximum elongation. At another site, Copán, one of the buildings has the symbol for Venus inscribed on it. One of the windows in this temple is aligned such that Venus is visible over a roughly two week period at the end of April and beginning of May, when the dry season ends and the rainy season begins, right before the Sun’s zenith passage.

Well, Venus was the most important planet for Maya astronomy, and I’ll have more to say about it in a bit, but there is a similar table of the motion of Mars as well in the Dresden codex and a partial version of the Mars tables also appears in the Madrid codex. The table gives the synodic period of Mars as 780 days, which is also correct, and, incidentally, corresponds to exactly 3 ritual cycles.

In addition to these planets, Mesoamericans, of course, closely tracked the motion of the Sun. But before I get into Mesoamerican conceptions of the Sun I need to talk a little bit about their cosmogony. Mesoamerican stories about the creation of the universe varied across the region but they had a few common elements. One of the most important sources we have for Maya accounts of the creation is in a post-Columbian text from the early 18th century called the Popol Vuh, which literally translates to Book of the Mat, but is typically translated as something like the Community Book, since the Mat in question was a kind of throne that the king of the K’iche’ people sat upon and which represented the community as a whole. As in many accounts of the cosmogony across the world, it begins with a description of the darkness and emptiness at the beginning of time.

This is the account of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm. Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky. These, then, are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow or forest. All alone the sky exists. The face of the earth has not yet appeared. Alone lies the expanse of the sea, along with the womb of all the sky. There is not yet anything gathered together. All is at rest. Nothing stirs. All is languid, at rest in the sky. There is not yet anything standing erect. Only the expanse of the water, only the tranquil sea lies alone. There is not anything that might exist. All lies placid and silent in the darkness, in the night.

Then, two gods, called the Framer and the Shaper appear before the creator god, called the Heart of the Sky. The structure of the various Mesoamerican cosmogonies then tell of how over a long period of time the gods attempt to create man, but each time their efforts are found wanting because their creations cannot properly worship the gods. They first created animals, but they found that the animals did not know how to worship the gods. Next, they created men out of mud, but the men fell apart in the water. Then, the Framer and Shaper gods performed a ritual over 260 days using grains of corn. After completing the ritual, they carved men out of wood. But they found that these men had no mind. In the words of the Popol Vuh, “They walked without purpose, were merely an experiment, an attempt at people.” So, the gods destroyed these wooden men, but some of them escaped and continue to live on as spider monkeys. Now, at this point in the text there is a significant digression involving a pair of twins, but once the narrative returns to the creation of man, the gods try one last time and create man from corn. Here, they are at long last successful. The men worship the gods and they are made to be mortal so that they remain faithful to the gods. Later on, the gods give the men wives to make them happy. This story lays out a kind of contract that mankind has entered into with the gods. The purpose of man was to worship the gods, and if they did so, the gods, in turn, would sustain mankind.

Well, in addition to a similar kind of account of the creation of man, the Aztec also had a belief that the universe had previously gone through four cycles of creation and destruction, and that they were living in the fifth and final cycle. In each age, a god associated with one of the cardinal directions is chosen to become the Sun and provide warmth and nourishment to the Earth. But each time, something goes wrong and leads to the destruction of the world. In the age of the First Sun, the god Tezcatlipoca was chosen, but he was the god of the north, which was associated with the color black. Consequently, he could not provide enough illumination for the world. Eventually another god knocked him out of the sky and jaguars ate all the people. This age was known as the Jaguar Sun. Then came the Wind Sun. But the people lost their faith, became preoccupied with wealth, and failed to conduct the appropriate rituals. Consequently a great hurricane was sent to destroy the Earth. The third sun was the Rain Sun. In this age the Sun god was tricked by Tezcatlipoca, and in his grief withheld the rain. After the people begged and pleaded for rain, the Sun god unleashed a torrent which drowned the world. The fourth sun was the Water Sun. The goddess Chalchiuhtlicue was chosen to be the Sun, but her husband told her that she was not truly good, but only faked being good to win the worship of the people. In her grief, Chalchiuhtlicue cried tears of blood for fifty-two years and drowned the world. The fifth and present age is called the Earthquake Sun. The god Huitzilopochtli became the Sun god. As the god of fire and war he demands human sacrifice. Should these sacrifices cease he would destroy the world in a great earthquake.

Each of these previous four ages lasts for a particular length of time. The Jaguar Sun lasts for 676 years, the Wind Sun for 364 years, the Rain Sun for 312 years, and the Water Sun for 52 years. If you do a bit of mental arithmetic you might notice that all these periods are divisible by 13, the cosmic number in Mesoamerican numerology. Well, the previous four ages and their association with the four cardinal directions led to another important number in Mesoamerican numerology — the number four. The number four was closely associated with the Sun, and through the Sun, the cosmos more generally. It was typically depicted as a quincunx — a cross, often with the Sun at its center. Typically the number four was shown on the face of the Sun god, and the Sun god is associated with the phrase “four are his paths.” The conquistador Hernando Ruis de Alarcón described the significance of the number four in 1629:

Their use of the number four in all of their superstitions and idolatrous rites, such as the insufflations that they make when the sorcerers and false doctors conjure or evoke the Devil, the cause of which I was never able to track down until when I heard the story of the waiting for the sun. And for the same reason, the hunters, when they set their snares in order to catch deer, give four shouts toward the four parts of the world, asking for favor, and they put four crossed cords over a rock. The bowmen call four times to the deer, repeating four times the word tahui, which no one today understands, and they cry four times like a puma. They put a lighted candle on the tomb for a dead person on four successive days, and others throw a pitcher of water on it for him on four successive days. And, finally, among them the number four is venerated.

At the start of the two main seasons, the wet season and the dry season, the high priests would make four sacrifices. Mesoamerican towns typically had four entrances. From this association between the Sun, the mystical number four, and the cardinal directions, we can see why the zenith passage of the Sun was considered to be such a significant event. At this time, the Sun stood in the center of the world, equidistant from the four directions of north, south, east, and west.

Well, we know from their depictions that Mesoamericans made even more detailed observations of the Sun. In fact, there’s some evidence that Mesoamericans even observed sunspots. It seems to have been a practice of Mesoamerican astronomers to observe the Sun directly through arrow holes in a shield. In Maya depictions of the Sun, the Sun is sometimes depicted with marks like freckles on his cheek and other times is not. If you correlate the dates of these depictions against the Solar cycle you find that the Maya tended to draw the Sun with spots on his cheek during periods of high solar activity, when there were likely to be a lot of sunspots.

Perhaps the most famous Mesoamerican depiction of the Sun is the elaborate Aztec Calendar Stone, also called the Aztec Sun Stone. The stone was originally carved sometime between 1502 and 1520, during the reign of Montezuma II. About half a century later, after the Conquest, the Archbishop of Mexico ordered the stone to be buried along with a number of other artifacts in order to put the memory of human sacrifice in the past. Two centuries later in 1790, the city was now known as Mexico City and was undergoing a burst of infrastructure development. On August 11 of that year workers were digging a sewer when the stumbled on a massive statue called the Statue of Coatlicue. This turned out to be a fortuitous day, because in Mesoamerican mythology, the principal date of creation happens to be August 11. Towards the end of the year, the workers made another discovery, the enormous Sun Stone. At this point, in the late 18th century, the Enlightenment had been underway for some time and the early colonial history of Mexico was in the distant past. So the rediscovery of these artifacts was treated with curiosity and was seen as a piece of information about the country’s forgotten past. Upon its rediscovery the Sun Stone was placed in the cathedral, and about a century later it moved into a museum. Over the years it became one of the most important symbols of Mexico and since the 1990s it’s appeared on the country’s coins.

To briefly describe it, the stone is huge. It’s a circle about twelve feet across, three feet thick, and weighs more than 54,000 pounds. The stone is intricately carved and represents the major features of the Aztec understanding of time. At the very center is a depiction of either Tlaltecuhtli, the Earth God, or Tonatiuh, the Sun God. The depiction of this god is just the center of a large hieroglyph that represents the word “earthquake.” This references the age of the fifth Sun that we are today living in that will one day come to an end in a great earthquake. Then there are four symbols which form an X around the central god. These are the symbols for jaguar, wind, rain, and water, representing the suns of the previous four ages. Then around this is a ring with the symbols for the 20 distinct day signs of the ritual year. Outside of this ring, arrows point the way to the four cardinal directions. On the outermost ring at the top of the circle there is a glyph which represents the date 13 Reed, which is the start of the age of the fifth sun. Finally, the edge of the circle is inscribed with dots which have been interpreted to represent the stars of the night sky. So, this massive stone pulled together the central elements of the Aztec conception of time: the changing of the ages, the circular nature of the ritual cycle, and how it all revolved around the center of the world its the meeting point of the four cardinal directions in the Sun. Hence the inspiration for this episode’s title, the clock around the rock.

Well, Mesoamerican conceptions of time went beyond the 52 year cycle of the Calendar Round. In addition to this cycle, there were much longer cycles called the “long count.” The Maya conception of time was related to the phrase “Jaloj-k’exoj,” which could be translated to something like “change within change.” Time progressed through a series of interlocking cycles. In this phrase, “jal” has the sense of the change that an individual experiences over the course of his or her life. One is born, becomes a child, grows into an adult, and then ages and dies. But on top of this kind of change, there was also “k’ex” which has more the sense of “substitution.” So as individuals grow up, a younger generation comes to replace the older generation. The children of a society become the parents, and the parents become the grandparents. This idea of substitution manifested itself in Maya society through the passing down of family names.

Well, to describe the longer cycles of time in the Long Count, the Mesoamericans used a rather simple but extremely powerful number system. Numbers were written in base twenty. You would would notate numbers up to four with just so many dots. Then when you got to five you would collect them into a horizontal bar. Six would be a bar with a dot on top. Seven would be a bar with two dots and so on. Ten would be two bars, fifteen three bars. Incidentally, this is the Maya practice, the Aztec would just write the five dots in a horizontal line. At any rate, once you got to twenty, you’d now have a two digit number. This next digit would be written the same way. The genius of the numbering system is that it included the numeral zero, denoted by a glyph for a shell. This makes the Mesoamericans plausibly the first civilization to truly adopt a numeral for zero.

Given this numbering system, the Long Count was really pretty straightforward. The fundamental unit was a day. Twenty days make a month, and 13 days make up a 360 day unit which is about a year long called a “tun” which literally translates to “stone.” After this you just have successive groupings of 20. 20 years make a “k’atun.” 20 k’atuns make up a “bak’tun.” The Long Count cycle is then 20 of these bak’tuns. The overall period of this is 7885 years.

During the classic period, the Maya generally recorded their dates using both the solar cycle and ritual cycle, and also the date in the Long Count. This is fantastic for us, because unlike the date in the Calendar Round, which repeats every 52 years, a date recorded in the Long Count is unique. At least, as long as you can match up where the Long Count fits next to the Western calendar. The tricky thing here is that the Long Count had generally fallen out of use by the time Europeans arrived. This problem of matching up the Long Count against the Western calendar is what is known in the field as the correlation problem. Over the years there have been a number of proposals, but today the one that is generally accepted is one of the first to have been proposed, by Joseph Goodman. Now, because the ritual cycle and solar cycle were still prevalent all throughout Mesoamerica during the colonial era it was very easy to match up the location in the Calendar Round to the Western date. This essentially restricts any Long Count date to a set of dates spaced 52 years apart. But Goodman found a clue in a colonial era record that a certain Maya nobleman named Ahpula died on the sixth year after a k’atun ending on the ritual cycle date 13 Ahaw. This limited the number of possible correspondences between the Long Count and the Western calendar. Then by combining this result with Maya records of lunar phases, he could establish a unique correspondence that more or less fit all the available evidence. In this solution, the beginning of the Long Count cycle began on August 11, 3114 BC. Over the years Mayanists have accumulated more evidence and it generally agrees with Goodman’s solution. For instance, one monument contains an inscription of a covered Sun followed by a Long Count date. If you use Goodman’s solution to work out when that date was in the Western calendar, you find that it is within a few days of a total solar eclipse. Mayanists today still debate exactly what the correspondence is and whether it is the date Goodman suggested or if it is off by a couple of days. Some correspondences fit better with the historical records, and others fit better with the astronomical evidence. It’s also possible that at some point over the centuries there was some reform to either the ritual cycle or the Long Count that perhaps skipped over a couple of ominous days. And just as an aside, perhaps counterintuitively, these kinds of deviations from a regular cycle are a sign of a highly centralized society. Naively, you might think that if a day got skipped it was just because a civilization was decaying and people lost track of a day because they were just so busy worrying about their survival. But on a society wide scale this just doesn’t happen. Anytime you have dates skipped in a calendar it is a sign of an extremely powerful and centralized force in that society. Historically, only a powerful central figure has been able to impose a calendar change across a large population. It just doesn’t happen otherwise. We’ll see this in more detail in a future episode when we talk about the calendar reform of Pope Gregory. During that calendar reform, which erased 10 days from the calendar, it was only Catholic countries who accepted the pope’s authority that made the calendar change. It took Protestant countries much longer, in some cases centuries to accept the reform. And the more decentralized Eastern Orthodox Church has not accepted this reform to this day. At any rate, all this is to say that if there have been some deviations in the Long Count, they probably would have happened in the Classical Period, during a time of high centralization, maybe in the heyday of Teotihuacan.

Well, the standard correlation between the Long Count and the Western calendar puts its beginning at August 11, 3114 BC. Now, this does not imply that the calendar itself was actually created on August 11, 3114 BC. There isn’t really any evidence of any true Maya civilization that early on. This was a period of transition towards agriculture. What is more likely is that the calendar developed sometime in the early first millennium BC, and the high priests fixed the date of some significant event like a coronation to be midway through the Long Count on some particularly auspicious date.

Well, the Mesoamericans considered the times when the longest cycles rolled over to be particularly significant. It was considered to be important when the tun, k’atun, or bak’tun was 0, 5, 10, 13, or 15. One especially momentous event occurred on March 13, 692 AD, when Maya society celebrated the 9th bak’tun and the 13th k’atun. A number of Maya kingdoms built large monuments to celebrate this occasion. Every 13 k’atuns, the Long Count cycle would come back in sync with the Calendar Round cycle, so this was seen as a kind of repeat of history. Over the course of a bak’tun, the rulers of the kingdom of Palenque seem to have deliberately chosen their regal names to illustrate a kind of folding back of time through the bak’tun. The kings chose unique names until they were halfway through the bak’tun. Then, the names start to repeat backwards. So the ruler right after the halfway mark had the same name as his predecessor. The following ruler had the same name as the ruler one before that, and so on, until the last ruler of the era had the same name as the first.

This kind of thinking of time in terms of these discrete eras led to a belief among Mesoamericans that a new bak’tun would herald a new era with new characteristics. This might even signal the end of a kingdom. One theory for the mysterious abandonment of Teotihuacan was that its residents may have believed that its time had come to an end with the end of a bak’tun or ka’tun.

Well I can’t talk about these major transitions in the Long Count without bringing up the famous 2012 phenomenon. Listeners of a certain age, myself included, may remember that there was a lot of talk in the media about the Maya in the years leading up to 2012. Certain more excitable outlets claimed that the Maya had predicted that the world would end at the end of the year 2012. This was because December 21, 2012 was the end of the 13th bak’tun. And given that 13, of course, is the cosmic number and is associated with the date of creation in Maya numerology, this would have been a particularly momentous transition. But the origin of all the fuss around the year 2012 actually only comes from a single inscription in the archaeology. And this rather makes sense, the classical period was around 200–900, the year 2012 was more than a thousand years off, so they didn’t think much of it. But near the city of Palenque there was a small ruin named Tortuguero. The ruin contains a stone slab that was once part of a temple. The slab has an inscription that reads “At the end of the 13th bak’tun, it will happen that” — and then there is a huge crack in the stone and the rest of the line is gone. On another line there is a glyph which is rather hard to read, but is usually translated, rather ominously, as “he will descend.” In another part there is a glyph which is also hard to read but is generally taken to be a rather obscure god called Bolon Yokte’ K’uh.

So that’s all there is to it. That is all of the archaeological evidence we have that the Maya thought that there was anything special about the year 2012. How we got from this slab to people hyperventilating about Armageddon is more of a 20th century story than a story about the Maya. The 2012 phenomenon began innocently enough. The anthropologist Michael Coe described the Long Count in a book of his in 1966, and as I have been doing, was talking about how the Maya considered changes in the bak’tun roughly every four centuries to be significant events. He speculated that they probably would have considered the end of the 13th bak’tun to also be significant, and possibly even especially significant. And he speculated that maybe, due to the association between the number 13 and creation, they might have conceived of it as an Armageddon.

Well, these idle speculations by an anthropologist were later picked up by the novelist and esoteric thinker Frank Waters in his 1975 book Mexico Mystique: The Coming of the Sixth World of Consciousness. This turned out to be a fairly popular book, and in true 70s fashion, he took Michael Coe’s ideas and transcended them to a psychedelic new level. He argued that the end of the 13th bak’tun in 2012 would usher in a new kind of human consciousness into the world.

These ideas were then taken into an even more, shall we say, esoteric direction by one of the major figures of the New Age movement, José Argüelles. Beyond his writings on the Maya calendar, Argüelles is perhaps best known as being one of the creators of Earth Day, and one of the popularizers of the idea of the noosphere, which will probably at least be familiar to any listeners who are deep enough in the Bay Area tech scene. Well, at any rate, Argüelles seems to have become rather obsessed with the transformation that the world was going to undergo in the year 2012 and in 1987 he penned a book called The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. The Mayanist David Stuart described it as a “spectacularly incomprehensible yet popular treatise.” It’s a little hard to understand even in its barest outline, but the basic idea is that Argüello claimed to be a messenger of the command of Pacal Votan, Pacal Votan being his rendering of the names of one of the Maya rulers buried at Palenque. In his telling, the Maya were aliens. They were galactic agents put on our planet to “place earth and its solar system in synchronization with the larger galactic community.” In the year 2012 not only would the 13th bak’tun end, but the solar system would become aligned with the center of the galaxy. This would “[bode] nothing less than a major evolutionary upgrading of the light-life — radiogenetic — process which our planet represents.” To prepare for this momentous event, he set up the Galactic Research Institute, which operates to this day. Well, José Argüelles never lived to see the harmonic convergence that he predicted. He died in 2011. But as the momentous date approached a flurry of books, articles, radio and television programs followed, the contents of which were as often as not revealed to their authors in a hallucinogenic trance. And, to be fair, given that the only archaeological evidence specifying the year 2012 was this single slab at Tortuguero, that left them with precious few other sources of information about the event.

Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the ruins at Tortuguero have one other interesting astronomical connection. There is a glyph inscribed on one of the monuments there that appears on several other monuments throughout Yucatán that has been called the “star war” glyph. The glyph depicts the sign for the Earth with a star above it. To the side of the Earth are drops which represent rain. This glyph is one of a small number of glyphs which carry the meaning of “war,” and due to the star in it, it is called the “star war” glyph. One prominent theory in Maya studies is that the star war glyph represented a particular type of war that the Maya waged. Now, as an aside, the understanding of Maya warfare has undergone some rather dramatic changes since the early days of Maya studies. Prior to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs, early archaeologists generally believed that the Maya were a peaceful civilization in which warfare was largely unknown. To the extent that archaeologists from this era admitted that the Maya engaged in war, they would say that it was a later practice that was brought in by the Aztec. Even in the early days when not much of substance was known about the Maya, this belief of the Maya as a kind of noble savage civilization probably had more to do with ethnologists’ feelings about Western civilization after the catastrophes of World War I and World War II than anything else. Maya art and iconography has no shortage of depictions of violence and these early ethnologists were well aware of this. But these ethnologists argued that these were more symbolic or mythical, or served some sort of ritual purposes.

This thesis that the Maya were a peaceful people became untenable by the 1960s as Maya hieroglyphs started to be deciphered. As it became clear that many monuments were erected to celebrate a king’s victory in battle, no one could seriously argue anymore that the Maya were pacifist.

At any rate, the Maya used multiple glyphs to denote words that we would translate into the English as “war,” but the “star war” glyph seems to have represented the largest and most intense conflicts in which one kingdom annihilated the ruling dynasty of another. So, what does the star have to do with the conflict? In the 1970s, the Mayanist Floyd Lounsbury noticed that one of these major battles denoted by a star war glyph was fought on August 2, 792 AD. This corresponded to both the inferior conjunction of Venus and the zenith passage of the Sun. This has led to the hypothesis that the Maya timed their wars based on certain astronomical events. It’s well known that among the Maya Venus was associated with war in much the same way that Mars was in Ancient Rome. Proponents of the star war theory have noted that more than two-thirds of the dates recorded with the star war glyph correspond to the first appearance of Venus in the evening sky. And in most of the remaining dates Venus was visible as an evening star. As intriguing as it is, the idea is somewhat hard to test. There are a number of dates recorded with the star war glyph that don’t seem correspond to any particular astronomical event. So whether these wars were only sometimes timed to the heavens, or if there was some other phenomenon that they watched for, or if it was all a coincidence, we can’t really say.

But the idea that the heavens might indicate the end of a kingdom or the transition to a new era was not unfamiliar to the Mesoamericans. As with virtually every other civilization on the planet, the Mesoamericans considered comets to be bad omens. And in 1517, two years before Hernán Cortés arrived, the Aztecs noticed that a comet had appeared in the sky. It was described as “a wound in the sky, wide at its base and narrow at its peak.” And this was not the only bad omen of the year. There had earlier been a very bright meteor and then a fire had broken out in the Temple of Huitzilopochitli, the god of war. Then, strange rumors began to circulate coming from people out on the coasts reporting that they had seen floating houses in the ocean. Needing to know what all this meant, the Emperor Montezuma II brought before him all his high priests and astrologers and demanded that they tell him the significance of this comet and all the other strange tidings besides. But, as in Western astrology, besides being a generally bad sign, comets had no particular astrological interpretation in Aztec astrology. The best that the emperor’s astrologers could muster was a Delphic prediction that “the Emperor will behold and suffer a great mystery.” Knowing that this brief statement was unlikely to satisfy the emperor for long, the astrologers fled the capital that night. When the Emperor had discovered that they had fled, he killed their families in retaliation.

Well, of course, two years later Hernán Cortés arrived on the North American mainland, and two years after that, he was able to overthrow the largest empire that the Americas had seen, in no small part thanks to the help of other Mesoamerican peoples that the Aztecs had previously subjugated. By 1546 the Spanish had also conquered the Yucatán peninsula. Due to the missionary efforts of, among others, Bishop Landa, whom we heard about earlier, many of the Maya on the Yucatán peninsula converted to Christianity and became subjects of the Spanish crown. But other Maya groups retreated into the dense jungle further to the south where the Spanish were unable to reach them. After the Spanish controlled Yucatán, isolated pockets of Maya self-rule nevertheless persisted for another 150 years.

One of the most important of these was the Itzá Kingdom which had a population of some tens of thousands of Maya. Its fall is a revealing case study in the Mesoamerican conception of time, and how changes in the eras of the Long Count could create a political reality. The Itzá kingdom was able to maintain their independence for so long because the tropical jungle made it very difficult for the Spanish to travel to them in large enough numbers to invade. But this was not for lack of trying. During the 16th century, Spain had established two major footholds south of the area occupied by the Aztec Empire that was now known as New Spain. One of these was the Yucatán peninsula. The other was in what is now Guatemala along the Pacific coast. The existence of the Itzá Kingdom in between these two settlements was a major geopolitical problem for the Spanish since it prevented the construction of a road connecting these two. This road was doubly important because not only was it a link between two major Spanish settlements, but it would also connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

Well, over the years there was sporadic contact between the Itzá Kingdom and the Spanish. The initial contact came quite early on and actually left a major impression on Itzá culture. Without getting too deep into the details of the internal politics of the Conquistadors, this period was a wild time. The Chinese have a saying that “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” to, in effect, describe the practical limitations of governing distant provinces. Well, during this time we might say that “the Atlantic Ocean is wide and the King far away.” Here was a vast continent, its land ripe for the taking by anyone who had the means and will to do so. How could the King of Spain ensure that these newly conquered lands, which were nominally conquered in his name, actually came under his control? This was not some idle worry. Cortés’s invasion of the Aztec Empire was actually a rogue operation, done against express orders of the Governor of Cuba. The only reason he wasn’t hung for his treason was that his invasion turned out to be so spectacularly successful. In recognition of this, the King appointed Cortés to be governor of New Spain, but he also appointed four court officials to “assist” Cortés, essentially ensuring that someone loyal to the crown would keep a close eye on him. Cortés, in turn, chafed under what he felt was insufficient recognition of his accomplishments in conquering New Spain. To make matters more complicated, although he had managed to conquer the Aztec Empire with the help of other subjugated indigenous groups, everyone was aware that this was an “enemy of my enemy” situation, and they owed him no particular loyalty.

Well, the Governor of Cuba was worried about Cortés’s increasing power. So he convinced one of the Conquistadors who was a kind of mentee of his, but also one of Cortés’s key men, to break away from Cortés and rule in Honduras in his own right, still nominally loyal to the Spanish crown, but independent of Cortés. In response to this, Cortés led a force of his conquistadors through the dense jungle down into Honduras to bring this rebellion under his heel. This trek was uniformly described by the conquistadors as the single most grueling journey of their entire life. Well, as it happens, the trek took Cortés and his men through the Itzá kingdom. Despite some initial suspicions, the Itzá king ultimately allowed these beleaguered strangers to stay a few days in his court and pass through the kingdom. Apparently the king and Cortés got on well with each other, and the king provided them with directions for how best to reach the location in Honduras that Cortés was aiming for. But what made the biggest impression on the Itzá people were the horses the Spanish had brought. Horses, of course, are not native to the Americas, or more accurately, native American horses had gone extinct thousands of years prior, so the Itzá people had never seen such a magnificent beast. One of Cortés’s horses had injured its foot in the trek and was unable to walk, so Cortés agreed to leave the horse with the Itzá and they promised that they would treat the horse well. The Itzá took the horse to be a divine being, named it Tziminchaak, and the high priests fed it only foods proper to the gods: a steady diet of flowers and birds. Naturally the horse starved to death, but the Itzá kept Tziminchaak in their memory by carving its image in stone and venerating its remains.

Well, nearly a century passed before there was another encounter between the Spanish and the Itzá Kingdom. In 1617, a Franciscan friar named Fray Juan de Orbita was inspired by the records of Cortés’s travels that told of this mysterious kingdom deep in the jungle replete with magnificent temples and palaces and made the dangerous journey to rediscover it. He seemed to have some success in this mission. He converted several Itzá people and the king of the Itzá people told him that he was open to the Christian faith. At the encouragement of Fray Orbita he even put up a cross in his palace.

So, after this encouraging start, Fray Orbita revisited the kingdom a year later with a companion, Fray Bortolomé de Fuensalida. His goal now was to convert some more of the common people and hopefully a courageous nobleman or two. But he was surprised to find that upon his return there seemed to be absolutely no interest from anyone in converting to Christianity. In Orbita’s words, the Itzá nobles told him that “it was not time to be Christians … and that they should go back to where they had come from; they could come back another time, but right then they did not want to be Christians.”

Later in the day after this rejection, Orbita and Fuensalida were taken to the Itzá temple, and there saw the various idols, including the idol to Tziminchaak, Cortés’s old horse. Idols and Franciscan missionaries are something like matter and antimatter, and as soon as he saw it, Orbita smashed the precious idol to Tziminchaak, which led to a tremendous outcry from the people when word got out.

Orbita and his companion were taken before the king and they convinced him to grant them a private audience. There, they and talked to him about the Christian message and how important it was for the souls of him and his people that he convert to Christianity. But, again in Orbita’s words, the king responded, “It is not yet time to abandon our gods…. Now is the age of Three Ahaw. The prophecies tell us the time will yet come to abandon our gods, years from now, in the age of Eight Ahaw. We will speak no more of this now. You would best leave us and return another time.” Well, in this intervening time several noblemen began to gather warriors outside to exact their revenge on Orbita and Fuensalida for their blasphemy, and so Orbita and Fuensalida had to flee the kingdom for their own safety.

Now, Frays Orbita and Fuensalida did not realize it, but the year that they made their second journey to the Itzá kingdom, 1618, was one of the rare changes in the bak’tun that happens every four centuries. In fact, the next change of a bak’tun was none other than the one a few years ago in 2012. It’s possible that this change of a bak’tun instigated a more fervent worship of the traditional gods. But each subsequent ka’tun every twenty years brought with it a new era. And the Itzá priests prophesied that in Eight Ahaw, four ka’tuns later, a new era with a new religion would begin.

Well, a few years after the journey of Frays Orbita and Fuensalida, the Spanish sent a much larger armed expedition with about a hundred men, both Spanish and Maya, to help move the conversion process along. But Fray Orbita’s destruction the idols in the temple was still fresh in the minds of the Itzá people. Upon their arrival, they were all taken prisoner and told that they would be sacrificed in atonement for the blasphemy that Fray Orbita had committed. More than 90 of the men were killed, sacrificed to the gods with their hearts ripped out of their chests. A few of the group were spared so that they could take the story back to the Spanish with the message that the Itzá wanted to be left alone. Over the decades there were a few more half-hearted attempts to convert the Itzá, but they all met with a similar grisly end.

By the end of the 17th century, the Spanish presence in the New World had been growing exponentially, and the larger population was putting pressure on the border with the Itzá Kingdom. The Itzá would conduct raids into neighboring lands, and the Spanish still couldn’t build their long desired road connecting Yucatán and Guatemala. On the Itzá side, their raids had impressed on them the value of Western goods, particularly machetes. So, with the memory of Fray Orbita’s destruction of the temple out of living memory, there was more willingness on the part of the Itzá to build diplomatic relationships with the Spanish. And, of course, the age of Eight Ahaw was fast approaching.

Well, the records from Frays Orbita and Fuensalida had indicated the importance of this new era and the prophecy that was associated with it, and now, decades later, another Franciscan, named Fray Avendaño realized that it was soon coming to pass. This was the golden moment to convert the Itzá people. Fray Avendaño spent years planning for this mission by studying any documents on the Maya religion and Maya prophecies that he could get his hands on.

Many of these survive in what we today call the Books of Chilam Balam that I discussed earlier. And as I also mentioned, every 13 ka’tuns, roughly 256 years, the Long Count cycle would sync back up with the Calendar Round cycle and this was seen as a kind of repetition of history. So what were the Maya prophecies of the age of 8 Ahaw? Well, as the Books of Chilam Balam describe the history across the ages of time, a theme that emerges is that the arrival of 8 Ahaw is associated with upheaval and destruction. One passage says,

8 Ahaw was when Chichen Itzá was abandoned. There were thirteen folds of ka’tuns when they established their houses at Chakanputun.

After 13 ka’tuns, Chakanputun is in turn abandoned. 13 ka’tuns later the Itzá abandoned their homes yet again. The text says,

8 Ahau was when the Itzá men again abandoned their homes because of the treachery of Hunac Ceel, because of the banquet with the people of Izamal, For thirteen folds of Katuns they had dwelt there, when they were driven out by Hunac Ceel because of the giving of the questionnaire of the Itzá

So, the Itzá people knew from their prophetic histories that the arrival, once again, of the ka’tun called 8 Ahaw in 1697, would usher in yet another upheaval.

So, early in 1697, Fray Avendaño departed for the capital of the Itzá Kingdom with a small party. Upon his arrival he came upon a number of commoners. The women and children ran away yelling to alert the people of the arrival of foreigners, and the men greeted the party by pointing bows and arrows at them. Fray Avendaño approached the men with open arms to show that he was unarmed, offered them gifts of things from Spain, and embraced the men when it was clear that he posed no threat. Fray Avendaño intended to give these men a few token gifts and save the bulk of his gifts for the king, but to his dismay the men carted away nearly everything he had brought. Nevertheless, he was able to spend the night peacefully with some of the Itzá commoners.

The next morning, news of the Spaniards’ arrival had reached the king, so the missionary party went to the shore of the Lake Petén Itzá and waited for the king to arrive and grant him an audience. At around two in the afternoon the king made a grand entrance, sailing across the lake shore on eight canoes full of men dressed in battle attire. Fray Avendaño had expected that on the shore he would formally greet the king and announce the reason for his visit. But instead he was immediately grabbed by the king’s guards, stuffed onto a canoe, and taken to the king’s royal canoe where he would be transported to the palace on an island in the middle of the lake. On route to the island, Fray Avendaño then recorded that the following happened:

Suddenly the king placed his hand on my heart to see if it was at all agitated, and at the same time he asked me if I was so. I, who was before very glad to observe that my wishes and the work of my journey were being realized, replied to him, “Why should my heart be disturbed? Rather it is very contented, seeing that I am the fortunate man who is fulfilling your own prophecies, by which you are to become Christians; and this benefit will come to you by means of some bearded men from the East, who by the signs of their prophets we ourselves, because we came many leagues from the direction of the east, plowing the seas with no other purpose than to bring them, borne by the love of their souls (and at the cost of much work), to that favor which the true God shows them.” I at this time, with some liberty on my part, also placed my hand on his breast and heart, asking him also if his was disturbed, and he said: “No.” To which I replied: “If you are not disturbed at seeing me, who am the minister of the true God, different in everything from you—in dress, customs, and color, so that I inspire fear in the devil, and if your heart is not troubled, why should you expect me to be afraid of you, mere men like myself, whom I come purposely to seek, with great pleasure, merely for the love which I have for their souls, and having found them, in order to announce to them the law of the true god, as you shall hear when we come to the Peten.”

Upon their arrival, the priests were taken up to the temple and palace where they came upon the altar upon which some hundred of their confreres had been sacrificed years ago. But the priests were taken past the altar and into an antechamber of the king’s palace where they were given food and drink. Finally, the men were asked the purpose of their visit. In his exhaustive preparations, Fray Avendaño had written a letter in the native language explaining that, in accordance with their prophecies, he was here to convert them to the true faith. The antechamber had no windows and he could hardly make out his letter, so he asked if they could move outside into the daylight. And there, before a crowd of people he proclaimed his letter.

The response to this letter from everyone listening, from the nobility to the commoners was neither positive nor negative. Just confusion. When Fray Avendaño penned his letter, he wrote it in an extremely formal diplomatic style, and if you’ve ever read any formal European diplomatic letters from the late 17th century, you’ll know that this language was baroque, to say the least. Then Fray Avendaño translated the letter rather literally into the native language of the Itzá people. The result was a letter that was essentially incomprehensible. When the Itzá noblemen told him they had no idea what he was saying, he decided to put the letter aside and try to explain his purpose extemporaneously in more direct language. He described how their prophecies indicated that in the age of 8 Ahaw, a time of great change was upon them. This change, he declared, was to be their conversion to the Christian faith. Would they put aside their old gods and worship this new figure, Jesus Christ? Now that the Itzá finally understood what Fray Avendaño was here to do, the king told him to wait there a little while as they thought about it.

During his deliberations the king forbade the people from engaging with the Spaniards. But the people found these foreigners to be so exotic that they completely ignored this prohibition and huge groups of commoners came to see the Spaniards at all hours of the day and night.

Well, the king of the Itzá truly believed that the age of 8 Ahaw would usher in a time of destruction and upheaval, and was convinced by the foreigner’s detailed knowledge of this prophecy that was supposed to have been the secret knowledge of his high priests. After a few days he decided that he and two of his high priests would get baptized. As a kind of test run he first offered up his own son to see what would happen. After the boy had the holy water poured upon him and seemed to suffer no ill consequences, the king and high priests underwent the ceremony as well.

Well, the Itzá nobility were by no means unified behind the king’s decision. Several noblemen and the queen herself were aghast that the king was abandoning their gods and capitulating to their enemy, the Spanish. Within a few days it the king learned that of a plot to murder the Spaniards, so he urged them to leave. Like their predecessors decades ago, the Spanish missionaries escaped the Itzá kingdom under the cover of darkness.

But, at this point, the patience of the Spanish authorities for the Itzá kingdom had worn out. A few months after Fray Avendaño and his party escaped, the authorities sent a much larger military force consisting of hundreds of troops and even artillery with the purpose of deposing the kingdom. But when the force arrived at the kingdom they were astonished to find that there was nothing to conquer. They had arrived at a ghost town. The capital had been almost completely abandoned. As the prophecies had foretold, the arrival of the age of 8 Ahaw had led to the Itzá people abandoning their home, just as they had done innumerable times in ages past.

The troops set about their work of converting the pagan temples to Christian churches, and in the process of destroying the pagan idols they came across a box hung from the ceiling over a shrine that was filled with horse bones. An elderly Itzá woman who had been too old to leave the city told the Spanish that those were the bones of Tziminchaak, the horse that Cortés had left centuries earlier.

Well, speaking of ends of eras, with this we’ll wrap up not only our tour of Mesoamerican astronomy, but our tour of non-Western astronomy more generally. Ordinarily I would at this point tell you what next month’s episode will be about, but I’m afraid I have to say that there will be no episode next month. Now that we’ve come to a natural stopping point in the narrative I’ve decided to take a bit of a break. I’ve been faithfully putting out episodes every full moon now for nearly four years, and this one marks episode number forty-seven. In all, I’ve written nearly 450,000 words for this show, which is about the length of the Lord of the Rings. But as some of you may have noticed, the episodes have started to come a bit late. So, I’m taking some time to catch up on the reading I need to do for the next phase of the show and also work on a few other projects that I’ve been neglecting these past couple of years. But don’t worry, the Song of Urania is not going away for good. The next episode will come out in about a year’s time, at the first full moon of 2026. Then we will transition into what we might consider the next season of the show. If we were to divide the show into seasons, the first would have been the astronomy of the ancient world, with the episodes on Babylonian, Greek, and Roman astronomy. Then this second season, which we’re wrapping up in this episode, covered what we might very loosely call the history of non-Western astronomy. In the third season will cover medieval astronomy, starting with the astronomy of the Islamic world, and then transitioning into astronomy in Christendom. So, you’ll have to wait a little longer than usual for the next episode, but I hope that when it comes the wait will be worth it. So, until the next full moon of 2026, good night, and clear skies.

Additional Resources

• Stuart, The Order of Days