Peculiarities of Ancient Maya Astrology - Coursework Example

Ancient Maya Astrology The vast expanse of the night sky that dominated the Mayan rainforest, the shifting of the sun over the year, the phases of the moon, the changing positions of the stars above, as well as the frightening experience of the eclipses must have cultivated among the Mayan people an awe and interest in the cosmos. The ever-changing, yet predictable movements of these heavenly bodies and phenomena became the domain of the shamans, priests, and rulers – the elite – generating an impressive esoteric knowledge and source of power through the understanding of time and beliefs about prophecy. Indeed, throughout the period of the Mayan civilization, a complex cultural tradition emerged that had extended over a long period of time, encompassing different groups of people. From 200 to 1000 C.E. otherwise known as the Mayan classical period, an elaborate astrological science was developed, flourishing to dominate the social, political, economic, spiritual and social life of the Mayan peoples. Celestial Science From a Western perspective, it may be difficult to relate to the shamanistic rituals and meticulous observation and recording by the Maya scribes of astronomical data. This is because the Maya “celestial science” was also a form of divination as recordings of the movements of the astral bodies were used to predict the future. Here mathematics and science were employed as tools to divine the future. The Maya went to the extremes of building a calendar system that was so accurate in so far as recording and calculating enormous units of past and future time. Michael Kampen (1981) explored this aspect as he wrote: The Maya did not view historical events and astronomical events as separable phenomena. Astronomical configurations coinciding with events in the past were expected to do so again in the future. Human history is part of the predictable pattern of the cosmos. If the astrologers could calculate the positions of heavenly bodies in the future, they believed that they would be able to predict the historical events accompanying them.1 In the Dresden Codex, a Mayan divinatory almanac which is one of the rare surviving Mayan artifacts, texts abruptly passes from precise numerical calculation and detail of celestial observation – what we would call scientific astronomy – to matters that deal with the veneration of the deity.2 It is easy to consider the Mayan astrology as a paragon of scientific timekeeping although it is constrained by ritual dictates such as the need to set the celebration of the arrival of the deity on his special name days in the Tzolkin. Understandably, Mayan astrology, wrote Arthur Demarest, did not grow from an abstract desire to understand the cosmos nor, as has sometimes been proposed, to study the seasons in order to plan crops, but instead, like astrology everywhere, it developed as another tool of the shamans to predict future events. Mayan astrologers believed that the gods of the days, months and larger time colored those time periods with their own characters. Kampen illustrates: Day numbers were associated with a list of gods and entire years were prejudiced by the god of the new year day, the year bearer. Since the Maya had so many time periods in operation simultaneously, the Haab, Tzolkin and solar year, to name only three, any given day was under the influence of a large and diverse collection of deitic characters. (6) The complexities of the Mayan astrology as illustrated above made the ordinary Mayan peasant dependent upon the astrologer-priests for all the important divinations and, henceforth, decisions in his life. The Mayan Calendar The immensely high level of Mayan culture enabled the training and resources that produced learned scribes and priests. At the peak of its civilization, the Maya had achieved an exquisite system of understanding nature and the cosmos, particularly. One of the most solid evidence to this fact is the accuracy and the complexity of the Mayan calendar. Shamans recorded the periodic appearances, movements, and eclipses of the moon, the sun, Venus and the stars, refining timetables and calendars for all their movements. James McClellan presented a study on this astounding artifact: Mayan astronomers computed the length of the solar year to an accuracy greater than 365 ¼ days, although they used a 365-day year for calendar purposes… Mayan astronomers harmonized cycles of Venusian and solar years, and they elaborated even more complex cycles, including one integrated 104 solar years, 146 sacred Tzolkin cycles, and 65 Venus years. Experts may well have produced tables for Mars and for Mercury. Other inscriptions indicate that Jupiter possessed astrological significance; certain stars have special meanings as well.3 These calendars could then be used to record the past in terms of datings in the cycles of each celestial body. Such dated events would also predict the future, since they would be expected to repeat, symbolically and literally, when the same set of dates in various Maya calendric cycles reoccurred years, decades, or centuries later. One of the most important of the Mayan annual calendars was the Haab or “vague solar year” of eighteen months (Winals) of twenty days (K’ins) and a special, prophetically perilous closing month of five days (Wayeb).4 Many of the Maya astrological computations are projections into the past or into the future that required dovetailing the cycles. For instance, one inscription, commemorating the enthronement of a ruler, gives the calendar round dates of his birth and his enthronement, as well as the enthronement of an earlier, somehow related ruler or deity.5 In analyzing utilitarian motivations, calendrical mastery at the most simple level gave Mayan rulers an understanding of the seasons and agricultural cycles. In its more complex formations the Mayan calendar governed elaborate religious and ritual activities, and the full complexities of the Mayan astrology produced magic numbers, prognosticated the fates of individuals, and predicted propitious and unfavorable times for a host of activities.6 This is the reason why some scholars believe that the full knowledge of the Mayan calendar must have been guarded jealously by the ruling elite since it was undoubtedly a source of great power. Two of these scholars are Robert Sharer and Sylvanus Morley who explained that the full possession of the calendric knowledge demonstrated to the populace that the rulers held close communion with the supernatural forces that governed the cosmos.7 Venusian Cycle One of the concentrations of the Maya astrology is the movements of Venus. The Mayan civilization knew Venus by several names –Great Star, Wasp Star, Bright Star – and associated it with Kukulcan, Feathered Serpent, god of the wind and inventor of the calendar.8 The Venusian movements were so important in the Mayan astrology that in the course of its history, the Mayans built at least three major buildings with Venus in mind – the Caracol at Chichen Itza and the Governor’s Palace at Uxmal, both on the plains of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and the Temple of Venus at Copan in Guatemala. About six pages in the Dresden Codex were devoted to Venus (see fig. 1) Here, a table is included that permits calculations of the date in the 260-day calendar significant junctions in the 584-day cycle of the motions of Venus as seen from the Earth.9 It also shows Venus deities flinging spears at various earthly victims underscoring the reason why the movements of Venus had religious and military significance. For instance, the Venus cycle was used to time military campaigns. Mayans are said to fear the planet in the days just after its switch to the morning sky and that many of them believed that certain perils were related to the heliacal rising of Venus after inferior conjunction, a time when bright rays pierced the atmosphere like arrows causing death, pestilence and destruction.10 It is easy to understand why Venus receives attention among all the celestial luminaries. Other than Mercury, it is the only bright planet that appears closely attached to and obviously influenced physically by the sun. Venus announces the sunrise in the morning or rises from the ashes of the deceased solar luminary as darkness approaches. Indeed, the Mayan Venus is identified in all forms of inscriptions, including texts, pottery, and stelae and of course, the Dresden Codex. 11 Fig. 1 Source: Lankford, John, History of Astronomy: An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 1997) p. 24. In the Mayan astrology, time is considered as cyclic. Supernatural forces and beings are associated with and influence units of time. In this perspective, events of the past, present and future are related through the recurrence of named time units. The Mayan calendars incorporated astronomical phenomena and that there was a preoccupation on the interrelationship of the arbitrary cycles the Maya created and imposed on time. It is for this reason why the Maya are said to have mathematized time and, through it, their religion and cosmology.12 This enabled the Maya to summon the cosmos by borrowing time as well as space as they engage in an exchange with the numinous forces of nature. Mark Taylor provides an account of an astrological ritual: When he later pays a visit to each of the mountain of the four directions, the day keeper symbolically aligns himself with the universe on a larger scale. Thus he goes forward to the eastern mountain on the Tzolkin day 11 Quej, a day associated with the ability to see into the future, backward to the mountain in the west on 11 Junajpu, a day associated with the ancestors; and to the mountains located laterally on the south and north, which are said to benefit the male (right) and (female (left) sides of his body, respectively. (322) The Mayan meticulous observations of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars to divine the future – combined with their sophisticated mathematical concepts – produced calendars, eclipse tables, and a level of astronomical knowledge beyond that of their contemporaries in Europe. All of these calculations, however, were made based on the periodicity of the appearance of the astral bodies without any Western “scientific” concepts of the structure of space, the planets, or the solar system.13 For those trained in Western, “rational” scientific thought, the ancient Maya astrology seems like a baffling stew of mysticism, astrology, geomancy and numerology with some fairy tales and feng shui tossed up for good reason. However, for anthropologists the Mayan astrology is an example of a different but significant belief system which worked and flourished for those who partake of them. And so it was with the ancient Maya: their religion and cosmology are interwoven with their political and territorial organization, making it an interesting study. One of the defining principles in the Maya philosophy of astrology is the belief that the pattern of the past operates in a literal sense as a framework for the future. The Maya - with its sophisticated mathematical and scientific ideas as displayed by its complex astrological systems – is one of the few civilizations who have flourished independently of the Western culture. It would have been interesting to find out how its culture or as with the subject of this paper - astrology - would evolve to modernity if it has endured through all these years. Bibliography Anderson, Marlow, Katz, Victor, and Wilson, Robin. Sherlock Holmes in Babylon. MAA, 2004 Aveni, Anthony. Skywatchers. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Demarest, Arthur. Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kampen, Michael. The Religion of the Maya. Leiden: BRILL, 1981. Lankford, John. History of Astronomy: An Encyclopedia. Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 1997. Reddy, Francis and Walz-Chojnacki, Greg. Celestial Delights: The Best Astronomical Events Through 2010. San Francisco: Celestial Arts, 2002. McClellan, James and Dorn, Harold. Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction JHU Press, 2006. Sharer, Robert and Morley, Sylvanus. The Ancient Maya Stanford University Press, 1994. Taylor, Mark. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Read More