The ancient Maya achieved one of the highest levels of civilization of any native peoples in the Americas. Among their intellectual achievements was a form of hieroglyphic writing that enabled them to develop a highly sophisticated concept of time. While they were concerned more with matters of religion and politics than with purely scientific research, they developed a concept of time and space that contravenes the so-called "natural" laws of science. Their ideation was similar to recent scientific theories about time, space, and the creation of the universe. The problem was to discover what, if anything, exists, or can exist, outside of the known universe. The Maya came up with a rather unique solution: two separate but intermeshing calendars.
The Maya sacred calendar (Tzolkin) contains twenty days, each of which is accompanied by a number from one to thirteen. Each day is a god and is designated by the god's name and number. The numbers and the names run concurrently. After thirteen the digits start over again, but the names continue to twenty. Thirteen numbers plus twenty-day names add up to 260 days, the length of the sacred calendar.
The secular calendar (Haab) uses the 365-day solar year divided into eighteen months of twenty days each with five "Dead Days" left at the end of the year. Each day, also a god, is designated by its number and name, both running concurrently. For example, in the Maya calendar, the last day of the year would fall on 0 Pop. New Year's would be on 1 Pop. The month would then run from day one to day nineteen, with 0 Pop representing both the first day of the month Pop and the last day of the preceding month.
The intermeshing of the two calendars is called the Calendar Round. For example, a starting point would be 1 Imix of the sacred calendar in conjunction with 19 Pop of the secular calendar. This same combination of dates does not recur for 52 years, the basic cycle of the Mesoamerican calendar.
Like ourselves, the Maya also felt the need for a fixed date from which to make calculations backward into the past and forward into the future. This is called the Long Count, based on multiples of twenty. The basic period is called the Katun (approximately twenty years). The Maya fixed the starting date of their era as 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, which represents a period of approximately 5,128 years. In terms of the Gregorian calendar, this would correspond to a day in 3114 B.C. Using this system, Mayan priests were expected to predict the events of each Katun, five years before it began. Five years afterwards, they recorded the actual events as a basis for future policy.
In Maya thought, cyclical time ran concurrently with linear time. Notable events were recorded in linear or historical time. But in cyclical time, an event that happened on a particular day in the present would also happen again on that corresponding date in a far distant future, that was also the past. Any point on the circumference of a circle can be past, present or future to anyone travelling around that circle. In purely practical terms, this meant that the Maya were able to combine the notion of qualitative or cyclical time with that of quantitative or linear time. For example, an actual historical ruler would be fixed in linear or secular time, while his divine nature would be emphasized in the vast cycle of sacred time. This provided the Maya with a form of divine justification for their rulership and political system.
The Maya took their own prophecies very seriously. For example, one Maya group called the Itza ("Water Witches"), fleeing from the Spaniards, resettled at Tayasal on Lake Peten. Twice, in 1539 and in 1618, they rejected the efforts of Cortes and others to Christianize them because the time was not right according to their sacred calendar. But in 1695 they knew it was time. They requested the governor in Merida convert them. But the Spaniards would not wait until the appropriate time and forced the Indians to fight. True to the prophecy, Tayasal was not conquered until Katun 8 Ahau (1697-1717). Did the Maya predict their own future or did they make it happen? It all depends on your point of view.
