In December 2012, Guatemala will be celebrating the new era of the Mayas, according to the Long Count Calendar, one of the 3 calendars known to be used by the ancient Mayan culture. According to Archaeologist and expert Tomas Jose Barrientos Quezada, M.A, from University del Valle of Guatemala, the event of the 2012 Mayan celebration has to be put into a broader context of the very complex and still largely unknown Mayan culture.
He says that what is known about the Mayan culture and their thoughts is only the tip of the iceberg and may things might never be known, because the transmission of the knowledge was based largely on oral tradition. The history of the Mayas was not written as much as it was transmitted by oral tradition.
The event has been reported since last year by the international media. This January the flood of articles has increased noticeably. The western media uses Hollywood parallels and analogies to interpret important events of foreign cultures, maybe to make it easier for the audience and to attract the reader’s interest for the articles. The headlines usually contain some familiar ingredients of western Hollywood epics and words like apocalypse, end of the world, doomsday and end of time that people can associate with the adventures of Hollywood.
The market of pseudo pseudo-scientific personalities or cults also play a role as does the tourism industry that uses the Mayan -hub to lure the tourists to the exotic destination to be “ there” and witness the cataclysmic event “that maybe will occur”.
Archaeologist and expert Tomas Jose Barrientos Quezada, M.A explains that our vision and ways to explain the Mayan culture is from a western point of view. In the first place there is not one Mayan calendar, there are at least, three important ones that were used for different purposes: “ to explain it with western examples we could mention the tax year cycle, the school year cycle, the agricultural cycle, etc.”
He explains that the knowledge concerning the LONG COUNT CALENDAR is based only on the re-discovery and re- interpretation of the Dresden Codex (Codex Dresdensis): “until recently, the Mayas in Guatemala did not use the LONG COUNT CALENDAR in their daily lives, that is why we know so little about it.” The documentation of the Long Count Calendar and many other manuscripts where destroyed during the conquista. The Codex of Dresden, Paris and Madrid can be described as guides or manuals for the Mayan priests of that period. However they do not represent the totality of the Mayan knowledge. To simplify the concept it could be said that the codices tell the “what” but not the “why”.
The other two calendars are the CHOLQUIJ / TZOLKIN and the solar calendar JAAB that are currently used by Mayan priests and academics as agricultural calendars and for the description of astronomic and solar events that predict the Nahuales- the auspiciousness of each day, according to its meaning and interpretation.
An astonishing fact is that the 3 calendars are synchronized in time and space.
How does it work, that will be addressed in the next article about this Mayan celebration. Stay tuned.
Pictures: Barbara Schieber, Bosse Persson, Ministry of Culture Guatemala
