Talk:Maya calendar/Archives/2006/April

Suggested Revisions

The first section states that natural phenomena such as the solar and lunar years can be tracked by the calendar. This is wrong. The Haab is only a vague solar year of 365 days and it diverges from the solar year of 365.2422 days over time. There is no lunar year in the Maya Calendar - only a series of six counted lunations.

The section about the end of the world is wrong. Yes, the Maya did ritual calculations way into the past and future but the people of the new world also believed that the world had been created and destroyed four times before. These are the four rectangular glyphs surrounding the center of the Stone of the Fifth Sun ("Aztec Calendar Stone"). The writer of this section states that 12.19.19.17.19 is only the end of a baktun but it is really the end of the thirteen baktuns of the Fifth Sun and is an end of the world date. The Maya told Diego de Landa this and painted a picture for his relacion that depicts the war god raining down projectile weapons to end the world.

It seems to me that there are three problems dogging the study of the Maya Calendar today:

1. Use of the Proleptic Gregorian Calendar. In reading books about calendars and astronomical algorithms I have never seen any reference to this. If as I believe, this system was invented by Thompson to make it easier for him to do the calculations in the pre-computer era and is only used by those attempting to do Maya Calendar calculations then we should abandon it.

2. The debate about the correlation constant was dead and buried until Linda Schele advocated the use of Lounsbury's correlation in her popular Maya book A Forest of Kings. In her own writing she says "I'm not a numbers person." and "I really don't understand these things.". Also she was urged not to write about this by Dennis Tedlock who really knew about it and told her that there were at least 18 other suggested hierophanies that were as good as Lounsbury's and that Lounsbury's made significant mistakes. In Wikipedia we are writing to educate people looking for information and should probably not muddy the waters by resurecting the debate about correlations.

3. Weird pseudoscientific spiritualisic gobblygook by writers like Jose Arguelles. An article about the Maya Calendar should be simple and stick to the facts about the calendar, not bizarre theories.

Rather than starting an editing war I wanted to put this here. If anyone can tell me what is wrong with the above statements maybe I wouldn't edit the page to reflect it.

206.54.78.72 18:16, 6 April 2006 (UTC)Tlaloc

I would have to agree with most of this, but I'm not crazy enough to edit these pages. ("Edit war! Edit war! Dance to the music!") I'd even go so far as to say these sorts of problems are holding back Maya studies in general.

The proleptic Julian calendar was in fairly common use, the proleptic Gregorian less so, but neither one was invented by Thompson. (See The Calendar FAQ.) Using a proleptic calendar does greatly simplify calculations when trying to calculate date spans. They aren't used much anymore, thanks to computers.

And kids, the multitude of wacko links at the end of the article have got to go. The world is not going to end in 2011, or 2012, or 2013. There are no mystical vibrations associated with the Maya, the Maya calendar, the Long Count, etc. It's just a calendar system and a number, and I can't understand why Wikipedia would want to support the scam artists coming up with this nonsense. (Blue Spectral Monkey, indeed.) 12.103.251.203 18:02, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually it is quite easy to do conversions to/from julian day numbers using algorithms developed by astronomers. 216.67.161.197 14:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)Tlaloc

"The Classic Period Maya obviously did not believe that the end of this age would occur in 2012. According to the Maya, there will be a baktun ending in 2012, a significant event being the end of a 13th 400 year period, but not the end of the world."

- This is leading and uncorroborated. You (the writer) may have come to this conclusion in your own research, but it is an opinion and not a fact. Perhaps the Mayan's did believe the end of this age would occur in 2012...or perhaps you have conversed with them using time travel or astral projection ;)

it'll be reverted anyways.