What mayan calendars mean?

It's common for people and scholars to day that Mayan calendars are complicated. Or that they had a vision of time that was cyclical. Let's clear this up before learning some mayan calendars.

Our calendar seems simple in comparison, because it only does one of two things: count the says, and kinda tell us how is Earth moving in relation to the Sun, so that we can have a sense of what season show we be in, and what is the next season to come.

Mayan calendars do more than that. They paint a picture of how the sky looked on any given date, during the night and during the day. And yes, I said "calendars" because they didn't just had one, but many calendars. They followed lots of the planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc), the Moon, the movement of the Earth around the Sun, solar and moon eclypses, and for the long-count, even the date their mythology said it was the creation date... and 13 creations before that.

If you look at the moon for many days, you will notice how it will receive more or less sunlight (phases of the moon), but also rising on the horizon earlier and then later. And after some days, those observations will start repeating, over and over. This is why their calendars feel as cyclical, because that is what the planets and the moons doing as they go through the sky.

Another short example is looking at Venus. Sometimes this planet will appear at sunrise, sometimes at sundown, and sometimes it will be too close to the Sun to observe it. And here we can realize something very important. All civilizations, through all of the ages have named "the morning star" and "the evening star" as two separate objects, with no relation between them. The maya were the only civilization to understand that it was Venus. And this tells us that they were incredible astronomers, with nothing that we could compare from their time or before. It would take 100's of years of arab precise observations with astrolabe and sexants, and advanzed mathematicians like Copernicus for the rest of the planet to realize this.

So, mayan calendars are not just ways to count the days, but ways for us to understand the sky and to keep track of where everything is on a certain date. Or, the other way around, to paint with numbers and words how the sky would look like when certain event happened. Think of it like Stellarium, but instead of being a piece of software it was the base for a culture that loved the sky.

Why learn them?

Sure, if we already have Stellarium, why go through the trouble of learning them?

As we talked about, they are an astronomical tool that has modern uses. If you know the date of the Moon Landing, what does that date tells you about the sky when that happened? Or, what would you know about the sky if you translated that date to mayan calendars?

We also talked how is the base for an entire culture that was almost completely erased. If they knew so much, what could we still learn from them?

Would you even look at the sky in the same way, if by "today" you can relate to where are all the planets in the sky and where they are in their cycles just by looking at the date?

Not just that, but mayans scribes and builders were some of the most extreme graphical artists you can think of. Imaging having artist and area specific, anime or graphic-novel style art, filled with astronomy and culture in every important building of your town! The styles of how you draw a specific calendar glyph are quite beautiful and intricate.

Tzolk'in

This will be our first calendar, used in lots of parts of mesoamerica, not only by the mayan but by many related cultures. It has many names, but Tzolk'in is one that we use often, also called "sacred round" or "sacred calendar". It's not based on a solar year, but on aprox 9 months. Some scholars point that it could be length of time of a human pregnancy. It sort of makes sense, they believed that the date you were born influenced the type of person you would become, and it's also used to name a child.

Others point to agricultural calendars, since if you plant maize on a certain day, you should have a harvest when the calendar is about to repeat. Since their culture uses a lot of maize, there is no doubt this would be useful as well.

My favorite idea, is that as we have discussed, the calendars paint a picture of the sky. In one of the few codices that still exist, called the Desden codex, we have an amazing section that we call "The tables of Venus", and it's a series of events in the cycle of Venus through the sky (from our view point) that are computed by using the Tzolk'in.