Creative Cogitation

The Mayans actu­ally had sev­eral cal­en­dars: a 52 “year” cal­en­dar round, bro­ken into 20 day / 13 “month”  seg­ments, a long-count cal­en­dar for trac­ing long peri­ods of time, a cal­en­dar for track­ing the phases of the moon, a cal­en­dar of the heli­a­cal cycle of Venus etc.  Your aver­age Mayan prob­a­bly mostly paid atten­tion to the cal­en­dar round, but prob­a­bly didn’t track long peri­ods of time as the cal­en­dar round was appre­hen­si­ble in terms of a human life-span at the time. 

The one you keep hear­ing about with respect to 2012 is the Long-Count cal­en­dar.  It appar­ently was used to mark events, and aus­pi­cious days on which to do mon­u­men­tal things– from what I can tell it is largely asso­ci­ated with archi­tec­ture – you know pyra­mids, stella etc.  Just as we count time from before and after J.C., the Mayan long count cal­en­dar counts from zero around August 11 –3113 on the Julian Cal­en­dar, and about a month later if you go Gre­go­rian (yes, that is more than 5000 years ago)

The Mayans used a veg­isi­mal sys­tem of count­ing (base-20).  We use base-10, maybe Mayans counted on their fin­gers and their toes.  :)  They also seemed to like the num­ber 13 too.  Any­way, the long count cal­en­dar is just Base 20 mul­ti­ples with a one wrinkle-since a solar year is around 365 days, they dropped the sec­ond place holder to base-18 instead of 20 to make it match the solar year a bit bet­ter. See 20 x 20 is 400 which is about 10% longer than a year, but 18 x 20 is 360, which only misses the mark by about 2%, so the sec­ond place holder in the Mayan Long Count Cal­en­dar only counts to 17 instead of 19.  Before you won­der about the Mayans fudg­ing their cal­en­der, remem­ber, every four years we add a day to Feb­ru­ary to fudge our cal­en­dar.  The Mayan Long-Count cal­en­dar usu­ally dis­re­gards the 5 extra “unlucky” days (the dif­fer­ence between 365 and 360) in the solar year-they didn’t fudge for them; I guess they decided 360 days was close enough and kept on counting.   

The cur­rent hype about Decem­ber 21, 2010 is very much like the Y2K hype about going from Decem­ber 31, 1999 to Jan­u­ary 1, 2000.  It’s just a flip­ping of a bunch of veg­isi­mal places to 0, while the high­est place holder incre­ments up one.  One ques­tion is whether the cur­rent cycle ends at 13th b’aktun (remem­ber the Mayans had a thing for the num­ber 13) or whether the b’aktun  keeps on count­ing to 19.   See Decem­ber 20, 2012 is the very last day of the 13th b’aktun:  12.19.19.17.19 in terms of the Mayan system-if the high­est place holder base twenty then the next day is merely the start of the 14^th b’aktun.  13.0.0.0.0, but if the high­est place holder is base-13 then the long count must add another place­holder 1.0.0.0.0.0 and start count­ing b’aktun from zero too. 

 My under­stand­ing is that most stella and other things depict­ing the Long-Count Cal­en­dar do use base-20 for the b’aktun, the 5th place holder that counts the num­ber of 400-year spans. The glyphs on some stella even pre­dict events after the begin­ning of the 14^th b’aktun.  There is noth­ing to sug­gest the begin­ning of the 14^th b’aktun por­tends disaster-in fact it seems that flip­ping over of a b’aktun, which hap­pens roughly every 400 years, would be con­sid­ered aus­pi­cious and prob­a­bly accom­pa­nied by celebration. 

One final note.  As I said the Mayan sys­tem is higher than base-10, so in order to depicted it prop­erly you need a sym­bol for each new pos­si­ble digit.  Com­puter engi­neers resolved this ques­tion eas­ily sub­sti­tut­ing let­ters to sym­bol­ize dig­its higher than nine (some com­put­ing goes on with Base 16 – hexa­dec­i­mal). Fol­low­ing the same pro­ce­dure 12.19.19.17.19 becomes CJJHJ. E.g. 10 becomes A, 11 becomes B, 12 becomes C … 17 becomes H and 19 becomes J. 

Jake Beckman’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Mayan Long Count Calendar.

And that is how I arrived at CJJHJ – because the next day will be either D0000 or 100000 depend­ing on whether you thing the b’aktun is base-20 or base-13, but the 13^th b’aktun will be over. In my paint­ings on the sub­ject I depict each place holder with a cog.  The place hold­ers count out from the cen­ter. The ver­ti­cal from the cen­ter to the top shows the “cur­rent” count, in this case CJJHJ the last day of the 13th B’aktun, which will occur Decem­ber 20, 2012.  My rep­re­sen­ta­tion uses base-13 for the B’aktun cog.  The very next click on the wheel of time would set each ring back to zero.

At the moment I am work­ing on two dif­fer­ent paint­ings which will con­tain this sym­bol, and indeed this image is a photo from one of the in-progress works.  The com­plex­ity of this sym­bol war­ranted a lit­tle extra explaina­tion in my opin­ion.  Enjoy.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

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