TZOLKIN HISTORY
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Mesoamerica is the cultural land-zone covering all of southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Mesoamerican civilizations notably include the Olmec, Maya, Toltec and Aztecs. These civilizations are similar in religious views, their building of pyramids, their growing of corn as the main crop, and their common use of a 260-day ritual calendar called the Tzolkin. And it is from the Tzolkin that the Maya created the 2012 end date scenario.
We have incorporated the 260-day Tzolkin calendar into our normal twelve-month Gregorian calendar made it easy to use with simple definitions which allow you to imagine how the Maya, and other Mesoamerican cultures are using the Tzolkin today. We know you will enjoy using the calendar and encourage you to read the rest of this page for a brief history of the Tzolkin, its use and what people are thinking about it today.
Briefly, the Maya were a civilization that started around 400 BC and built themselves towards their height in the 7th and 8th century AD. Having built the largest pyramids in North American and possibly the largest pyramid in the world at El Mirador, the Maya suddenly collapsed as a civilization in the 9th century. The Maya did carry on from this point, building new cities in new regions but the collapse meant they had lost the finer aspects of their mathematics, astronomy and the complex writing system that peaked in the 1st millennium of the Gregorian calendar. As Europe groveled in the Dark Ages, when the cities of London and Paris were nothing more than mud caked villages, the Maya built giant cities like Tikal and Calakmul with populations in excess of 500,000 each. These cities once covered 42-square miles in stone and were studded with pyramids sixty meters tall and higher.
After their collapse in the mid-9th century the Maya mainly returned to village life. Through the early part of the Middle-ages they were invaded by the Toltec and this Mayan/Toltec civilization centered in the cities of Mayapan and Chichen Itza were the Indians Spanish conquistadors discovered in the Yucatan Peninsula in 1518 along the southern Gulf Coast.
Starting from the very beginning, the archaeological history of Mesoamerica is divided into five main catagories; the Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Pre-Classic (or Formative), the Classic and the Post-Classic eras. The Post-classic era ended abruptly with the cataclysmic devastation of the Colonial era, an era which defines the largest cultural and physical Genocide in recorded history. In fact this genocide is an ongoing today. I highly recommend reading Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids by Peter Tompkins
To give an example of this ongoing Genocide look no farther than the Guatemalan Civil War, the longest civil war in Latin American history, which ran from 1960 to 1996. The war was initiated as an indigenous Mayan response to the Latino-military takeover of Guatemalan State institutions. The Latino’s violent disrespect for the human and civil rights of the Mayan majority is what inspired the Guerrilla Army of the Poor to form under the logo of Che Guevara in January of 1972. At the beginning of the war the population in Guatemala was 95% Mayan, 5% Latino. By its end the Maya population had been reduced in Guatemala by 90%.
Pre-Mayan settlements date as far back as 10,500 BC. These settlements are characterized by big game hunters and subsistence gatherers. The next period of development known as the Archaic period lasted between 8000 and 2000 BC. This period reveals the earliest agricultural societies in Mesoamerica. The initial phase of agricultural developed around the cultivation of wild plants. This transformed into the development of domesticated food strains; Maize (Corn) pollen samples from this era date back to 3500 BC. These efforts meant the formation of agricultural societies that started to develop into more complex socio-political organizations. By the end of the Archaic period true civilization began to form.
The first Mesoamerican civilization to take complex form were the Olmec. The Olmec existed between 1400 and 400 BC, developing along the gulf coast in what is now Veracruz State, Mexico. It is from the Olmec that the 260-day calendar was passed onto the Maya, and from the Maya onto all other Mesoamerican cultures that came later. Remains of the Olmec civilization are found at the archeological sites of Takalik Abaj, Izapa, and Teopantecuanitlan.
The Olmec were first discovered in 1862 when plantation workers came upon what they thought was a large iron kettle buried upside down in the earth. What they uncovered was a gigantic carved stone head featuring African facial characteristics and weighing approximately 20 tons. Numerous heads have since been unearthed and some of them weigh as much as 40 Tons, and are carved from a single stone.
The Olmec were the founders of all Mesoamerican cultures in the probable fact that they provided the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar, were the first to build pyramids in the region, the first to plant and harvest corn, and the first to worship a set of Gods that all future civilizations in the region took as their own. - Academics and New Age Mayanists debate the origin of the 260-day Tzolkin. Some say the calendar emerged from the average length of the agricultural season particular to Mesoamerica. Others point out that the Tzolkin was perhaps the average time between conception and birth of a human being. Archeoastronomer Susan Milbrath points out that the 260-day calendar was highly useful in predicting lunar and solar eclipses, as well as the phases of Venus and other important astronomical calculations. This facts suggests the Tzolkin was passed down as an astronomical tool. In any case the Maya referred to the Tzolkin as their magical calendar and conducted their festivals and rituals in accordance with the Tzolkin’s intercorrelation with numerous other time cycles, including the phases of Venus [Tlaloc], Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, the Pleiades constellation and their 365-day solar calendar to name a few. Buy What is certain is that the Tzolkin was used by all Mesoamerican cultures including the Olmec, Maya, Toltec and Aztec.
We have included the Tzolkin into this calendar to introduce the curious to this ancient time piece. Those of you particularly interest in 2012 are getting in touch with the origins of this mysterious end date. Our calendar includes the basic interpretations for each of the 260-days of the Tzolkin. And you’ll be able to use the calendar as a normal twelve month calendar with as many holidays, religious and UN observances as we could put into it. - The Tzolkin is the beating heart that pulsed through all Mesoamerican cultures and their perceptions of time, but especially the Maya, the masters who creators the 2012 end date notation. Our calendar is a unique opportunity to become familiar with this ancient time piece as we approach the end of the Mayan long count on midnight December 21st, 2012. Buy now
Our understanding of the Mayan calendar and of their complex writing system began long ago. Yet the details of Mayan history, the Kings who ruled, how they truly viewed the Universe and our place in it, really only became clear over the past 30 to 40 years. True understand of the writing system and specialists ability to read the ancient hieroglyphs began in 1973 with a meeting that took place near the ancient ruins of Palenque, an event called the Palenque Round Table [Mesa Redonda de Palenque].
The Palenque Round Table was a crucial summit of professional and non-professional Mayanists who met in 1973 to share insights on the subject of Mayan art and hieroglyphics. In the uncommon spirit of academic sharing these participants quickly developed the basic understanding of Mayan writing that created an unprecedented surge towards total understanding. From 1973 onward, participants from around the world attended subsequent Palenque Round Tables, and through their efforts deciphered Mayan hieroglyphics, iconography and pictography for the rest of the world. New understanding and new excavations are happening as we cooperate in our personal attempts to evolve towards a better state of mind and awareness.
It’s important to note who took part in the Palenque Round Tables, and who’s work they based their discoveries upon as an Academic resource of information for anyone of you interested in taking a serious dive into Mayan Academic studies, their cosmology and especially their calendar system. Some of these names include Linda Schele, Peter Mathews, David Stewart, Floyd G. Lounsbury, Karl Taube, and Nikolai Grube. Many of their discoveries were based on the ironic work of Franciscan Friar Diego de Landa, the man who wrote Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan in his own defense against accusations he unlawfully used the Spanish Inquisition on the Maya to torture children and convert their families to Catholicism. His work is also ironic in the fact Diego de Landa is responsible for sanctioning the burning of thousands of Mayan Hieroglyphic books in the middle 16th century, Yucatan.
Other remarkable contributors to our modern understanding of Mayan hieroglyphic writing and Mayan anthropology are Sylvanus Griswold Morley, Yuri Knorozov, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Frans Blom, Michael D. Coe, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Frederick Catherwood, John Lloyd Stephens, Dennis Tedlock, Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, Robert Redfield, Alfonso Villa Rojas, John Montgomery, Susan Milbrath, Alfred Maudslay, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, J. Eric S. Thompson, among others. I strongly recommend reading anything by Linda Schele, Micheal D. Coe, Dennis Tedlock, Diego de Landa and Susan Milbrath as a starting point for your curiosity. I also recommend Jose Arguelles as an alternative to the mainstream thinking patterns of the collective viewpoint.
One could say that Jose Arguelles is at the far opposite end of the thinking scale in consideration of the 2012 end date notation, far opposite as in not confined by by the limited and negating culture of the Academic paradigm itself. One could call this “opposite” end of the scale an artistic and spiritual approach to life. As evidence to this Jose Arguelles is the individual singularly most responsible for the collective awareness of 2012 as a Mayan end date notation.
Sadly, yet predictably, as an “end date notation”, popular culture has bastardized 2012 in yet another cataclysmic prognostication to sensationalize for the purpose of profit [2012]. Jose Arguelles has promoted it as a cosmic, one might say paranormal opportunity given to use by the intelligence of the Universe to expand and purify consciousness on earth as a shifting event as positive as the Nuclear bomb was negative.
Arguelles notions of collective visioning are derived from a generalists perspective on Mayan cosmology, interpreted through a wide variety of contemporary and ancient metaphysic, scientific & spiritual practices that have led to a host of individual discoveries. Jose Arguelles has dedicated his life to synchronizing the minds of individuals around the world off of an arbitrary time system with no basis in natural rhythms of any kind [the Gregorian Calendar] to that of planetary and interplanetary cycles to bring collective conscience back into alignment with the outer, and thus the inner realities and wisdom available to us. This is no different than the agenda of the Buddhists, the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, Krishnamurti, S.N. Goenka, Eckhart Tolle
The Popol Vuh was the spiritual text of the Maya-Quiche first encountered in the 16th century. The Quiche indians wrote the Popul Vuh in counterpoint to the Catholic Bible as a way of comparing indigenous spiritual rights and values with the Western World. Europeans ignored it. And though the Quiche were a Post-classic Mayan community, and far removed from the classic-Maya that created and used the Long Count from which the 2012 end date notation is derived, there is a continuity between the Pre-classic and post-classic Mayan worlds that substantiates.
None the less Argüelles takes the Popul Vuh and the Long Count and uses them to augment a unified spiritual agenda, a response to the necessity for cataclysmic change to the way humans conduct their lives on earth. Arguelles espouses the use of the Dreamspell Calendar a collective motivation to promote peace in the practical method of bring humanity into greater alignment with the natural rhythms of other life forms on earth through the human perception of time.
José Argüelles first became recognized for his organization of a worldwide New Age esoteric-religious event called the Haromonic Convergence. This event took place during a specific alignment of planets and involved gatherings of people at various sacred sites around the world. The intention was to use the presumed amplification effects of the astronomical alignment that took place August 16th, 1987, take that opportunity to meditate on world peace and hopefully usher in a new age of harmony and rejuvenation on earth and among man.
Argüelles, along with his current project, the Foundation for the Law of Time are engaged in a worldwide endeavor to institute the 13 Moon calendar, that incorporates many aspects of the Mesoamerican calendar. This endeavor is predicated on Arguelles complex awareness that “time is the universal factor of synchronization”, and to bring about the necessary awakening to a unified existence, man must first become acquainted on physical, mental and spiritual synchronization with “natural time”. And then go deeper.
What is self-evident is that humanity is collectively behaving in a way that is destroying the ecosystem and unraveling the natural systems which support out lives on earth. Visions of a violent and destructive Apocalypse, Armageddon, 2012 Cataclysm, could be described as a self-fulfilling death wish. For Argüelles the result of this death wish are global Nuclear armament, religious-fanaticism, the Industrial-military-complex, and that these schisms are manufactured by scientific-imperialism.
Arguelles also believes in Alien intervention. I do not. However the creation of the 260-day Tzolkin from which so many intercorrelations with modern scientific discoveries have been found, has been attributed to Alien intervention. This was a concept first spawned by Erich von Däniken in his 1968 book titled Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. In his book Von Däniken claims that the existence of structures and artifacts among ancient civilizations could not have been possible given the technologies available during the eras in which they were manufactured. Among the artifacts and technologies Von Däniken targeted was the Tzolkin, as well as the Mayan creation of a mathematical system that incorporates the concept of zero. He also interpreted the Lid of Palenque which Von Däniken claimed depicted King Pacal the Great in a space vehicle blasting into the heavens.
In the Maya language of iconography and cosmology the Lid of Palenque depicts Pacal the Great [K'inich Janaab' Pakal] descending the shaft of the world-tree into the murky underworld of Xibalba, domain of the Nine Lords of the Night. According to Mayan cosmology Pacal, along with all those who die, must face these underworld denizens and pass through their perilous trials of endurance and ingenuity to pass through the realm of death into the Angelic realms visible to man in the night sky.
