Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

EXISTENTIAL DURATION MEASURED BY MAYAN TIME

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/existential-duration-measured-by-mayan-time-04ea9ffce53d

Duration is all that plants and animals experience. They last as long as either possible or necessary. When the phylogenic target of bringing in the next generation of life is fulfilled, the plant or the animal can die or wither away. Homo Sapiens, and probably most Hominins developed from experience the need to measure this duration, at first in days and nights, and then in clusters of days and nights. Then they can coordinate their observations and notice some cosmic items go through regular existential cycles, first of all, the sun rising or lowering in the sky with shortening or lengthening days and nights. Second, the moon and its phases are numbered as two, four, or three, but systematically waxing and waning. You can easily measure all that in solar days and that is the beginning of time: a human invention quantifying the duration of anything in observable regular elements.

From what we know the Mayas were among the most advanced people for such time-quantification and they developed all sorts of calendars to do this. But they were neither the first one nor the last one. They were not the best either, though they were very good. I will even say that all the lines of dots or check marks or squares or other geometric forms we can find in all the caves in the world in which Hominins and Homo Sapiens lived and that they decorated in many ways are the quantification of various phenomena, though we don’t always know which ones.

This book by Hunbatz Men concentrates on Mayan calendars but in modern language and modern terms, not necessarily in the real Mayan terms at the time, up to 3,000 years ago. It assumes the Mayas were aware of the leap years, though we do not seem to have any real reason to believe so. The author does not work on any serious lunar hypothesis, maybe a calendar. It vaguely mentions but does not explore the Venus cycles as Morning Star and as Evening Star. To work on the Pleiades, why not, yet one question does not concern such a long cycle but the simple working of the ritualistic 260-day Tzolk’in Calendar that is out of sync with the solar calendar, the 365-day Haab Calendar, and even more so if we consider the 360-day Haab Calendar, and how the ritual activities dictated by the Tzolk’in Calendar can be prescribed and predicted and performed when their Tzolk’in dates can fall at any time, in any season in the Haab Calendar. It is hard enough to coordinate the 12-and-a-half moon cycles over a solar calendar, but many civilizations are dealing with it and managing it with cyclical corrections.

That’s why it would have been good to give us some elements on this very same problem with the Tzolk’in calendar when we can compare with the difficult adaptation of the Muslim Lunar ritualistic calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The floating Ramadan is the result of this necessary adaptation. In other words, the present book is slightly short.

Academia.edu Comment

Jacques Coulardeau uploaded a paper

To explore the Maya capture of time is interesting but we have to go back to what it was at least one thousand years ago. It is too easy to use a completely corrected set of data that fit in the modern apprehension of time. But it is one flexible door to historical truth.

EXISTENTIAL DURATION MEASURED BY MAYAN TIME

Jacques Coulardeau

2024 • Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com

 Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2024

Maya Art,  *  Time Perception,  *  Cosmic Rays,  *  Calendars,  *  Pleiades

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:11 AM