Myths of the Mayan Calendar

If you are here it is probably because you are using non-Mayan iconography to talk about the Mayas and some of your very concerned friends (who certainly love you and don’t want to continue seeing you making an idiot of yourself) sent you here.

There are three important aspects of the Mayan Culture that you should know.

1. The Mayas are a culture in Latin America (south of Mexico, north of Guatemala and Belice, El Salvador and Honduras) which started in the year 500 b.C.  and continues up to now. And yes, the Mayas are still very much around today. Though because of the conquest (which happened around 1500) they  abandoned the great cities and lost most of the traditional scientific research. They did this because the Spaniards were keen on torturing, maiming, raping, enslaving people, pillaging cities and burning books.

A Maya City would have looked like this about 600 years ago

It would be the equivalent of some aliens coming and starting to probing and dismember the members of sororities and frat houses while burning all the libraries and replacing internet with 24 hours of infomercials. The culture in the USA might still survive after this, but the knowledge probably might be dispersed.

Mmm... Rat burgers

2. The Mayas were great astronomers and mathematicians, their calculations about orbits, meteor showers, Sun, Moon and Venus eclipses, and other cosmological phenomena are still more exact than the calendar we use in Western Civilization. And it so happens that the Mayas  “predicted” and end of a period to happen in the Winter Solstice 2012, and they talk about it here, in the Stelae 6:

Some interpretations here

3. This, however, is the Sun Stone, from the Aztec civilization. 

It was probably used as a table by an Aztec priest

It is not a calendar, though it does contains elements of the Aztec calendar, mythology, and cardinal points.

The Aztecs believed that if you stopped feeding human hearts to the gods, the Sun would stay underground during the night and never come out again.

So if you talk about the Mayan calendar like so:

It would be the same as googling Eiffel Tower and getting this: