Her findings are well documented and are revolutionary in their implications. They provide support for my end-date alignment theory on two fronts. First, her theory utilizes the base date of the 13-Baktun cycle, in 3114 BC, as a reference point for its intervals. Second, the method requires an accurate estimate for the rate of precession (if not the full precessional cycle), which was built into the Long Count at the time of its inauguration. The apparent lack of accurate precessional calculations made by the ancient Maya was one of the critiques against my theory asserted by Aveni; now that critique is challenged by Barb’s findings. And she is not alone in finding accurate precession calculations in the ancient Maya Long Count inscriptions.
Barb introduced me to the work of Dr. Michael Grofe, a rare Mayanist who has a deep understanding of both astronomy and epigraphy. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami in 1993, his MA from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and his PhD in Native American Studies from the University of California at Davis in 2007. Michael had worked under Martha Macri and Matthew Looper as a graduate student, and he became interested in the calendrical bones from burial 116 in Tikal, including the 3-11 Pik calculation as discovered by Looper. In a 2003 research paper4 Michael had similarly proposed that the 3-11 Pik formula suggests a precessional calculation, which later prompted his correspondence with Barb in 2008 when Looper brought Barb’s paper to his attention. Barb and Michael had both reached similar conclusions independently, which says something in itself. Grofe’s work on precession is amply documented in his PhD dissertation, called The Serpent Series: Precession in the Maya Dresden Codex. His work deduces a methodology used by the ancient Maya astronomers for calculating sidereal positions of the moon, planets, and the sun, and thus precession, using eclipses and asterisms like the Pleiades. First and foremost, Michael’s pioneering work presents evidence that the Serpent Series in the Dresden Codex contains a Distance Number formula strongly suggesting that the Maya had achieved a very precise calculation of the sidereal year and the rate of precessional drift. Since then, Michael has also found epigraphic evidence in Tortuguero’s 2012 text (Monument 6) and at Palenque that identifies solar and lunar alignments with the dark rift, lending a great deal of direct epigraphic support to my controversial end-date alignment theory.5
I quickly realized that the film documentary needed to include these breakthroughs. The script had already gone through another revision, based on conference calls incorporating Anthony Aveni’s now obsolete critique6 and other scholars as voices of reason who would cast doubt on the precessional basis of the galactic alignment theory. With the new material by MacLeod and Grofe, the film script went through yet another round of changes. Forward motion was followed by hovering.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE DARK RIFT
After Tulane, Hans announced that a funding deal with PBS was imminent. I was called upon to be filmed, summarizing in short order the importance of my own as well as Grofe’s and MacLeod’s work. I thus needed to refresh my mind with their key ideas, and had two long phone calls with both of them. In setting up the call with Michael, I decided to share my plan to analyze the Long Count dates from Tortuguero, looking for precessional intervals and relevant astronomical alignments utilizing, for example, the dark rift in the Milky Way. I knew that only a small portion of the Tortuguero Monument 6 text had been translated, and I believed that it might be possible to identify secondary references to 2012 via the astronomical image-complex of the galactic alignment. Instead of finding specific 2012 date references, we might find secondary contextually meaningful references utilizing the “sun-in-dark-rift” statement. This would be similar to the known use of tripartite monuments to designate the solar zenith and the hearthstones in Orion—an astronomical image-complex that refers to Creation narratives connected to 3114 BC.7 The inscriptions might be found to consistently reference the dark rift as an alignment locus for the sun, moon, eclipses, or planets. Dates of the sun’s alignment with the dark rift during the Classic Period would be particularly compelling if they were used in meaningful ways that implicated the end date’s like-in-kind alignment (albeit utilizing the December solstice sun).
* * *
This is where the newest new discoveries come into play, ones that require further study by Maya scholars. In broad outlines, they comprise what I would call smoking-gun evidence for the hypothesis I put on the table fifteen years ago—that the ancient creators of the Long Count system intended the 13-Baktun cycle end date in 2012 to target the rare alignment of the solstice sun and the dark rift. I described in Chapter 6 how Tortuguero’s 2012 inscription was used to consecrate a building dedication. It was meaningful because a building (or a house) is a microcosm of the cosmos. That alone shows that 2012 had meaning for the Classic Period Maya. What follows are several equally important recent findings.
The Long Count dates and inscriptions from Tortuguero were described in Sven Gronemeyer’s study of the site, and Geoff Stray had made available a PDF of the study on the Tribe 2012 website.8 Although Sven’s work was in German, one could at least track the Long Count dates and look up the astronomy. I noticed a solstice date and a 3 Kankin haab date, which is the haab date of the cycle ending in 2012, perhaps suggesting an intentional haab resonance. I also noticed that a very important Katun ending, 9.14.0.0.0, was recorded on Tortuguero Monument 2. This was intriguing because the date also occurs on Stela C from Copán. An astronomical alignment that happened on that date is conceptually analogous to the 2012 alignment.
In 2000, at Jim Reed’s invitation, I published an article in the Institute of Maya Studies newsletter in which I pointed out that on the Long Count date 9.14.0.0.0 (December 3, 711 AD), the sun was positioned in the dark rift in the Milky Way. In addition, the figure on Stela C was the ruler 18 Rabbit, and he faced the eastern sunrise, where the sun with the dark rift were rising, together. He was wearing the caiman regalia, composed of two caiman jaws draped around his front and back, the upper and lower jaws of the caiman giving the appearance that he, the solar ruler, was within the jaws of the underworld monster. In other words, 18 Rabbit was posing as the sun in the dark rift, an alignment that was happening on 9.14.0.0.0.
The Stela C image is symbolically reminiscent of both Stela 25 and Stela 11 from Izapa. Stela 25 depicts a caiman whose mouth and fangs are very similar to the caiman on 18 Rabbit’s regalia. Stela 11 shows the solar Ahau standing in the cosmic frog’s mouth. The similar frog on Stela 6 is positioned such that a figure in a boat is sailing into or out of its open mouth. This suggests that the mouth of these cosmic frogs were portals to the underworld, analogous to the dark rift in the sky. Stela C at Copán, therefore, confirms the astronomy of the date carved on its side: The mouth of the caiman represents the dark rift in the Milky Way.
This can be stated bluntly: Copán Stela C, perhaps the most famous carving of the eighth-century Copán ruler 18 Rabbit, depicts the ruler as a solar god aligned with the dark rift in the Milky Way. Curiously, the context of the scene is transformation. That the date is also recorded at Tortuguero is intriguing. Kings at Copán and elsewhere were very interested in showing their rulership over period endings and Long Count periods. As we can see, the astronomers at both Copán and Tortuguero were aware of the concept of the sun aligning with the dark rift. The precessional shift between 711 AD and 2012 AD is 18 degrees, or “days.” This may be significant because it provides a precessional shift-interval that is commensurate with 360, a key number in the Long Count. It is also 1/400th of a Katun. I shared this with Michael Grofe, and he was intrigued. A few days later, he dropped the bomb on me.
In spending a few late nights examining the astronomy connected with dates in Tortuguero’s inscriptions, Michael identified a date on Monument 6 (Long Count 9.10.11.09.06) that occurred just a few days after an eclipse in late May of 644 AD. It was a total lunar eclipse, so the moon was opposite the sun, right in the dark rift. As the moon was blocked out by the earth’s shadow, the outlines of the Milky
Way became visible. This was a way to identify when the sidereal position of the sun would come around and likewise be aligned with the dark rift—exactly a half-year later. (The sun’s alignment with the dark rift is, in fact, what is recorded and indicated with the 9.14.0.0.0 date.) In the ensuing 67 years between 644 and 711 another day or degree of precessional shift would occurred. The link seems to indicate an interest in precessional drift.
But we haven’t gotten yet to the bomb. Michael is an epigrapher, having worked for years as a grad student under Macri and Looper, compiling the new catalogue of Maya hieroglyphs and the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project. He can read the inscriptions, and he said the text associated with the eclipse date could very well be read as an “eclipse of the moon in the celestial caiman.”9 Like Stela C from Copán, it indicates that the dark rift was envisioned as a portal into the celestial caiman! Michael also pointed out that there are crossed bands in the eyes of the caiman glyph, significant as a symbol for the cross formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic (which targets the southern terminus of the dark rift). I e-mailed him back with the further observation that the next date in the hieroglyphic corpus from Tortuguero, the Tun ending from Jade Celt 1, was 174 days after the eclipse text—the eclipse half-year period, indicating when the next eclipse was likely to occur.
THE KING AND THE DARK RIFT
Michael responded that evening with a report that he had just completed a thorough examination of the text on Monument 6 and couldn’t believe what he had found. He said he was tracking the events in the life of Balam Ajaw, the king who ruled when Monument 6 was dedicated. It was apparent that the king had a special relationship with Bolon Yokte, the deity who appears on the 2012 date and has transformation and warring attributes. Balam Ajaw was somewhat of an aggressive reformer, transforming his kingdom through waging wars on neighboring kingdoms. These kinds of rulers typically saw themselves as following a divine mandate, blessed by the culture heroes and creation deities. In the same way that Pakal, the king of Palenque, and 18 Rabbit, the king of Copán, created propaganda monuments that placed them into mythic narratives with cosmological Creation events, Balam Ajaw claimed Bolon Yokte as his totem and 2012 as his cosmological mandate. He, too, would create a new world, a new kingdom, through the auspices of his tutelary creation deity. In the same way that 2012 could be called upon to consecrate a house or building dedication, it could also be invoked to confer blessings and legitimacy on a royal house.
This scenario makes sense, but what Michael found really nails it to the wall: Balam Ajaw was born between November 28 and December 8, 612 AD (one of the dot-and-bar sections is eroded), with the probability being for December 3. This means, importantly, that he was born when the sun was precisely in the dark rift. These hierophanies did not go unnoticed in the Maya world. Wars were timed with Venus movements, eclipses had their auguries, and we’ve already seen that the dark rift was depicted in the iconography in specific ways involving birth and transformation themes. Balam Ajaw’s birth, and therefore his identity, was seen to have a special connection with the Creation events—not those of 3114 BC as at Quiriguá and Copán, but those of the future cosmogenesis event, in 2012. That sounds reasonable enough, but the smoking gun lies in recognizing the only reason why this would be so. And that is because the astronomical configuration of his birth was analogous to what they knew would be happening in 2012: the solstice sun in the dark rift. The key that makes the 2012 scenario unique is that it involves the solstice sun, but the parallelism was clearly compelling enough for Balam Ajaw to claim a special relationship with 2012 and the deity connected with it, Bolon Yokte Ku.
Michael found further support for the above precessional calculation elsewhere in the text from Tortuguero Monument 6, which mentions another date on an exact winter solstice on 9.10.17.02.14, as well as another pair of dates separated by 137 years, 9.03.16.01.11 and 9.10.15.01.11, which place the sun in the exact same sidereal position, while the tropical year has shifted by two days.
Dr. Aveni, in his talk at Tulane, said there was no evidence that the Maya made forward projections in their calendrical calculations and rituals. This is abundantly untrue, the best example being how Pakal, the king of Palenque, noted a special connection he had with a 20-Baktun cycle ending, one that comes to pass in the forty-eighth century AD. He found it useful, as a political stratagem, because it just so happened that the date of his own coronation (his ritual birthing as king) fell on the same day in the solar year that this far-future cycle ending will fall on. He, like his contemporary Balam Ajaw, cast himself into the narrative of creation to increase his status in the eyes of his subjects. Both used their own “birth” event as a connection point to the cosmological birth of a large period-ending, understood to be a World Age birth. He may have done this as a copycat to what Balam Ajaw did, also perhaps one-upping the Tortuguero king by using a larger cycle of 20 Baktuns.
IT HAPPENED AT THE BLACK HOLE
The king of Copán, 18 Rabbit, did something a little different with the dark rift. After showing himself on 9.14.0.0.0 as the sun-king in the dark rift, he erected a series of stelae in the great plaza of Copán. His Maya name, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil, references the deity K’awil. In the many inscriptions he recorded, he honored a ritual involving K’awil performed by one of his lineage ancestors on a Baktun ending, 9.0.0.0.0. Other inscriptions infer that he likewise wished to claim the next Baktun ending, in 830 AD, as his own. Since he ruled in the early eighth century, that would be too far off for him to live through, but he nevertheless needed to relate himself to cycle endings and their attendant creation imagery. His entire corpus of inscriptions, building dedications, and activities are astounding and require thorough investigation. 10 What follows provides more evidence for the role of the dark rift in transformational creation imagery, with a special focus on the motif of sacrifice that the Maya believed was necessary at cycle endings.
Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s namesake, K’awil, is the deity associated with God K and the planet Jupiter. Helen Alexander writes that God K “is the power behind conjuring, transformation, and transcendence in Maya ritual practice; he is the essence of the och chan, the bearded dragon of Xibalba; he is the essence of the sacred dance that empowers the Maize God to dance out of Xibalba; he is the essence of human royal power that allows mankind access to the cosmos from the heavens down to earth and into Xibalba itself.”11 A strange event brought this king’s forty-three-year reign to a sudden, perplexing close. In 738 AD, just after he made the final dedication on his new ballcourt complex at Copán, he was captured by K’ak Tiliw, the king of nearby Quiriguá, and held prisoner. No resistance, no Copán militia was sent to rescue him. On the solar zenith passage day, May 1, he was marched into the Quiriguá plaza and decapitated. This ritual sacrifice was reminiscent of the beheading of One Hunahpu by the lords of the underworld in The Popol Vuh. The event is recorded in four surviving inscriptions at Quiriguá and Copán. The most official report, from Quiriguá Stela F, reads: “He is decapitated, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil; under the supervision of K’ak Tiliw, it happened at the Black Hole place.”12 The black hole? Years ago, in a review-essay I wrote on place-names and Maya Creation Texts, I concluded that the hiero-glyph translated as “black hole” probably represented the dark rift in the Milky Way.13 So I suspected that something relevant happened in the dark rift on the day of his decapitation. Looking at astronomy software, there it was, the most appropriate possible astronomical configuration one could imagine: Jupiter was perfectly aligned with the dark rift. Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s head, Jupiter, the dark rift, transformation, sacrifice, Creation Myth themes, are all wrapped up in this event.
Hieroglyphic text from Quiriguá Stela F describing Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s decapitation and apotheosis at “the black hole,” when Jupiter was aligned with the dark rift in the Milky Way on May 1, 738 AD. Drawing by the author
Most strikingly, because of the odd circumstances of this important event in Maya history
, namely its providential timing, we must entertain the possibility that the Copán King went willingly into the black hole and his sacrificer was accomplice to a historically enacted mystery play. Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil’s apotheosis ensured his legacy by laying him to rest in the heart of heaven. We think of the Passion of the Christ as a mystery play full of drama and theological significance. These events at Copán may have had a similar powerful purpose and meaning for the ancient Maya. If Jesus could willingly go to the cross, Waxaklahun Ub’ah K’awil could willingly drop his head into the dark rift. As we can see, calendrical inscriptions indict meaningful astronomical configurations intimately involved with the end-date alignment theory.
DARK-RIFT GLYPHS
The “black hole” glyph can clearly be identified with the dark rift. The controversial half-eroded glyph next to the Tortuguero 2012 inscription is identified, with fair confidence, as containing a “black” element. Scholars, such as Susan Milbrath, believe that the dark rift is associated with skeletal maw imagery.14 The Black Hole glyph, for example, is miniature shorthand for skeletal jaws, also sometimes identified as incised bones. An entire range of hieroglyphs can now be suspected as being related to the dark rift and the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center (see cloud center glyphs, page 274).15 These are found in meaningful ballgame contexts and in relation to other monuments dated 9.14.0.0.0 (sun in dark-rift date) at Tikal, Calakmul, and Dos Pilas.
The 2012 Story Page 29