Page 165 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

to an end, amid global destruction, on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin: 23 December AD
2012 in our calendar. The function of the Long Count was to record the
elapse of time since the beginning of the current Great Cycle, literally to
count off, one by one, the 5125 years allotted to our present creation.
24
The Long Count is perhaps best envisaged as a sort of celestial adding
machine, constantly calculating and recalculating the scale of our
growing debt to the universe. Every last penny of that debt is going to be
called in when the figure on the meter reads 5125.
So, at any rate, thought the Maya.
Calculations on the Long Count computer were not, of course, done in
our numbers. The Maya used their own notation, which they had derived
from the Olmecs, who had derived it from ... nobody knows. This
notation was a combination of dots (signifying ones or units or multiples
of twenty), bars (signifying fives or multiples of five times twenty), and a
shell glyph signifying zero. Spans of time were counted by days (kin),
periods of twenty days (uinat), ‘computing years’ of 360 days (tun),
periods of 20 tuns (known as katun), and periods of 20 katuns (known as
bactun). There were also 8000-tun periods (pictun) and 160,000-tun
periods (calabtun) to mop up even larger calculations.
25
All this should make clear that although the Maya believed themselves
to be living in one Great Cycle that would surely come to a violent end
they also knew that time was infinite and that it proceeded with its
mysterious revolutions regardless of individual lives or civilizations. As
Thompson summed up in his great study on the subject:
In the Maya scheme the road over which time had marched stretched into a past
so distant that the mind of man cannot comprehend its remoteness. Yet the Maya
undauntedly retrod that road seeking its starting point. A fresh view, leading
further backward, unfolded at every stage; the mellowed centuries blended into
millennia, and they into tens of thousands of years, as those tireless inquirers
explored deeper and still deeper into the eternity of the past. On a stela at Quiriga
in Guatemala a date over 90 million years ago is computed; on another a date over
300 million years before that is given. These are actual computations, stating
correctly day and month positions, and are comparable to calculations in our
calendar giving the month positions on which Easter would have fallen at
equivalent distances in the past. The brain reels at such astronomical figures ...
26
Isn’t all this a bit avant-garde for a civilization that didn’t otherwise
distinguish itself in many ways? It’s true that Mayan architecture was
good within its limits. But there was precious little else that these jungle-
dwelling Indians did which suggested they might have had the capacity
(or the need) to conceive of really long periods of time.
It’s been a good deal less than two centuries since the majority of

24 Ibid., pp. g, 275.
25 José Arguelles, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, Bear and Co., Santa Fe,
New Mexico, 1987, pp. 26; The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p.
50.
26 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, pp. 13-14, 165.

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