Heaven and Earth: La Fascinante Arquitectura Astronomica / Ecologica de Los Mayas

Let he who hath understanding reckon the number of the Beast. That number is 6³.

Mayan architecture continues to be much more than purely functional. Much of it has told stories, listed zones of kingship, kept count of astronomical cycles since creation, and symbolically linked these schema altogether. Much is inlayed with complex glyphs that are simultaneously phonetic, poetic, metaphoric, and numerological. There is a general agreement that the information stored in these glyphs is relative to exactly the geographic location of the structure upon which they are etched or embossed. Many of the more well-known ancient Mayan temples and halls were reserved for the religious elite and for warriors, much as in Rome and in America today. The view from atop most of these buildings is astonishingly provincial compared to that of the forest floor. There is a direct correlation between the knowledge of the cycles of nature and cosmos and those members of Mayan society who were allowed access to such knowledge. Hence, the elite, with such access, could claim divine right for their powers of understanding and seemingly direct communication with the deities of the Day Signs and the Lords of the Night.

Buildings are aligned principally with the equinoxes and solstices, as is seen in much architecture of Native America as well as Europe, the Middle East, India, and Asia. This mirror of Heaven may be the common sky folklore which all ethnicities share, from a collective outgrowth away from the Old World. The planet Venus orbits just over 13 times for every 8 orbits of the Earth, creating a pentagrammic pattern of inferior conjunctions. Each successive inferior conjunction occurs after about 1.6 Earth years and therefore shifts about 144 degrees in the direction opposite the Earth's orbital motion. After each cycle of 8 Earth years, the pentagram precesses about 1.5 degrees in the direction of Earth's orbital motion, reflecting the fact that the Earth:Venus orbital ratio is an approximate ('near') rather than a perfect orbital resonance.

(de Wiki) “Composite 3D laser scan image of El Caracol from above. El Caracol is a round stone structure with a partially ruined domed roof that originally had a cylindrical shape; it was named Caracol (Snail) due to its internal spine that climbs up in a spiral. Narrow windows cut into the outer walls seem to have been designed in order to observe the irregular movements of Venus, which was considered to be the sun's twin and held great significance for the Maya, particularly in decisions pertaining to war. The staircase at the front of the Caracol faces 27.5 degrees north of west, perfectly in line with the northern positional extreme of Venus and producing alignments at the building's northeast and southeast corners that track both the summer and winter solstices. The Caracol is one of the oldest standing observatories in the Americas, and highlights the great importance that astrological phenomena held for the people of Chichen Itza.”

There exists a separation of 144 degrees between the radians of a true pentacle, where they touch the circumference of an encompassing circle. Moreover, 144 is the 12th numeral in the Fibonacci Sequence (which the Aztec knew of before Fibonacci was even born) which represents the Golden Spiral in nature, is the same as 12 squared (12 by 12), is roughly the same number as the amount (142-147) of centimeters in the Maya “xo’ot” unit of measurement, and, thereby arguably analogous to mathematics of the furlong and horology of Mesopotamia. 144 of these Mayan xo'ot measures comprises one "zapal" of startlingly furlong-approximate length) [O'Brien and Christiansen 1986]. This 144 is also the same as the Kabalistic Gematria (number-wording) “Double Tetragrammaton” – one of the pre-Biblical “Esoteric Hebrew Names of God” [Parsons] revered secularly throughout Egypt and all of ancient Mesopotamia. This occulted ‘144’ is a big deal, in terms of summing up many secrets of sacred geometry, for all of humanity’s research efforts into the hidden realm.

All Zodiac signs shift through the calendar in 25920 years. The Tzolkin is 260 days long. After 52 years, the number of weeks in a year, the Tzol’kin meshes with the Ha’ab 365 day calendar. The temples would be used heavily for festivities at the end of every 52 year period. Four of these periods equals 208 years – one De Vries Cycle or intensified climate variations. That particular solar cross observation had a place in society unequaled in astronomy across the world. Also, instead of intercalating the calendar system like the Roman Catholic Leap Year does today, the Maya paid witness to the strange Sothic Cycle which causes the constellations to precess one degree in 4 years. Westerners since Rome either think that this cycle causes an uncontrollable spinning of otherwise predictable celestial motions or they would simply rather have a perfectly still cosmos instead of a naturally complicated one. Amazingly, just by abiding a particular calendar system (Gregorian), this complication is both obscured from view and apparently dissociated from climate change. There are 27.6923 Calendar Rounds that take place throughout one Sothic Cycle – which is roughly the amount of days that pass in one Anomalistic Lunar cycle. So, the Sothic Cycle was likely akin to one lunation for the Maya; and, there occur 18 of these 1440 year-long Sothic Cycles in one 25920 year Precession of Equinoxes. The Maya were all about fractal geometry. 18x20 is the numbering system used for the Long Count of 5200 years (linked to 2012). If we imagine that the full 25920 year period is akin to this 18x20 system, then the 18 Sothic Cycles in one Equinox Precession can be multiplied by 20 to equal one Great Cosmic "Year" (symbolically) of 518,400 years within which there exists a fourfold pattern of sea level rise/drop variance across the Earth. No less, at a smaller level, each of these "lunations" could be split 20 times into 72 year segments which represent the amount of time it should take for one degree of sky to shift (numerically more so than apparently) through the precession of equinoxes.

Welcome to the Age of Aquarius. Embrace it. It's written in stone and tied to self-consciousness borne from the entheogenesis that founded our capacity to stargaze let alone manifest complex societies.