HEAVEN BORN MERIDA AND ITS DESTINY - Histomesoamericana

30 INTRODUCTION
that is what they are.
All these materials are profoundly interwoven with the mystique and
ritual of the calendar. They are dated by katuns and are preoccupied with
katun ritual, referring frequently to the various acts of the katun ceremonial
drama as outlined above. All the katun histories, for example,
mention seating (act 9) and the word of the katun (act 15), and most of
them give at least a précis of the sermon (act 20). All the earlier katun
histories refer to at least four and as many as eight of the thirteen acts of
the ceremonial of the katun. This structure disappears rapidly after 1677.
None of the histories appears to refer to the first seven acts of the baktun
ceremonial. In almost all cases, allusions to the ritual follow the order of
the acts in the original may ceremonial of 11 Ahau in 1539.
The katun histories may be precisely characterized, then, as ritual history.
They are considerably constrained by the expectation that they will
convert the real history of each twenty-year period into the language and
ritual order of the katun ceremonial. And that they do—often with remarkable
economy and elegance. By the same token, this is intentionally
esoteric history, and, while the Mayan sun priests had an intensive education
in it, we latter-day scribes are forced to educate ourselves, inevitably
somewhat imperfectly. Like our Mayan forebears, we worry a lot about
philosophy, specifically about the cosmology and theology that shaped,
and were shaped by, the mystique of the katun, the may, and the baktun.
Myth. Mayan cosmology formally begins with a characteristic ending:
13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku (August 15, 3115 B.C.). The morning after
that date was the beginning of the pseudohistorical Mayan calendar. It
was also zero. Nothing existed—not even God, according to some accounts.
There is reason to suppose that this date was the end of the third
or possibly even the fourth baktun cycle of 5,200 tuns, implying an even
earlier starting date around 20,000 B.C., but even that was merely a moment
in a cycle that is bound to repeat itself. The first beginning of everything
was time itself.
This mystery is beautifully expressed in the creation myth "The Birth
of the Uinal," which constitutes chapter 20 of the Chumayel. This delicate
allegory likens the birth of time to the origin of man, a man traveling
like the heavenly bodies on the road of days, time, sun, and fate
[kin), carrying his burden of sin and shame to its inevitable and selfregenerative
end.
Did man come before woman? No, it was four female relatives of his
who discovered time. So much for the rib of Adam. This may be an exquisite
recognition that women counted time more precisely by the moon
(u), as most American Indians did, for a long time before it could be paced
(oc) by the sun priest. And for very good reasons: women were naturally
more concerned with the approximately lunar cycle of menstruation and
with the period of gestation, which seems to have given rise to the (again
approximate) cycle of the 260-day tzol kin. What the women discovered in
the footprints of Time was sex: the footprint of lah caoc'll Oc, twelve
foot, or all of two feet'. After that, men and women traveled together. No