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*Posted to the Aztlan e-list Friday April 19, 1996 by Linda Schele
(commentary notes added by John Major Jenkins in 2003):*
(Linda): The following was sent to Milo Gardner on May 6, 1994 as e-mail
because I had not yet figured out how to reply to AZTLAN. For those who
are interested, here is the reply to his question about the correlation
and Floyd Lounsbury's 1.5.5.0 number.
First of all, you must understand I am not anumber person. I am a good
friend of Floyd's and have watched him argue the correlation problem
with David Kelley for 25 years. Floyd did not send me a preprint copy of
his correlation paper because he knows I am not a number person, and
/The Sky in Mayan Literature/ was not available until very late 1992,
when the manuscript for /Maya Cosmos/ was going through its final
editing process before going to the Morrow [publisher] for production.
If you have published books, you know that any changes made after the
stage of copy editing causes apoplexy in harried editors.
But I probably would not have cited Floyd's article anyway, because I
was not attempted to make an argument about the correlation?only stating
that David Freidel and I would be using the 285 correlation instead of
the 283. Moreover, Maya cosmos was written for the general public first
and professionals secondarily. In my experience, there are people who
think in numbers and who love them. For this kind of mentality (which
Floyd and Dave Keley have and I patently do NOT?this is a big joke
between us), the Dresden Codex, the eclipse tables, and other such
things are the best way of entering Maya studies. But for most people,
the numbers are opaque and mind numbing.*[1]* For instance, I took
Floyd's seminar on glyphs in 1974-1975. He taught us the Venus tables
and the eclipse tables. I was supposed to have learned from the master.
All of his lessons fell on deaf ears. I could not reproduce any of it
and understood less. In the workshops here I describe the experience as
"it all made sense when I heard it, but when I walked out the door, it
dribbled out of my left ear." It's the "left ear" syndrome.
I finally learned how Venus works by taking EZCosmos 3 and adding the
appropriate intervals over hundreds of years and watching what
happened.*[2]* I learned it through the geometry of the sky rather than
the numbers.*[3] *Same thing for the eclipse tables. The rows of numbers
that Floyd put in his Encyclopedia of Science article [1978?] were just
that?rows of numbers. I learned how the eclipse table worked by using
the eclipse finder in EZCosmos 4 to construct my own table for the Maya
last summer in our Antigua workshop. This semester I did the same sort
of thing in our Dresden seminar by using EZC 4's eclipse finder to check
the Dresden eclipse table against the real world using al of its
eligible base dates. After that, Floyd's numbers made sense to me.
At a conference here in Austin last November, Dennis Tedlock argued with
me about this. He argued that there are other hierophanies just as good
for the Venus pages as the ones Floyd Lounsbury presented. Dennis
assumed, as many others have, that I prefer the 285 for the same reasons
as Floyd does. But you have to understand that I never fully understood
Floyd's reasons.
I have been convinced that the 584283-5 correlation was the correct
family because of the astronomical alignments we lept finding, but as
Dave Kelley says, the astronomy falls into regular periodicities that
can be used to support many different correlations?as they have been for
a hundred year.*[4]* Dave doesn't even believe that the 584283 family is
correct*[5]*; for me the problem has been to chose between the 283 or
285. In general, the astronomy does not help because almost all of the
known events have a one or two day or greater fudge factor in them.*[6]
*You cannot use them to select betwen one or the other.
Dave Kelley gave me what I consider to be the critical clue twenty years
ago. The eclipse table of the Dresden Codex lists a 13 Ahaw that falls
on 9.17.0.0.0 13 Ahaw 18 Kumk'u if the initial 12 Lamat base date is
used. In the dresden sequence, this marks 9.17.0.0.0 as a new moon with
an eclipse station.*[7] *More over, the same augury that appears in the
Dresden Codex also occurs on Quirigua E east side as the age of the moon
in the lunar series. I take this to identify 9.17.0.0.0 both in the
retrospective chronology of the Dresden and in the real time chronology
of the Classic Period [Quirigua E east side] as an eclipse station and a
new moon.*[8]*
584285 answers this limitation.*[9]* It was a new moon and an eclipse
eligible date. There was not a visible eclipse on that day at Quirigua,
although there was one of about 20% at tikal. However, there was a 94%
umbral lunar eclipse on February 4, 771 fifteen days after 9.17.0.0.0.
That alone would have confirmed the correctness of the
identification.*[10] *9.17.0.0.15 was a lunar eclipse and the next day
is marked at Copan as the heliacal rising of the Eveningstar. 584283
puts 9.17.0.0.0 on Jan. 18, 771, which was not [within] an eclipse date
[range].*[11] *Moreover, as I found out last summer in constructing a
modern eclipse table with the Maya, 584283 does not place July 11, 1991
on an eclipse station and 584283 does.*[12]* This was the date of a
total eclipse over Guatemala City.
Finally, I have not read the two other sources you cite. However, I am
confused by your reference to a fourth calendar. Do you mean fourth
codex? I do not accept that there were many different calendars running
at the same time as some people have proposed. We have a difference in
the year-bearer's between the Dresden, the Yucatecan, and the highland
calendars, that resulted in a slippage of the interlocking of the
tzolkin and haab?that is, on which set of days 1 Pop would fall.*[13]*
Justeson has suggested a slip of one month in the epi-Olmec calendar,
but so far I see no evidence that they were counting from different
bases.*[14]*
*Notes (from John Major Jenkins, 9-2003):*
1. Unfortunately, this prevented her from seeing the absurdity of
Lounsbury's argument in his 1992 paper from /The Sky in Mayan
Literature/, not to mention his earlier paper of 1983.
2. As early as 1991 I too was using /EZCosmos/ to track Venus and
eclipses as well as precession.
3. And because of this Schele noticed interesting connections with the
dark-rift and the Milky Way-ecliptic crossroads that were explicit in
her famous 1992 workshop (see the workbook from the Austin Hieroglyphic
convention) but were not expanded and explored in /Maya Cosmos/.
4. However, C-14 testing, even with its inherently large error range,
defines a limit for how many astronomical periodicities can be included
as candidates for the base date.
5. Kelley's correlation is some 200 years different than the 283-285
family, which he claims is within the C-14 range of error, but his
argument for extending the error range up to 200 years is questionable.
Both Kelley and Lounsbury disregard the importance of the ethnographic
evidence of the surviving tzolkin calendar, which only the 584283
correlation supports. Lounsbury's argument for a 2-day shift is
extremely implausible, which I've addressed elsewhere.
6. And this is why her following argument doesn't work.
7. Predictive error ranges for the eclipse table are easily more than 2
days; a new moon may have been counted from its first appearance in the
west, one or two days after precise "moon dark." Thus, we already easily
have at least a 2-day ambiguity in this argument.
8. But here is the problem: What she considers a "real time chronology"
recorded on Quirgua E is almost certainly the ideal new moon of the
widely used lunar series table?the same predictive sequence found in the
Dresden. In other words, the source of both records is the ideal
predictive sequence, not real time chronological observation. The Maya
were less interested in precise calculation than with the idealized
frameworks of cycles that allowed commensuration. A couple of days error
between prediction and actual occurrence is an issue to the modern mind,
but not so much for the ancient Maya.
9. But so does 283 given the ambiguity of the phenomena involved.
10. Not really. Fifteen days is the error range for eclipse predictions.
However, that error range must be applied as a plus/minus to the ideal
eclipse date that is indicated in the table. Therefore, up to 7.5 days
before or after the ideal date would be acceptable, but not 15 days
after. But perhaps I'm being to rigid, for you could be generous and
allow a plus or minus 15 days from the ideal date. This just goes to
show the generalized situation, one which does not support the precision
that Schele (or Lounsbury) require for their arguments to have merit.
11. Yet the 283 is but two days outside the eclipse-period range?this is
insignificant when, again, the variablity of the phenomena is
considered, as well as my point in note 10 above. The ideal predictive
eclipse tables, whether or not you use the 283 or the 285, will indeed
occasionally fail to yield an observable result. Or, as in this case,
the eclipse falls slightly outside of the predicted date-range.
12. It is ironic to point out that the Quiché Maya people that Schele
was working with in Antigua follow a tzolkin day-count that is
consistent with the 584283 correlation, but not the 285. And, as it has
been argued by Mesoamerican scholars Dennis Tedlock, Munro Edmonson,
Barbara Tedlock, Victoria Bricker and others, this modern day-count
placement almost certainly has an unbroken lineage going back to Classic
Period times; i.e., it is congruent with the count followed at Copan,
Uaxactun, and Tikal.
13. Or 0 Pop if "zero counting" was adopted. See Edmonson's /Book of the
Year/ (1988) for more.
14. I agree, which means that the earliest Cycle 7 Long Count monuments
from the first century B.C. can be expected to track consistently and
congruently into the huge corpus of later Classic Period dates.
*Context: *I received the same or a similar query from Gardner at
the same time as Schele did. My response to him echoes
some of Schele's comments, but brings a focus to certain items of
interest that Schele did not explore.