How the Mayan Calendar Works, Revisited

In this classic episode, former hosts Candace and Jane explain how the Mayan long count calendar works. We also discuss some other doomsday prophesies from 1666 and 1910, when people feared Halley's Comet would poison them with gasses from its tail.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm very Dowdy and I'm de Blaine and chocolate boarding.
And I think one thing proven throughout history is that
people really love a good doomsday propaty, don't they. It's

(00:22):
so true. Just last year, we had a lot of
news about the May one potential doomsday. I remember seeing
billboards and news articles about it. It was kind of
a kind of a story for a while. See I
must have been living underground or because I remember I
was in Italy at the time and the friends I

(00:44):
was traveling with they mentioned that that was going on,
and just sort of like, oh, yeah, this is going
to happen maybe away. And I remember we were debating
over like, well, how will we know what the time
change when it's happening, because you know, when you're in
a vacation, you don't even know what day. It as
a lot of time. I know, I was at a
friend's wedding and I remember her saying like, well, hey,

(01:04):
you know, at least I'm throwing a big party with
all my friends and family, so attitude. Yeah it is.
But today we're gonna be looking both to the past
and the future, and we're going to revisit an episode
recorded in two thousand and eight by former podcast host
Candice and Jane, and they discuss what's perhaps the most
famous doomsday possibility out there at least these days, probably

(01:28):
because it's still to come December twenty one, twelve, and
that date is of course based on the so called
mind calendar, really the Long Count calendar, and the fact
that will be at least coming to the end of
a great cycle that started back in BC. Many other

(01:49):
doomsday prophecies have also been connected to great calendar changes
like the Long Count, or otherwise around dates. Probably all
but our youngest listeners remember y two k in which
people feared not so much a great apocalypse but an
electronic one still enough to hoard the water. Yeah, I
mean it was scary to a lot of people. But
at other points in history the predictions have also been

(02:11):
date based, but for the sake of the date symbolic
significance rather than just its roundness, like the year two thousands. So,
for instance, many people in England feared the year sixteen
sixty six because of that inauspicious series of numbers and
the world of course didn't end, but a plague did
strike the year before, and of course the Great London Fire,

(02:33):
the Great Fire of London, I should say, occurred in
sixteen sixty six, something we mentioned in our Famous Fires
episode and really might have served to make people feel
like potentially the world was coming to an end. Cosmic
events sometimes also trigger doomsday prophecies, according to National Geographic
For example, the nineteen ten appearance of Hayley's comment had

(02:53):
folks scrambling for so called comic pills and oxygen supplies,
which both were supposed to protect you from the comments
tales noxious gases. Yeah, and in n the appearance of
the hill pop comment um drove members of Heaven's Gate
to commit suicide, expecting aliens following the comment to come

(03:15):
rescue them. So, you know, I think this gives a
pretty fair representation of all of the different kinds of
reasons why people expect the apocalypse. And this was just
a very small number of things we could have mentioned.
But even the twelve event does have of cosmic element
to it, It does have a year kind of significance

(03:38):
to it, and we're gonna look into a little bit
more about that in Candis and Jane's episode, So let's
take a listen. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff sider Jane McGrath. Hey,
they're Candice Jane. Did you take time the other day
to watch all of the inauguration ceremonies and television footage?

(04:00):
Know what? I was so busy eating at a chance,
But I've been watching on YouTube and all like that. Okay,
so you follow it up on all the stories of fashion,
the speeches, the bloopers, etcetera. Of course, it was really
fun in the house Stuff Works office because a couple
of us dropped our work and we went into the
common room and we watched the ceremony on TV, and
it was it was really special, and not just because

(04:20):
the Obama girls looked adorable and they're brightly colored clothes. Um,
and because Rick Warren pronounced their names so fancifully. I
have I have to quote him. Malia and Sasha. We
really couldn't get enough. We've been saying around the office
ever since then. But it was just really great to
be in a room with intelligent people watching such a
historic event. And I was thinking how utterly incredibly tragically

(04:45):
sad that it is the last inauguration we will ever
see because the world will end in Oh my goodness.
I know Jane's a little bit on edge. I don't
necessarily ascribe to that belief. I was trying to get
everybody worked up excited for our podcast today, which is
about the Mind Calendar. And if you are at all
familiar with the Mayan Calendar, you may know that there's

(05:07):
a prophecy that the world will end on December twenty one, twelve.
That's true, and some people are a little on edge
about this idea, although it doesn't have that much uh
history in terms of the Mayan Calendar, in terms of
what the mind is actually believed, which is interesting, right.
I think a lot of the fuss can be attributed

(05:27):
to doomsday speakers, and we actually got away popular. Yeah, well,
because they're fun to hear about and they're fun to
think about. The end of the world is always the
end of the world. We actually got a listener email
about the Mayan Calendar, and I'm not quite sure if
our friend Molina is a a doomsday believer or if
she just wanted to hear more of the story behind it.
But she write to us, Hi, I'd like to know
what the Mayans really say about this twelve end of days.

(05:51):
I have heard many interpretations, most of which I think
you're geared at selling books Smart Girl and Doomsday Gear.
I'd like to know how accurate were their prediction sends
and why this calendar was so important to them. So, Molina,
here's the answer, and we will start by cracking the
code behind the Mind Calendar. And to understand this week,

(06:11):
we have to get a little context about the Lion
civilization in general. I guess just to let you know,
the Mayans, the whole empire was incredibly sophisticated. Uh. They
existed around parts of what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras,
els Avaldoor, and parts of southern Mexico as well, and
they were a very sophisticated culture. They actually started reading.

(06:32):
They were one of the first meso Americans, the people
in that Central American area to start writing at all
in the pre Classic period, which went up to from
between about two thousand BC and three. And you can
actually divide the Mind civilization into three distinct periods. The
format ever pre Classic, which Jane just mentioned, then the

(06:52):
Classic followed in that reign from about three hundred until
nine hundred and the post Classic from nine hundred to
four hundred, and around that time we see the Mayan
civilization sort of reaching out a bitter end when the
Spanish Inquisition comes in and starts phasing the culture out.
This true, and spellers are a bit baffled by what
happened at the end of the Classic period is interesting.

(07:14):
They were incredibly sophisticated, but there was a time about
nine a d. Where they reached a sharp decline in
their civilization. They left cities and temples abandoned. It was
very odd, and scholars disagree about what caused this, whether
it was exhausting the food supply or the rewards among
people and do right Candice. The Spanish arrived and about
the fourteen hundreds, like fourteen hundreds, and that sort of

(07:37):
ended the period of the mind Empire in general. And
we know a lot about mine history because these were
people who left written records. They had a system of
hieroglyphics that they used for recording myths and history and
other governmental decrees things like this. They actually had sort
of like a primitive type of book and paper that
were bound together as well as stuli, which were large

(07:59):
free standing stone monuments almost like an obelisk really, that
they would carve things into. And in addition to hieroglyphics,
they also had a logo, graphics and a phonetic syllabic
sort of alphabets. They in many ways or at least
three ways really of recording their history. That's right. A
lot of their writings had to do with time in general.
They were very focused, maybe preoccupied, with the idea of time,

(08:20):
and that's where we get the idea um that they
were how they came up with all the different calendars
that they did, right, and calendars were important because they
wanted to mark the passing of time, because they looked
to heavenly bodies in the sky to interpret the behavior
on the moods and whims of their gods, and many
of their actions, whether it was you know, a ceremony

(08:41):
for for planting, or for the economy or for accounting
procedures were based on God's behavior. And almost like today
how some people ascribe to astrology to determine how a
person's personality may be influenced by their birth date. The
Mayans use their calendar for similar purposes. That's right. In
numbers them elves held a particular importance. Particular ones like

(09:03):
the number thirteen, for instance, held sort of religious connotations
with the represented levels of heaven where sacred lords ruled
the your earth, and so the number thirteen is pretty important.
And that applies over to the first calendar, which is
called the zole Keying. I believe it's pronounced calendar, and
we should mention too, there are all manner of pronunciations

(09:24):
as far as we could tell in our research for
the different increments of time and name for the Mind calendar.
So um, we're assuming that there are some scholarly variations
on pronunciation, but we are going to go with the
most popular and to kick it off, like Jane said,
the Zulking calendar also called the Sacred Round calendar. Let's
let's break this down, and this is going to get

(09:45):
a little bit painstaking, So if you're near a computer,
it might actually be helpful if you could go to
the House staff Works website and pull up the calendar.
I'm so easy the article on how the Mind calendar works.
That's right. Um, it'll be easier to visualize if you
we have a nice animation on the site that will
let you go through this Zolken calendar. Okay, so the basics.
The Zolkan calendar is divided into two hundred sixty days,

(10:07):
and this number is kind of significant of itself. Scholars
kind of disagree. It might signify the length of pregnancy,
but more than likely it probably signified the time of
a corn crop exactly. So from here, two hundred sixty
days are comprised of twenty different day names and thirteen
different numbers. So imagine two circles, and around the outer

(10:32):
larger circle we have the twenty day names listed and
each one is represented by a glyph. Then on the
inside circle it interlocked with thirteen different numbers. So is
the inner circle turns a number matches up with a
glyph of a day name, and if you're good at math,
or you have a calculator nearby, you may figure it out.

(10:53):
The two hundred sixty days. It's derived from the fact
that twenty day names times thirteen numbers equals to sixty. Yeah,
that's true, And so would go through the cycles of
the days and the numbers together. And as you know,
thirteen is less than twenty, so once it got through
the thirteen numbers, it would go back to the first number,
but continue on in the cycle of thet or sorry

(11:15):
of the fourteenth day name exactly. So it just continues
rotating until you reach two hundred sixty. And each combination
of number and day name has a significant meaning. And
the holy men and the agriculturalists of the mind civilization
would use these numbers to predict auspicious times for ceremonies
and crop planting. Like we said earlier, but there was

(11:37):
a problem with the talking. I'm sorry, not the talking, well,
some people stay talking. We're saying Zolking Zolking calendar, and
that was that it didn't measure a full solar year
like the Gregorian calendar would do. That's right. There were
smart enough obviously to figure out that there were seasons
and two hundred sixty days was not a solar year basically.
And we should also mention that the Zolking calendar had

(11:59):
segments of twenty days which they called wenols um u
I and a L and so these segments of twenty
days were particularly important, and they carried over into their
other calendars as well, and this led to the hop calendar.
And this is a calendar that was based on the
cycle of the sun. And we know als were sort
of the formative unit of the hop calendar. So as

(12:23):
Jane said, a ween as a twenty day period, they
were eighteen of these twenty day periods, which equalled three
hundred sixty days. Now, as we know, again three hundred
sixty days just not a full solar cycle, make so
they're true, But three d and sixties a pretty even number,
and I like it. Yeah, So the May Ends compensated
for those five extra days by making them nameless days,

(12:45):
and they refer to those as a way up. And
that was a single month comprised of these five days,
and they thought it was a very dangerous time, that's right.
And the way it was kind of a compromise between
the mathematicians and the astronomers, because obviously the astronomers knew
like three sixty days is not a full solar year,
but mathematicians loved the evenness of the number three sixty.

(13:06):
So that's where they get the compromise of the way
of And during this time, I was customary to pray
vigilantly and to celebrate the gods and to beseech them
for blessings on the civilization and hopes that you know, good,
good tidings to be restored. Again. That's right, because during
the way of they believe that gods sort of left
the whole earth unprotected. So but again the samest song

(13:27):
you'll hear this refrain a couple of times. It wasn't enough.
They wanted a longer calendar. And uh, the even though
the Hot calendar is closest to our Georgian calendar today, Um,
they did want to record more time in a single
calendar for historical reasons, to keep posterity, and so they
came up with what's called the calendar Round. And this

(13:47):
had eighteen thousand, eight hundred ninety days and encompassed fifty
two years. But here comes out refrain again. It still
wasn't long enough. Fifty two years was not enough, as
you said it, and so they wanted to make it
even longer. And this is the massive, most massive calendar
I've ever heard of. Um, it's called the long Court calendar.

(14:08):
We refer to it today, is that, and it measures
time in great cycles, and a great cycle spans a
little over five thousand, one hundred and twenty five years. Right,
So the Long Count calendar also has its own individual
units that it is comprised of. So let's go over those.
We've got one day which is a keen, twenty days,

(14:29):
the Wayne All which we've heard before, three hundred sixty days,
a tune, seven thousand, two hundred days, a cartoon, one
hundred forty four thousand days back tune. So we have
all these different individual components going inside the Long Count calendar,
and we see that it is very useful for measuring epics,

(14:50):
really for giving historians something to um base their civilization
on and predict future civilizations going on and and things
like this. Yeah, it is actually a difficult test to
be able to find the zero date, uh of the
great cycles. For instance, that we're in a Great cycle
right now, um, And in order to figure out what

(15:10):
date today is in the Great cycle, we had to
figure out what the first at the beginning of this
Great cycle cycle was and that ended up being August thirteenth,
three thousand one BC. And we didn't just come up
with that number. Happened stance There was a British anthropologist
named Sir Eric Thompson who wanted to reconcile these different
calendars and in order to find out when the current

(15:31):
great cycle began. He had to match up some different
events from the Spanish Inquisition that had been recorded on
the Dresden Codex, which was one of the mind governmental
records that was spared from the ravages of the Spanish Inquisition,
and he took that and compared it alongside the long
Count calendar as well as the Gregorian calendar to come
up with a definitive date. And like James said, that

(15:52):
was Auguste h BC. So we're in the middle of
a great cycle, that's right. But if you do the map,
we're actually to end that great cycle, and that's where
you get the date of December twenty one, which will
end a cycle. But it's important to note that the
Mayans believe that this is not the first cycle has
ever existed. It's actually believe the fourth, and so the

(16:15):
universe of the planet has lived through um already three cycles,
the ends of three cycles. So the Mayans don't necessarily
believe that the world will end at the end of
this fourth one now, and they actually think that the
ending of a cycle is a really wonderful time to
celebrate and to appreciate the fact that the planet has
made it through another great cycle. Yeah, but there is

(16:36):
also another reason why people think that this might be
the end of the world, because an interesting thing is
going to happen on December, and that is that it
is a winter solstice. But you know that happens every year,
but it's also a particular winter solstice where the sun
will along with the center of our galaxy, and that
happens only every twenty six thousand years. So if you're

(16:58):
like me and you're curious about what people say, you
can do a Google search and pull up all number
of different doomsday websites, and predictions for December ranged from
the culmination of social strife and environmental catastrophe and in
war a sort of amalgamating into a giant apocalypse. And
some people say that a comet or asteroid is going

(17:19):
to impact the Earth and we're all going to die,
or that the magnetic field on the Earth is going
to change and the polls will be reversed, or or hey,
you could rent Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and sort of get
a preview of what's going to happen. Yeah, it's interesting
if you look at the idea that the minds were
actually able to predict eclipses, which is pretty sophisticated for

(17:40):
for what they knew. And so maybe you might be
inclined to think, oh, well, did they know that this
this crazy happened stance we can happen on that day too,
But most of ronomers actually agree that they could not
have known this. So hopefully, armed with that information from
Candice and Jane, you be able to encourage your frightened

(18:01):
friends that the mind calendar does not necessarily mean certain doom.
And I personally like the idea of seeing the passing
of such a huge amount of time as a reason
to celebrate and be thankful I did too. I mean
it seems like, just just as you celebrate the new year, uh,
you'd celebrate this the passing of this huge chunk of time.
So maybe we need to have like a long count

(18:23):
calendar party time for that. UM. So we do have
lots more to read on this, and if you want
to share your own ideas about the mind calendar, UM,
you can email us. We're at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. We're also on Twitter at missing history, and
we're on Facebook. And if you're still uncertain, then you'd

(18:44):
like to explore this topic a little more, we have
a couple of articles regarding the Mind Calendar and the
twelve issue. We have how the Mind Calendar Works and
will the World Really End in twelve? And you can
look those up by visiting our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com for more on this and

(19:06):
thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com?
Mmm