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Mayan Spiritual Order
Mayan astrology is really an extension of Mesoamerican efforts in general. The Aztec people were working on the same general sort of thing as well, so the distinction is perhaps overly fine a point to make. Mayan astrology doesn’t focus primarily on planetary observation. It does involve things like that, especially tracking the star Venus,…
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Mayan World View
Were Mayans organized in city-states? They were organized into city states. Their city structures being temples. I kind of see the Aztecs like the Romans – war like conquering empire – and the Mayans like the Greeks – focused on learning. This is another way they were like the Greeks. In a sense yes, though…
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Cycles of Creation
The cycles of creation were mostly elemental in nature, corresponding roughly to the Mayan agricultural cycle, but they did also include things like a season of war as well. In a way, perhaps like our football seasons, both American and European, and periodically the world “ended” in a storm season. Would the calendar tell them…
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Gods in Everything
I did some research on how the Mayan books were constructed. The codexes or more generally? The codexes. They were accordion books, and they seem to have thought that the gods lived in the words and when you opened the books, the gods would come out. Ah, indeed they did. Gods were in everything. In…
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Mayan Glyphs
Unfortunately, there isn’t a great deal to say on the mayan glyphic system. First off, it would be mistaken to call it an alphabet. It had no such structure or interrelationship between glyphs. The glyphs themselves can’t even properly be compared to modern alphabetic characters. If anything, their linguistic structure would be better described as…
Category: Mayan
The purpose of the Mayan calendar was to keep the social and spiritual order. Their rituals served as a necessary duty, or “tax” if you will, in order to keep the powers that be able and willing to keep nature working in the way it should.
They used a variety of things to understand human destiny/human nature and the calendar was perhaps the biggest. But you also were seen to have multiple souls, each having a different destiny. They believed that any illness or misfortune you might experience arose because one of those souls had been lost or alienated, and they had rituals to restore that order.
“Mayan cosmology contains within it the explanation for our current global transformation, and possibilities for how we can survive it.” John Jenkins